Gentlemen of the road
This morning he walked along the road – the big tarmac road that was long and broad and had no beginning and no end except that it went into the city. Motor cars passed him. Men and women going to work, some in the settled area and some in the shoe factory, chattered along ….” That is a quote from Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s famous novel, Weep Not, Child. This passage poignantly captures what goes through my mind everyday when I pass through Lagos roads.
If you are a bit philosophical like me, I am sure you will agree with me that our daily activities as human beings are pregnant with meaning; they are highly symbolic of life itself. A typical Lagos road is life itself while the drivers are human beings struggling to realise their dreams or achieve their goals. On a typical Lagos road, you encounter all manner of drivers who are too much in a hurry to care about the next road user. There are drivers who move from one lane to another in a bid to ‘out-drive’ other drivers. Like some reckless drivers, some people are in hurry to be successful in life.
At this point, I recall the character of Man in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah opens his novel by describing an old choking commuter bus arriving at a bus stand. On the bus, the conductor is careless and uses abusive language on both the passengers on board and the driver. Armah uses the bus to symbolise the corruption, disorder and immorality in Ghana soon after the country’s independence.
As the writer builds up the plot of the novel, he carries corruption as the main theme of the book. Poverty, which is the main problem of human beings, is also shown by the writer as the real problem facing the Ghanaian people, despite being free from colonialism. Only the masters (leaders) change; the situation remains the same. The black masters are not different from the white masters during colonialism.
Armah also uses the general filth in the environment to describe how corrupt and evil Ghana is after independence. And the main character, Man, represents the masses who are poor as opposed to leaders like Coomson who are rich and live in luxurious estates.
Enough of that story. Now, back to the gentlemen of the road. Just as there are fast-moving drivers, there are those who move at snail speed. They seem not to be in a hurry to get to their destination. They move at their own pace, or is it the pace at which their cars allow them? Some may not be bold enough to drive on top speed like others for fear of accident. Like life, this category of people love to move at the speed which life allows them. They are not in a hurry at all to get to their destination. All they want is to do things their own way. Some of them are move slowly for fear of trying out new things such as increasing the pace at which they travel. Some others love to move at top speed, but the brand of their cars or the condition of their cars would not allow them.
There are people who are in-between these two groups. They are neither slow nor fast. Sometimes they accelerate; at other times they slow down. They want to arrive their destination at the right time without sustaining any injury.
Life is a metaphor. It is about beautiful and ugly sides – corruption, starvation and vices of many generations that constitute a compassionate vision of modern Africa and the magical heritage of its myths; a relationship between history and contemporary social and political trends mired in confusing perception of realising the self and the nation.
FUNKE OSAE-BROWN