Marek Zmysłowski Blog

Adapted from Chapter 7 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns, written about my first years in Lagos.

Imagine an enormous city. Twenty million inhabitants, ten times bigger than Warsaw. Add an almost complete lack of public transport, and the traffic jams that come with it.

Sometimes we sit in a jam in central London or New York, in an air-conditioned car with our favorite music on, and moan as if an hour made any difference. In Lagos there are people who spend five hours commuting to work and another five coming home, and then work ten or twelve hours. Most of the sleep they get is found while travelling.

The danfo

One day I had a meeting at a hotel about 10 km away. I decided to take a danfo, the local minibus, to understand the customers I met every day.

Imagine a long street with twenty yellow VW Transporters, the boxy third-generation ones from the 1990s. If you or your family ever owned one, I can guarantee it is now travelling the streets of Lagos. There is no route number and no sign. The driver stands in front of the bus and shouts where he is going, that he’s cheap, that “danfo good”, that only a few seats are left.

The vehicle had about five million kilometers on the clock. The headlights were covered in metal grills, and spikes had been welded to the rear bumper “so that they don’t travel without a ticket”. Inside, the seats had been replaced by five wooden benches. Behind the driver was “first class”: two kitchen chairs screwed to the floor. My fare was around 50 cents.

That day I learned that a VW Transporter can carry thirty people. When we pulled off there were twenty-nine of us, including the driver. I survived, mostly thanks to a window that opened. I considered my experiment with mass transport finished. I had started with too extreme a method.

Getting a driving licence, Lagos style

Being driven around has advantages, but I longed to get behind the wheel. Nobody recognizes a Polish driving licence, so I looked into getting a Nigerian one.

A colleague had a cousin who was the brother of the sister of someone who was a sub-contractor for someone in the Department of Transport. To get a new licence I needed a scan of my old one. A day later my new assistant handed me a scan of the licence of a total stranger, with my photo stuck over his, probably in Paint. His name had been replaced by a white box with my details in Times New Roman.

“For God’s sake, even the greatest idiot would notice that!”

“He won’t notice,” he said. “There are four civil servants. One is blind, another has short-term memory loss, another is obsessively nervous and types faster than you think.”

I had my licence the next day. After ten hours in a Nigerian transport office, which is a bit like ten years in a Polish one.

Driving

My first drive lasted an hour and I aged a year in it. In Lagos, lanes are a sort of suggestion. The greater the congestion, the closer the cars drive, and five lanes are created from three. More cars move forward per minute, until they block the next junction. It is not aggression, it is survival: if drivers did not drive like this, they would starve before getting home.

Everyone honks, constantly. My friends and I joke that car makers in Africa should fit four horns. No. 1: I’m overtaking. No. 2: I’m barging into your lane. No. 3: I’m tailgating, please slip out of the middle lane. No. 4: please get out of my way, politely. Since it is all done with the same horn, you have no chance of understanding what is going on.

Time works the same way in Nigeria, with its own vocabulary:

• “Now” means “soon, perhaps”. It is the opposite of what we consider now.
• “Now, now” means something that will happen shortly. Quicker than “now”, though it is still unclear whether it will happen at all.
• “Just now” means later.
• “I’m coming” means “I intend to come to you soon, and I’ll probably do so”. He will arrive in three hours.

A thousand naira

One night I was in a hurry and missed my turn. I could drive 200 meters against the traffic or take a two-kilometer detour. You know which I chose. Two policemen jumped out from behind a proverbial bush. When they saw a white man at the wheel, their smiles were so wide that night turned to day.

I learned how it works. It always starts from 20,000 naira, but depending on your negotiating skills and self-confidence, it ends at a thousand. The “transaction” can last five seconds or an hour. And it is not a fine.

“Are they always like this with you?” I asked as I left. “These bribes.”

“What? You gave a bribe? That’s against the law. I have to arrest you.”

“But maybe you didn’t take it.”

“Of course I didn’t take it. It was a normal transaction.”

“And what did I supposedly get for a thousand naira?”

“This,” he said, taking the Nigerian highway code from his breast pocket. He smiled, saluted and left.

After that, the pattern became clear:

• Driving home at 4 a.m. behind a drunk driver swerving across the road, I stopped next to a police car to report him. “I saw it, I saw it,” said the officer. “Saw that you didn’t have your seatbelt fastened.” A thousand naira.
• I bought a bottle of water from a street seller because the air conditioning had broken down. A policeman at the junction asked why I had been stopped at a green light. “Maybe two seconds. I was drinking water.” A thousand naira.
• At night, I swerved around an enormous hole where flooding had washed away part of a dual carriageway, and two officers were waiting by the roadside. “Why did you change lanes without using your indicator?” I lost my temper and said that instead of waiting for suckers to pass, maybe they could do something about the hole. “And do what?” they said, offended. “Do we look like road workers?”

A thousand naira is about $3. I often preferred to pay rather than argue, because they know the naira is Mickey Mouse money, and that the really valuable currency from a white expat is his time. They will keep you for two, three, four hours, because the longer they keep you, the greater the chance of getting paid.

Over time I noticed ever more desperate attempts by the police to do their job, and equally creative ways of playing them. When a policeman on foot waved me down, I would slow as if to stop and switch on the interior light, as you do in Nigeria before an inspection. Once he moved to the door, I floored it. It worked, until the day there were two of them, 100 meters apart. I made a fool of the first and the second jumped in front of my hood. “Gentlemen, I thought you wanted to check I’m not a terrorist, so of course I switched on the light, I’ll cooperate, yadda yadda.” A thousand naira. For each of them.

There is one thing you must never take lightly: MOPOL, the Mobile Police, in black uniforms and armed with Kalashnikovs. Nigerians call them “Kill-and-Go”. If one of them stops you, do everything he says. I once watched, from a traffic jam, as masked men stoned three armored vehicles and MOPOL jumped out and sprayed the neighborhood with rounds. I later learned they had come to a local market to get a gang leader, and the gang had organized an ambush.

The last Friday of the month

A few weeks later I was working in the office when I heard shots, uncomfortably close. I looked out of the window. Between ten and twenty policemen with Kalashnikovs were running around the street, shouting at a group of men who had not even tried to run away.

I was terrified. And I was the only one in the office who paid any attention. The team kept working.

“Hey! They’re shooting!”

“It’s the last Friday of the month,” said one of the boys without looking up from his laptop. “Those guys downstairs are drug dealers. The junction is their spot. Every last Friday the police come and put on a little show. They shoot a bit, shout a bit, the dealers give them their share, and it’s over.”

“How’s that?”

“A police officer is just a man, Marek. He also likes partying at the weekend. But he doesn’t get paid until next week.”

This is from Chapter 7, “Cops and Robbers”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. The book also covers the day my Toyota turned out to have been imported as a “boat”, and the afternoon I ended up in handcuffs outside Nigeria’s version of the FBI. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.

Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify