This is not the train ride I expected. In 2015, I boarded a one-hour plane from Kaduna to Lagos, and then took a taxi for another hour to Abeokuta, to attend the Ake Arts and Book Festival. A year later, on board a train, this same journey will take me about 40 hours to cover. 40 hours bundled with tubers of yam, sweaty bodies and passengers hanging throughout the journey, while flanked by two other writers without whom I would have abandoned the mission halfway.
¶
The train station is a vast space bathing under the sun of Kaduna. There are two platforms. One is for the intrastate train travel from Zaria to Kafanchan. The other, which we are to wait for, is the interstate train that will move from Kaduna to Minna, Mokwa, Jebba, Ilorin, Ilesha, Ibadan and Abeokuta with a final stop at Lagos.
Two days earlier, I had been at the train station to enquire about our journey. Then it was a ghost of the hubbub I meet now. The interior of the station looked like a cinema hall without chairs. Just a sparse hall with a huge board. On the blackboard the various destinations the train traversed were written with a white chalk. I could see names of towns, letters and numbers, but could not make any sense out of it. I moved around through a pathway calling, listening for movement. I saw silhouettes of a man in a dark room, a face only visible in a slit through a window.
“Good morning.” I greeted him. He grunted an answer.
“Sorry. Please I am enquiring about the train journey to Abeokuta.”
The man did not bother to look towards me as he kept shuffling what seemed to be piles of paperwork on his desk.
“Please when does it leave?” I added again, getting impatient.
“Go and look at the board,” he grumbled again without raising his head up.
“That’s the problem, I don’t understand anything written on it.” My forceful voice laden with irritation seemed to be a language he understood. He raised his head up for the first time. He looked to be in his fifties, his eyes sunken and red in their sockets behind clear spectacles. His facial muscles appeared to have forgotten the effect of a smile in a long while.
“The train leaves every Monday by 2pm,” he answered back, interjecting my thoughts.
“Thank you.” I said with a smile and turned to leave. But I heard his voice again as I took a step forward out of the corridor.
“Where is your last stop?”
I turned back in my stride to answer. “Abeokuta.”
His face is still expressionless, his eyes fixed to the papers on the table. “The fare is two thousand seven hundred naira. You should be here before 2 p.m. to book your ticket. The train leaves by 2 p.m. every Monday and returns from Lagos by 9 a.m. every Friday.”
“Thank you very much.” I replied, but he had turned to his pile of papers.
¶
I arrive at the Kaduna train station on travel day. My backpack is filled with few clothes and several books. My previous knowledge of a train station all came from characters in a couple of these books—in the 1987 novel The Virtuous Woman by Zaynab Alkali and from Labo Yari’s 1978 novel Climate of Corruption. Through the characters Nana and Sule respectively, I pictured a train station from the northern part of Nigeria travelling down south related from the novels as: disorderly, commotion, noise and struggle. But also, in these novels set years before I was born, they wrote with a tinge of hope for the future: travel from Kano to Lagos in a day with a train. Such hope.
I meet my co-travellers Katung and Anselm. Anselm has his camera accessories adorning him like a soldier bearing guns. He brings out the Canon camera and begins to take snapshots, pre-travel shots. I bring out my phone and soon we are live on Facebook, live-streaming the start of an eventful journey.
The train will arrive soon. We do not buy tickets because it is not advisable to buy tickets at the station office, Katung had told us. So we meet a young man dressed in skin-tight trousers and a bandana tied around his head, accompanied by a lady, his sister. They will be providing us with tickets but we will have to pay extra cash for each. We pay and they promise our tickets will arrive soon. We wait, and wait and wait some more.
The train arrives two hours late. Our tickets arrive with it. Our agents have a man inside the train coming from Kano, who has our tickets and seats reserved for us. Most of the people waiting for the train, we are told further, will not be able to secure a seat once the train arrives. We are safe and lucky, and sweaty.
The honk of the train from afar dispels our feeling of safety and increases the tension. We brace up for the struggle to board the train. The male agent drags us across the train track away from the boarding area, so we are at the wrong side of the entrance. The female agent picks our bags and joins us. We are not alone on this other side; other passengers are waiting here as well. One of the passengers is a plump older woman, with about three huge matted bags filled to the brim by her side. I am wondering how she will manage to get through the commotion and board the train when our eyes meet and she gestures in a way that suggests I help her with some of the load. I notice the turmoil gathering and realize it is going to be a war to board the train, so I pretend I do not understand what her gesture means and look away, concentrating on the task ahead.
