Every Day Is for the Thief

The woman the narrator sees is striking, but he’s just as interested in the fact that she’s reading Michael Ondaatje, one of his favorite authors. Nigerians, he says, primarily read newspapers, magazines, and tabloids, which makes this even more surprising to him. He goes through the conversation he’d like to have with her about literature, but he knows that the danfo isn’t a place where trust in strangers is easy. He hopes she’ll get off at his stop, but she doesn’t.

At the wedding, the narrator’s aunt tells the story of a friend of the family, Mrs. Adelaja: In 1998, armed robbers came to her house and killed her husband. The narrator’s family has its own history with armed robbers, as criminals besieged them one night but couldn’t get in; after the narrator left for America, thieves returned to the house and stole things while holding the family hostage.

Mrs. Adelaja’s story is worse, however, as the thieves took her husband with them in the trunk of their car when they left. They then used him as bait to get his neighbors to open their doors, taking the husband from that home too. After discussing it, the thieves decided that they must shoot the witnesses, and they killed Mr. Adelaja in the trunk of the car while his neighbor watched. They intended to use the neighbor for further robberies but were picked up by police.

The narrator observes Mrs. Adelaja, who looks radiant and unbothered by her sad history. He looks around at his family, all of whom have been changed by the years since he’s been gone and by similar kinds of loss. The narrator, too, lost his father, and his memories of his father are fading. He’s reminded of the lines from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land: “‘And there, behind it, marched so long a file / Of people, I would never have believed / That death could have undone so many souls’” (49).

The narrator briefly describes a scene in which he watches a television broadcast of Pastor Olakunle, whose sermon promises healing from God. The narrator notes his silk suit, his Rolls Royce, and his great wealth. The God of Nigeria is not a poor one.

The narrator has a conversation with another relative, his nephew Adebola, who is a good student who attends a school founded by Tai Solarin, a noted humanist who championed free elementary education. The narrator asks Adebola if he knows what a humanist is, and Adebola says it’s “someone who doesn’t believe in God” (54). The narrator tries to correct him that this is the definition of an atheist, but Adebola is adamant that is what he learned in school.

The narrator goes to a market, which he sees as a cornerstone of life in Nigeria. There, he’s mistaken for oyinbo (a Nigerian word for white people that colloquially refers to anyone of European or Western descent). Revealing himself as native Nigerian doesn’t help him get a better price, and as he wanders the market, describing its wares and sights, he’s repeatedly mistaken for a foreigner.

He comes out of the market into a crowded intersection where, he’s told, a boy was recently killed. The boy was 11 and had stolen a bag from the market. In Lagos, thievery often leads to mob violence, and the narrator describes it as a ritualized act of cruel justice. In this incident, the boy was surrounded, and it’s said that he attempted to steal a baby, which the crowd believes. A digital camera caught the event in which the boy was beaten, bound by having a tire thrown over him, doused in petrol, and burned.

The incident passes from memory quickly, except for copies of the video that the narrator imagines still circulates among the shopkeepers or the local police. He leaves the scene and finds a danfo, noting the religious bumper stickers on the vehicle.