Eneh Akpan Writes: Amassing Graffiti

An old model Toyota Liteace gives the heads up through a yellow painted “Back to School” label. A VW Vanette rejoins with an offbeat “Mummy’s Pet.” Yet, a beat up Nissan Urvan serves up a terse comeback with an in-your-face “Back to Sender” sticker. There are a string of buses with the “God” graffiti on them, mostly stuff like “God First,” “God is Great,” “God Pass Them,” “No King as God,” “God’s Time is the Best,” “No Be God?” “God is Good,” “Man No Be God” (pidgin version of “Man ain’t God”) “God Dey” (pidgin version of “There’s a God”), I watch, a trifle amused as a kept up VW Caravelle marked with the label “H₂O” negotiates a turn, early on I spotted an old model Toyota HiAce tagged “Big Fish.” I visualize these drivers hanging out on the same team—some inane variety of a mobile EPA where the story ends with the tuned up “H₂O” gobbling up the tacky “Big Fish.” But life doesn’t work that way and folks gotta maintain up in the game if family’s going to have food on the table. Probably, why the owner emblazoned the rear window of this bus I’m riding (which is a copy of “Big Fish”) with two words; a no fuss phrase which carries in it all the authority Lagos drivers need to “Carry Go” as one useful pointer hacked in chicken scratches says, it is uncomplicated yet delivers its import like a decree when it states “No Story.”

“Have a problem with my driving? Call 08099999999,” reads the inscription on the company truck speeding past my morning ride. Such CTAs (call to action) are commonplace, these days. You will find a hundred variations of it painted on transports especially, on the back of school buses. A friend once boarded public transport which showed off similar message on its body. He committed the number to memory before climbing on the bus and decided to humor the driver (or whoever had drafted up the phrase) so he called him up. And guess who picked up? It wasn’t the driver but it was just as well. Someone who was probably home or about her business several miles from the scene of incident answered the phone. And said, “Hello. My husband is over speeding again, isn’t he?”

Large red letters of “Remember six feet” marks the bus leading this one. The rear window of another (a yellow old model Volkswagen Transporter) preaches “One Love” in daring, bold letters. Several other buses wheeze past flaunting some ambiguous graffito, many in local dialect and I’d rather not go there. I wouldn’t want to spend the whole day acting interpreter unnecessarily extending the length of this post. You see, Lagos drivers are a little religious on an entire level. A Volkswagen Vanette riding along beside my bus boasts, “I Love this God!” As we drew near the other auto I am offered a close up of the guy behind the wheel. I struggle to imagine this fellow as a bible holder and can’t turn off the image of a thug lord in a suit, wielding a bible like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat.

The sticker of the American eagle dappled with the red and blue stars and stripes has by unanimous consent, become the secret transit code of Nigeria’s highways. You hardly fetch a commercial bus not wearing the gummed label like some Restricted Area access sticker. Besides, there are other writings I can’t quite place in a category like the ones above. “Holly Mary” (could be same as Holy Mary, who knows?); “Psalm 140 v. 1” (Get your bibles, folks); “Empty” (Now why would anybody scrawl this on public transport?); “Superstar” (I feel this guy); “Backward Never” (Amen to that, bro); “It pains you, why?” (I got this one off the cowl of a Volkswagen Beetle). And so on and so forth like that. Long before I started collecting bus graffiti, I ran into a certain brilliant one-liner. It was drawn on the rear of one of those huge Marcopolo passenger vehicles. It seemed to have found me just when I could use a breathing spell and here’s what it said, “No Competition in Destiny.” It never slips my mind how that one-liner rearranged my entire mindset.

Talking about graffiti calls up an early childhood memory about a story I overheard my father talk over with a relative who bunked with us. He told a tale of a battered public transport which, threw bystanders into a fit of hee-haws when it passed by. In time, the driver designed a method to the madness. It was in a sense, his way of saying you can laugh all you want but wait until you see what I got written up on the rear window. See who’s laughing then. On the rear window makeshift glass, a spread of polyethylene held fast with adhesive tape, he had scratched two words in Ibibio, my native dialect. These words: “Asak Uka” which by interpretation means, “Yo Laughing at Yo Mama!”

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan