Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (3 page)

The house, of course, is unchanged. It is smaller only in memory. Memory and the intervening years, many of which I have spent in cramped English flats and American apartments, limitations I have endured like a prince in exile. Now, in the cool interior of this great house in Africa,
proper size is restored. No single body could dominate a room in such a house. Even the bathroom dwarfs me. I pass through the door that connects the family room to the passageway time and again, as though to test the portal. And each time, I find its generosity marvelous.

Part of this story has been told before: the broad doorway, the acrobats. These are incidents from a book I love. Incidents, to be exact, from a dream in that book. But is it any less real to me now for having once happened to someone else elsewhere? For having been recorded in print in the dream, twenty-five years ago, of a great writer returning to his ancestors’ Sri Lanka? This is my story now, not his. I am in my aunt’s house, but I make it a substitute for that other house of vanished histories, my demolished childhood home. I gape at the soaring ceiling and look down again, just in time to see the smallest of the acrobats restore her grip. The human star is preserved.

FIVE

O
ne sign of the newly vital Nigerian economy, and one of the most apparent, is the proliferation of Internet cafes. There had been none when I left home. Now there are several in every neighborhood, and there must be hundreds in Lagos alone. The Internet cafe is symbolic of a connection to goings-on in the larger world, an end to Nigeria’s isolation. It is a connection shared by many other large countries trying to shake off poverty. The availability of computers is, in this sense, an index of progress. But while India is an emerging software player, and countries like China, Indonesia, and Thailand have successfully staked claims in manufacturing, Nigeria’s contribution is much more modest. In
fact it is, for now, limited to the repetition of a single creative misuse of the Internet: advance fee fraud.

The fraud, popularly known as “419” after the section of the Nigerian criminal code it contravenes, is endemic in Nigeria. I have only guessed at the extent of the scam from being on the receiving end of emails which promise a large share of one fund or another in exchange for a small advance fee. I have also read in the American press about people who have been taken in by these offers. My perspective on 419 changes on the morning after I arrive in Lagos. That is when I pay a visit to Tomsed Cyber Cafe near the Ojodu bus stop, some fifteen minutes’ walk from my aunt’s place. Tomsed is on the second floor of a building that offers print, phone, and fax services. The main computer room is fluorescent-lit and air-conditioned, and it contains twenty-four machines, all connected to the Internet by dial-up service. It costs one hundred naira—about seventy cents—to browse for an hour. This cost, even in the absence of a regulatory body, is remarkably consistent at Internet cafes of different standards across the city. Of at least seven I end up visiting, none costs significantly more or less than Tomsed does.

The cafe is close to capacity. Most of the customers are young men with a certain look: close-cropped hair, lean faces. They are dressed in short-sleeved shirts, and all of them are over twenty and under forty. After paying the attendant, I take a seat and wait for the Internet page to load.
The man seated next to me composes a message by the hunt and peck method. He presses one letter on the keyboard, searches for the next, presses that one, and so on. It is his one-fingered technique that attracts my attention, but when my eye alights, not entirely accidentally, on his text, I catch my breath. The words I see him type, “transfer,” “dear friend,” “deposited into your account forthwith,” present incontrovertible evidence: he is composing a 419 letter. I have stumbled onto the origin of the world-famous digital flotsam.

I feel as though I have discovered the source of the Nile or the Niger. The man keeps at his typing with the single-mindedness of a hen picking a yard clean. Above him, on the wall of the cybercafe, is a large yellow sign with black block letters that warns: “TO OUR CUSTOMERS—Tomsed Cyber Cafe now has an activity monitor software that monitors all activities of 419s including their mails in all our workstations. Therefore any customer caught with 419 job will be handed over to the police. BE WARNED!” The man knows the risks, but he carries on nonetheless, casting his net out into the unknown, prompted by urgings so frequently indulged that they have become instinctive. Later, I see other men with the same shifty faces, all of them composing letters or using the chat features of Yahoo and Microsoft to reel in their victims. After I see several such incidents at Tomsed, the initial frisson I felt disappears and is replaced by irritation.

I ask my cousin Muyiwa what he knows about the practice.
He informs me that the universities, the one he attends in Osun State included, are the nerve centers of this activity. For most of the boys, the goal is to get cash so they can live large and impress their mates on campus. They call the scam “nineteen” (a further abbreviation of 419), and they themselves are known as “the yahoo boys” or simply “yahoo yahoo.” While they often work in daytime, they prefer the night: that is when they have discounts at the cafes. Under cover of night, the yahoo yahoo can work for long, coffee-fueled stretches, unmolested by censors.

Yahoo yahoo are on the front lines of their own shadow war, mangling what little good name their country still has. Their successes depend on the gullibility of foreigners, who apparently are still in plentiful supply. There is a sense, I think, in which the swindler and the swindled deserve each other. It is a kind of mutual humiliation society. Once, looking to my right in an Internet cafe—and this surreptitious reading quickly becomes habitual for me—I see a letter being written from the “Chairman of the National Office for Petroleum Resources.” The writer is a rough-looking man who is clearly chairman of nothing. There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded.

