This happened a good few weeks ago now, but I was initially too angry to write about it without risking saying something that could have potentially resulted in me being sent home. I realise my posts often make it sound like I’m not taking things very seriously out here. But sometimes that’s just my strange way of dealing with things. There’s also a limit to how much I can put on here, knowing it’s a public forum.
But anyway, a few weeks ago I woke up to shouting at about 5am. I didn’t think much of it initially. Sleeping here is a nightmare and there’s always something weird going on in the middle of the night around My Squat that disrupts my sleep (I have some very strange neighbours). But then I woke up enough to realise what was actually going on. My Squat is a ground floor room, which has a window out onto the side alley of the compound where people normally park their cars. Only on this particular morning it was being used as some sort of punching ground. The people who run the compound I live in aren’t the nicest. The overall compound is owned by someone who doesn’t actually live in the building, but they seem to leave the day-to-day running of the property to their cousins/brothers/sisters and their boyfriends/girlfriends. There are about 7 or 8 men and women in their late twenties who all live in this compound, and all seem to be related to the owner, and therefore seem to consider themselves in charge. Of what, I’m not quite sure, given we never have any water or electricity, and the communal areas haven’t been cleaned since it was built about 10 years ago. But anyway. On this particular morning these 7 or 8 people were all taking it in turns to whip a man outside my bedroom window. It took me a while to understand what they were doing and why, because they kept switching to a local dialect, but the general gist was that this man had ‘stolen’ from one of the women. 500 Naira (£2). The man they were flogging was quite a lot older than all of them, and probably in his late 50s or early 60s. What really really made me sick to my stomach was the way they were doing it. They were all laughing, and joking with one another about whose turn it would be next. I really didn’t know what to do. There is no generic number for emergency services here. I’ll never forget half jokingly asking my colleague what I do if I set My Squat alight when I try to use my gas stove, and all he said was, “Pray that a fire engine is passing your road at the time.” I knew I couldn’t go outside, I’d had enough conversations with colleagues to know that I wouldn’t have been able to stop them, and would have probably just made the situation even worse. So feeling like the world’s biggest coward, I stayed in my room until they had finished, and I had calmed down enough to be able to face my neighbours without saying something that I would have regretted, given I have to live here for the next however many months. When I got to work and told my colleagues they said that the man was lucky, and in many other areas he’d have been put in tyres and burnt alive. ‘That’s just the way it is here” was the general gist.
Ironically, one of the people from my compound who was involved in this owes me 2,000 Naira. I gave it to him stupidly on my first day in My Squat, so he could get a plumber to fix my kitchen sink. The plumber never came, and he keeps telling me my ‘money is coming’. Similarly when I first moved in a day rarely went by when one of these people didn’t come knocking on my door and asking for money for one thing or another. The excuses varied, but it was always something to do with ‘property maintenance’: money to buy fuel to pump water; an electricity bill, despite my electricity being included in the rental payment; money for a new water pump.
I knew I would be likely to encounter situations like this. I also know it happens frequently in the schools here, which is one reason why I’m very glad I haven’t come here as a teacher. But it doesn’t make witnessing it any easier. Especially when I can’t do anything other than sit in my room like an absolute coward and try and pretend it’s not happening. I now have the number of a local policeman, as my landlady brought him round so I could get his number a couple of weeks ago after there had been another incident down the road from My Squat. But I still don’t know what I could achieve by ringing him if I was faced with the same situation again. Another thing that surprised me was that the people who were involved were all young. I think I had naively and ignorantly assumed that whilst I knew it happened, perhaps it was a practice that was being kept alive by the older generations, or by people in institutions, such as schools. But no, it’s commonplace amongst the younger generations as well, and is readily accepted as the way to deal with crime here at the community level. Meaning it’ll be even longer before any of these practices ever start to change. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
*Wahala is Pidgin English for trouble/bother
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