We walked 30 minutes through Jibowu and Empire’s traffic to reach Aunty Ramota’s house. It was quieter than the last time I was there. Two women were helping her move small stuff around — a keg, a spitting bowl, a standing fan. And there was my aunty, seated on her bed.

The Sunday before that, she was lying in the living room, telling marriage jokes and forcing us into stiff laughs. Nothing was funny.

“My back,” she said. “It’s paining me, and it’s because of this bed.” Her mattress had seen better days, but it wasn’t the only reason her back hurt.

The reason came with my older brother after Isha the Friday prior. “Ọmọ, wahala dey o,” he said, unable to sit still or look at me.

“She looked so pale,” he said.

“Her breasts,” he paused. “One of them looked very big.”

There are a few reasons why a fifty-eight-year-old woman would have a visibly bigger breast.

“And if you see… if you see the way she’s coughing ehn.”

“If she has a visibly swollen breast, and she is coughing aggressively, that’s not a good sign bro.”

I’m not a doctor, but I know if she’s coughing and has a visibly swollen breast, we might be looking at cancer that’s spreading.

“If it’s metastatic, we’ve lost a lot of time,” I said.

“We’ll run tests tomorrow and know how far,” he said.

By Monday, the results were out: “Irregular mass in the right breast,” “Metastatic,” “Pleural something-something,” “Multiple masses in the liver.”

Cancer didn’t just take the breast, it took the lungs and liver. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I asked my aunty how she was feeling and she said, “Better.”

I wasn’t just there to bring her a new mattress. I wanted to understand why she was rejecting chemo.

“Tell me everything,” I said, pleading.

Towards the end of 2017, two years before, was when she saw the first sign, she said.

“It was paining me, so I went to the doctor.”

They prescribed painkillers. Fucking painkillers. For a woman with a hurting breast. In her fifties.

“But this same thing happened to your sister,” I said. I wasn’t sure she heard me between my clenched teeth.

At forty-two, a doctor told my mum that her growing stomach was because of age. Something hidden from CT scans was slowly taking up space. One year later, and thousands of kilometres away, she finally got a diagnosis in Chicago. Pancreatic tumour.

In the theatre, this was the plan: wake up feeling light because the tumour had been taken out.

“We couldn’t. It’s too big,” the half-crying doctor said to her when she woke up.

My mum still found it amusing on the last long call we had late December 2011, three weeks before she died.

Just like her sister, my aunty took the painkillers with devotion — as she did with everything else, from family to friends, faith, life: devotion. But even that started to fade. “It was still paining me,” Aunty said.

Where do women in their fifties go when a doctor in a lab coat fails them? Some go to other lab coats, many others to herbs.

“Ìyá Alagbo kept rolling out agbo after agbo. ‘Drink this, drink that.’ But, it was still paining me and getting worse.”

What do Agbo people do when nothing works? They tell you it’s not ojú lásán. Metaphysical. Where do Yoruba Muslim women in their fifties who believe it is beyond science go? Some go home to pray. Many others go to an Alfa with a thousand-bead tesbiu.

Alfa said it was, in fact, metaphysical.

“He said they sent it to me.” At this point, my aunty said, it had been a year since the diagnosis.

My jaw tightened.

There’s nothing a woman’s wrapper tied around her chest can’t conceal, and so she concealed her pain. Aunty Ramota stayed home more and her back bent more, wrapper wounded tight on her chest.

By January 2019, my cousin, her only daughter, started to panic. “Busola kept saying the Alfa was a fraud,” my aunty said.

But, how much sense would an elderly Muslim woman make out of the words of her born-again Christian daughter?

“I just dey yimu give her,” Aunty Ramota joked. You could sense the self-deprecation in the room.

One day that January, her daughter managed to drag her to a hospital.“Ìkà ni yín mummy,” the doctor said. Why did she have to wait this long before coming to the hospital if she wasn’t deliberately trying to make her daughter miserable?

“When he said that thing, ah, mo wà depressed,” aunty said. The heartbreak from being everybody’s caregiver to being told that you were going to cause the primary subject of your care so much misery.

What did Mr Doctor say was the way forward? “Abẹ́rẹ́.” Chemotherapy. “But he said it was 50/50, that I might die. Ah, I’m not doing it.”

One of the women in the house knocked and came in, a keg in hand. It was full of a dark-coloured liquid, more agbo.

“There’s one woman on our street,” aunty started to explain. “She had fibroid, but after taking this woman’s agbo, the fibroid disappeared. If you see her breast before, it was really black, and now it’s getting better.”

I explained to her how fibroid worked. And how cancer worked. How fibroids don’t move from your breast to your liver and lungs. And how it wouldn’t stop spreading until we forced it to.

“The doctor didn’t explain it to me like this,” she said.

On my way back to work, in my Uber, I texted my brother, “She’ll go into chemo.”

The next time I saw her, her bed was by the window in a gynae ward at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital. Seeing the window’s torn net, the rusted giant oxygen cylinder, and a worn-out restraining leash dampened my mood.

I didn’t need anyone to tell me why she needed a leash.

Think about a small town. It’s a lot of farmers, some traders — mostly civilians. There’s a small unit of guerilla fighters disturbing the peace. They subdue the town and control it. But the thing about power, like fire, is that it only wants to take up more space. So they try to take the next town — this is where the government steps in and sends in the army.

The soldiers can’t tell who the civilians are from the fighters until the latter starts shooting. So the soldiers find a safe spot far from town. They point their artillery guns and gboom, gboom. Fighters start to drop dead — in the bushes, holes, markets, houses. But so do the kids, farmers, and traders.

This is what chemo does. It destroys bad cells, but some types of good cells burn too.

I found my aunty this way: burning on the inside, screaming so intensely that there was no sound. Her daughter had stepped out to get some materials on the instruction of the doctor.

The nurse — the only nurse in the ward of six beds with women about my aunty’s age or older — was tightening her leash as I reached her bedside.

“She’s not staying still for her transfusion.” The nurse pointed at a blood bag hanging beside her bed. I followed the other end of the line to the syringe in her hand. There was dried blood from multiple splatters on her hand and on the bedsheet. Each pattern, a testament of how the pain ripping through her body had forced her to rip off her syringe.

