On originary labors, or women’s terribly hard work

Taken together, the epigraphs that open this essay foreground the concurrency of women’s productive and reproductive labor and the inadequacy of discursive efforts to recover them. The first, “Women work terribly hard in Nigeria,” is an assertion by Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. On her way back to Nigeria from Vienna where she had attended the 1952 International Conference for the Defence of Children, Ransome-Kuti spoke with the Daily Worker’s Sheila Lynd (Reference Lynd1952). In that interview, she laments the deplorable condition of women in colonial Nigeria, where Western patriarchal ideals seemed to have blended with traditional patriarchal ideals to no good end for women. The more immediate reason for Ransome-Kuti’s assertion, “Women work terribly hard in Nigeria,” was that in mobilizing colonial resources toward its campaign in World War II, Britain placed enormous burdens on its colonies whose men it had enlisted in the War. Consequently, British wartime austerity measures had the most adverse effects on women, whose labor largely sustained the colony itself.Footnote ³ The adverb “terribly” is but an inadequate placeholder for the enormity of colonial economic burdens placed on women. Much more is crammed into this statement than Ransome-Kuti could have articulated. I tease out some of that later, but as a way of beginning this section, I complement the assertion with the two other epigraphs drawn from popular expressions in Lagos.

The second comes from a widely used Yorùbá expression celebrating motherhood: “Ìyá mi ni olọ́kọ̀ tó wà mí wá’yé” (“My mother is my originary driver; she drove me into this world”). This celebratory expression binds female reproductive labor together with registers of vehicular technology. The vehicle in this case is, of course, the womb, the originary vehicle. This aphorism, which draws on the paroemiological strategy of symbolic condensation, emphasizes the labor of the woman as the originary driver, whose body is the vehicle, and on whom falls the responsibility of maintaining it. Yet, celebratory expressions of women’s reproductive abilities such as this often fall far short of the celebration they purport. They at once acknowledge and understate women’s multifaceted re/productive labor. The labor multiplies itself time and again over nine months, articulating the fundamentality of the originary labor that reproduces itself and other forms of labor beyond the capture of such a panegyric statement. So, although the declaration occurs in praise of the labor, it ultimately condenses that labor, and in the process objectifies the woman’s body as a container, a conveyor, a vehicle for producing a labor force. Much Black feminist critique has dealt with this issue in considering the ways that plantation colonialism took possession of Black women’s bodies. What I call originary labor rethinks women’s labor as central to the making of space and place. The woman’s body literally holds space for the unborn child, a subject in transit, a mobile subject, and therefore connects being with space and time.Footnote ⁴

In my analysis here, I align with Black and African feminist thinkers who have viewed motherhood as a troubled yet promising locus of female empowerment. In Africa, where the imperative of survival underwrites the problem of sexism, where negotiation is a fundamental feminist strategy,Footnote ⁵ most women see their childbearing as holding the possibility of survival—even if vicariously through their children—and of escaping the most insidious manifestations of the sexism of their societies. As Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi notes, “most African women find empowerment in their children and families. They use their status as mothers to challenge some of the demands their cultures place on them [and] … to make demands and obtain tangible concessions for themselves” (Reference Nfah-Abbenyi1997, 23). Nfah-Abbenyi observes that women’s oppression is not in motherhood per se, but in its combination with patriarchal practices that assign better socioeconomic status to motherhood. African feminist writings and popular expressions are forthright on this point and not lacking in nuance, as I will show here.

The third epigraph collapses the abstract and the material by locating the woman on a public bus in a way that deepens the nuance which I highlight above. Perhaps no other common cultural expression in Lagos marks women’s labor as sharply as that third epigraph: “Ó l’óyún [she is pregnant], ó pọn’mọ [she’s got a child strapped to her back], ó fa báàgì [she’s got a heavy bag].” This asyndetic expression projects the frenetic pace at which these different labors are happening concurrently. Its lack of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions suggests no ascendancy to any of the three labor modes thus brought together in the statement. This expression originated among bus conductors as a note of caution to the bus driver. In declaring that the woman in question is pregnant (the originary driver in the process of driving a new subject into the world), laden with a child (actively undertaking the labor of nurturing another laboring subject), and she bears a bag (usually containing food for her child, stuff to sell for food, or just the accoutrements of daily life), the conductor appeals to the male bus driver to bring the bus to a halt and let the belabored woman off gently. Otherwise, the bus driver commonly expects his passengers to jump off the moving bus regardless of their abilities. The expression is now widely used to call the driver’s attention to any passenger, man or woman, who cannot disembark from the bus as quickly as expected. Elderly people on the bus, as well as people with disabilities, can be heard cautioning the driver, as they make their way off a bus, that they are pregnant and laden with child and load. It is thus within the cultural expression of a woman’s labor that the possibility of place and of being heard is extended to others.

