The Train To Kano: A Journey Written In Dust And
Delay
Aondoana Abraham
©
Copyright 2025 by Aondoana Abraham
|
Photo by Petar Milošević at Wikimedia
Commons. |
The
Lagos–Kano train does not care about time. Schedules exist more
as suggestions, fragile notes in the margins of Nigeria’s
chaos, than binding promises. The morning I boarded, I learned this
the hard way. I had arrived at the Lagos station at 6:00 a.m.,
clutching a ticket whose departure was marked for seven. By nine, the
train had not moved. By ten, passengers were still trickling in,
sweating, bargaining with porters, dragging sacks of rice, yam, and
secondhand clothes. At eleven, with a long groan like an ancient
beast waking, the train lurched forward into the dust, carrying us
north.
To
travel from Lagos to Kano by train is to volunteer for uncertainty.
Flights can whisk you there in an hour, buses in a day. The train
takes two days if you are lucky, three if the gods of delay are
restless. But no bus or plane delivers the same experience: the slow
stitching together of the country’s landscapes, languages,
tempers, and contradictions, carriage by carriage, hour by hour.
The
closed compartment was stifling hot. From a raffia basket beneath a
woman’s seat, a few squawking chickens were packed. A boy
selling pure water on his head and a basin, squeezed through the
aisles. A few men’s arguments on whether Nigeria has ever been
joined, over the train’s rhythmic clack and clatter, were
heard. A few mothers were hotly chastising children for the sin of
leaning out and inhaling the rushing air. Next to me was an old,
faded, and dusty kaftan. I showed him the book I was reading.
Achebe’s There Was a Country. A solemn nod, confirmation I was
what he thought.
At
a distance to Lagos, the view, in reverse order, was: collapsing, to
crowded tenements, to open markets, to scrubland, and to rusty
half-dismantled cars. Dust and fearless smiles were the accessories
of children, happy to wave. By evening the humidity of the Atlantic
was submissive. The view through the windows was of farmlands:
cadaverously patched with cassava, yam mounds, and the swaying of the
plantain trees.
You
really can’t do anything about life, even with your best plans;
beauty comes interlaced with delay. Somewhere near Ibadan, the train
stalled. For almost two hours, while the crew tinkered and the train
engine had a sputtering sigh, we sat. The returning passengers had
mentally resigned to the delay. Women, wrappers spread on the floor,
peeled oranges. A man, stretching out the delay with an impromptu
recitation, began with A ki fi esin san niwaju ki a maa sare—you
cannot ride a horse in front and still expect to run. Comically, the
whole delay became a joke, a moment to be shared in food and
laughter.
Night
on the Tracks
That
evening, the train turned into a village-on-rails, and the kerosene
lamps made everything seem a little more splendid than it really was.
Strangers shared a little space and,, I exchanged groundnuts with a
Hausa trader. Bolts of Ankara cloth were his cargo. A little distance
over, a university student was embroiled in a heated argument with a
soldier. Corruption was the topic. The soldier was crystal clear that
the country (and most, probably the student) needed a ‘discipline’
overhaul of a democracy. The student shot back that dreadful disorder
was the result of men with guns. Their impassioned and opposing limbs
accompanied the train’s steady song, a rhythm of its own, a
perfect circle, in drumming.
It
was impossible to sleep that night. Cries of a dozen children, the
gentle protestation of a hymn, the casual humming of Fela’s
“Water No Get Enemy,” and the train’s life. The
night air was kept alive, and I, with it, flew, however slowly,
surely, to my destination.
Encounters
Along the Way
During
these night stops, Ilorin, Minna, Kaduna, the train let off
passengers only to take on more. Each station turned into a frenzy of
excitement, a scene of a desperate collection of civilizational
fragments. Walls of chop vendors ran with overflowing cauldrons of
jollof and suya. Passengers leaned out, either bored or excited.
Muffled squabbles over the train biscuits could be heard over the
jostle of the crowd. Most people began scrambling back to the train
the moment the brakes hissed to a stop, desperate to board, frantic
to be off to the next station again. Each had march of the sought
separators of the dispersed populations, skeptics of the train. Even
the seagulls of the barkers were derborn to the train.
The
Pulse of a Nation
What
struck me most about the journey was how the train forced Nigeria
into proximity. In Lagos, the Yoruba man might never sit for hours
beside the Igbo trader, nor the Fulani herder share roasted corn with
the Tiv student. But on the train, there was no escaping one another.
Differences had to converse, sometimes clash, but ultimately coexist.
When
the train delayed—and it always did— it was never one
ethnic group left stranded, but all of us together. When a hawker
rushed to sell bread through the window, it was every hand
scrambling, every language shouting. On those tracks, the divisions
Nigeria struggles with daily felt less like walls and more like rough
edges bumping together, sometimes painfully, sometimes in harmony.
I
realized then why I had chosen the train over faster options. To fly
is to leap over Nigeria’s contradictions. To take the bus is to
pass them in a blur. But the train forces you to sit inside them, to
live among them, to measure time not by a clock but by conversations,
breakdowns, and meals shared with strangers.
Arrival
in Kano
We
arrived in Kano late on the third morning, as was to be expected.
Attendants have little time to sleep, let alone the few hours
necessary to prevent a disheveled appearance in the morning. Wrinkled
clothes mean little if tempers do not follow suit. There was a wave
of relief and joy, however, when the conductor called out "Kano!"
and the wait was over. Children bored and squealing in their seats
were the first to spot the city and the children glued to the windows
were accompanied by their delighted parents, fingers linked and
quarreled to the tune of the children.
I
wanted a memory of the last two and a half days: the determination to
dine restlessly, keep arguments civil, stand within the joy of
others, and anchor to the tune of discord. I wanted the noise as much
as the silence, if only to fill the aching memory of cramped, dusty
limbs with the perspective of others.
To
the passengers, the Lagos-Kano train means little in the way of
efficiency. They mean to wrap themselves in the warm embrace of a
disobedient country. The left over dust and delays of the slowly
unravelling. I wanted to erase the memory of the journey with the
tune of the city, the delays of the country warm, and embrace the
coming disobedience of Kano.
And
maybe, I thought, that is the journey we all are on.
Abraham
Aondoana is a graduate of law. He is a writer, poet, and novelist. His
poem was recently longlisted for the Renard Poetry press 2025.
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