When my aunty calmed down, the nurse made to leave. “Watch her,” she said as she walked towards another patient, “Keep her hand still.”

I stood by her bed, hoping that she’d fall asleep since her eyes were closed. I don’t know how long I stood there before she started to wriggle again. Her leash — which was just as thick as a fat wick — loosened. The syringe in her left arm, on the other side of the bed, didn’t look like it would hold for longer if she didn’t stop moving, so I held her.

I leaned over the bed and held her down as tightly as I could without adding more to her pain. When her eyes opened, it looked as if another weary lifetime had been added to her years. Her hair was greyer and had lost all its shine. She looked tired, petrified, and I just stared back. She didn’t recognise me for a moment.

“Jọ́ ọ̀,” she said. Please.

I don’t know why she pleaded. Was she asking me to leave her? Was she asking that the pain be taken away? Did she want me to do something for her?

I broke the stare, wanting my mind to wander. To my watch, the torn net, to that water game she bought me when I was little, the one with the tiny hoops you had to dunk on two pins. I wandered to that holiday at her house where I slept on the couch and woke up on her bed, wandered to the entrance of the ward, hoping a nurse would come.

“Ẹ pẹ̀lẹ́ mà,” I said every few moments. I didn’t know what I was sorry for. Her pain? Was I sorry that I knew that this wasn’t the best possible treatment she could get in Lagos, even though we couldn’t afford better at such short notice and we’d all burned through so much cash already? Was I sorry that she hid what she was going through, and I wasn’t attentive enough to spot it, call out its name and burn it before its roots dug too deep into her skin? Or was it my lack of faith in her fighting chance?

“Ẹ pẹ̀lẹ́ mà.”

When the nurse returned after her rounds with the other patients, almost thirty minutes had passed. I needed a break from holding, and the nurse looked like she needed a break from everything.

On Saturday, 9 February 2019, a few weeks before the elections, President Buhari was in Lagos to commission the Cancer Treatment Centre at the teaching hospital. Eleven Saturdays later, I walked past the building — it was sealed.

“Didn’t they commission this place in February?” I asked a security man.

“They commissioned it,” he said, “but they’ve not started work.”

“Them go soon start sha,” he said, as I kept walking. I smelled like hospital antiseptic and a lack of interest in getting old. I couldn’t wait to get home.

When a Muslim dies, acceptance comes to the living either from self or from whiplash. Whatever the outcome, finality is instant. Everything, the procession, becomes a list of things to check.

On Wednesday, 24 April 2019, I got a message from my brother: “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun.” I sighed, grabbed my office things, and headed out immediately.

At the hospital, my aunty’s body was already at the mortuary, getting prepared for burial. I wasn’t with her body but I knew she’d be on a table. Her hair would be washed and made into three braids. The final washing of her body would be done with perfumed water. She’d be shrouded in four pieces of plain white fabric — one she probably owned while she was alive. Her body would then be bound with loose fabric.

I spent a few moments with my cousin, sitting quietly in a hug, then I headed out to the next task. The burial permit needed to be sought and the grave prepared. By evening, family members I wouldn’t see till the next funeral appeared.

There comes a time in your family when there are enough people in the afterlife to make a family picture. The portrait my aunty would be walking into is already packed. There’d be her father who died from diabetes while managing hypertension. There’d be her mother who people say died because she didn’t want anyone changing diapers for her — a proud woman till the end. There’d be her two brothers and her baby sister. The only person missing in this picture is her big sister and only surviving sibling, the family matriarch nursing a bad hip, a seventy-something-year old heart, and unstable sugar levels.

Just before sunset, her body was lowered into the ground. Her daughter, everyone standing around her, had given her mother’s body one last look. I could not think about my aunty’s life beyond that tiny little ache on her right breast. I wondered how many people in that cemetery in Sura died because an overworked doctor said, “Just take panadol.”

The gravedigger sealed the grave with the urgency of someone who had somewhere else to be.

“Well done, sir,” I said when everyone had left and it was just the two of us. “How long have you worked here?”

“Almost twenty years,” the gravedigger said.

“Do you have any idea how many people you’ve had to bury?”

“How many?” He tapped the ground with his shovel gently, then looked at me, laughed and walked away. I wondered if any of it meant anything to him. Our sadness. Our tears. What was it like digging his first grave? When did he realise that he could no longer shake his head in sympathy for every single body he lowered into the ground? At what point did he realise it was just that: a lifeless body to be lowered into the ground, and sealed with shovel and sweat?

Above his small frame, the last speck of sunlight sunk behind a cluster of buildings in the thick of Lagos island, where my Aunty Ramota was born.

And I might be dying.

“Fu’ad, some days, you’re 35 years old,” Eniola said some weeks ago. “Other days, you’re 12.”

Today, I’m 27.

December 31st 2017.

My 2018 game plan was clear; jump more — that kind where you jump off a cliff and figure out the parachute thing on your way down. I did make a serious jump; quitting a job. The landing went well too.

“Okay tell me; what’s your favourite thing about yourself?”

“I can get up and hit the road at a moment’s notice.” That used to be my favourite pitch when people ask me about myself. I still can, but I see it in a different light.

Imagine you’re in the driver seat snaking through a horrible Nigerian highway. Driving into a bump isn’t always a bad thing, especially when you’re alone. But when you have passengers jumping around the car every time you hit the brakes abruptly, there’s going to be a lot of sorry-telling.

Being spontaneous is cute when you’re riding solo.

A lot of my spontaneity is because of my ingrained thrill-seeking missile, so I’m learning to keep this beast at bay. Lots of no’s. Managing the mundane. Re-training my secret terror of permanence. Because starting is easy, the real work is in the followthrough.

Patience is a truly excruciating virtue.

“If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.”

I’m heavily invested in content, and how people interact with the good stuff. I’ve had a lot of opinions about how it should be done in the past, and 2018 has been the walk-the-talk year. My new job has been extremely hard, demanding 110%–like how running hurts, but with the good kind of hurt. Most of the sacrifices, I can live with, like turning down the much-needed extra income because of bandwidth.

The most hurtful sacrifice though has been with a book I should be working on–a memoir of sorts–of what life is like backpacking across Nigeria. Some nights, I go into my bathroom and scream for two seconds because it sucks to not be a crier. That’s a ton of personal writing and unpacking that didn’t get done.

