Memories of Maiduguri

“Never shall I forget his deep-throated laughter as he told me that ‘the rascals’ would kill him.” – Taki 

DZ wanted to travel to Maiduguri in Nigeria, where his father was a visiting scholar at the university. I agreed to go with him, knowing nothing about Maiduguri and very little about Nigeria, except that it was an English-speaking country, not a Francophone country like Chad, where we were stationed as Peace Corps volunteers.

The first leg of the journey was by bush taxi – a smallish van with benches bolted on either side of the cabin. The big advantage of bush taxis was the price. Fares were less than a dollar each, which made them the usual choice for Chadians and Peace Corps volunteers.

To eke out a profit, bush taxis did not operate by a schedule, but idled at the station for as long as it took to fill the cabin.

Chadian-full was different from Fort Lauderdale-full, or even New York City-full. Bush-taxi-full was 20 humans, each with boxes and bags, plus at least a dozen chickens and one or two goats. And that was just the contents of the cabin. Tied to the roof rack, there was likely to be a six-foot-high mountain of bed frames and firewood and farm tools and motors and bags of grain… and who knows what else!

DZ and I had woken up at the crack of dawn and were at the station by about 6:00 a.m. By 8:00, the van was full. The driver put the transmission into gear, and the van began coughing, sputtering, and finally hobbling and clanking down the dirt road.

Moments later, we heard shouting outside in some tribal language. The driver stopped the van, and his assistant went to the back and opened the door. There was an elderly couple that wanted to get in. The assistant yelled at us all in yet another language, in response to which our fellow passengers began shuffling themselves around in an effort to make room for the additional passengers. But even after another battery of verbal abuse from the assistant, there was, at best, only six inches of bench space available to accommodate them.

The assistant shook his head in disappointment and yelled something to the driver, who then put the transmission back in gear. “Finally,” I thought to myself. “We are on our way.”

The driver floored the gas pedal and the van bolted forward. A second later, he slammed on the brakes, hurling us violently backward and crushed up against one another, but freeing up the bench space the assistant needed. He shoved the old couple on board and shut the door behind them.

That was “Part I of Our Adventure to Maiduguri.” The rest of the trip was more exciting and even stranger, which I will save that for another time. I’m telling you this now because I happen to have read this morning a reminiscence from one of my favorite reminiscers, Theodore Dalrymple (of Taki’s Magazine), whom I’ve recommended to you before.

Dalrymple’s essay is about some of his memories of this very same city of Maiduguri in the early 1980s, just a few years after DZ and I traveled there.

Africa is a continent unlike any other. Its landscapes, varied as they are, do not remind me of anyplace else I’ve ever been. That’s also true of its peoples and their cultures. They are not like any others in the world. And it (sub-Saharan Africa, that is) has changed very little since I was first there 40 years ago. It exists in its own time capsule. It still feels undiscovered to me.

Chad was not an easy place to live in – especially for a 25-year-old American who had never traveled overseas. It was not just different. Everything, from brushing your teeth to giving a lecture at the local university, felt like it had to be reinvented from square one. I managed well enough, but many others didn’t. A fair percentage of the Peace Corps volunteers that went to Chad while I was there returned to the States before their tour was up.

And I’ll bet that, apart from a handful of large, relatively wealthy cities like Marrakesh, Algiers, and Cairo in the north or Johannesburg and Cape Town in the south, that strangeness and difficulty is still true for 90% of sub-Saharan Africa today.

Notwithstanding the uncomfortable differences, there are some things I remember about Africa that made the experience of living there worthwhile. One of those things was a depth of intimacy among male friends that did not exist in the States. Another thing that impressed me deeply, which Dalrymple writes about in the linked-to essay below, was the capacity of Africans to joke about the vicissitudes of life… punctuated by their huge, bellowing, and contagious laughter.

Click here to enjoy Dalrymple doing his thing!