A tainted view of Lagos

Yellow was the only colour Jorge Luis Borges could see when clouds of cataract blinded him; it was the one colour that didn’t desert him. In “The Gold of the Tigers”, a poem about his enduring friendship with the colour, he wrote:

Sunshine, warmth, fun, warning, friendship, caution, intelligence, cowardice, love, electricity, hope, optimism, imagination and curiosity are some of common connotations of the shades of yellow.

Borges did not allow his blindness to intimidate him. It was “a way of life, a way of life that is not entirely unfortunate.” He priced blindness for what it made him see. In the “slow nightfall” of his blindness he sought solace and discovered vistas in literature.

Five paragraphs to the end of his essay on Blindness, Borges says, “A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is always one, and continually assaulted by poetry.”

I doubt If I recovered from the yellow fever I caught during a trip to Lagos; it left me jaundiced.

Yellow assaults you round the clock in Lagos. Six years ago, while in Lagos on a trip from Ibadan the colour besieged me. It beguiled me for most of that day. My eyes swam yellow; partial and fastening to all shades of it.

I was first overwhelmed at a crossroad on Bodija Road in Ibadan when I saw the traffic warden at the intersection where the offices of the Customs and National Population Commission are located. Further ahead, boldly written in black on yellow a banner announced it would print passport photos in two minutes. The uniform of the Yellow Fever was in mint condition. Cars paused and moved at the signal of his white-gloved hands. His signalling stopped briefly when he chased a twenty-naira tip that slipped as it was been handed out. He returned to his post, continued conducting the traffic, with beads of sweat on his face.

When I arrived Lagos, it was on fire with the ubiquitous yellow taxis and buses and like a moth I fluttered into the flame. Two days earlier pictures of drowning SUVs and submerged houses were circulating on social media, but the drain-ducks of Lagos ensured speedy drainage. They were still at work, dressed in orange, doing their thankless job of either raking detritus from canals or disappearing into manholes to unearth piles of sludge studded with empty plastic bottles of Fanta and Lucozade Boost. Victoria Island and Ikoyi, where I had an appointment, showed no sign there had been a flood.

As the taxi I was in approached the Falomo Bridge from Victoria Island the umbrella at the back of a Honda stained my sight; its colour was a glowing orange, like the overalls of the street cleaners on Bourdillon. The taxi slowed down for two of them to cross the street around the Police barracks. I saw a cleaner help a driver unload water bottles from the booth of a black Corolla. A light fountain of water jetted from one of the bottles spraying the drivers’ black trousers.

Outside the French consulate, the latticed backrest of a plastic chair is embossed with “God is Great”. A young man carries a pile of them to the Federal High Court. Opposite the court a woman with a baby strapped on her back is sweeping; she’s not in uniform but a fluorescent orange face cap is cradled on her head tie.

On Gerard Road my eyes catch the yellow 25-litre jerrycan in the booth of beat-up Land Rover towing a Lexus. So too do the Caterpillar generators outside the mostly unoccupied luxury high-rise residences, scaffolds for hire, tractors, diggers and the ready mix concrete machines on numerous construction sites. All are yellow. AA is written in black on a yellow sticker and I recall a yellow BMW being towed seven years ago. Sunday’s flood, like that of Lekki in 2004 must have kept AA Rescue busy.

At my Gerard Road destination, while waiting in the reception, a CNBC newscaster in a yellow dress is talking about the Euro on the brink as banks’ sell-off distracts Asia.

My meeting didn’t break my bias for all things yellow. At a kiosk where I bought airtime and at City Mall where I replaced the strap of a friend’s Swatch yellow was an imp. It poked out of a flower pot while I watched an elderly couple dressed alike descend a faulty escalator. It waved at me when I saw a boy with the sole of a shoe under his arm, fiddling with a rubber band. The gear of a huge man with his helmet on was streaked in it. At a petrol station, the letters LHD in red on a yellow background reflected from tinted windows.

At a street promo it wrapped itself around the new packs of chicken flavoured noodles. The driver of the taxi I was in said, “All this chemical is killing us. Our forefathers lived to 120, walked to the farm, had four wives and hardly fell ill due to malaria.”