The train trundles through the track and, in a snap, the commotion begins on both sides as humans rush to the train like water released into a dam. The siblings have positioned so we are near the entrance of a coach when the train comes to a halt. Their man from inside the train waves to the agents and stands in front of the single entrance on the coach. He has to pull each of us one by one into the train with one hand clinging to the racks on the train and the other dragging us in with our load. Finally, we make it. He ushers us to seats by the doorway, on the wall behind our seats written in blue marker is a label:
STAFF ONLY
KEEP OFF
We drop our backpacks on the railing above and sit while the man moves back and blocks the entrance again to make sure other passengers on his payroll gain access.
Our seats face another three. There is a tiny slit of a window without windowpanes on each side of the coach open to air. Only heads and hands are able to go through the slit at any given time. As we settle, people keep trooping into the train through the door entrances, but soon all the access points become clogged with humans. Now people are jumping in through the tiny windows like locusts, head followed by the rest of the body. A mother pushes her infant daughter into our hands through the window from outside. The mother struggles to follow the daughter in through the same route, but her tummy gets in the way. Her head and hands have reached into the train but her legs are flailing outside. We are startled, with a wailing baby in our hands and the head of a woman pushing and straining like a lunatic trying to unite with her lost child.
The train shudders, ready to move. The mother is still trapped. The wailing of the child increases by another notch. We plead and plead to the head of the mother to let her feet go back and rest on solid ground, take her child and abort this reckless mission. The mother does not relent. She has not reached this far to give up; her eyes still urge her body to fight more. Now the train is moving, slowly in a crawl, honking a final warning. The mother now knows, it is game over. She drops back on her feet and we pass her child into her arms and even this strong mother is fighting back sobs.
The train honks three times and picks a little speed. Some passengers are alighting through the windows. These passengers merely struggled to get on board so they could make sure their loved ones are part of the journey and are now ready to drop off, fulfilled.
A lady just about to drop off from the train, one of the numerous ones that came in to secure a seat for their friends or relatives, approaches me. She holds my hand and makes me face a frail elderly woman. She communicates with the elderly woman in rapid Yoruba. She turns back to me, rubs her two palms together and begins pleading. “Please! You have to help me.”
The elderly woman is her mother and would be dropping at Offa, and she is pleading that I take care of her through the journey. The train sounds its final honk and proceeds to rattle forward. I am speechless, words are forming in my mouth but are not releasing. The lady is still begging on behalf of her mother. “Please! Please!! Please Sir!!!”
I have no time to think or we would have an extra unwilling passenger on the journey. I nod in agreement. “Hurry and drop off, before the train leaves with you!” I find myself yelling. She hugs her mother, rushes to a nearby window and drops out legs first and waves us goodbye. I smile at the elderly woman as the train finally jerks forward on the beaten tracks.
¶
For the first time I notice the real contents of this metallic rattling coach. It carries a bubble of humans, men, women, children, matted bags, glistening silver buckets, wrapped bundles of brooms, prickly tubers of yams competing for leg space, creaking assemblage of overhead fans, backpacks, wrapped nylon leathers, passengers on seats, standing, hanging on shoulders of seats, heads lying on the walking aisle. The journey is just beginning but we are tired faces.
The bewildered faces of my co-travellers, Katung and Anselm suggest this is not the idea of a train journey they bargained for. Neither did I. I begin to notice the passengers on the coach like a layer of darkness has been scrapped from my eyesight. The man to my side, staring into the horizon through the window travels light, no bag or luggage and looks very comfortable and unflustered even within this commotion. I will call him Baba. There is a young mother breastfeeding her baby opposite my table, sitting with Anselm and Katung. To the other side on the aisle seat is the responsibility entrusted to me, Mama, the elderly woman staring ahead. She speaks Yoruba and no English. I speak English and Hausa only. We keep smiling at each other.
Slowly, the trundling train drowns away anger and fury from the commotion of boarding into breaths and collective sighs as moulds of clouds fly through the windows. The coach is now a chatterbox of questions and answers. “Where are you traveling?” “And where are you going to?”
Baba on the window seat is journeying to Offa. He answers my questions in strings of sentences, but I do not mind.
“I take this train every week.”
“I am a trader.”
