The Soft Issue
August 2017
Story from Outside
Traversing Cities
By: Olawoyin Oladeinde
Ibadan, for its warmth
and traditional
ambience and
cautious drivers and
loud-mouthed market
women, is my ideal
go-to city.
M
y mind houses two cities: Ibadan
and Ilorin. Three, actually, if we
include Lagos, the city of my
childhood.
Lagos is where I presently reside, doing
some journalism. Ibadan, sited in the
belly of hills, is the city of my birth. Ilorin,
where the sun appears quite angrier
than it is elsewhere, was where I earned
a journalism, or more appropriately now,
Mass communication, degree.
So, it is a clammy Friday night and I am
seated somewhere in highbrow Ikeja GRA,
Lagos. But my body, literarily, is at my
grandma’s in Oja’ba, Ibadan; and my mind,
literally, is in Tanke-Bubu, Ilorin.
I
Lagos, for its loose women and maddening
chaos and snake-like traffic snarl, is where
everything happens. Fast and furious, this
city, everyone moves as though they are
84
being chased by unidentified assailants,
from Obalende to Oworonsoki to Ikeja
Under- bridge. Nobody waits for nobody.
Like Lagos, contemporary journalism,
too, waits for no one. Where there
were the gatekeepers—bossy editors
with over-bloated egos—who acted as
though the world revolved around their
editorial desks, there are now i-Phone-
wielding citizens, all eager to ‘break’
the news even before the news breaks,
with atrocious grammar and graphic,
uncensored images to boot. The overly
mischievous among them do not mind,
even, to invent the news where and when
there is none.
Exempli gratia: the ignorance-fuelled
Ebola salt water hoax that killed scores
circa 2015. There are thousand other
examples.
So, in a way, Lagos is a metaphor for the
the
LENS