‘Your Hands Up, And Get Out’
“The first second of the close encounter brought a rush of confusing emotions: anger, humiliation and a sense of loss: but not fear. “Out, and keep up your hands, or I will kill you.”
It’s like a plot in the movies or in one of those fast-paced thrillers, produced with such vividness that the audience is hard put to know whether what he sees is real or contrived. Is it a bad dream, or is it an unwelcome reality? It is a dream that doesn’t really stay far back in the mind of anyone living in Lagos. If hasn’t happened to you, it must have happened to someone you know or at the very remote the newspapers tell you that it is happened everyday, or the fierce looking police at check-points inform you graphically enough that your life and your car are not all that safe. In the days past, maybe not all that past, driving out at night was considered dangerous in that you were more likely to lose your life than your car. But soon enough, the armed robbers and car owners seemed to arrive at an unwritten agreement that loss of lives was not really worth it once you were familiar with the rule of the game. It was simple, when you were told to move up your hands and get out, you moved up your hands and got out. Those who did the ordering and those ordered all seemed to be gentlemen who would not like to wash the streets in crimson. And if the driver got too smart, then it was his fault in that he was certain to lose, first, his car, and then, his life.
The moment that everybody agreed to play by the rules, cars were the only things lost. Lives were saved, and so the matter received a lot less mention in the press, even at parties, than before. One other thing in this drama: Last year, the issue was that you packed your car and it was gone. It played like the music of the bizarre. You packed your car, went back it, and it was gone. You scratched your head, wandering just for one moment what had happened. You rubbed your eyes to make sure that it did really happen. “Was the car here?” Or “did I come out to the wrong side of the road? Maybe the car had been towed for wrong parking, let me check with the police.” And when finally you found that the car was not towed, you headed to the police to complain that your car had been stolen. And then the search. If you were lucky, they would find it. And if not, then your bad luck. It was the sort of problem that a prickly mind like mine couldn’t comprehend and which drove me to write a column which called “Brigandage.” The Washington Post found the piece graphic enough that it based a report on crimes in Nigeria on it and quoted copiously from it, with the paper and the writer sufficiently credited.
It was possible that armed robbers, the brigands, read the piece and concluded that I might have missed a crucial point or two. Someone with a Homeric sense of the absurd might have concluded that I should be taught a lesson, if for no other reason than that I should have a better idea of what I was talking about. I actually expected it to happen to me, as it did on the morning of Thursday, April 15, 1982. I was driving in my new (less than two weeks old at the time) White Honda Prelude. Somewhere at the back of my mind that morning, the scene that I was a bit player in actually formed itself. “What is someone tried to take this nice little car from me?” It was the type of phantasmagoria that the mind doesn’t like to capture vividly, else you will be warned and then look in your rear-view mirror for the sight of danger. Why, the heart was rather busy that morning thumping along with the guitar of Earl Klugh, and so the mind was caught in the beauty of music, and then was definitely not the time for the mind to gauge danger. The mallams had just finished sweeping the front yard of the house and were getting ready to open their kiosk for the day’s business. The horn was saying that the gate should be opened, and that one fateful minute of waiting while the hook was moved and the gate opened. In that one minute, I looked up into my rear view mirror, lest another car was held up trying to drive past. Then I saw it, a metallic brown Peugeot 504 SR car with three rather gentle-looking young men inside.
No panic. Earl Klugh was still playing, but a little sense or discomfiture touched me as I though that the opening of the gate was holding up the gentlemen who were perhaps waiting to drive past and go their way. I saw that the plate number read something like OG-some numerals-JA, and I knew that they could not have been my friends, and so could not have come to visit me. For the car did not drive past as I turned into my drive way and the mallams were opening the garage for me to drive in. They followed me, bumper to bumper. Even then, I sensed no danger. After all, the Prelude was mine, I bought it with my hard and salty sweat. Before I could turn off the engine, two occupants of the car materialized on the window on the passenger side of the car. I frowned, and the next I saw were two narrow nozzles of hand-guns. One was aluminium in colour, and the other was black like and ugly snake. The first split second of the close encounter brought a rush of confusing emotions: anger, humiliation and a sense of loss: but no fear. “Your hands up, and get out.” That was from the guy with aluminium gun, the type called the Saturday Night Special in the United States. The guy was well-dressed, gold chain dangling from his neck, but his face was contorted with a nervousness that dilated his pupils. His friend, the one with the black gun, was silent and he was the one that told me with his menacing visage to listen to the clean-cut fellow with the aluminium gun. “Out, and keep up your hands, or I will kill you.”
It’s a kind gentlemen’s agreement, and I knew that if I failed to make a choice, get out and keep up my hands then he was free to kill me. So, I obeyed. He got in that beautiful white lady. But he had a problem. The car was automatic, meaning it had no clutch and that you couldn’t move the car from Park to Reverse or Drive without pressing a small button on the shift to move the car. These guys, no matter how long they have been at it, stealing people’s car and threatening death if the hands didn’t go up, had never stolen an automatic shift car, and didn’t know what to do. I was looking at him as he struggle with the gear, and a wave of perverse relief ran through me. “Show me the reverse,” the man with the aluminium gun yelled. I was happy, and I began to move fast into my residence, even as I sensed that the third man in the gate-away 504 covered me with a heavier and more sinister-looking automatic gun. “Shoot, damn it,” a silent sound said within me. But sadly, the car suddenly jumped back, and the get-away car screeched back, and they all drove away like phantoms, with my beautiful white Prelude, LA 6343 KE, like an eagle, flying after the 504.
©Sunday Concord, April 25, 1982
(Pp.157-159)