On most days, I’m still not confident about my work. Partly because I’m consuming better, so I believe I can be better. It doesn’t stop me though.

“I demand to be left alone.”

My entire life, I’ve never owned space to myself. I shared a room with my brother, cousins and their friends for most of my childhood. My mum was always bringing someone to live with us. My dad was always letting someone spend “just a few days” for a few months at a stretch. I didn’t hate it though.

In university, my room was a camp. Now, I live with my brother, who–after weeks of passive-aggressiveness–has learned to knock. I tried to make my room here a place where I can be left alone, but someone always knocks.

One of my biggest obsessions this year has been moving out, getting my own space, one I’m fully responsible for and I can strut around naked in peace without worrying that I’m going to run into someone on the way to the kitchen. This year, I made getting a place my most consistent obsession.

But Lagos has a way of BDSM-ing you in every regard. Making you hang on till the next one; just enough pain to make house hunting hurt, but not enough to make you give up entirely. Aluta Continua.

Keeping count

I started tracking my finances, and I’ve done it consistently for at least seven months. It hasn’t significantly made me change how I spend money, but it has changed how I see it. Maybe helped me understand saving a little better.

I imagine a conversation between Spendee and me like it’d happen between Alfred and Master Wayne:

Alfred: Took quite a hit on that spend, didn’t we Master Fu?

Me: I didn’t want to buy that thing, but I needed to.

Alfred: Weird flex Master Fu, but okay.

Me: You still haven’t given up on me?

Alfred: Never.

I’ll keep at it, and maybe give investing a shot. Aluta Continua.

Sometime in September, 2012.

It’s one of those nights I’m lying down face up in a dark room, and thinking about life by thinking about death. I make a mental note of all the people who might miss me when I die and hope they get on with their lives as quickly as most people seemed to do when my mum died a few months earlier. I hope they don’t remember me or gather in my name. I have my mother’s genes, and she has her father’s. And both of them died because small rebellions started in their bodies, and no doctor could stop it.

I’m going to die too. A tear rolls down the side of my face, and it’s not fear, it’s just this overwhelming feeling of accepting the inevitable.

But I wake up in the morning; part shocked, but part hurt that I still have to keep at life. My mind still has scars from those nights. The most prominent of them is the eery feeling I might not live beyond 30.

But it’s not entirely a new concept.

I don’t know if there’s a Japanese word for it but–the Muslim tactic is to approach the night like you won’t see the day, and the day as though you won’t see the night. But this one feels different, and it doesn’t terrify me. It just creates a sense of urgency and a constant sense of, “is this what you want to do with the last three years of your life?”

But for the first time since 2012, I thought, what if I live longer?

So in 2018, I tried to make a run for beyond 30. I tried questioning my diet. I tried running, and my running has taken on a life of its own as catharsis. Running is me asking myself every night as I run through Surulere, “how much more can this body take?”

Perhaps whatever will be the end of me will take me all at once, and not chip away at my life breath by breath, rebellion by rebellion.

Time has eaten and drunk on us.

At a wedding this year, I spent most of the time looking at people and replaying brief histories about them in my head as they smiled or waved.

Everyone’s all grown and smoothened out at the edges. The tiny insecurities are managed better, and there’s an attempt at self-confidence. Vows are being made. Babies are dropping. People seem to be settling into this adulting thing, one anchor at a time. Because adulting is really about being calculated about what kind of anchors you want to hold you down.

On the days when people ask my advice, I feel 35 but still give terrible advice like “seeking constant happiness is a false expectation that will set you up for misery. Treat happiness like an event, not a constant state. Settle for contentment.”

Or “some trauma is training.”

Other days, I want to be 12, sneaking to the beach alone past midnight, to skinny-dip and gaze at the distant lights as the water dries on my body.

But today, I’m 27. Still trying to be kind. Still trying to be useful. Still making friends easily. Grateful for the wins. Moving on quickly from the losses.

I don’t know how else to live.

“Chairman,” he’s smiling at me as I enter and I know it’s not because I have a special head. Gbenga’s the go-to guy. Every time. Like most men, I tend to be monogamist when choosing my barbers. Maybe I hop around once or twice a year, but I always pitch my tent in one salon.

I know all the routines. Sit on the swivel chair and sink into the leather. Wait till he wraps that white strip around your neck. Wait till he wraps that cape around your body, then folds back the white strip so none of your hair goes below your neck or into your clothes.

The waiting is over. I’m bound.

That buzz. That clipper buzz.

“Just a little lower,” I say, like I say every time. Your hair doesn’t recover from clipper damage for about two weeks.

Even though the mirror’s calling it my right, I know he’s taking the left part of my hair first.

Back to front. Back to front. Back to front. Enough pain that you can feel something, but not enough to make you wince. Or maybe my threshold is just higher.

Everything that happens at the barber’s happens in the reflection. Parents bringing their sons. Women going to the spa upstairs. Barbers cracking jokes. A TV as fodder for banter.

MTV Base is on. Ehis is hosting a show called Celeb Living.

“You’d have to sell a lot of plantains to get a house like this,” he says.

In the show, Timaya comes out to meet Ehis and says “wow Ehis long time no see, where have you been,” like he wasn’t just prepped to say “wow Ehis long time no see, where have you been.”

They step into the mansion, and all the barbers as if choreographed, stop barbing at once. Timaya’s house is massive.

“How many rooms are here,” Ehis asks.

“I dunno,” Timaya laughs, “I’m not the Real Estate Agent. Don’t worry, you can do the counting while I show you around.”

The first barber to speak is my barber.

“Omo, these guys dey live life. See house.”

All of my hair is levelled now, a little lower than I wanted, but not low enough to piss me off.

He dabs the part of his palm below his thumb in powder, dabs the clipper on his powdered palm. Carving time.

The clipper leaves a white line everywhere it touches now. Along the hairline above my forehead. Along my side-beard. Along the beard beside my mouth. Along my moustache.

That’s when I see it. If he cuts along the white line on my face with a blade, and lays out that meat on a table, it’d look almost like the Wu-Tang Clan’s logo.

