A young girl of about six lay tranquilly asleep, side by side a male toddler, both without shirts, both out of all consciousness of the jangling clicks of our inquisitive phone cameras, the scorching afternoon sun, the balmy lagoon breeze. They lay on a blue wrapper, only big enough to contain the girl’s knees from the head, wrinkled by the unevenness of the dry vast sea sand. The rest part of her legs lay on the white sand, spread across a sand bag, one of the few scattered on the ground used by the kids as learning chairs.
This is a school, its only testament being a rough-edged chalk board nailed against the tightly knit bamboo wall, facing the door way (there are no doors in the two entry points to the building) from which we entered. On the board are chalked “3 x 1 = 3”, “3 x 2 = 6” up to “3 x 6 = 18“. The date on the board is that of the previous day, a Friday. East of the room, beside two lines of eight sand bags, lay a carefully packed heap of folding yellow plastic gallons, a sign that they are used as seats in the school. About three feet above the gallons is a wide opening that serves as window. Beneath the chalk board sits a rough bench which serves as the teacher’s chair and table. This is Lekki Peninsular, Lagos’ town of opulence, home to Nigeria’s wealthy.
The wonder, for many a first time visitor, might be why this slum, in spite of its near proximity to the sprawling Phase II mansions, remains hidden from public view. And for my friend Batarhe, whom I conscripted into the mission less than an hour before we arrived, this is a novelty by way of excursions. He never imagined what he would be greeted with as we drove. From the gate at the Ikate roundabout entrance, to the slum’s adjoining junction, is a three minutes’ drive or less. By the west, we walk past a massive construction site – the building which appears like a mall or flats of an office complex is awaiting final touches - as we leave the road that stretches from the estate gate. The gate appears to be GTBank-sponsored, for it has embossed on its apex a GTBank logo and had its entire painting in GTBank’s colours.
We head north; walk into a trail between a stagnant pond by the right and an ageing foundation of a block building - still at the DPC level – by the left. On opposing sides of the trail, now expanding into a broad sandy road, are structures that resemble kiosks, some ramshackled, but all built with bamboos, planks, cartons or nylons. Their roofs, covered of zincs coated in rust, are low. From one of the first few buildings, sound of a tailor’s sewing machine clatter into the burning sun. Next to it is a barber’s shop from which a clipper whirs, and opposite it is a malam huddled over his tray of kolanuts, chewing gums, cigarettes, lighter, bitter kola and biscuits. Five dark young men sit idly under the next, gisting in a language we don’t understand.
The trail leads us into a much wider stretch of road that cut across and extends on both ends. Eastward isn’t quite lengthy, so we go west, attracting, as we walk, curious glances from residents seated in their verandas. From this point, it becomes clearer that we aren’t in a village market, we are looking at a warren of shanties in a waterfront slum, all built of woods or planks or nylons or tarpaulins, stretching miles down the road, sitting atop heaps of dirt and accommodating many humans.
Life is normal here; normal in the sense that, like the rest of us, the residents eat, cook, make love, procreate, watch football, wash their clothes, and do many more of the things we do.
We pass a group of boys seated on a high, carpenter’s table situated at the centre of a shade. They look at us with interest, stirring a sense of apprehension within us. There is a building, about ten feet from where the boys sit, walled with black tarpaulin, and atop its rusted roof perches a small digital satellite television dish. The tarpaulin is covered with inscriptions that convey a message of what the structure is about: “BLUES 4 LIVE, ARSENAL 4 LIVE, REAL MADRID 4 LIVE, BARCA 4 LIVE”. This is a football viewing centre and even these ones here have caught the frenzy. That line, “…for life!” which they wrote as “…4 live” has become a national excitement line for football fans in Nigeria, especially the young. We bring out our blackberry phones and take pictures, the capture buttons clatter into their ears and they run out to the centre of the broad way, looking at us and wondering what we are about. I don’t know if Batarhe is returning the look, but I refuse to look. I tell him we shouldn’t act scared. He understands. I tell him to stop further snapshots. We leave.
By our left, a woman, charcoal black with a faded ash wrapper tied to her chest, is drawing water from a well by the broad way. A toddler, equally charcoal black, stands beside her and bends every now and then to pick up play materials from the sea of sands under his feet. Behind the woman is a cluster of shacks that extend down into a long, narrow and shallow pool of simmering water. The buildings here are suspended on stilts, with wooden stairs in front of the doors for entry and exit. Under them are dirt, ageing and uncared for. As we walk near the water, we are looking at two kids in front of one of the stilt-suspended houses, the bigger one tuck the smaller one, of about three years, inside a big dull plastic bowl, bathing him.
