In the 1950s, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski visited the Nigerian city of Onitsha. He hired a truck to take him into the market, and on the way the traffic came to a complete stop far outside town. After waiting for hours with no forward movement, he went ahead on foot to see what was holding everything up.
As it turned out, a great hole had opened up in the road that led into the market. It was several meters deep, with steep sheer sides all around, and filled with brown sludgy water at the bottom. Each vehicle that made it to this hole had to undergo a process. First, it had to drive into the hole, since there wasn’t enough room to go around and the traffic was stacked up behind it. Next, after the vehicle had made it down into the water, a group of men would descend into the hole and attach ropes and chains. Then — very, very gradually — the vehicle would be pulled up out of the hole to the other side inch-by-inch, whereupon it could continue its journey into the Onitsha market. Unless the water had killed the engine, in which case it was hauled off for scrap.
An entire economy had developed around this giant hole in the road. Various merchants set up shop and hocked their wares to the masses, including the drivers and passengers of the vehicles that waited their turn to be dunked in and ten dragged out of the hole. Local officials would come by to survey the scene, glad-hand the people, and cheer the whirlwind of activity.
The hole had been there for at least a year, though it was hard to get an agreed upon answer from the locals about when it had appeared.
There seemed to be no plan in place to repair the road.
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It’s amusing to consider that, from a certain “GDP” standpoint, this hole in Onitsha was a boon. It created jobs (the throng of people hauling each truck up out of the hole) and provided a new market for the exchange of goods and services. The Nigerians were able to busy themselves — not a given in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the art of “milling around” has been mastered. Book reviewers in the West who read Kapuscinski’s published account hailed the scene as illustrative of the “opportunistic entrepreneurship” of Onitsha. An entire town coming together to “fix” a traffic problem by means dramatically more labor-intensive than, say, repairing the road.
This was a common takeaway during the decolonization movements of the 1960s, as Western writers climbed over each other to share the latest exemplar of African vibrancy and ingenuity. The line proffered by the enlightened circles of London and Paris and New York was that decolonization was unshackling Africa from a European-imposed dark age, and now the continent was bound to surge into a new era of development and prosperity. To these people, this was a matter beyond freedom and justice and self-determination. Africa joining the modern world as a free continent was one of the most exciting wellsprings of civilizational potential in history. The absurdity on display in Onitsha was simply a different “way of being.” An indigenous and therefore superior mode of operation to the stagnant efficiencies of the West. A prospect to consider, as the public works tendencies of places like Nigeria come to Western shores.
Kapuscinski was himself one of these Afro-optimists. He was enamored with Africa, and spent a substantial part of his life exploring the continent. He adored the people and thrilled at the cultures he encountered. Still, he considered the hole and its attendant activity noteworthy because of the absurdity. He asked someone to explain the scene to him in a way he could understand, and the reply was simple.
“It’s always like that in Onitsha.”
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