At the Nigeria-Benin Border, February 18, 2006

“We have no fucking government, man”, Sunday yells after bounding back onto the bus after yet another confrontation with a bribe-seeking uniform. “That’s why it’s like this. The corruption starts at the top, the very top” he continues, obviously frustrated. Sunday is Femi Kuti’s manager, who has traveled from his home at the legendary Shrine nightclub in Lagos, Nigeria to Krake, a dusty stretch of road that qualifies as the Benin-Nigeria border, to escort us to the Shrine, where we will play tonight. Femi Kuti is Fela Kuti’s son, the legendary father of Afrobeat music and an iconic presence in recent Nigerian history equal parts Bob Dylan and Che Guevara. We are Aphrodesia, a ten-piece all-white afrobeat band from San Francisco, in the middle of a monthlong trip to West Africa, sitting inside a sweltering bus on the Nigerian border trying not to draw attention to ourselves.

It’s not working. We have been parked in front of two battered oil drums that support a fragile wooden pole for over three hours now, waiting as Sunday and his buddy Kofi, Chambers, the Ghanaian owner and driver of the bus, and Alex, our Ghanaian percussionist, alternately negotiate, beg, plead and ultimately pay off various officials in hopes of getting the bored-looking gatekeepers who control the wooden pole to lift it and let us pass into Nigeria. Sunday is a pro, but even he can’t change the fact that we are a big bus containing a bunch of white people sitting at the Nigerian border and so can’t pass unmolested.

Outside the bus moto scooters zip back and forth with bags of rice tied to their seats, women tap on the windows to wave bags of fried plantains and plastic bags of water at us, and the border officials who control our fate seem as indifferent to us now as they did when we first pulled up here this morning. We are neither escaping attention nor attracting it in the way we had hoped, and as the minutes languish by and the sweat runs off us we watch our Ghanaian sound and video engineer Panji leisurely get a shoeshine outside from a woman wrapped in beautiful blue printed fabric and begin to wonder if this is all worth it.

Several months ago on a chilly and wet San Francisco night we had gathered at our backup singer Nicole’s house and sat on her hardwood living room floor trying to hash out some sanity in this in this absurd idea- a white afrobeat band traveling to Africa, touring through Ghana on a biodiesel bus and maybe, just maybe, making the trip to Lagos, Nigeria to play and worship at the Shrine, home of Femi Kuti, his legendary father Fela and the birthplace of afrobeat. Our guitarist David had traveled to Ghana for a week to try and set things up for us- intercontinental phone communication being less than reliable, to put it mildly. We had hoped for an itinerary, a signal, a round of booked gigs that would pave and pay our way- instead David told us there would be no one holding our hand and no guarantees- depressing thoughts. Somehow though to our independent musician brains it was comforting to know it was up to us alone- if we really wanted to go to Africa as a band, to travel to the source of our music and get our butts kicked, we could just go: it would be like stealing second base or helping ourselves to another bowl of ice cream, because we could and because there was no one telling us not to.

This led to our previous two weeks- a whirlwind of new friends and otherwordly experiences in Ghana that included several spontaneous gigs in Accra, the capital, a trip up north to a tiny village called Binaba near the border with Burkina Faso where we played a village market and were paid in slaughtered goat, and many desperate phone calls to Nigeria trying to contact someone, anyone at the Shrine. Which led, eventually, to our being invited to play at the Shrine in Lagos, to our renting this bright green (petroleum fueled, unfortunately) bus from Chambers, and to us packing all ten of ourselves, our growing African entourage that now numbered at least as much, and all our equipment and bags inside for the trip through Togo and then Benin, where we played two unscheduled shows at an outdoor festival we chanced upon when wandering through the city wondering where we would sleep (see “Differences in Booking Gigs, Africa and America”).

Which led to us sitting here, on the Benin-Nigeria border, wondering if our luck was running out as each minute and hour seemed to slip away in the dusty heat just like the plastic bags of sweet mushy Fan Ice that dwindled away as we obsessively sucked on them to keep cool. An hour or so ago, Sunday bounded onto the bus in sunglasses and snazzy black T-shirt, lifting our spirits like an updraft catching a hang glider. We had agreed to meet here and have him walk us through the border and now he has found us somehow in the chaos, we beamed to ourselves. Our entry to Lagos, to the Shrine, to history, we all thought as he and his buddy Kofi hugged all ten of us hello, is assured.

Not exactly. It turns out that even having a Nigerian pro with us who knows the ropes and will do everything possible to get us through the border does not change the fact that we are a bunch of white people in a big bus who surely have money and so can’t pass unmolested. Sunday argues with someone about the bus license, with someone else about our passports, and finally we are all called off the bus one by one to meet with a uniformed Nigerian immigration officer who asks us each our occupation (musician) and whether we’ve been to Nigeria before (no). The price for each of these conversations, for each of Sunday’s negotiations with each official, is under constant discussion. Each demand for Naira- Nigerian money- and the Aphrodesia cassettes that everyone asks for when they find out we are a band is explained as some sort of ‘toll fee’ or ‘paperwork fee’, but never by its true purpose, which is that the Nigerian government would rather keep their oil wealth for themselves and let the masses blow off steam by collecting small amounts of money from each other. We are told by Sunday and Kofi, while we languish in the heat waiting for another official to decide how much our ‘paperwork fee’ will cost us, that Nigerian officials such as police officers, immigration officials and the like are not paid a salary. They are expected instead to collect money for themselves in the course of their job, and everyone routinely accepts this. As Panji explains, “This is quite normal, you understand. This is how we want our system to work. It is in this way everyone can get something small for themselves and everyone has enough to eat.” In other words, calling the system in Nigeria corrupt is a linguistic slight of hand- the system in Nigeria is corruption itself. 