There’s a sort of struggle as the bigger kid pours water on the head of the smaller one who makes efforts to seize the bail from him. We capture the scene. The sound from our photography, and our voices - even though considerably low – attract an ageing man in another hanging building just adjacent the kids. He stands peeping at us. I steal a glance at him, quickly shift my gaze to the small parcel of land in front of his building with a blooming greenery. Although pellets of dirt litter the place here and there, it is still green, and adds life to the otherwise dry colours of white, brown and grey. Until now, the only beauty we have seen here is the dome of the bending heavens overseeing a clan of the forgotten.
I don’t know if Batarhe sees the man staring at us. I just want us to move. I tell him so. He is clutching his phone tightly, snapping everything in sight. He smiles and tells me he sees the man. I am thinking the man could raise alarm, and alert the dwellers of this place of the presence of intruders. They could round us up and take seizure of our phones, and even beat us up. I am still apprehensive. Batarhe too. He stops and we move, still heading down the road. We walk past five kids, all half naked and dripping of sweat, playing small football the size of a handy shot-put, and oblivious of our presence, or that of anybody for that matter.
We continue our walk. Few feet past the kids are young ladies seated over a tray of smoked fish, chattering. One of them was loosening the hair of another one, they just talk and laugh.
I tell Batarhe that there’s a school here. He is surprised.
‘School?’
“Yes’. That provokes his inquisitiveness. I continue: “I was here about two weeks ago and I met a young man whom I interviewed. He told me there’s a school here. Remember I told you I’ve been trying to locate the name I saved his number with.”
“Then try and search further. We need him to accompany us. We need an insider here. We should have even come in shorts so we don’t look entirely odd. These people just know we are not part of this community.” He replies.
He is right. I scroll through my phone again, searching all links to the boy in my contact list. I can’t see him. Actually, I’ve forgotten his name. I was here about a fortnight ago, the first time I happened upon this huge slum in the unlikeliest of all places. After seeing thousands thrive in squalor just behind streets of splendor, I was moody. As I left, totally overtaken by gloom, I met him entering the trail to this settlement. I wasn’t sure he lived there, for he had the swagger of the son of a lower middle class family. He had walked past me when I called him back. He obliged.
“Are you going there?”, I asked, pointing the direction of the slum.
“Yes,” he replied as he embarked on a measured adjustment of his dangling tote.
“You live there?”
“Yes”. His two responses have been that short and snappy, but he didn’t send out any signal of discomfort with my probes. I was a bit shocked, because I could not conclude, up to that moment, that the people I saw there were shacking up in those cabins.
“So people live there?”
“Yes,” He smiled, and then added, “Plenty pipu o.” I quickly sensed his difficulty with English language and then switched over to pidgin.
“Plenty pipu? Like how many pipu?”
“Ah, e pass 2000 sef. Plenty!” His countenance sparkled as he let go of his initial self-consciousness.
He told me that they moved from a place called ‘Chisco’, that some of them aren’t Nigerians. (For instance, he also isn’t a Nigerian. He is a Beninoise). He said they have a traditional ruler, a Baale.
I asked if he is educated, he answered in the affirmative, pointing towards the gate. He said he’d done with his secondary education. I asked him a few other questions, promised him I would come back soon to check on him, and collected his number. As I we parted, he kept looking back to my direction as though to be sure I wasn’t pursuing him.
Today I can’t even connect to him. The moment I arrived the gate, I started searching my memory for a recollection of what I saved his number with.
As I talk with Batarhe, we see a lanky man approach from where we are headed.
“Well-done, Sir” Batarhe greets. He has, since our arrival here, understood the futility of full classic English language in communicating with the residents. “Abeg, we dey find the school for here.”
“School? Na dat side the school dey. Dem dey build new one sef.” He points far ahead of us, motioning to a building with blue roof, far off into the sun. We thank him and move on.
