FROM SANDSTORMS TO STREETLIGHTS (PART 2)

There was a stark difference between Niamey and Agadez in central Niger. One was a modern, cosmopolitan city on the east bank of the River Niger while the other was a dusty brown town with traditional mud houses, flies and camels everywhere. It took a while for Chukwuma to recover from the shock. It was a totally different environment! This was a town in the Sahara Desert. He looked around him in bewilderment for a long while, trying to recalibrate his bearings. His eyes roamed over the city anxiously for a while, pausing at the tallest mud-brick structure in the world, the Grand Mosque, with its tapered minaret and wooden projections. Was this still Earth or another planet? He felt Osas clinging to him timidly as they disembarked from the truck. He would have relished her bodily contact more if not for the glares he got from passers-by. They were both conscious of the hisses and murmurs as they meandered through the crowded motor park in search of food and water. As she pressed up against him with both hands clutching his left upper arm and her bosom resting on his back, he smiled, but only internally, because eyes judged him from every corner. Even the food-seller frowned as he looked up and saw them coming towards him. Chukwuma and Osas made their purchase of groundnuts and beelined back to the truck for sanctuary where they remained for the rest of their stopover. Thankfully, the group didn’t stay for too long under the scorching sun and scornful eyes of Agadez. By four o’clock, when the sun was in descent, they were on their way northwards to the Algerian border.

The journey was gruelling as they were all crammed up inside the truck like sardines. It was so stifling hot that Chukwuma took off his shirt in protest. He was only wearing a singlet now. Osas smiled and looked away. He grinned back at her profile, taking note of her delicate round chin, long neck, pink-tipped braids, full lips, and well-drawn eyebrows. He sighed. Around him, people pushed to get closer to the tail-end of the truck for some cooler, fresher air but were forced back inside almost immediately by the red desert sun. There were people of all ages and works of life in the truck. Teenagers, middle-aged men, artisans, pregnant women – people you would never have imagined would be there. All with their own story. All with their own dream.

This was when he noticed the Malian boy from Gao sitting beside him in the truck. His name was Abdoulaye Oumar. Chukwuma had gotten this much from the passport around his neck – a mandatory tag for these trips, he was told. He had joined them at Agadez along with a few others.  Chukwuma later learnt that their truck driver had abandoned them in the desert after making away with their money. Claiming that the truck had a fault that required them all to disembark, the driver had popped the hood and fiddled around the engine for a bit. Then they watched him get back into the vehicle to start it. It started alright, leaving them in a cloud of dust as it roared into the horizon. Still in a daze, twenty-seven feeble migrants were left to roam the dunes of the Sahara for days without meeting a soul. They followed the sun by day and stars by night but still saw no sign of human life anywhere. One day, following a heated argument over direction, they broke up into two groups and parted ways. By the time a land rover came across Abdoulaye lying in the sand, he was almost dead. The rest of his group was nowhere to be found. They had abandoned him as the boy was slowing them down. For all he knew, they had died of thirst, run mad from sunstroke, or gotten lost in the desert. Abdoulaye was the only known survivor of an ordeal best considered a nightmare. When he finally came across a dusty road, the boy chose to rest there and wait for a vehicle or death to come by – whichever came first. He was picked up by a good Samaritan and taken to Agadez where he slaved for a salt merchant for nine months before making his escape. Abdoulaye was only fourteen years old- an orphan fleeing from the Northern Mali conflict. As they dialogued in broken English, Chukwuma couldn’t help but observe that he drifted away a lot during conversations and occasionally smiled and muttered to himself feebly – the result of lonely, traumatic years. But he was a survivor, this lad.

Chukwuma and Osas couldn’t wait to leave the truck but the journey was still a while longer. Djanet in Algeria was a hundred degrees hotter than Agadez. To get there, they had passed a hundred checkpoints and their truck had broken down a hundred times. Chukwuma was angry, hungry, thirsty, and broke. They had to bribe their way through every roadblock to keep going. Everyone had to be bribed – gendarmes, guides, immigration officials, fruit sellers, you name it. After resting for a few hours in Djanet, they continued eastwards to Tin El Koum, a village along the Libyan border. They hadn’t gotten very far before their truck finally gave up the metaphorical ghost. With no other choice but to secretly cross over to Libya on foot, they all alighted with their belongings. The Tuareg driver was quite familiar with the terrain and knew a shortcut through the Tassili N’Ajjer mountain range to the valley of Tin El Koum. When darkness settled, he led the way across the range. Of course, he demanded settlement for this ‘extra service’ mid-way through the trek. Considering their lunar surroundings, nobody dared argue with him. Nobody reminded him of their blamelessness in his travails. They were all cowed to silence by the eerie sandstone formations that loomed over their heads, casting long, sinister shadows across the surreal landscape. Anywhere but this soulless, moonless place! They all paid him hurriedly.