Long email lists are cut from one page and pasted on another. The men work words with the intensity and focus of dowsers, leading their readers down fanciful paths, persuading them with barely concealed desperation. The nets are cast and cast again, because were there to be even a single bite, were there just one victim, the many hours spent staring into the glowing screen would have been worth it, the risk of being caught by the police would have been justified. An advance fee of ten thousand dollars can leave a yahoo yahoo set for months; many of them angle for much bigger payoffs than that. The engine for this industry is greed, and it is impossible to control because it is far more decentralized than anyone can govern. All this somehow reminds me of
Gulliver’s Travels
, which I read when I was a schoolboy in Lagos. In his fourth and final journey, Lemuel Gulliver’s preference for the company of the horselike Houyhnhnms comes at the expense of a race of uncouth creatures. Swift names this latter group, who were rather too close to humans for Gulliver’s liking, “the Yahoos.” It is a neat reversal of Marx’s dictum about history: the yahoo yahoo have bucked a trend, showing up the first time as farce and the second, in Nigeria, as something more tragic.

Nigerian law enforcement agents do what they can to battle the yahoo yahoo. In addition to the warning signs that are posted at every cafe, there is often a policeman or a soldier hanging about the entrance of the cafe. At Tomsed, the soldier in front of me caresses his tommy gun and cracks jokes with the staff, while the men to my left and right are
busy with their fraudulent work. I ask Muyiwa about arrests, and he says it is actually quite common to see an officer hauling off a yahoo yahoo. They drag them outside and, threatening them with incarceration and torture, are able to exact steep fines, fifty thousand naira, say, which is more than three hundred dollars. This goes straight into the pockets of the arresting officers. It is a catch and release program. The yahoo yahoo, naturally, promise themselves to be more careful the next time. They find another Internet cafe, and get right back to work.

SIX

O
ne morning, a child comes into the broad corridor of the house and greets me. I am shaving, unprepared for a guest. She calls me by name, and tells me who she is. We have never laid eyes on each other but we recognize each other immediately: first cousins. She was born after I left home, the last daughter of my father’s younger brother and, until this moment, we have only been rumors to each other. But so quickly do we get to know each other that, soon, I cannot even remember a time when I did not know her.
She moved so easily all I could think of was sunlight
. We spend hours on the sofa watching television. She teaches me about all the new films and the biggest music stars. I have brought some chocolates and a knapsack for her, so we almost have a
fair exchange. I am awed by her silences and excited speech, her darkness, her self-possession. The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child’s confidence is the world’s wonder.

A month later, as I prepare to leave, she says she will miss me. And I know I will miss her too, and I see with a pang that every good thing I wish for this country, I secretly wish on her behalf. Any prayer I have that the future be a good one, that the place keep from breaking, is for her sake.

SEVEN

M
y aunt thinks it is a bad idea. Her brother, my Uncle Bello, agrees. Her husband is indifferent, but he acts as if it is a bad idea. Everyone says I must not travel by danfo. The danfo is a death trap. It is a haven for practitioners of black magic, and is full of thieves. This much is known.

—But I used to ride the danfo frequently in my high school days, I even used to ride the molue, which is bigger and more dangerous.

—Ehn, that was a long time ago. You’re not quite as hardened now. Yes, you are street-smart, no one doubts it. But like it or not, America has softened you.

Uncle Tunde, Aunty Folake’s husband, is amused by the idea that I want to go out and take public transportation.
He does it from time to time, sure, but he is not visiting from America. To him and his wife, this is more evidence of my eccentricity. Why not just wait till the next day, so that the driver can take me? My destination is so far and the journey so complicated that any number of things could go wrong. They don’t understand that being there on the danfo, being there on the streets, is the whole point of the exercise. And there is no instinct there for helping them understand it, and all they have to hold on to is how contrary I was even as a child, in those years before my father died.

Just as I am about to leave, a guest arrives. He is a young man, the husband of Uncle Tunde’s cousin. My aunt asks him if he has a car. He does. In the blink of an eye, she persuades him to drive me all the way to Lagos Island. I know what this is about. It is about keeping the lines of privilege taut. Everyone does it. Each person knows how to get maximum comfort out of situations, how to avoid being “one of the masses.” It is essential, not just in terms of safety, but also in social terms. Aunty Folake has not been on a public bus in more than twenty-five years and, as she put it to me: “I’d rather not travel at all, than ever ride in one of those things!” I almost give in, but then it all strikes me as wrong-headed, and I say:

—Wait. This guy has plans of his own. Look, I’ll be fine. Why take someone else so far out their way? A guest calls and, next thing, we make him a chauffeur?

My protest settles it. I walk out of the housing estate
and within a few minutes find myself in the thick of that assault to the senses that is the Ojodu–Berger Bus Terminus. It is just shy of 9:30 in the morning and the place is teeming. The degree to which my family members wish me to be separate from the life of the city is matched only by my desire to know that life. The danfo, carrier of the masses, is the perfect symbol of our contest. The energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—converge at the bus stops. There is no better place to make an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home.

The typical Lagos danfo is yellow and decrepit, and seats fourteen: two in front with the driver, and three rows of four passengers each. The bus is operated by a team of two: the driver and a conductor, who is also known as the tout. In the typical bus terminus, such as those at Ojota, Yaba, Ikeja, or Ojodu, the air is thick with the cries of touts. They have to fill those fourteen seats as quickly as possible, and get a move on to their destination. “Jotajota-jotajota.” That’s the man calling Ojota. “Kejakejakeja. Kejakeja-straight.” That’s the express to Ikeja bus stop. The sound that rises from the thrum of congested traffic is like a chorus of cantors or auctioneers. “Balende–CMS, Balende–CMS, Balende-balende-balende.”