As we walk, a fat woman trudges on to the road from a cluster of buildings in the right; a bowl containing an aluminium pot sits stately on her head, her left hand pulling a plastic bucket and her right lending her head a support. She’s selling porridge beans. Another one, slim and tall, has on her head a plastic basin of agege bread, a blue plastic bucket hanging on her right hand and a pink skirt firmly tucked to her waist. She’s entering what looks like men’s rendezvous, a house of thatch roof with half walls made from, as every other building, tightly-knit bamboos, such that from outside one can view the heads of the men seated on a board of draught.
We get to the blue roof where the man said the school was, but see no sign pointing to that. A young man is lying atop a bench beside the blue-roof house. We are looking for school, we tell him. He points us back to the relaxation house where men played draught as we passed. We go back, greet them (about eight of them) and ask them about the school. They motion us to three buildings away and add that the new school is also there, just beside the old one. We sense they don’t feel threatened. Our fears may not have been legitimate. We get into the school and see the little girl and the boy – earlier mentioned - sleep in tranquility.
We are looking at the new school, about four times the size of the old one, with a touch of ancient sophistication: the bamboos are browner, bigger in size and more beautiful. But the bamboos aren’t everywhere. The length of it is walled with rust-clad zincs about 6 feet high. Scattered in the wide centre are planks serving as pillars. The building is yet to be roofed, but some of the plank pillars already have roofing woods nailed on them.
We walk a couple of steps down and see a young man hunched under the roof of a craggy wood-walled shack, clutching a phone. We ask him whether there’s a hospital around. He stands up, points to our left, and walks us near a small house at the foot of the ocean, perching on many stilts. He retreats, and we thank him. I wonder aloud to Batarhe the unwillingness of these residents to suspect us. Do they know we are about to tell their story to the world? Do they know the government – be it Lagos state or the central – in their knee-jerk responses to every issue, have the capacity to evict them the moment after reading the story of their existence in Lekki?
We walk past a middle-aged man drawing water from a well by our right. We greet him warmly. He returns the warmth. A young lady is washing clothes in front of a smaller house adjoining the hospital. The traditional blue curtain caressed by the midday breeze is hanging on the door. Batarhe is at the back capturing the moment in pictures as I ask the young lady, possibly in her twenties, if this is the hospital. She nods in the affirmative.
“Is the doctor there?”
“Yes. Enter inside. Siddon. Doctor dey come.”.
I push the curtain to one end of the door way and thrust my head inside. The inside is dark, a high table draped in flowery polythene cloth faces the door. On top of it lay two heaps of books, and a bible. From the door, by the right, a brownish curtain divides the part where the table stands and the other part where, as the curtain hangs three-quarter drawn, we can see two benches as wide as almost the width of a 6-spring bed, sit side by side atop the wooden floor which in itself is made of irregular planks that couldn’t join perfectly. From the floor you could see the sand upon which the shanty stands. You can mistake the two benches for beds if you don’t look at their legs. The lady’s voice comes again. “Enter now.” I enter with a measure of reluctance. A roughly-constructed bench sits in front of the curtain and facing the table, supposedly the doctor’s table. Another bench sits across, behind which a 14 inch tube TV hangs suspended high and above every head seated on the bench. The TV is blank. There’s no electricity. Batarhe and I sit facing each other.
A woman opens the blue curtain, smiling, her wrapper hanging above her breast. She’s pregnant. We greet. She responds.
“Are you the resident doctor here?”
“No. Na my husband.”
“Na your husband be doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Ok. Where im dey?”
“E dey sleep?”
“Una dey get light for here?” Batarhe asks. Since we got here, he’s been of the thinking that there’s no PHCN light in the community.
“Yes” She replies. And then continues, “We don even get light today sef. We dey get. E never even tey wey dem take am”
“How business na?. So people dey come here for treatment?” I ask
“Yes. Dem dey come.”
“And we been wan see your husband sha o.”
“Una fit come back now. Before that time in go don wake.” She replies before asking, suddenly, “Na who una be now?”
We let out a simultaneous smile. Batarhe looks at me. I tell her we came around to get sand from the sand diggers down the shore extracting black sand from the sea. The first time I came, I went as far as that end, where I saw hefty young men hauling the black sands from the canoe to nearby land.
She agrees.
“Other hospital dem dey here?” We ask.
“Yes. One dey that side.” She points eastward “Another one sef dey. Dem plenty.“ We tell her we’d like to see another one. We leave, promising to return.
