Read excerpt from Helon Habila’s short story about Nigerian football

Recently nominated as the chair of judges for the Etisalat Prize for Literature, Helon Habila has just written a beautiful short story about Nigerian football titled "Beautiful"

Published on Addastories.org, a website launched by Commonwealth writers, the 'beautiful' story examines the state of Ajegunle footballers, their struggle to play football in Europe.

Here is an excerpt:

"There are two ways to enter Ajegunle: from the front, past the noisy market and the frenetic traffic facing the store-front displays of clothes and household wares; or from the back by boat over the dirty, shit-lined lagoon separating the ghetto from the Apapa Industrial neighborhood. I decide to go over the Lagoon.

This access is closest to my office at Vanguard newspaper, about two bus stops away. Here you measure distance in bus stops, not in minutes or hours, because a ten-minute bus ride could end up taking over an hour. Like this one.

Our bus is hardly moving in the deafening, chock-a-block traffic that has something almost apocalyptic about it. God, if you get me safely out of this traffic, I’ll never sin again.

I sit next to a fat lady who is eating corn on the cob with one hand, and with the other she holds a sack of groceries in her lap. She appears oblivious to the intolerable heat that is oppressing everyone else in the overcrowded bus.

The danfo bus is cramped and smells of sweat and armpit and hair oil and food and, as if that isn’t punishment enough, loud Fuji music blares out from a speaker located somewhere above, or below, but it feels like it’s coming from deep inside my skull.

I am next to the open window. The lady is crushing me. I try to make myself smaller. I think thin. I turn my nose to the window for air only to find my view blocked by a sachet of water being thrust into my face by a hawker. Another hawker, a scrawny girl selling gala meat-rolls shoves the first hawker away and tries to push the pack of gala through the window.

“Oga, buy gala, fresh gala,” she commands. The two hawkers are now squeezed between the bus and another bus in a noiseless combat of wills, and any moment now, they would be crushed by the converging buses.

But the moment never comes; it is just another day in the office for them. It seems every space between bus and bus, and between road and curb, is alive with hawkers: young and old, male and female, selling wristwatches and cigarettes and groundnuts and sachets of water, also known as pure water, which is anything but. The ‘pure water’ is most likely obtained from their rusty bathroom taps at home, sealed in plastic sachets and sold by these girls to thirsty and tired passengers and pedestrians.

How much does the gala girl make a day: ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred naira? Well, say two hundred on a very good day, which she turns over to her handler who employs a battalion of little gala girls. Each one takes home about ten percent of whatever they turn in, say: twenty naira a day. Six hundred a month.

A cheap meal in a buka costs around thirty fifty naira. How does the girl survive? Impossible. But when you add her sisters and brothers, say about five in all, all bringing in about the same amount, and the mother bringing in twice that from her buka, and the father bringing in about thrice that from his driving job, then it all begins to look possible. But still marginal.

There will be no new shoes for the kids, no new clothes, no school—well, maybe primary school since it is mostly free, but every day spent away from hawking gala is a day without income—certainly no university.

“Hey, give me a gala,” I shout at the girl. I am not going to eat it. But by buying one I am contributing to her day’s income.

What hope do these kids have? It is part of the reason I am going to Ajegunle. The largest slum in Lagos, possibly in all of Africa."

Continue reading on Adda Stories.

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