None of which, of course, means there is anything we can do while we sit here, well into hour three, in a bus that now closer resembles a sauna than a moving vehicle.

By the time we finally roll forward through the dust, the maddening logic of this place has taken shape. The Nigerian border is some concrete buildings, a dusty road, and several wooden poles supported by battered oil drums that pass for checkpoints. To go through these checkpoints you must talk to the appropriate official, bribe him, and hope that he tells the person manning the oil drum to lift the wooden pole so you can drive through another 20 feet. If he doesn't, you bribe someone else, and hope that works. There is no government here, or authority, only a bunch of men in uniform demanding payment, and a bunch of men out of uniform demanding payment or else. Even with Sunday escorting us through the process it is maddeningly slow. It takes us five hours of paying off random 'officials' with Niara, CFA (Benin money) and Aphrodesia cassettes until we are finally cleared to move, but as the last wooden pole is lifted from its two oil barrels and we glide past, our sighs of relief are stifled before we  even finish exhaling. Beyond the last 'official' checkpoint stretches a narrow dirt road crawling with self-appointed gatekeepers wielding clubs, whips and sometimes metal spikes which they throw in front of tires and demand money from drivers they randomly flag down. There is no law here- they operate steps away from uniformed soldiers and policemen engaged in much the same operation. The sun cuts through a thick haze of exhaust and dust; piles of burning trash are everywhere and the acrid smell of burning rubber and garbage lingers in our nostrils. As we begin to move, things are getting rough and it seems like business as usual- I see one woman pulled from her car and whipped, and everywhere moto drivers and riders are rudely shoved until they cough up some small bills. The only rule here is sticks, ropes that serve as whips, and patches of ground where the thugs ply their trade. Above it all towers an immense billboard emblazoned with the image of a can of Super Star Motor Oil and the words "Welcome to Nigeria." If there is a gateway to hell, it looks like this.

We are stopped at least 10 times, 50 or so feet apart, each time by someone demanding more money. Finally we pay off the last thug and hit a stretch of open road, only to be pulled over again by soldiers in a jeep with uniforms and machine guns. One of them storms up onto the bus and orders us all out on the side of the road. He then grabs our stack of passports from our guitarist Chris’ hand, and as we nervously file out of the bus and onto the road they grab our Ghanaian friend Bongo and two of the four drivers- Sharrif and Omar- and push them up into the jeep. They demand we return to immigration, back to the border we have just spent all day trying to cross- a thought that right now is like returning to a dusty prison hours after parole. They speed off, three of our crew and all our passports with them, and as we frantically rush back into the bus they pull a screeching U-turn and head back at high speed towards the border. Chambers, who has grown increasingly irritated all day at the unending harrasment and demands for more money, fires up the bus, pulls the same U-turn and speeds after them in pursuit, pulling up alongside with Sunday screaming out the open bus door for them to pull over, the soldiers in the back sitting nonchalantly next to our friends, cradling machine guns absently like walking sticks. They pull another U-turn and pull over, and we cut them off and glide to a stop in front of them. Sunday, Chambers, Panji, Alex and the rest of the drivers stream out of the bus and onto the shoulder, yell and argue with the soldiers, then bound back on the bus with the announcement that our passports and 3 friends will cost us 1000 Niara (a little less than 10 bucks) and 5 Aphrodesia cassettes. We pay them off, slap high fives with Bongo as he and the other two bounce lightly back into the bus, then wait awkwardly and anxiously as we sit there, unmoving, feet away from the armed soldiers who had just taken three of our crew hostage. We have no driver.

“Where the fuck is Chambas?” yells Zack, and we all crane our necks around the bus, peering out the windows at the jeep behind us, fearing the worst. And then we spot him- ten yards or so off the highway, in the grass, kneeling to the ground with arms outstretched- praying to Mecca. We wait awkwardly as he finishes, runs back onto the bus and into the driver’s seat, fires up the starter, and we are gone, cruising back the way we were headed, away from the border, towards more unknown gauntlets that surely await us.

We drive, through some “checkpoints” that Sunday orders us to ignore, are waved trough a police checkpoint, then pulled over by immigration officers,  passports checked, 1000 Naira and no cassettes taken. Then again almost immediately by the Nigerian DEA, and the officer who boards the bus explains that he will have to take everyone’s passport and check all of our luggage. He relents when Sunday tells him we are musicians en route to play at the Shrine- information which has proven about 50% effective today, with half the bribe-seeking officers we encounter being impressed enough to wave us through and the other half treating this information as if we had told them we were on our way to the dentist. The following stretch of road is clear driving broken by checkpoints we either ignore or are waved through when Sunday yells out the driver’s window, leaning over Chambas and barking to the officers standing on the pavement, that we are musicians heading to the Shrine. After the first stretch, as we pull away from the border and deeper into the madness that is Lagos, it’s almost starting to seem routine.