The man we saw at the well is still there drawing water to fill his five or so bowls. We take special interest in the water which is surprisingly clean. We tell him we like the water and his countenance gains an instant sparkle.
“Yes, e fine. No well we be like this one for this place.” He tells us. “Because this place get level. Water get level. Na here be the highest.” We are feeling a total absence of danger now. The people here are harmless. We ask him about the new school. Is it a primary school or secondary? He tells us it is both. Students study there for nine years. I remember the new universal basic education scheme.
We move to check out the next hospital, walking past an execrable billiard table, crying babies, idle young men sipping local gin and smoking weed, zinc-walled houses, heaps of planks slanted against shanty walls, dirt-covered portions of land overgrown with grasses, near-colourless paint buckets on the wooden verandas, resting canoes tied to bigger bamboos erected in the manner of electric poles and a green-painted shack on top of which is boldly inscribed: BARBING SALOON LEKKI PHASE 2. We walk past a vast expanse of land with two opposing goal posts. The sand, typical beach sand, is white and nearly sinks the foot.
We walk past the best building in the community; constructed from bottom-up with smooth plywood and roofed with red long sheets. It is a branch of The Redeemed Christian Church of God. Inside it are white plastic chairs, a luxury in this place. A big large-blade fan is seen from outside.
One of the canoes sits in front of a house on top of water, suspended on countless stilts. The canoe’s thwart has the colour of sand, like it was sand-coated. It attracts our attention, just as the house. A plastic bucket is suspended on a rope from near the roof. Beside it is a line tied to an erect bamboo on which hang a jean and shirt. At the west end is a hanging wood upon which three wears hang. Under the hanging bucket is a base of wood also suspended by stilts. On the base litter yellow jerricans, wrappers and rags of all sorts. A boy sits turning water from jerrican ripped open from the top to serve as a basin, into a full can. Beneath the base is an old 50 CL black gallon lying horizontally with its wider surface cut off. The click of our snapshot attracts a heavily pregnant woman from inside the house. We immediately start admiring the stretch of water that extends far into where the ocean meets the cloud. She stares curiously at us. We greet her. She waves. We ask how she’s feeling. She speaks in a language we can’t understand and then motions unto a boy who came standing behind us as we arrived. The boy tells us the woman doesn’t understand English language. We ask him where the water stretches to. He says it’s Oreta. Is it in Lagos? He says yes.
We beg him to take us to the other hospital. He agrees without hesitation. As we move, a set of two young men in their twenties call him and speak something we don’t understand. We intervene and promise them he’s coming back immediately. He leads us through a snaky trail with opposing shanties circling a vast basin of black, shallow water. In between we see a boy applying his sonorous voice to praises, a shop selling Ijebu garri tied in satchets and heaps of planks that must be serving as firewood.
He stops before a fair beautiful lady seated idly on the elevation adjoining another house, and tells us we are at the hospital. We greet the young lady. She responds, but not with any air of sophistication that most doctors drag. We ask her if she is the doctor. She doesn’t reply, but quickly stands up –revealing straight legs merely stained by days of immersion in the sea of squalor - and tells us, “Come .” We follow her. We enter the house, it is dark. Unlike the first hospital, no curtains nor benches on which to lay patients. A rough table is at the centre without any cover. And beside it is a chair that looks like a bench with a back for resting. There’s no book, nor bible. The house is built, not with beautiful bamboos, but with the stems of elephant grass. The woody floor is scraggy. The only curtain it has is inside, not at the door. A bottle of schnapps is on the floor.
She motions us to the bench at the entrance and disappears. About two minutes later, she reappears with a woman who looks pregnant. And we begin to have that sense that a lot of women here are pregnant. It might be false generalization, but that’s the feeling we have. She says, “Welcome”. We greet her. She says ‘I’m coming”, but she stands looking at us. We ask her if she is the doctor in charge. She says “I no be Nigeria. I be Togo. Na French. French.” The beautiful lady still stands beside her, conversing with her in a tongue we can’t understand. The pregnant woman goes out immediately and shortly reappears with another woman whom, we suspect, she rousted from siesta.
She comes in, looking sleepy and complains, “Ano dey hear English o. Na only Yoruba adey speak.”