“I will be taking the return train back to Kaduna on Friday, or Saturday. Whenever the train comes back to Offa.”
I assume he buys whatever he trades on from Offa and sells in Kaduna, as he has no visible wares on this travel.
“Why do you subject yourself to such rigorous travel every week?” I continue the bombardment of questions.
He shrugs. “It is cheaper.” He says with finality.
Baba becomes my intermediary to Mama. He dangles his head across my chest, and communicates to her in Yoruba and then relates back to me in English. A journey of language. I have a feeling a lot is lost in translation, but his words convey Mama as a sarcastic old woman disguised with a smile plastered to her face even when abusing you. Anselm whips out his camera and flashes clicks on her wrinkling face. She gives a perfect smile to the lenses and passes a comment still smiling. Baba says: “She says you are all going to get in trouble one day with your cameras and running mouths.” We all double over in laughter.
¶
On this train, you are either crumpled on a seat, hipbone to hipbone, squatting with one buttock on a seat, and the other buttock on a matted bag, or standing and hanging all the way through the bumpy ride. On the aisle of our coach a man stands, swaying on every bump. His destination is Lagos, the last stop. His story: He is not supposed to be in economy class with us.
“I had booked and bought a first class ticket days back only to arrive the train station and be told that the single first class coach has been filled up right from Kano,” he laments. “Just imagine o,” he adds.
There are no more vacant seats, but he really wanted an experience of the train ride, so he struggled to get onto the economy class coach with a first class ticket and is now left hanging. We dash pitiful faces at him without relinquishing our seats. Baba assures him that once we reach a certain station he will be able to get a seat. “Many, many passengers usually drop off at Minna station,” he consoles him.
As the train moves with full speed, the horizon and the vegetation outside begins to change, from arid Sahel, to a lush savannah. I see children playing in colourful school uniforms, waving whenever the train passes by. I wave back at them. I request for the Canon from Anselm. Baba to my side has one hand hanging on the edge of the window, his eyes staring into the distant horizon. I aim the camera. The image it produces is of a man in a multi-coloured dashiki, with a stern face lost in shrubs, green leaves and a sunny sky.
Later, I relive this journey through the small rectangular screen of a Canon camera: in this screen, the train is not just a rushing metal, but an array of colours – silver buckets, brown brooms, yellow and red clothes, blue, red, and white matted bags – smiles, stretch marks, yawns, cries. It is a dizzy picture of a receding sun, total darkness, fans attached to the roof of a train whirling, snores of humans and dripping sweats.
I have the snapshot of a girl in school uniform: white shirt and blue skirt, walking, green and brown shrubs rising to her waist, her head tilted a little downward, dangling forward.
I tilt the camera headlong and photograph the train taking a bend on the track, so that our coach is in direct view of another part of the train. It is a long train, each coach attached to the other like marching soldiers. I take a snapshot, and the image caught makes me return back to my seat. I pass the camera to Anselm in his window seat. “You have to take these shots. Outside.” I whisper. He refocuses the lens through the window and clicks, clicks, clicks. I hear the shutter sounds but my eyes already had a glimpse and my mind processes the images. He returns the camera into the coach and we consider the images. Outside, just above us on all the coaches, there are masses of humans standing, sitting, squatting, and lying down on top of the train like daredevils. They improvise risky positions and create their open-air coaches, just above us, as if reminiscing old Bollywood movies. We are riding. They are flying.
¶
The train station is a market of sorts. As we approach Minna, what seems to be a deserted vast space from afar suddenly flickers to life. Light bulbs flash, children crawl out of the valleys, to create a bubbling market at midnight. No matter the time or location the train arrives, the markets spring to life. We arrive Minna at 12am, some eight hours after leaving Kaduna, a journey that takes around three hours by road. Dim yellow bulbs are lit, kiosks are set up and trading begins. Makeshift tents are filled with food, wares and products. Anselm and I alight from the train through the windows – the usual entrances are still crowded by baggage and sleeping passengers – to explore. Katung stays back, his face still show signs of discomfort, his backpack firmly attached to his chest while his legs are placed on tubers of yams spread on the floor.
