Close encounters of the Nigerian kind

The way people drive here, keeps surprising me. The way I adapt to it, is perhaps even more surprising. These days you can see me speeding through the city, using my arm as an indicator light, and horning my way through close encounters with other cars. Sometimes these encounters are quite too close though.

The other day I was leisurely driving up a slope to some traffic lights. To my direct amazement, a car was reversing on that same road. Reversing myself was no option because of the cars behind me, but clearly the guy in the car heading towards me didn’t have the same sense. Horning and shouting did not help either, and less than a minute later my front lamp was crushed and my bumper cracked. And that’s when the theatrics began…

The policeman who first tried to put fear in the man who bumped into me, ended up trying to shield him from my rage. Quiet me (normally, that is) was shouting at the bloody stupid imbecile who drove into me, asking him where the money was to repair the damage. He was on his knees, begging me (“mommy, mommy”) because he didn’t have money. He also didn’t have a driving license, I found out. He was the kind of guy that I used to help when I was still “saving the world” as a volunteer, yet I was too enraged to care about his poverty. If you don’t have money, then you shouldn’t reverse into other people’s cars, I would say. He kept begging, I kept raging. We went in a convoy with the police to his employer where he got a bit of money for the transport he did that day. An entire street came out to help with the “negotiations”, and it was such a spectacle that another accident happened right next to us… In the end I took his day’s earnings off him. A fortune for him, but not nearly enough to repair the damage.

Only a week later did I realize that I was in fact insured and that all of the above hadn’t been necessary. I’ve been in Nigeria so long that theatrical negotiating comes naturally.

Since that accident, I have had countless near-accidents. Driving in Nigeria requires special skill, one could say. On top of everything you would need in eg. Europe, here you also need to foresee potholes and anticipate the behaviour of other drivers to the extreme. That could be anything from reversing on main roads, to stopping abruptly or jumping up in the air –nothing would surprise me anymore!