He pauses for a moment, looks at my face, or hair in the reflection. Whichever. Dives into a drawer, and out comes a Razor blade. New and shiny. He grabs a comb too.

But there’s no face to cut for him, at this time. Only hair. In combing motion, he trims my hair, smoothening it out. I watch his hand closely, a small worry in the corner of my mind, that the comb might slip and the razor will comb out a fine piece of my scalp.

He drops the blade.

Ehis and Timaya get into his children’s room as he picks up the Clipper.

“How’s he the only one in this big house,” one barber says.

“They’re inside the house,” Gbenga replies, “He’s not showing his children so that they won’t get kidnapped.”

I try to read this piece on wealth and pop culture to distract myself. It works for only a few lines.

He adjusts the headrest and I know he wants me to lean back. Time to take the chin.

The clipper touches my neck just as I begin to wonder in what mood he really is in today, beneath all the laughter. What if he digs these clippers into my flesh, gunning for blood?

The blades retreat. My head is raised again.

A hot towel presses against my head and for a moment, there’s no thought of a blade cutting my throat or scalp, or my face getting skinned. Just this warm towel on my head.

Then the hair cream follows with that light sting that tells me there’s sulphur in it. I want to tell him to stop, because I’m still going to end up taking a shower, but keep going Gbenga. Spoil me. Make me feel good.

The spray follows, and my head is shining. For a moment, I make a mental note to buy that spray, and shut it down the next moment.

He’s dusting down the cape as I hand him the price for the part-torturous, part-relieving hour.

He knows I won’t ask for change, so he smiles that smile he smiled when I first walked in again, just as I head for the door.

Those aren’t my words.

It’s one of those weekday nights in Surulere where you’re too lazy to cook. So you just step out of your house, cross a busy street, and buy rice. It’s one of those one-table-can-make-a-restaurant stands by the road, just a few inches from the gutter. 3 big coolers; one for Jollof; one for Fried; one for White. 3 small coolers; one for stew, one for Plantain, one for Beans.

If you pass in the morning, there’ll be no sign of this stand, because this business is for people who come home late from work like me; too tired to cook. If I had to name this stand, I’d call it “Come to me, all ye who are burdened and weary…” and I’ll give you rice.

I voted for Leo, twice. I really like him.

Again, those aren’t my words. They aren’t the actual words in fact.

“Mo like Leo gan. Mo vote fun lemmeji.”

It’s not the main Rice Mama that said it. It’s one of her assistants, and I can’t tell if it’s Rice Mama’s daughter or worker. What I know for sure is how passionately she spoke about him to some guy who insisted Tobi was his fave. The Yoruba is so easy on her tongue.

This is Leo, a now evicted housemate from the Big Brother Naija House;

And there was Rice Mama’s girl, rooting for this guy at the time, hoping that her long distance crush wins the money.

We’ll come back to Rice Mama’s girl, let’s take a quick contextual break.

How did Big Brother Naija become such a movement?

We’re going deeper, into another layer of context. And this one is taking us to Nigerian concerts. Just pretend this is Inception.

Many Nigerian concerts are too poorly designed. Take this one for example;

They charge a lot of money for VVIP and make them sit so close to the stage as reward. Thing is, the average Nigerian VVIP can’t shout. The Regulars will most likely be in one corner, shouting their lungs out at celebrities who can’t see them because they’re blinded by the spotlight.

But see what happens when you make the stage more accessible to the about-average Jane and Joe, this happens:

Let’s climb back up to how Big Brother Naija became a movement. Rewind to 2017, when thousands, or maybe millions of people were willing to die on the line for Efe.

I have a theory: maybe Big Brother Naija was such a force because it had become more accessible. DSTV used to be a luxury item. It probably still is to a lot of people, so that’s why Multichoice thought it’d be great to have a cheaper, mass-market alternative, GoTV. Maybe it’s also interesting to note that, some Big Brother action was available for GoTV users for the first time in 2017. Maybe the party pops more when more people are closer to the stage.

Back to Rice Mama’s girl. She voted twice, at 30 naira per vote. She probably would have voted more on Big Brother’s web page if the internet was less expensive or puzzling maybe. (It’s in italic because I might be overreaching).

“Nigerians won’t pay for shit,”

Said the cool people on the Internet, who want Nigerians to pay for things they have little interest in, nor understanding of. They’re probably right to a certain degree.

Rice Mama’s girl is proof, if you ask me, that Nigerians can pay for content, as long as they find some value in it. So, will they pay say, 50 naira monthly by USSD, if it will give them access to some exclusive content they would normally not have access to?

I don’t know.

What I know is that someone paid 60 naira to keep her favourite person in the house. To keep content she considered valuable. To subscribe.

So, what’s the problem with paid content in Nigeria for example, is it the price or the method of payment?

Or are we just generally looking in the wrong places, from the comfort of our bubble? I want answers.

I hope you weren’t expecting any conclusions. I really hope you weren’t. Because this is how it ends.

Okay, a second thought.

I’d like to talk about this Content thing. This part might be totally unrelated to everything before this.

I have a theory, that when you create something you find interesting, it could be called art, where you’re first of all creating, as a means of expression. But when you create, putting into consideration the behaviour of a potential audience, hoping they consume, that’s Content.

The real magic, the hard part, is when you can create truly great work, and still appeal to an audience.

So you run into people who create some stuff, blaming the audience for not consuming what they create, missing out the most important ingredient here; Empathy.

Empathy is understanding that your audience will probably check out within the first 5 seconds of your video if you have no clear plan to keep them. It is knowing that your website might have really great stuff, but is costing your audience — who’s probably managing a small data plan — a lot, simply because it’s taking too much data. The guys at Opera Mini know this.

Over 26 million people voted in the final week of the Big Brother Naija 2017. I wonder how many of those votes happened by text because opening a website with horrible Internet is just stress.

Empathy makes all the difference.

P.S: Here’s one more empathy game we should play. I want you to remember again, that this is a train of thought that completely went out of control, and share what you think. You know, add your wagon to this train.

“Doggy dey?”

Everyone I asked just pointed to the water. It’s like walking into a joint, and asking about that one person, and everyone just knows exactly where they’d be.