The train is a very long body of coaches attached to the other, and as we walk the length of it, a market is thriving by its side. It takes us about fifteen minutes of walking past eager traders, local tea joints, and food hawkers with pots of stews on head to traverse its complete length. We see Baba in one of the food shacks devouring an unfamiliar meal that may taste alien to our taste buds. We found the first class coach—a single coach—at the rear of the train. It is brightly lit. Its windows shut tight with air conditioners running. New paint still glistening differentiates it from the rest of the train like a peacock amidst pigeons. The seats are neatly arranged, each passenger to a single allocated seat like in an airplane. At the entrance to the coach, we meet a man dozing. He stops us in our strides as we make to enter the fluorescent-lit coach.
“Hey! Where you think you wan go? This na first class o,” he leaps towards us.
His aggressive attitude makes me take a step back and jump down from the coach back to the red earth. I leave Anselm fuming, exchanging heated words with a man locked out of a first class coach just to be able to lock others away too. I stray away inhaling the midnight wind towards two men. I join them in worship and repay my missed evening prayers.
¶
Our nights on the train are for poetry, discussions, and live-streams. When the train is too quiet, except for the pounding of the locomotive on metal tracks, we distort the solitude. We are night talkers, munching packages of biscuits, popping bottles of soda and biting on bars of chocolates. Mama is tired of begging for quiet at night. Baba is not bothered anymore, as he drowns out our voices with his snore. We perform poetry; we live-stream videos. As the hours accumulate, a day already spent, our energy gets drained. We become unkempt, our beards have grown into stubbles, but we render poems and stories like artists confined in a moving metallic box. We revel in irritating sleeping passengers, and soak in smiles of appreciation from drowsy eyes.
¶
The train breaks down in the middle of nowhere and we are stuck for hours waiting for repairmen. I ask Baba how mechanics can reach us to repair the train when we are basically stranded in nowhere. He smiles when he answers. The crew are the repairmen, the repairmen are the crew. I pick the Canon and leave the train. There are no more passengers clinging on the top of the train, Minna must have been the final destination for daredevils. Outside, the mists of the morning are still falling. The train is surrounded by a majestic view of domineering hills covered in grasses and a cloudy smoke, and we are stuck within their valleys. Women drag children, pour water into their mouths, brush their teeth and rinse faces. Skirts lift, trousers drop and urine is directed at dewy grasses. I see a few girls hawking dried fish on silver trays, and I do not know how they always appear whenever the train halts.
A boy sees me fondling with the camera and poses for a picture. Soon his friend rushes and joins him, one hand across a shoulder, in a swag pose, deliberately looking away from the camera. After the shooting session, they rush to the camera screen to view the pictures. They ask when I will be printing the pictures, and how much I charge. I tell them I do photography for the fun and beauty. They are confused and do not seem to believe me.
I wander around and aim the camera. The lens captures a boy, about five years, in a school uniform, a hand knitted blue cardigan embroidered with an initial to the chest side: S.T.J. He is viewing the surrounding through the windows, his eyes yearning to disobey warnings and instructions, to be able to feel life outside the metallic containers. A younger toddler is by his side, tiptoeing, only his eyes are visible through the window slit. I take a snapshot.
¶
We arrive at Offa with our eyes bulgy, and sleep-deprived. Offa station is a noisy bubble, a point of farewells and goodbyes. Half the train empties, replaced by new passengers. A few of us remain constant. Baba drops here. I feel like rising and squeezing him with a warm hug. I shake him and wave goodbye. Before he leaves, he dishes out precise instructions about the stations ahead and what to expect all the way to Abeokuta. Mama is relieving me of my responsibility here too. She teases us in Yoruba for the last time as the scent of home beckons her. I miss their company already. The standing passenger finally gets a chance to own a seat, after a day of journeying while standing. But I do not know why he is reluctant to take a seat, still hanging through the door, still standing. He peeps outside and whistles to Baba before he disappears.
“How long will it take to reach Lagos from here?” he asks.
“Ah! It is like another 12 hours before you reach o.”
“By road nko?”
“Not very far. Around 4 hours like that.”
Our standing passenger suddenly jumps down, and walks away.
“I have had enough of this,” he grumbles under his breath and storms out of the coach to the blazing sunshine of Offa.
Offa station is a changeover, a point of exchange. A young couple joins us with twice as much loads and matted bags of luggage than the previous passengers left with. Destination: Lagos. They are talkative, but now we lack energy and cannot compete with them. Their story: They are a recently engaged couple, buying goods in Offa.
“We are preparing for our wedding.” The man chuckles.
“Buying cheaper and spending less in this harsh economy.” The lady says with a wide grin.
