You’re Not Tired I
Dozie and Salima spoke five languages between themselves, but for a long while, they had no words. Like playing Ultimate Catcher with a group of energetic primary school students, speaking required space. Words dashed though your head, or heart, or stomach like sweaty children ran across playgrounds. You needed energy to chase them, agility to catch them, skill to press them onto the sheet that was your tongue. You needed care and precision to check them then strength to speak them. The girls had none of these.
They followed this gathering closely, their gazes slowly travelling from the docile crowd to the energized speakers. There was a notable speech from an unremarkable person. His words tore through the forest of sticky air, quaked and thundered throughout the crowd, then settled into the droplets that tensioned these hot Lagosians. This group of market women, school-aged girls, and adult men applauded in unison. Truly they were content to acknowledge him in their hearts, but they clapped to pacify his pride in hopes that he would return to his seat.
Dozie’s eyeliner was bold and blue. High wings, ready to fly. Away from her home, where she was not respected, and away from this crowd she stood before. It was the mark of beauty that had stained Dozie: she was too intelligent to be this beautiful, too beautiful to be chaste, and so on. She caught a particularly fat man—likely a father of two or more—staring at her as she walked from her seat to the podium. He was completely taken, paralyzed by desire so much that she could almost hear the small, pricking voice that told them—in whatever language he spoke—that he was not man enough to have her. His ego, and his smile collapsed. She held his gaze, he knew that she knew: he was scared shitless of her. And her eyeliner.
Nigeria was tired; heat, hunger and hardship had flogged this West African Giant every day since its independence in 1960. Yet Nigerians would swear they could take more. More death, more crime, and these days, more rape. Dozie’s opening remarks shook her audience, and they were intentionally quiet as she proceeded. She pressed them, spoke straight through the “baseless thinking” she and most of this crowd had been brought up with. She turned to a new person with each new point, speaking each word with huge gestures that almost resembled the pounding of yams.
“We are two hundred thousand in number today,” she declared, her voice giving way slowly, “Remember that. When you are told to keep quiet, to preserve our culture, our way, remember that there are two hundred thousand men, women and children in Lagos today who have decided that enough is enough. What kind of culture suffocates and frustrates the progress of its people?” she paused, wiped her brow, “if you are selling fish and your fish should spoil, do you keep the spoilt fish on your tray for the sake of remembering fishes of the past?” People laughed, “I hope not,” she said, nodding with every word, “so I hope you are all ready to throw away this rotten agenda against the girls and women in our midst. I hope you are truly as tired as you look, as tired as you need to be.”
Dozie shuffled to the side as Salima, the dark-skinned Hausa hijabi with whom Dozie had spent the fairer days of her time at the University of Lagos, made her way to the podium. The girls were now in 300 level, close to tasting Lagos without thirsty professors and entitled confraternity boys. They had found, only a week before this day, that Lagos holds greater evils than any they had seen in Unilag. Demons with thick beards and lofty pockets, others with blonde goatees and a whopping seven thousand five hundred Naira to their names.
A week before this day, Chime, their friend and roommate, decided she would not make the trip from Yaba to Ikeja for a call-back interview: “The whole thing na 4-1-9,” she had told Dozie and Salima, “And the stress to go to Ikeja…” Chime’s first interview with this company had been almost a month ago. “The CEO talked like an agbero, he didn’t know anything about anything, obviously he didn't go to school. So where did he find twenty million Naira?” Salima and Dozie were not convinced. Chime sighed, and peeled off the tight rubber cycling shorts from under her skirt. She sat on Salima’s bed, and three of them spent the rest of the day doing nothing. This regular Saturday morning unfolded into a regular Saturday evening.
On Sunday morning, noise from the stupid football enthusiasts in the next room woke Dozie, puffy eyed and audibly congested, cussing in Igbo and some Hausa which she had learnt from Salima. Dozie took a sachet of pure water, put it in her blue bucket, grabbed her toilet bag and headed to the bathroom. She closed her room door behind her, tugged at the wrapper she had tied on her chest, on top of her night gown, and wiped her eyes.
She opened her eyes to see Chime pinned to the wall by two men—a young one with a blonde goatee sporting the Lagos-famous fake-brand Bike slides, and an older, rounder one whose stomach threatened to burst out of his kaftan. Goatee held her down, potbelly kaftan had stuck a plastic bottle into her throat, shaking it as the bottle emptied to the very last drops. They shot a threatening eye at Dozie, dropped the bottle on the floor, and walked away.
Chime was mostly fine. Whatever they had fed her was hot, Chime’s lips were raw, and so was her throat. Salima had woken up soon after Dozie had found Chime. The three girls sat together in the corridor, Salima trying to comfort their friend, Dozie cussing Chime out for not having any health insurance.
Dozie stopped in the middle of a sentence to sneeze, and that’s when Chime started to scream. It was Salima that noticed Chime was bleeding. “Chime, are you seeing your period?” this was no period, Chime’s blood came fast, thin, maybe thick—nobody could think over Chime’s screams. She was in deep anguish, clenching her stomach and screaming so that the entire hostel, including their stupid amebo neigbors, surrounded her.
All the girls knew what was happening. They had all heard of it, many of them had experienced it, and so on. There was something brutally crushing about Chime’s confusion. “Did you know she was pregnant?” Salima asked Dozie.
Only ten minutes after it had started, and just before Dozie could respond to Salima, Chime’s crying quieted. It had come away. Dozie looked at Salima. How would they comfort their friend? Chime’s let out three burdened breaths, pungent with the smell of alcohol, and fainted.
Salima replayed all this as she spread her arms onto the podium. She had not come here to reason, to speak of logic, as Dozie had. Was there any logic in forcing hot ogoggoro down a pregnant lady’s throat?
She would demand, command, scold. But she would not reason.
“Most of you here today, I am your junior. But since you are stubborn like children, I must act like the elder in this place and be the one to talk the truth,” she knocked her hand against the podium, “if you like suffering, if you love wickedness… then that is your own portion, and your own problem, and Allah will judge you for it. You will reap that judgement, that portion alone. But me,” she pounded her chest, “them,” she motioned to Dozie and the rest of the women on the stage, “us,” she waved to the crowd, “we will not follow you and die.”
Gunshots. The crowd dispersed.