Oniru Beach is a joint too. It’s not like other beaches. The distant music is louder than the waves here; there are no big waves. It’s more like a bay in the real sense of it. There’s new land ahead that used to be water years ago.

That new land is Eko Atlantic.

The beach itself is never really crowded; a long line of chairs and umbrellas, a suya stand behind this line. Or two. Someone selling chewing gum and cigarettes. Or two. One elderly man singing to visitors with his shekere hoping they get generous.

Just this one man.

At night, the beach is mostly empty, and little crabs that spent the day hidden away, like they’re avoiding human cruelty, come out to play.

This afternoon though, I noticed there were two life boats at shore instead of one. None of them, familiar.

That’s when I saw him. He walked with the sun behind him and I couldn’t make out his face. The Bob Marley and the Wailers shirt he was wearing though, and the way he walked, I could make out.

“E done tey wey I see you o!” He was semi-shouting and walking faster. “I never see you this year.”

Doggy gives boat rides here and doubles as a lifeguard. I’ve met him here almost every time I came, night or day. The last time I saw him, he was boatless and selling little teddy bears to earn.

He started gushing about his new boat as he took me to it. The old one he had was bright yellow and ended up with a leak. This one, he didn’t stop saying, would last longer. It’s an American white Sea Eagle; sturdy seats, better design.

Doggy took the boat back into the water and paddled for a few minutes. I felt genuine happiness seeing him again, and it had very little to do with boat rides.

“This guy is owing me gist,” I told Samson. He’s the one I managed to drag along to come to the beach with me. I’d already told Samson about Doggy more than once.

My plan was straightforward; I get in his boat, and we row as far away from shore as possible, and then I just listen to him talk.

This plan didn’t work out.

“Let me wear this life jacket for you,” Doggy said after he’d paddled for a while. Zips together, and up. Buckle one and two. Click.

“Today, we’re going to swim.”

I didn’t ask any questions or say anything, I just jumped right behind him and walked into the water.

The first swimming technique I learned was kicking my legs. I learned this off my little cousins’ Waterproof Kids DVD about a decade ago. I tried it in a crowded pool, where everyone else was too busy playing around to notice me flapping around like a fish out of water.

The next thing; freestyle strokes. These have kept me alive in every pool so far.

The water at Oniru shows you two colours, the brown and the blue-green. Brown is the colour of sand at shore, and blue-green is the deep.

Don’t go to that part.” That’s what someone had said the first time I was in this water ever. “It’s very deep.”

In typical fashion, I got carried away while flapping around that first time with Ayoola and Segun in the brown. It’s a drop. literally. Like dropping down a hole you didn’t even know was there.

There I was, under water, with empty lungs, and the two closest people to me not being able to swim to save their lives. It took a few seconds to understand my orientation, and with all the adrenaline and chill I could muster, I swam back to the brown.

The second time I made it to the deep, I was holding tightly to the rope of Doggy’s last boat, knowing fully well that if I left that rope, I might die.

And now, here I was, with no rope. As I walked into the deep, my heart climbed two gears.

“No fear,” Doggy said, smiling back at me a short distance ahead.

I swam right after him, and with each stroke, I felt better. Swimming is technique, and a lot of guts.

“Have you ever swam to the bottom,” I asked.

No, Doggy laughed. Too far. It’s not fear that’s his problem, it’s distance. I looked down at my bright orange life jacket and it dawned on me again that my life depended on me remaining attached to it. I gave it a squeeze, for reassurance.

And right there, I remembered my favourite scene from Nolan’s Interstellar:

A claustrophobic Dr. Romilly is sitting on a bunk, in a ship swimming through space. “This gets to me Cooper.” He says as Cooper joins him. “This,” he taps the wall beside him, “millimetres of Aluminium. That’s it, and there’s nothing out there for millions of miles…”

Cooper then says, “you know, some of the finest, solo yachtsmen in the world don’t know how to swim. They go overboard, and they’re gone. We’re explorers Rom. This is our boat.”

This thought didn’t make me feel better, or worse. It was just that, a thought.

“Oya,” Doggy said, and I swam up to him.

“Is this how you swam to Italy?”

He laughed. “I never made it to Italy.”

“They sent you back?”

“That time, there was no need. In Ghaddafi’s Libya, life was good. One canned food was 100 dinars. You go belleful.”

“But why did he swim out in the first place?

“Business,” he laughed. He mentioned an Arab friend and business partner.

We swam further, and when I looked back, Samson was a tiny dot and the shore was a thick line.

“You dey fear?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Your tall Arab friend…” I picked up where we left off.

“Yes,” he tries to remember a name, “Hassan. Hassan. We used to swim out together then. We’d carry many men and women that time and swim, all those Bini and Ijaw them— ”

“Women?”

“Yes na, women follow. Because we know the water, we’ll charge them 700 dinars. We used to discourage them, because nothing was in Italy. Life in Libya was good. But they wanted Italy.”

He talked about the patrol boats and their huge torches, and how when a light was coming close, everyone would go under, bring their nostrils out for air every few minutes.

“No forget say all these people go still carry their things inside nylon.” No life jackets.

Forward we went, and now I started to make out what was on the other side of the water.

“Do you want us to cross,” he asked me.

“Yes.” I didn’t know I wanted to cross until that moment.

Then he told me about a Filipino who challenged him to make the cross just last week. They’d swim, and rest, just like we were doing.

And we swam some more. And more. And we got to a point where I couldn’t tell if we were closer to our starting point or to our destination.

“We used to go to Tripoli Beach that time, and I used to sell one kind of tobacco,” he said, “like snuff.”

“You just put it inside the corner of your mouth,” he put a finger in the corners of his mouth. “You leave it there till it dissolves.”

Weed, he said, was only smoked indoors.

“You will enjoy Libya that time as long as you don’t do anyhow near their women. They can kill you.”

“When did you come back from Libya,” I asked.

“Around Nigeria ‘99,” he said. “I left around 1995. I be small pikin that time. I never even reach twenty years old.”

“How old are you now?”

“Forty-two.”

“Will you ever go back to Libya?”

“Ah, never. They’re fighting there now. All my friends done come back sef. It’s Canada I want to go now.”

If “I want to go to Canada” was a song, it’d top every Nigerian chart right now.

“Let’s swim back,” he said.

“No jare.”

