Crowds of danfos in traffic with Cubist-style collaged headlines dominate one corner of the painting; the headlines read e.g. 'Lagos sends students to U.K. transport education tour,' and 'Why I will not take Public Transport in Lagos: My Experience'. In the foreground, a drummer on the roadside, a man in a suit and a woman in a yellow dress and red headscarf before a packed danfo with a man debarking. A red sky and night traffic in the distance to the right. A very beautiful painting.
Painting by the author

Today: Yemisi Aribisala, writer, editor, essayist, painter, and author of Longthroat Memoirs.

Issue No. 179

Danfo Nuptials
Yemisi Aribisala

Danfo Nuptials

by Yemisi Aribisala

A preacher, who is both native speaker of the Yoruba language, as well as beautifully eloquent in many of its dialects, says that there are three kinds of marriages. The first is Ọ̀sìnkín, the Yoruba gold standard, where all protocols are attended to with deep respect, and dowry estimates calculated so the bride is not commodified but prized in terms of appropriate bijouterie. Or as Molara Wood the Yoruba intellectual broke down for me: akin to fresh corn no less. 

The Ọ̀sìnkín is a young beautiful bride, Iyawo olele, carried in the proper way. Because in Yoruba we talk of carrying the bride. She is beautiful in the height of her season and in idealism that compares her to all beautiful fresh and new things. Iyawo dun l’ọ̀sìnkín or ọ̀sìnkín dun ni iyawo are words in a song we sing for brides at weddings. Fresh corn at the peak of harvest, right around now between September and November, silk veil turned moody copper, hawked along southwestern Nigerian streets, is advertised with loud calls of ọ̀sìnkín agbado!—buy fresh, new succulent delicate corn. 

The second kind of marriage is Dandawì, which has a wonderful kindred in Cameroonian patois: Camwestay. Dandawì is, Who’d you get pregnant for you stupid lass…well might as well pack your things and move in with him because no one is going to pay your dowry now. Camwestay, means Come and let’s stay together like the Al Green classic, only a cappella with insult song interludes. It means, common law wife with no dowry, well maybe later the dowry will be paid, maybe not. No new wrappers but grudging trousseau. No Okuru kaka (traditional marriage rite of the Okrika-Ijaw people) because you are too heavy to walk through the town. The incidental music to your life becomes Cardinal Rex Lawson’s “Sawale”…Greetings of ‘Iyawo’ [“bride”] are interspersed with “Ashawo” [“sex worker”].

  

The third is Òkùfìrìgbé which as onomatopoeically suggested is elopement. The word has a briskness in the way the tongue skips that helps you understand that it means a fleeing in the dark, disgrace, metaphorical death, taking one’s life into one’s hands, or being kidnapped, no difference in the end. All the roads of goodwill are covered up with necrosol as both parties run, and bitter darkness falls like curtains at the end of a solemn theatrical scene. We like to think we are all contemporary and new-world in our mindsets where it concerns issues of life but this preacher put his finger on the differences as eloquently as he speaks Yoruba. Some women who elope are classified as dead. Final. The cultural norms concerning marriages have existed for so long, even when we say we have moved on, we’ve only turned the corner and returned to where we started. Notably this preacher’s spoken English is appalling.

The danfo enters the scene both as a contraption of modern transportation and the scene of a fourth and most desperate kind of marriage. There is nothing aesthetically modern about the danfo. Yellow minibuses with black stripes along their sides, with crude hard seats made of metal and cheap foam, they have been part of the Lagos urban landscape for decades, connecting roads small and large, from suburb to metropolis, able to navigate all passages. Some say they entered the scene in the ’70s, some the ’80s, and there has been no improvement, not the slightest increment in efficiency or beautification of these buses in all those years. Danfos are the most hoi-polloi way in which to travel and know Lagos. To really get to know the underbelly of that wicked, mad, beautiful, fascinating city, the danfo is the vehicle of choice. Magicians, preachers, lovers, kidnappers, blue- and white-collar workers all use the danfo daily, round the clock. Danfos are at the head of infuriating, meaningless traffic jams, the cork at the bottleneck, shifting obstinately, belching carbon monoxide in every direction like a flatulent colourful insect. They are filled to the brim by their unconscionable conductors, until people are sitting on top of one another. Sometimes you sit in a danfo and your backside heats up dangerously like it is going to explode because the engine is back there right under your bottom. The windows are often difficult to pry open, if they open at all. Driven by a reckless doped chancer, you pay your fare to another character that fiction could never have produced called the conductor. Conductor as in something that transmits a menacing pseudonymous energy rather than an innocuous collector of fares. 

