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Monday, December 19, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
ROAD TRIP IN AFRICA/Two American brothers attempt to
drive from Ghana to Nigeria. Along the way, it becomes
clear that the main rule is that there are no rules.
Dan Hoyle, Special to The Chronicle


   FIRST OF TWO PARTS
   Heading for Nigeria

   Dan Hoyle, a San Francisco native, created the solo
shows
"Circumnavigator" and "Florida 2004: The Big Bummer."
He is in Nigeria on
a Fulbright scholarship gathering material for a third
show about oil
politics. His brother, Jonah, a writer now based in
Anchorage, Alaska,
joined Dan for three weeks on the hunt for stories.
Dan had also run out
of PowerBars, trashy novels and Ziploc bags (all
crucial items for travel
in Africa). This is Part 1 of a two-part series of the
brothers' attempts
to get Jonah to the Lagos, Nigeria, airport on time.

   "What? There's no way to change the ticket at all?"
Jonah, my senior
brother, yelled into the phone. Somewhere in Paris a
man was sitting
behind an Air France counter, and his computer was
telling him that
changes were not permitted. "But that seems pretty
stupid if we are
trapped in Ghana. Do you understand that we are
literally trapped? They
bumped us from our flight from Accra to Lagos this
afternoon and so
there's no flight till tomorrow afternoon, and that
will be too late. So
that seems pretty f -- stupid to me!"
   Jonah isn't the type to swear on the phone. There
are people who swear to
strangers on the phone, and there are people who
don't. Jonah doesn't,
normally. I do. I'm the hot-blooded younger brother. I
sat in a chair in
front of a TV showing a Ghanaian music video in Sue's
Inn in Accra, Ghana.
It had taken us three hours and 30 phone calls to get
through to an Air
France official. We had assumed the flight from Port
Harcourt to Paris was
changeable, and we would just putter around the beach
a few more days.
"Well how much is it going to be to buy a one-way
ticket from Lagos to
Paris?" Jonah asked. I stood up next to him. Jonah's
eyes grew big and he
wrote down $1,300. I shook my head. "No. Tell him to
confirm the flight,"
I said. "We'll just have to go by road."
   My friends at the U.S. Consulate had told me about
traveling by road. They
said it was about a six- or seven-hour drive. But they
had diplomatic
license plates and diplomatic passports, so I knew it
wouldn't be quite
the same. We arrived at the Accra main motor park just
as it was getting
light the next morning. There was a big,
air-conditioned bus we could
take, but it would drop us at the Ghana-Togo border
and we'd have to board
another bus. We needed to pass through Togo, then
Benin, enter Nigeria and
get through Lagos traffic to the airport to catch the
last flight to Port
Harcourt, which we thought left around 5 p.m. But we
didn't have visas for
Togo or Benin, and I had never tried to enter Nigeria
by land.
   "We want go Lagos," I said in pidgin to the man
behind the desk in the
motor park office. As chaotic as the motor parks can
be in West Africa, in
Nigeria and Ghana at least, they are highly unionized.
On a blackboard
were listed the license plates of their entire fleet,
including two that
were listed as "wanted." If those cars are ever found,
they will be dealt
with harshly. Enforcement is one of the most organized
aspects of the
unions.
   "It's 250,000 cedis per person," said the man
behind the desk. About 25
bucks. "But you will have to wait till it fills up."
   "No, we want go now, now," I said.
   "Then it's 1.2 million cedis," he said. "This is
your driver."
   A man whose name we would later learn was David,
dressed in jeans and a
T-shirt, gave a short nod and stood in his most
formidable stance. I
looked him in the eyes and did my best to coax out
that reservoir of
humanity that was all we could count on. He led us
through lines of parked
cars to his, a red Volvo with a completely cracked
windshield. As soon as
we shut the door, a flock of men started squawking at
every window, their
mouths open, begging for "some-ting small for me."
David began handing out
small bills, and to ease the congestion, I began doing
the same, until the
crowd dissipated to a manageable two or three, small
enough so David could
pay one person to beat them away. The car bumped over
the curb and onto
the road, and we were on our way.
   The first three hours were a breeze. At the
Ghana-Togo border, we stopped
to change money, getting about $150 worth of CFA
francs. And David picked
up his cargo. Transporting cargo (i.e. smuggling)
represents the profit
margin for drivers on the Accra-Lagos circuit, but we
were supposed to
have paid enough to eliminate that component. But two
men were counting
out small packets of a brown liquid, placing them in
black plastic bags