“Can you speak Yoruba?” Batarhe asks me, worried that the language barrier could pose an obstacle to our quest to leave her with sufficient information. I doubt my ability, and quickly reply him no. Then on a second thought I start. I ask them if this is a hospital. They say yes. They tell me they deliver babies there and treat everybody who comes, whether an adult or a child. Who is the doctor? The pregnant one say her husband is the doctor, and that he travelled. He will be staying away for a while.
The fair lady zooms off again, and this time returns with a small woman in gown. She walks in grinning from ear to ear, begins with pidgin, asking us what we want. I speak Yoruba with her. She replies in Pidgin, as though to justify the commission she undertook. We explain, make further enquiries and leave. They ask us what we brought for them, we assure them we’ll be returning when the doctor comes back and then we’ll get them gifts.
We are already looking dehydrated. Our shoes are cloaked in dust. We are headed outside. As we walk, I”ve not stopped ruing my inability to save the contact of the boy I met the first day. As Batarhe and I chat while we head out of the settlement, we come across two middle aged men sitting idly under a shed facing a decrepit canoe, chatting. They stare at us as we approach. We greet them and walk past. Behind them is a shop that sells local gin and other things, and from which chattering voices rent the surrounding air. We stand before it and capture more views in camera. The click of our capture button arouses their curiosity.
“Come!” A short man mixing two or three bottles of local gin in a glass orders us. This could be it. We might be facing a major confrontation here at last. The real concern here is that the number of people inside the shop is considerably much. Some are drinking, some are eating pepper soup, others food. I ask Batarhe to allow me respond to their questions. We get to him and greet at the same time.
“Wetin happen?” He queries without stopping the mixture to look at us.
“Nothing.” We reply jointly. Then I say; “We just dey see this place for the first time. We come buy sand sand for that side. From there we talk say make we see as this place be”
He raises his head, looks at us a bit more relaxed and says, “Shey no problem sha?”
“No” We assure him, and then add our individual smiles. “No wahala at all.”
“Come buy pepper soup now.” A woman from inside where the small crowd sat said. A man tells us to come in for nkwobi. We smile and tell them we are late already and can’t afford one more minute in the community.
Feeling relieved at what would have been real danger, we hasten our pace on our way out, discussing what would have happened if the people had insisted on taking us to the sand diggers at the foot of the ocean to find out if they truly knew us. That would have been unpleasant. We talk about the role of having a resident of the place as a guide to protect us from the prying eyes of natives. Again, that boy comes to mind.
“And here he is!” I shout.
“Who? The guy?” Batarhe asks, surprised.
“Yes! Isn’t this an interesting world?” We are looking at the guy in blue singlet, white shorts, big silvery wrist watch on one hand and a black rubber bangle on the other. He clutches his phone tightly as he makes to enter a house built of rough-edged planks. On hearing my scream, he stops, stares at us under the scorching sun.
“Hey, you don forget me?” I ask.
He suddenly remembers the face. “Yaay! Good afternoon. I remember you now”
“You know say I promise you say I go come back?”
“Yes. Yes. Na true.” He smiles again as he shelves his plan of entering the house and comes out to stand facing us.
“Wetin be that your name again?”
“Sam.”
“Yes. I remember now.” I say. I scroll through my phone and see SamLekki saved there.
He walks into the veranda of the house, pulls out a bench and asks us to sit down. We sit. He hurries inside, grabs two sachets of pure water and offers us. We tell him we are so hot we will not be satisfied with anything not chilled.
“Meet my friend, Batarhe”, I tell him.
“Ok. Good afternoon”. He greets again.
“How you dey na?” Batarhe asks
“Fine.”
I ask him same old questions. Do they have a ruler here? He says yes, repeating that they have a Baale who lives in their midst, but Oba Elegushi is their traditional ruler. I ask if he is educated, he says he’s done with his Secondary education. He calls it Government College, Okoko VI.
Batarhe knows the school, having been raised on the Island. We ask him about his mother. He says she’s asleep inside the house. And that she sells stuff in the house, that is their means of livelihood. We ask him the name of the community; he corroborates what others had told us. The name of the place is Gbame.
We stand to leave. Batarhe asks if he would be willing to have us take his picture. He agrees. He poses for a few shots for us.
We bid him good bye and leave, wondering, as we come out to the major road from where the mansions stand, the wonders that would close the gap between those in these two extremes of the social divide.
Report by: Foghi Batarhe and Chinedu Ekeke Click to signup for FREE news updates, latest information and hottest gists everyday
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Very adventurous and interesting!
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