So they resumed their long trek uphill through the rock forests with nobody making a sound. Chukwuma focused on the future- on uplifting his family’s status. Osas focused on Chanel bags and partying with Adesuwa in Rome. Anything to keep their minds off the morbid environment they found themselves in. 

Osas rued not travelling by air. She had told Chukwuma this so many times during their journey that he knew when she was about to say it and how. If not for the confounded NAPTIP that was hot on Mama C’s trail, she would have been reclining in economy class en route to Rome by now. Mama C’s contact could no longer help her get visas because “good jobs were hard to come by” so Osas and the other girls decided to travel by road as they were so desperate to leave. Now, in the harsh desert, they were so desperate to live. Over the past few days, her voluptuous figure had shrivelled and darkened from hunger and sun. She knew she had lost her attraction. Even her mother would not recognize her now. She would have wept for herself had she not been so dehydrated. So she steeled herself and kept on moving. It would be morning before they reached some flat land and it was while traversing it that they encountered this infernal sandstorm that confounded it all.

Chukwuma peered over his pulled-up shirt nervously, shaking off a cake of sand. This bloody desert! Where’s everybody?

He heard nothing. The storm had abated and there was now a deafening silence. Could it be he couldn’t hear anything because he was now deaf? Aha, wait! He heard something – the sound of residual breeze…whistling past his covered ear… then frantic voices, urgent voices… the sound of panic. He pulled the shirt away from his face and sand cascaded into his left ear. He sat up, shook his head vigorously, and cleaned the ear with his index finger. He had to hear everything!

Abdoulaye groaned to Chukwuma’s left and sat up groggily. He dusted the sand off his tiny shoulders and tugged at the neckline of his caftan to rid it of soil. 

The boy has nine lives, I swear. Chukwuma patted him on the back warmly. More sand fell off his garment and he managed a faint smile in reply.

Men everywhere staggered to their feet in response to the Tuareg’s husky call, dark shapes rose slowly in the grey sky. Some did not rise at once. Some did not rise at all. They had continued their journey on another plane of existence.

Osas! Where’s pretty Osas?

In order not to offend the sensibilities of their Arab hosts, the women had walked in a separate line beside the men but as the journey got more arduous, they had fallen behind. It was of little consequence to the men at the time. After all, the mantra in this damned place was ‘All man (and woman) for himself (or herself) and God for us all’. As the women were most likely behind them, Chukwuma turned back on all fours and crawled across the sandy slope in search of Osas. It was difficult maintaining one’s balance with the sand constantly shifting under one’s weight but he managed to manoeuvre his way to where the women were gathered, trying to find their bearings.

“Osas! Hello? Have you seen Osas?”

The women did not speak a word of English and were too flustered to understand his gesticulations. They wailed in Arabic and French to him, showing him their bruises and cuts. Chukwuma turned away. She had to be somewhere around here! He scanned the sands frantically in search of something familiar…something Nigerian…and soon noticed another cluster in the distance. This time it was a gathering of both men and women. He recognized four of the women as Osas’s friends and ploughed awkwardly through the sand towards them. He could no longer shout because his throat was dry and abrasive. The saliva in his mouth was now a thick paste that he could neither spit out nor swallow.

“Have- have you seen Osas?” he managed to say when he got to them.

“We’ve been looking for her oh! For the past twenty minutes!”

“We lost her during the storm… She couldn’t hold on and we couldn’t go back for her…”

“We just hoped she would be here when the storm cleared.”

“Six of us are still missing! Oh my God! Oh my Godddd!” The woman started to cry uncontrollably. Another followed suit.

Chukwuma was too dehydrated to shed tears. Nothing would have come out. He didn’t bother trying. He slumped on the white sand and lay there, feeling a pang of guilt. Not because he wasn’t there for Osas. Not because he had lost his fine friend. No. He felt guilty because, in all his exhaustion, he was not thinking about her at all. He was thinking about something else. Matter of fact, he was thinking of only one thing.

Water. 

Damn you, Ehis! You lucky bastard! You must be downing an ice-cold glass of water in Madrid right now.

****

To be continued…