and storing them in the trunk where the spare tire
usually is. Out of the
corner of my eye, I caught a hint of Chinese writing.
Soy sauce. No doubt
it's cheaper in Ghana than Nigeria. We were smuggling
in about 20 pounds
of soy sauce.
   We also picked up our border clearing agent. He
hopped in on the Ghana
side, hopped out on the Togo side, and directed us to
the correct
registrars and immigration officers. Ghana immigration
stamped us out
quickly enough, and as per our driver's instructions,
we gave him an
unsolicited tip of 20,000 cedis (about two bucks).
   The Togo side was the first act of our three-border
show. A man resembling
a modern-day grim reaper, in a black Lycra hooded
sweatshirt, black sports
pants and high-top basketball shoes, strutted around
with a thin stick,
poking people and trying to intimidate them into
stopping to let him shake
them down. He had no official authority though, and
his stick wasn't very
big. So he couldn't get many people to stop. A large
man in a baby blue
Sean John sweat suit bounced past. The sweeper, who
was sweeping the Togo
side of the border, essentially moving cigarette butts
back and forth,
called after him, "Hey, you my DJ! Yeah." The most
unexplainable was a man
shuffling around holding a pair of pink plastic hands
that held a white
egg. By his posture, it was unclear if he was selling
them, or if he had
just bought them, or whether he was paid to walk
around the border with a
pair of pink plastic hands that held a white egg.
   And, of course, there was the immigration officer,
presiding over the
circus from a lone wooden desk perched above the wide
road that ran next
to the gentle waves of the Atlantic. His uniform was
full of pockets, some
with buttons, some with zippers, some with flaps, and
his wooden desk was
full of stamps. In West Africa, where the nation-state
is still an idea, a
very new idea that rarely supersedes the old systems
of tribe and extended
family, it is easy to argue that these ratty uniforms
and old stamps are
what hold countries together. Togo was grabbed by the
Germans during the
scramble for Africa, and was then shoved off to the
French and British, as
were all of Germany's African colonies, after World
War I. Africa wasn't
ready for the nation-state when it came, and I'm not
sure it is even now.
   The walls were clogged with posters of Faure
Gnassingbe, the president's
son who recently "won" the election (after his father,
Gnassingbe Eyadema,
who ruled for 30-some years, died in February.) The
man with many pockets
mumbled in French that it would be 35,000 CFA francs
(about $70), and then
proceeded to paste in stamps amounting to 30,000.
Apparently there was an
expedited service charge. But when he gave us back our
passports, with
Togo transit visas pasted in, he had one last
question. It was in French,
so our clearing agent gave me the translation: "He
wants to know what is
there for him." I peeled off another 3,000, pushed it
into his palm,
smiled, and said, "Merci." Our clearing agent then
smiled and slightly
tipped his head. I gave him 2,000 and tipped my head
back at him. We had
Togo visas, lots of soy sauce, and it was only 10 a.m.
   We blew through Togo in an hour, past a series of
cement factories and
other industrial wonders. Of course there was none of
the sense that one
was in a different country, as when one crosses from
France to Spain. "Why
can't Togo and Benin just become one country?" Jonah
asked from the
backseat. As if in answer to our query, the Togo-Benin
border felt almost
routine. We stopped to pick up our clearing agent; "My
senior brother,"
said David, and I turned around to see a man with a
thick smile who most
certainly had never been introduced as David's senior
brother.
Nevertheless he helped us stamp out of Togo and into
Benin, which featured
a lot fewer portraits of the president and many more
wall calendars. It
was as comforting a sign of political stability as
any.
   But then David's "senior brother" didn't get out
after the Benin border.
It didn't sit right with me, but I obviously wasn't in
control, so I held
my tongue. We were making good time, we had gotten
visas for the two
countries we had lacked and our Nigerian visas were
good. We began to
worry, in a confident way, about Lagos traffic. Then
David dropped the
bomb. "Do you have money plenty?" he asked. "We have
some money," I
responded. In addition to our cameras, Jonah and I
each had $600 in
hundred-dollar bills.
   David told us to give him our money. "These
Nigerians, they will take all
your money. They see American, they will take you to
one small room." My
throat went dry. "I have seen it with my own eyes,
they take five hundred,
one thousand dollars. Those Nigerians are very wicked
people." It is the
common comment about the Nigerian character.
   "I don't think we should give him our money," I
said, turning around to
