Writers Studio held in Ibadan on April 6, 2013. One of the participating writers Fiyin Akinsiku tells of her experience. We present her story in parts; this is the first.
This would be a Edo State is about four hours from Ibadan. We left Benin in a private car driven by an Ibadan man – I knew this from his accent. Of course, h is absent from the vocabulary – both English and Yoruba - of typical Ibadan people. And the marks on his face were as if he fought with a tiger which mauled him.
I first saw the invitation to a one-day intensive writing workshop organized by Tosin Kolawole’s Writers’ Studio on Facebook. I thought it was a great idea but I did not know I could make it because of my tight schedule. I was only sure I would be there by the time I registered: four days to D-day.
We passed through the only road that links the South-East with the South-West: the Lagos –Benin express road. We were approaching the Edo-Ondo border when we ran into a small hold up, or so we thought. All through my days as an undergraduate of University Of Benin, I passed through the road, so I was used to the road. There was a day I spent six hours in a hold up on that road. That was in 2006. The state of the road was deplorable at that time and the then Minister of Works, Mrs Diezani Allison-Madueke shed tears on the state of the road: a matter for another day.
Gradually the hold-up became longer till the long queues of cars ahead disappeared in the distance. We waited. Then waited. And waited. The queue moved slowly. Drivers shouted lewd words at one another. Passengers alighted. Whenever the queues moved, passengers ran after their buses. Old men became mango hunters. They threw sticks and stones at the yellow mangoes that dotted the trees. Inside the car, we sweated like Christmas goats. I sat beside a garrulous man and there was no dull moment for me. The only problem was that if my sister were there, she would have nicknamed him water supply, for sparks of saliva struck my face whenever he talked.
In front, black smoke arose, as though from a chimney. And we heard people talk with excitement about fire. Fire. Some people were calling other people to check out the footage on their phones.
When we finally got to the source of the smoke, the black hulks of a truck, a fuel tanker and a luxury bus were staring back at us. The charred remains of people were on the ground. Charred. Burnt. Beyond recognition. I closed my eyes. Outside some people were engrossed in a discussion and someone said something like eighty bodies...eighty bodies. When I opened my eyes, the other occupants of the car were moaning in the right places. The rest of the journey was uneventful, except that the garrulous man showed that he really had verbal diarrhea. Later, clouds gathered and threatened; but in the end, gave up their threat of a heavy downpour and walked away.
I got to Ibadan when I could see the lines on my palms only with the aid of the bright headlamps of cars that sped along Iwo road. I was fagged out but that did not stop me from noticing that I was surrounded by so many people with tribal marks: either three vertical sitting on three slanting horizontal or just slanting three horizontal or an ultra short vertical beside a short horizontal line on both sides of their faces. It also made me remember the tribal marks in my village: a single vertical line drawn from below the eyelids to the jaw on both sides of the face. Tribal marks always fascinate me; I felt like closing my eyes and running my palms down those marks….
Later that night, during the 11 o clock news, I saw that the Federal Road Safety Corps had begun to divert cars from the Benin end of Lagos – Benin expressway to the Akure-Owo-Ifon axis.
Fiyinfoluwa Akinsiku studied Medicine at the University Of Benin; she was also the Editor-in-Chief of The Great Physician and The Stethoscope. Her short stories have been published in Naijastories, Sentinel Magazine and The Touch magazine. She writes from Benin City and is currently working on her debut novel.