He looked back at the beach, and I looked too. More tiny dots were walking around, and we knew that when we got back, it’d be to a busier beach.

“Make we go back,” he said again, “business dey.”

A tiny white line sat beside a yellow one at shore. A few weeks ago, Doggy didn’t have to worry about competition. Now, every time he spent out in the water was a customer lost to the owner of the Yellow Boat.

I wanted to insist we keep going, but it’d be pure selfishness.

He started swimming back, and I followed. And for the first time, I felt the strain in my calves and shoulders. I was fatigued.

The journey back is always shorter. I wonder if it’d have taken longer to get to the other side, or shorter.

Samson was sitting under an umbrella when we got back, and I couldn’t tell if he thought I was mad or suicidal.

“Water is his life,” Samson said at some point that afternoon.

You bet. He’s from Bayelsa State. He’s swam in every kind of water there is. He’s made a living off water. “It’s from this water I married and had a son,” Doggy had said. His son is 16 now, and in secondary school.

“I fit stay inside water from morning to night.”

I was dipping in the brown later while Doggy was waiting by his boat for customers. We talked about selling dogs for his brother, where he got the name Doggy. If you come here asking for Maxwell, no one will help you find him. But Doggy, that’s more familiar.

We talked about Canada again.

“How are you going to get to Canada, I hear you can’t swim.” It was a lame attempt at a joke.

He laughs. “Any which way, na way.”

“I wish we crossed sha,” I said, while we’re on dry land. “E pain me small.” It actually pained me that we didn’t. A lot.

“Next time you come, we’ll cross.”

Thought is an incredible thing.

A thought starts like a fire, and like fire, a thought has a love for itself, and so it grows, and grows, and next thing you know, you have an inferno. This is what I think is called obsession.

One moment, you’re accepting your fate, knowing you can no longer travel to Yankari for December as you planned, because the office won’t let you disappear as planned. Next moment, you’re telling yourself, “fuck it I’ll take the whole country.”

I Entered 2017 With One Plan.

Travel around the entire country, every single state, find as many stories as possible, and tell it. Tell it to everyone. Tell it to yourself.

“Awesome! What’s the plan?”

Plan One: tell your boss that you might need to disappear for 8 weeks, come back, and still have a job. lol.

Plan Two: fuck it, and worry about a job when you get back.

Plan Three: “Maybe you should speak to your editor about it”.

Plan Three

“Fuck it. We can do this”

That’s Osagie, my Editor-in-Chief. And it’s January. We plan, and plan, and plan, and plan. Because now, it’s no longer just about me, it’s about the entire team at Pulse.

July 2.

I hit the road with Chris. He’s my colleague, and a videographer.

Our first stop is Ogun State. But we’re moving again, and hitting Ore, Ondo, Idanre, Benin.

I’m in!

That’s what Jesuloba said, when I told him about the road trip (5 minutes after meeting him) at Fati Abubakar’s exhibition sometime in February. In Benin, he joins us, and sticks with the wagon, till the very end.

We don’t stop, we reach Warri, Asaba, Onitsha, Ogbunike, Owerri, Yenegoa, Port Harcourt, Aba, Umuahia, Uyo, Eket.

Calabar, Abakaliki, Afikpo, Enugu, Nsukka, Makurdi, Jalingo, Gembu. In Gembu, my mind is blown a way.

We head for Yola, Mubi. Here, I see firsthand, what it’s like to live in a country at war with terror.

We head to Maiduguri, then Biu, then get into trouble with the Nigerian Army and the SSS. They take us to Damaturu, and hold us for a few days, but they can’t stop, because next, we reach Gombe, then Yankari.

Susan joins us, and now there’s four of us. And Susan just breathes a new spirit into the road for us, and lights it with a new glow.

Dutse, Kano, Daura, Birnin Kudu, Gusau, Kebbi, Yauri, Kainji, Minna, and Abuja. Here, Susan leaves us, 8 states and two weeks later, not because she can’t finish, but because some important calls need to be answered.

We don’t stop, we keep going. Then we head to Lafia, Akwanga, and Jos, where we all-but freeze, beside our broken down cab, in 13 degrees rain, at midnight.

We head to Kaduna after, then Zaria, then Lokoja, Kabba.

“Where are you jumping to?”

That’s what our bodies said, when we reached Illorin, and a fever came, and we had to take turns to sit under a shower, and throw up, and lie in hospital beds. Two days. Two days and we’re back up, and we head to Ikogosi, and Ilesa, Ile-Ife, Ibadan, Abeokuta.

Lagos.

80 days later. 10,000 kilometres covered, according to my map. 700 thousand steps walked according to the Gear S3.

And I swear, it truly is a great feeling setting out to do something, and actually doing it. Especially when you’ve tried other things and failed, because you just couldn’t follow through.

And I realise that I couldn’t have done it without friends who said it was possible even before I finished telling them. To colleagues who spent the extra time making sure we weren’t out in the cold. To strangers we found everywhere, who re-affirmed my faith in humanity.

Thank you, to those who loved me, and helped me, whether I see you again, or will never see you again. I’m forever grateful, and I can’t ever forget.

“Have we started the fire?”

My blood hasn’t settled. I doubt it can. Now, I can’t stop thinking about the road. It’s why when I overheard someone talking about a wedding in Mubi, Adamawa State, 1,500km away. And I was ready to go right away.

I can’t stop thinking about Timbuktu, and Bamako, and Abidjan, and all of West Africa. And everyday, I’m thinking of where I want to be, I’m thinking of the Merci beacoups to be said.

2018 is here.

There’s this story I’ve been telling a lot in the past few weeks. And I found the perfect illustration.

The story starts midair, because jumping is never a matter of if, only when. When you hit the water, everyone watches, and when they wait and your body doesn’t come back up because you’ve drowned, they say “oh, what an idiot.”

But when you come back up, and then see you thump your fists, they say “wow, that’s awesome!”

Sometimes, the logical choice is not always the right one.

2018 is going to be about jumping more. About taking risks — sometimes calculated — where we make this up as we go. Where we don’t know whether it’s a tragedy or a success story till it’s over.

Bend your knees, all the way down, put your arms by your sides.

Now, with all your might, jump.