Jonah, "I mean, would they really just take our
money?"
   Jonah shrugged. "I don't know, man; it's not hard
for me to imagine."
   Indeed, it was very easy to imagine a line of thick
Nigerian men in
sunglasses and black berets, shaking a stick at me, as
I sat on a small
stool in a small room, my money dancing out of my
pockets and into their
hands. But I bet against my imagination, which is
known for overactivity,
and shoved my dollars in my sock the same way I used
to do when heading
out on Muni to the baseball card shop as an
11-year-old.
   The wooden shack was in the middle of the road, and
even before we came to
a complete stop in front of it, a man thrust his large
belly in front of
our car, and stuck his arm through our window.
"Passports!" he said, and
turned his face away. We quickly handed them over,
although he had no
uniform on and the shack had no sign above it.
   "That is the one small room," David said, lowering
his head.
   "Now go collect your passports," David's alleged
brother said from the
back, still smiling broadly. We shuffled in, and, to
my relief, there was
a man in uniform. When we explained we were students,
and I made some
small joke, and they laughed enough, the chafe from
the dollars in my sock
subsided. The small room wasn't worth the hype.
   We stamped out of Benin (1,000 naira, about $7) in
record time, and I
began to feel a surge of confidence. Nigeria was my
home base, the system
I was most familiar with. I had cell phone reception
and numbers of people
in the U.S. Consulate in Lagos to call. So when a
couple of pretenders
asked to see our health cards, and he began shaking
his head in showy
disapproval before he even looked at it, I went on the
offensive.
   "That health card is correct sir," I began
lecturing, shaking my phone at
them, "and if it's not, you can tell me who I should
call to figure out
what's wrong with it. Should I call the University of
Port Harcourt,
should I call my people at the U.S. Embassy, or should
I call my friends
in Nigerian immigration? You tell me."
   The Nigerian immigration officers weren't really my
friends, but I had
given them a good dash when they renewed my visa last
month. And I was
feeling it.
   The Benin health unofficial officials recoiled.
"Let them go, let them
go," said one.
   "It's not compulsory, but anything for my office?"
cooed the other.
   "No, I've given you enough," I barked, and pushed
my way past them like a
hero breaking through police lines at the fire scene
in a Hollywood movie.
   "Hello? Hello!" somebody else was calling us, but I
strode past. It was
getting close to 3 p.m., we were an hour from Lagos,
and we couldn't be
stopped by every tout along the way. David tapped me
on the shoulder. It
wasn't a tout; it was the Nigerian immigration
officer. We handed over our
passports. I think I was panting. The Nigerian
immigration officer gave
them a quick look and began shaking his head. "Who is
going to pay for
these people?" he asked David. David shrugged. "They
will pay for
themselves."
   The officer kept flipping through my passport
without looking at any
particular page, and kept shaking his head. "That
passport is correct-o,"
I broke in, and as soon as I had, I realized I had
messed up.
   He became perfectly still for one second, letting
the rage well up in him,
and then shot back. "Was I talking to you?"
   "Sorry sir, I beg-o, I'm sorry, it's been a long
day, no vex, I beg-o, I
be small boy now." I ran off my best pidgin, but
unlike in recent weeks
when it had begun to flow, it sounded like baby talk.
   "Up against the wall!" he shouted. "I'm not looking
at these passports!"
   I shuffled over to the wall, where Jonah had been
calmly standing, hands
behind his back.
   "I'm not looking at those passports!" he thundered
on. "Maybe when I close
my shift, a new person can come, but you can wait
there all afternoon!"
   Jonah shook his head, and teeth gritted, commanded
me to "chill out,
you're not in control here." I fell into a shamed
silence. I had messed
up. I had gone on the offensive, but I had
miscalculated. We were in
Nigeria now, and when one goes on the offensive, one
has to go all the
way. Even if I called my friends at the consulate, it
would take them an
hour to get there. We couldn't afford that type of
delay. Had I just cost
my brother $1,300? Had I, the fearless leader, been
too fearless? I leaned
back against the wall, and blew out a long breath. For
the first time on
the trip, I felt like the immature younger brother.

   Tomorrow: The Hoyle brothers take on the Nigerian
immigration mafia,
negotiate with club-swinging "area boys," do battle
with Lagos traffic on
motorbikes and reach the moment of truth at an Air
France counter.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 SF Chronicle


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