Ajegunle; dreams and dirt by Jephthah

We bought a fairly used Video Cassette Recorder and a plastic manual cassette rewinder. I watched daddy off loaded the gigantic machine from his car booth, he heaved and puffed when he lifted it into our two-room apartment in a face-me-I-face you building in one of the more decent slums of Ajegunle.  He noticed I and my little brother standing by the car, dancing and smiling so gay. Daddy said, “Now you don't have to go to Remi's place to watch films". Neither would we wait for the earlier privileged ones to broadcast the films played on their VCR via sender to those of us close by and with the luxury of television. We had our personal video player. We then suddenly climbed the economy ladder and joined the groups of the wealthier ones in the street of the poor. 

He took the VCR into the house and called Dr. Electric to help set the machine up, a nearby radionic as we locally called him then, a name that got stuck probably because he majorly repaired radios then, people didn't have sophisticated electronic gadgets to repair. We all sat in front of our grey scale televisions, only the affluent had the luxury of coloured televisions and we watched the wonders of the foreign gadgets in mouth gaping awe. We watched them use their gadgets and when they were out of season they deported them in large scale to the sub-saharan countries like ours to use, our country was the refuse dump. We didn't complain, we were happy to scavenge off the refuse dump of the developed nations.

We had the luxury of a huge archaic video player, a small Panasonic black and white television, a huge Kenwood radio cassette player with its box speakers all strewed on a wooden shelf with different compartments for all sorts. It was the electronic shelf, the book shelf and the safe. The shelf sat against the wall, in our parlour which doubled as dining room and make-shift bedroom when its night.

Ajegunle - the street of the hustlers. This isn't the Lagos' Ajegunle. I heard that place is the boss of all other slums in Nigeria. I heard there is a Ajegunle in every Southwestern state of Nigeria and they are all peculiar for the notoriety of the poverty that resides there and plagues the inhabitants. Our street was Olonkoro; a sub-slum. A dirt path leads off the tarred road that goes to Governor's office into the street. The dirt road is lined with wooden stalls, unkempt gutters reeking with dirt water, sewage leakage and dirts dumped into it. There is a fan milk depot overlooking the street, the road opposite it is where we play football, a field, where local auto-part sellers set their stalls. I used to play football a lot, we even had a street league set up by elderly ones who swindled us of the money we used to enter for the league. We never got our prices each time we won. We had dreams of becoming superstars like the footballers we saw on OSBC and NTA and wallpapers displaying their sweet rides and sophisticated homes. We wanted to be Kanu or Okocha. We nicknamed ourselves after our professional footballer play-alike. My younger brother was Chilavert, the popular Uruguian goalkeeper during the France '98 world cup because he could dive to save the ball. I was Roberto Carlos, a brazilian left back because of my defensive skills and my muscular displays. We all dreamed and hoped, hopes that didn't rise higher than the walls of our cheap and dirty street. Some of us joined petty football clubs where you paid trite fees for recruitment and some little changes contributed for development of our team, we contributed to the belly-emptied coach's basins.

Ajegunle differed in building heights, so did the economy class differed. The people that stayed on the top floors of story buildings were the well-to-dos in the streets, they had a three or two bedroom apartments, the people that stayed in the lower floors are of the lower classes. Bungalows were majorly constructed for the poor ones. Families who couldn't afford to pay for the high rise top floors managed the face-to-face rooms. They shared toilets, kitchen and bathroom. The toilets were mostly always in mess.

With the slum came so many dirty habits and morals. Little children already knew early about sex, they either saw their parents sleeping with a neighbour's wife or husband as the case may be, or they peeped through keyhole to watch their elder brothers and sisters. The advent of video cassette players and a nearby rental made access to pornographic videos easier. Children preyed on it, so did the adults. In the street you would see a young girl, just probably heading into her mid-teens carrying a convex protrusion on her stomach, a young boy of the same age range had impregnated her. Primary school children had sex in dilapidated classrooms. Sex predators preyed on innocent children; sex starved ladies to young boys and men to young girls left with them. Despite this brimming darkness still Ajegunle breezed with life and a light of hope shines afar in every nooks and cranny. We believed.  We were free to dream, we could be what we wanted in that street. Dream, we did. We aimed higher.

 Somewhere hidden in the sweats and the bent backs of the poor in the streets is the hope for a brighter future, a prayer that their children would live out of their shadows in the bright light of luxury, that their children would master their books very well and be able to hold positions lofty. We were made to go to school, my parents were well off compared to most of the inhabitants of the streets, so we went to the best private school around, I and my younger brother. The parents that couldn't afford such schools sent their children to schools that cost less or they went to the community schools nearby. We went to school and learned to speak english better than her parents did. Well, not every child on the street could because not all the schools were good enough. 

Its been years I left the street now, ages as a matter of fact. I still dream. I have realized a few of the dreams I had earlier on that dirty street. Dreams that defiled the situation we lived in. I met some of the boys we grew up together in the street, you wouldn't perceive a single scent of the street on them. It was like most of us didn't grow up in such street. We led different lives; in our dreams, close to our dreams or far from it. As much as I could say, none of these boys in the street league became footballers. Some of the boys still live in the street with their parents, in the same house, selling the same things. A few of us were privileged to move on to better houses and more serene vicinity.

That street shaped us. It moulded me. I learnt so much passively. The good, the bad and the ugly. My parent moulded my life, with biblical instructions and constant admonitions. They tried to shield us from the life of the street but the street was us, we were the street, no matter how hard we tried to scrub off the malodour of the bereaved and forgotten Nigerian which Ajegunle puts on us. Ajegunle made us.