“We are moving to Lagos”, Daddy announced that evening. We were excited. Finally, this Lagos that we only visited for birthdays or parties or holidays, we were finally going to live there. We are going to be big people in Lagos, we thought to ourselves.

As we drove in my Dad’s Datsun car, headed into Lagos from Abeokuta. Or was it from Sagamu? We saw the eere meta just on the outskirts of Lagos. Dad reminded us again what they meant. Those eere meta in their White caps and White regalia. Pointed fingers and stern faces too. “Oo gbo do su egbe, oo gbodo rin din ju, oo gbo do ya mugu”. They were the commandments of Lagos, Daddy said. To survive in Lagos, remember these three rules. The phrases literally meant “Thou must not be too trusting. Thou shalt not be too slow. Thou shall not be stupid”. We didn’t think we would forget. We were 8years old.

Right after that, Daddy set a challenge before us – count the number of bridges between here and our new home. In fact, whoever got the number correctly would get a gift. That’s not hard, we said to him. We were not about to disappoint. So we started to count. The bridges of Lagos.

On getting to what I now know as Cele, there was an argument. Our numbers were not adding up. The three of us had different numbers for the bridges we had counted.

“No, it’s 10”.

“How can it be 10? I didn’t see more than 5”.

“Did you count the ones we used and the ones overhead?”

“I thought we were only to count the ones overhead”

“Daddy said count all the bridges. Simple instruction. Daddy, shebi that’s what you said?”

My Dad nodded in agreement.

“You people did not count the pedestrian ones”, someone said.

“Ah ahn! This one is ojoro o. Daddy, did you ask that we count the pedestrian ones too?

“But Daddy said ‘count all the bridges'”.

By the time the argument was over, we had lost count of the bridges all together.

“O oh, that’s how you people did not let us win something now”, someone said as we drove through the gates of our new home.

As Daddy put the car in park, one of us remembered to ask. “So Daddy, how many bridges are there in Lagos?”

An Uncle started to laugh. My Dad joined in. Both laughing hysterically. “You are not supposed to actually count the bridges”, the uncle said.

“I didn’t come to Lagos to count the bridges”, Daddy said and then he started moving bags inside the house.

We would later come to know that this was a popular Lagos saying that bore lots of nuances. We would come to know that saying you didn’t come to Lagos to count bridges was a way of saying you were not stupid. A way of reminding yourself of why you were in Lagos – to become successful, to be better than you were, to remind yourself of how far you’ve come to get where you are. Or to remind others to not take you for granted.

We remembered the eere meta and the commandments of Lagos. Daddy had taught us the first lesson.

*end*

 

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