P.S:

I had a very interesting conversation with Ayomide Tayo about the whole experience, but I wrote a lot of stories from the road here.

It’s past three in the morning, and cold

And I’m lying on the road,

At the mercy of armed hooded men, ready to offload,

This is not a cute poem, or a poem at all.

This is me getting robbed.

It’s March of 2010, and Sagamu-Ore Highway is not a nice place to be at 3 in the morning. Especially when just a few weeks ago, a story was making the rounds that some robbers forced passengers to lie in the middle of the road. Next, they made a bus run over them. Why? Because they refused to part with money.

Anyway, you’re reading this because when I wanted to explain to them that I was just a broke student traveling for exams, they didn’t shoot me.

They just gave me correct beating.

A few days later, my mum and I were arguing because I wanted to travel to Lagos, by road. At Night.

The Yoruba Mother won.

A few months later, someone gave me money to fly to Port Harcourt. But the airline I used was one of those ones at Jibowu, that have four tyres, and lets us stop at Ore to eat and shit.

I think it was Ifesinachi Mass Transit.

Now, I can’t remember whether I took a bus because I needed extra cash or because I just wanted to touch asphalt.

The thing is, I love the road, very much. I love to travel by road. I love it. I love it so much I once made the decision for a 10-hour road trip, in less than 15 minutes. I just packed a small bag and hit the road.

I’ve travelled in a car with friends, from Rivers State to Kogi State, with nothing but Google Maps and a reasonable supply of junk food. (We got lost once though. The Map re-routed too quickly)

So now, I’m travelling again, but it’s nothing like I’ve ever done before. This time, I’m travelling round the entire country. In one stretch. With one backpack and nothing else.

I’m round-tripping it. So I’m leaving from Lagos, then heading to the South-South, then to the South-East, then the Middle-Belt, then the Northeast, then the Northwest, down to the North-Central, back to the Southwest, and back to Lagos.

I’m planning to spend 8 weeks max, and I intend to start mid-March, but I’ll be needing some help.

First, I’ll be writing stories on the road, and taking pictures. I don’t have a DSLR (yet), so I’ll be taking the photos with my phone and my memory. Most of it, I’ll be documenting on Pulse.

Second. I want to make this road trip cost as little as possible. That means zero hotel costs. So if you know anyone willing to spare a couch in any state, my body is ready.

Bonus: I don’t bed-wet.

Another way you can help me is by telling me things you think I should explore. Just to give you an idea, I’ll be going to Upper Sakpomba, in Edo State — the place Lawrence Anini grew up. I’ll be looking for weird things in weird places too, like the village in Ebonyi where no one is allowed to kill snakes (God, snakes terrify me). Or a Biafran war veteran with war stories. Or like the dog meat market in Itam, Akwa Ibom State. Or the vagina therapists of the North. Or the secret drug culture in Zamfara. And if you know anyone who’d take me to Sambisa, I really don’t mind to be honest. So yes, please tell me things you think I should see, or eat, or do. No matter what it is.

I don’t think I can do this alone, mostly because I don’t have two heads. So I look forward to the things you want to share, or the ways you’d like to help.

Stay awesome, or better still, pack a bag and hit the road.

P.S: This was supposed to be a motivational/inspirational/life-coachinal piece. If you didn’t feel inspired, please start from the top of this page, and read to the bottom.

Thank you.

Please share. I need all the help I can get.

Originally published at pulse.ng on February 4, 2017.

Son of The Road was originally published in Pulse Nigeria on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s another day. There are many sad emojis on your timeline. Someone has died. Someone young enough to have an internet life.

So you’re curious, or sober, but mostly curious than sober, because you’ve seen many deaths.

You find his Twitter, see the kinds of things he tweeted. See his friends and what they are saying.

Twitter is fine, but it’s never enough. So you check if he had Facebook. Friends are signing their RIPs on his Facebook wall, like a condolence register. You read the posts. Maybe they’re sad that they lost a friend, or that they have now meditated about their own deaths. You check his photo album. Photos from when he was much younger are there, sitting pretty. You wonder how long death stalked him before it finally struck.

You check Instagram. You see the kinds of photos he posted. You try to understand who he was from these tiny little things. You wonder if he posted few photos of himself because he thought, one day, someone is going to come looking when he’s dead.

You try to speak to his friends. You ask about the little things, like favourite foods, or last conversations. You ask about his hobbies, and dreams. You ask about his relationships, the people he loved. You ask till the questions almost become uncomfortable.

You’re going to be needing photos of the deceased. So you download them. For a fraction of a second, you feel like some sort of grave robber. You’d have asked for permission if he was alive.

You take only the best photos. You feel like a coroner preparing his guest for the journey to the afterlife. Wiring the jaws shut. Dressing them in their best clothes.

All the tiny specks of the deceased’s life you’ve collected, you put together, and build a mausoleum with it. You ignore the hesitation in some of the good things his friends said. You ignore the buts, because the best mausoleums are built with fine marble and rocks.

Now, you write. You write about his dreams, you re-enact his life in paragraphs. You reconstruct his ambitions in diction.

When you’re done, you read through again. Your beautiful depiction of his life makes his death feel like martyrdom.

You publish. Everyone who sees or hears of him, will feel something, and if you could check, you’d see the light of his life. He will live in their minds. If only for a few moments. They won’t think of his fears, or insecurities, like how he probably worried about bad breath when speaking to someone at close range.

When they are done, they’ll say, “eyya, such a beautiful soul taken at such a young age”.

Your editor will nod his head as he reads, as if he can taste the words on his tongue.

Perfect, he’ll say, perfect. “You captured his life really well.” You’ll smile a weak thank you smile.

Everyone deserves a chance at a perfect life after all.

You know when little light enters a dark room, and right in the line of fire are those specks of dust, scampering for cover, or for light in all directions.

GoodMan™ likes to describe my life like this — spontaneous, full of energy, all over the place. Love him to bits.

This post is going to be a lot like those specks of dust.

In 2015, I discovered Google’s Primer app and I went round the full office of almost 100 people, telling as much people as I could to download the app, and helping the reluctant ones download it myself.

Oh God, I loved that app so much. This is how I am with people I like, or things. I talk about them everywhere, to everyone, every time, to whoever I think cares to listen. So I’ll wear that one shirt till it dies and abandon all the other good ones.