Danfos are the commonest crime setting for “one-chance” kidnappings of people en masse, whisked off to undisclosed locations for anything from ritual killings to textbook ransom demands.  As an outsider it is easy to romanticise the danfo. To classify it as the only device that can navigate the quick-witted disorganisation and chaos of Lagos. The bright yellow colour lends it a juvenile liveliness so that when you see it from afar, from all the way back in some art gallery on the shores of another country or in Mr. Eazi’s Lagos or in the London amalgamation of bus bodies, you run toward it with instinctive sentimentality, all misdemeanours and waywardness forgiven. 

I believe the only thing that redeems the danfo is its ability to encapsulate truly organic stories. This vehicle has served as a creative influence for innumerable Nigerian artists from Igoni Barrett to Tomi Wole, to Babatunde Tomori who drove one from London to Lagos, to Osaze Amadasun’s hand-painted homages, to Emeka Ogboh who installed a danfo with a Lagos soundscape in the courtyard of the Elysée Palace in Paris.

Danfo nuptials are the whirlwind matchmaking and marriage that happen in a danfo at high speed on an unheralded morning, between bus stops. The marriage is officiated by the conductor in a manner recalling the veering, lunging, braking, and generally dangerous motion of the danfo in the adept hands of a medicated bus driver. Pa pa pa as we say it—the marriage is done and dusted. 

The necessity for this kind of marriage ceremony arises when you get on a danfo without the correct fare. You need change when getting on a danfo. Not transformation or evolution, but small change, smallish-change because you might go to bed one day with the price of CMS to Victoria Island being one thing, then wake up the next day and there is a fuel crisis with queues for petrol everywhere and the cost of travel has run off the rails. 

If you rush onto a danfo heedlessly without appropriate change you are looking for trouble. The conductor is waiting. He demands everyone’s money in a guttural growl like he eats gravel for breakfast. You hand him your money and he insults you without hesitation. Didn’t he tell you this bastard that you should hold your change—what is this you’ve given him? His bloodshot eyes roll over you all warm and sticky and you don’t respond. The bus is on the move and you are glad, because it has taken you so long to struggle onto this bus, and he can throw you out. He can.

You are too tired to argue or defend yourself. Too tired to think or fight. It is significant you are tired, so tired in the morning. You sigh and look away. You are trying to inhale some fresh air seeping into the dankness of the bus. The conductor has thankfully forgotten you and turned to a young lady who has also failed to produce the exact fare. He sizes her up for an appropriate insult but has found none. Not yet anyway. She doesn’t look consoled because she must know the insult will come to him. He reaches behind him from his seat next to the door to collect the fare from passengers behind. He smooths all the notes out, ironing every crease with unkempt fingers and nails so dirty they look like he walks on his hands. The nitpicking fashion in which he is arranging the notes makes no sense at all when his fingers are so mangy with engine oil and grime. You are watching his hands hoping he will have mercy and give you the change to your fare that you can see him holding. At the same time you don’t want to handle what he gives you for obvious reasons. Someone has given him the change he owes you—the exact change—but you don’t want to provoke him by asking directly, so you bite your tongue and calculate how many minutes till the next stop. He might be merciful but soon enough you realise it is too much grace to ask for. Suddenly he pounces on you.

“Bros I go do marriage for you and this Aunty. Sebi I say hold your change, you refuse.”

The bus fills with stifled laughter.

“Oya…” He says as the bus rolls to a stop.

“Aunty.” He turns to the lady who did not give him the exact fare. “Meet your husband.”

“Bros,” he says, turning his feral red gaze your way. “Meet your wife.”

“Come down come down come down abeg,” he growls.

You bend to escape the dimness of the bus, your new bride behind you. 

He stretches out a note that represents the combination of both your change and flashes a mischievous smile. You grab it quickly. And in a flash the bus is reloaded with more passengers and speeds off. 

You sneak a look at the woman beside you and quickly shift your attention to the street peddlers nearby selling this and that. You are going to have to ingratiate yourself to get the note given to you by the conductor broken into smaller change so you can give the woman her half and be on your way.

You would let the change go because of the intense awkwardness of the situation, but every single kobo counts. You need it for the journey back home after work.

You approach one woman with a tray of green oranges who is smiling and has the knot at the end of her wrapper in her hand. She looks willing to help. You head resolutely in her direction and the woman married to you on the bus ride follows you as if indeed compelled by covenant. You greet the woman and hand her the note. She accepts it and smiles sheepishly, leaning to look behind you.

“Husband and wife abi?”

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