I occupy Baba’s window seat. Our new seatmate is a man who seems in his 60s but dresses like a 30-year-old gangster comrade: a flat cap, baggy shirt and three quarter shorts. On his lap is a packaged meal wrapped in a black nylon, dripping oil. He balances on the seat, his stature crushing me inward, unwraps the nylon, and scent of food fills the entire coach. He dips his hand and begins to eat, the soup draining from his palms and staining his white shirt. After the meal, he joins the chatter. He begins every conversation with the phrase, When I was in America. Anselm is intrigued with Americana and continues to chat him up. He continues narrating.
“I am from America.”
“I live in Miami.”
“You know Miami? Florida? It snows white from heaven. I live there.”
He keeps insisting he is an American, even though his voice is a thick Igbo accent. Americana has a proper routine: eat, talk, talk, sleep, snore, snore, and the cycle is a continuum. Right now he is sleeping, his snores aimed at the ceilings and silencing the creaking of the rotor fans. Maybe he is deep in a dreamy slumber, where he is back in the beaches of Miami, Florida.
¶
The train track in the southwest is constructed in such a way that it passes right through the center of major towns and cities, unlike up North where tracks are laid on outskirts of towns. We cross right through the main township road in Osogbo halting traffic. It feels majestic, the whole of the town stopping abruptly for our passage, as we ride along like kings on horses waving at masses below them. Today we have the right of passage, elephants of the jungle.
¶
Over the last century, Nigeria has been a fragile country. Yet the North and South have been held together by the tracks of a railway. In 1898, the British colonial government constructed the first railroad in Lagos. The first train engine to work in Northern Nigeria, ran through the forgotten capital of Northern Nigeria in Zungeru town, steaming round the river Kaduna to the new capital of the then British Northern Nigeria, the brand new city of Kaduna, a city that rose out of a railway line to link a country with its capital Lagos in 1912.
In 1964, few years after independence, the railway lines began a period of rot. By 1988, the Nigerian Railway Corporation declared bankruptcy, and all rail traffic stopped. With a stable period of democratic rule from 1999, the railway lines began to breathe again. In 2012, scheduled passenger service was restored on this Kano to Lagos line we are plying with rugged coaches, over-booked tickets, and daredevils hitching rides on top of the train.
This is however not the case with the new standard gauge Abuja-Kaduna rail line. The first standard gauge railway modernization project in Nigeria connects the new Federal Capital City Abuja, with the capital of the defunct Northern Nigeria, Kaduna. Rail travel is now fashionable again. The elites, and not just lower class traders, patronize the Abuja-Kaduna line with its plush coaches, well decorated interiors, on-screen movies playing throughout the air-conditioned ride, spacious luggage compartments, as well as treats of snacks with a food bar to dine on the smooth ride enjoying the countryside terrain of Northern Nigeria. The railway tracks are a metaphor for Nigeria, and the complete opposite hue of two different railway lines connecting different parts of the country is a vindication of the maxim.
¶
The setting sun vanishes down the hills as we begin to ride towards Abeokuta. The couple recounts stories of horror throughout our final night: stories of kidnap and banditry. How Abeokuta is the most dangerous place to be at midnight.
“There is this passenger who dared to enter Abeokuta at midnight.” The woman begins. “He was robbed of all his luggage and belongings and then stripped naked, such that he ran to the major highway pleading for help,” the man continues.
“But he is stark naked at midnight, and all the cars did were to flash their headlights and speed away.” The man adds.
“Unfortunate soul.” the woman says. “Nobody stops for a waving naked madman at midnight.” They say in unison.
We arrive Abeokuta at 1am. A train journey of a day and a half from Kaduna without bathing or a proper meal. We are all now being warned and cautioned, that we better pass the night at the station and enter the town in the morning, under the safe cover of sunlight. We alight from the train into darkness and bid farewells. After almost 40 hours of travel we are eager to find a lush room to shower, snore and sleep away tiredness and hunger, but the fear of becoming three naked madmen on a highway haunts us. The train station at Abeokuta at night is a deserted building that feels haunted. The only lush bed here is the solid floor. We all stare at the dire situation. We cannot survive the tiredness tugging at our bones for another hour. We need a lush bed. So we dare bandits and bad omen and storm into the dark nights under the rocks of Abeokuta.
¶
Stories hunt us gasping.
editor 
Nkiacha Atemnkeng 
Raoul Djimeli