I haven’t opened that app in months to give it some proper use. This is how I am with everything, and many of my interests. I just run out of steam. I just forget.

“Change all your passwords, they broke into the house and they took your laptop.”

In September, Jasmine called to tell me while I was at the office. That laptop had all the drafts I kept procrastinating about putting on my Google Drive. All of it, lost.

Folarin Okunola was sitting opposite me at the office had no idea what was going on. It took me the time it took to change all the passwords to move on. I stopped bothering about the drafts.

This is how I am with people leaving, or dying. I think both are inevitable. When people want to leave, nothing can keep them, not even love. And it’s fine, because I don’t want anything pulling me back when I’ve run out of the will to stay, or when I simply can’t stay any longer.

“Do I let go easily because of strength or because I never really cared enough?”

I used to worry about this a lot, but Nana Aisha Salaudeen says I don’t rate myself enough. Love her to bitses.

In my first year of secondary school, I had a notebook that had all my interests, from normal schoolwork to life. It was my neatest note, the only one that managed to stay complete and up-to-date every time. I got flogged by teachers a lot of the time for incomplete notes. Bleh.

This is how I am with many things. It’s always not-enough something, or too-much something, so I create my own, and sometimes that could mean not paying attention to what I should be paying attention to.

“Abeg see the one wey fit size you.”

I came home one day like three months ago, and on one of the rare occasions where my room wasn’t scattered, I packed all the clothes I hadn’t worn in months and gave it to our gateman, because it’s easier to give them out than to have to sort out what I’m clearly not using. (There’s no this-is-how for this one).

One day, I came home from work and met one big plate of Fried Rice and Chicken, and you know what I did? I sat down while still carrying my backpack and finished the thing.

This is how I am with food, I wipe the plate clean — every goddamn time. I love food, and I have enough body fat to show for it.

Five of my friends married this year. Two married each other. One got stolen away from another friend the way everyone steals the best players from Wenger on deadline day. Another one married someone that found a way to blow her mind. Miracle. Over one year ago, all of them had insecurities and uncertainties about bae.

But look at God.

Creative Mutant made so much illustrations this year that I started to wonder if it was not the same person that just started drawing stuff last year. Homeboy put in work.

This post was supposed to be about me, but now I’m talking about everybody else.

This is how I am with everything, starting off in one place and completely ending up where I didn’t plan. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it sucks real bad.

I started obsessing over a GoPro, looking for sugar mummy to buy it for me. None came along, and after a situationship with my wallet, I saved enough to buy it.

This is how I am when I get obsessed about stuff. I don’t stop. I wish I could be obsessed about other things like work and learning to speak Arabic, and other projects.

Now, I’m obsessing over a new thing. I want to travel across Nigeria, in one single stretch. From Lagos, to the south east, then to the south-south, then middle belt, then northeast, then Northwest, then north central, then back to the southwest.

It will take less than two months, and while I haven’t completely figured out how to be on the road and not lose my job, I’ll still do it in 2017.

Remember those tiny specks of dust at the beginning? We are back at it again, because I started off asking if there’s a name for what I have.

Now I don’t know if I’m interested in a name anymore.

Is There A Name For What I Have? was originally published in Danfomatic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Secondary School geography says America is the name of two continents, North and South America. In real life, it’s the United States of America.

We know Lagos is doing fine, compared to the rest of Nigeria. The GDP of Lagos alone is Kenya’s sugar daddy goals. We are the rich uncle of West Africa, and clearly, an African culture powerhouse. Heck, there is a thing as ‘Nigerian accent’, ask Sauti Sol.

Lets play a little game of Compare.

Some guys in The Abroad did a poll; they were asking if America should go bomb Agrabah. 57% weren’t sure, but 30% were like BOMMBBB THEM!

Here’s the fun part. No real person lives in Agrabah. That’s because Agrabah it’s where Disney’s Aladdin lives. Duh-uh.

The Lagos arrogance is not that different and looks like this tweet.

But its a free world, so this person has the right to their opinion. Never mind that Prof. Umar Maryah of the University of Maiduguri has tried to get it into our thick skulls that Sambisa is sixty times the size of Lagos.

Yes we forget, but Lagos really is a claustrophobic one-thousand-square-kilometre piece of land.

This is the arrogance that makes you forget that Nigeria doesn’t begin and end in the smallest state in Nigeria, or the type that makes you forget that Ibadan is only 11% of Oyo State. Or the one that makes you think everybody after Ore in Ondo State is Igbo. Or the type that makes you forget that the North is not Hausaria.

There are talented people outside Lagos too, and not all of them come to Lagos to blow. There are designers, artists musicians, programmers, and everyone else you can imagine.

Ah, the immigration part.

America is the land of opportunity, like Lagos. Donald Trump, whose ancestors are German, thinks some people like him have more right to America than he does. How familiar.

Remember in 2015 when some people thought it was a great idea to throw people in the Lagoon if they worked against what they perceived to be the “best interests of Lagos”?

Remember when some people thought hawkers should be kicked out of Lagos because they can’t follow all of Lagos’ rules and because they “aren’t really Lagosians”?

Here’s the fun fact,

Most of you are as Lagosian as Trump is American. Most of your grand-daddies and mummies came from their little villages looking for greener pastures in Lagos, like a huge chunk of those hawkers, who were probably born in Lagos.

And if you think being Yoruba gives you some right to Lagos, you better be Awori, because they were here long before you got here. Back when they still had to pay taxes to the Oba of Benin, who sent his son down to rule Lagos as the first Oba.

Ah, you didn’t know that, did you?

While this arrogance is not so with all Lagosians, it is ingrained in its culture. Its in how you look at JJCs, how you think it can’t be good if its not Lagos-certified.

Lagos, like America, was built by all types of people, from all types of places, including those places we think less off. So yes, maybe Lagos really is the Centre of Excellence where all the greatness is Nigeria is born and bred.

My people beyond that Berger bus-stop, there’s a whole new world out there, and while you might be shocked to know this, its not all bush.

Originally published (in some form), at partyjollof.com on July 12, 2016.

Lagos and America are Birds of the Same Arrogance was originally published in Danfomatic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.