The geographic retelling presented here commences with Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti in order to contextualize the two other examples that follow. That is because to locate this analysis of the discursive and aesthetic representation of women’s labor in the postcolonial present would be to tell a half-tale of it. I begin on this sociohistorical level to foreground women’s labor as always fundamental, always holistic, always suturing, and always making place for the possibility of other beings and things. Ransome-Kuti’s discursive and political actions implicate coloniality in the account of women’s labor in postcolonial Africa, and therefore, locate that labor squarely at the center of a global network of things, beings, and places, just as Ransome-Kuti (Reference Ransome-Kuti1947) herself did when she declared, “we had equality till Britain came.”

“We had equality till Britain came”

In a 1947 article for the Daily Worker, a London-based communist-leaning newspaper, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti asserts that colonization inaugurated a social and economic regime that systematically impoverished women and deepened gender inequality in Nigeria. According to her, the agrarian system that preceded colonization allowed for a division of labor:

The short article details women’s troubles in early twentieth-century British-ruled Nigeria, where poll tax and income tax complicated life for them.

Intriguingly, the declarative sentence with which Ransome-Kuti titles her article does not surface anywhere in the piece. The standalone assertion raises a question of definition: what does she mean by equality? If Ransome-Kuti meant to imply it in her description of the division of productive labor, where “men cultivated the land, and it was chiefly the duty of women to reap,” she might have been referring to what scholarship on precolonial African societies has often described as a social order of complementarity.Footnote ⁷ But complementarity does not mean equality. The sociopolitical organization of most societies in Africa was such that men were more equal than women. Indeed, in a later interview with the Daily Worker’s Sheila Lynd, she asserts that “men are still our overlords” (Lynd Reference Lynd1952).

What Ransome-Kuti meant, it seems, was that economic regimes under British colonization exploited women’s labor by upsetting precolonial social arrangements, where, in most cases, labor was generally directed toward communal ends. The point has been well made in scholarship that under the colonial economic regime in British-dominated Africa, women labored in the shadow of men who in turn labored in the shadow of colonial empire.Footnote ⁸ One of the first operations of this economic order was the cooptation of men’s labor in a system that redirects the products of their labor toward the empire with little compensation in return. In other words, the colonial process that gave rise to postcolonial modernity in Africa, and with it African cities as we now know them, was extractive and excessively macho. It is as true of Lagos or any other African city as we know it today as it is true of Johannesburg that it was “born out of a ruthless, extractive … economy.”Footnote ⁹ Achille Mbembe reminds us that the production of metropolitan modernity is realized when relations of production and the social sphere “rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction” (Reference Mbembe2004, 373). Because the production of metropolitan modernity in Africa overly relied on men’s labor in mining gold in South Africa, or cultivating cocoa and other cash crops in southwestern Nigeria to be shipped across the Atlantic, or building roads to convey raw materials from the hinterlands of Africa to its coasts, it complicated an earlier labor system in which labor was oriented toward the family and the community rather than toward a colonial economy. Thus emerged an economic order that channels men’s labor outward and women’s labor inward, toward the family, where—to refer back to Ransome-Kuti’s interview with Sheila Lynd—“The woman is expected to earn enough to feed and clothe her children and often her husband too, and to pay school fees, if she wants her children educated…” (Lynd Reference Lynd1952). Further below, I examine a scene that contests the recession of women’s labor into the shadow of men’s labor. But first, I turn to Karen King-Aribisala’s Kicking Tongues, a contestation of macho representations of power on one hand, and a holistic theory of discursive relations on the other. King-Aribisala’s choice of setting her novel on a bus proffers a crucial opportunity to further explore women’s labor in its abstract and material iterations.

Familiarity and control: Bus play and spatial contestations in Kicking Tongues

Replete with literary devices and narrative elements that emphasize the interconnection of the characters it brings together, Kicking Tongues challenges its reader to apprehend women’s labor in terms of nation building in its global breadth and not just within its domestic frame. In the holistic and geographic storytelling enacted in Kicking Tongues, issues concerning the nation are folded into those that implicate the domestic space. King-Aribisala’s use of a Chaucerian narrative frame evokes Chaucer’s most famous female character, the Wife of Bath. Scholars of Chaucer may very well argue that the narrator in Kicking Tongues channels the Wife of Bath, but the narrative affinity between Kicking Tongues and The Canterbury Tales actually ends just there. Nothing more connects Chaucer’s work to King-Aribisala’s, and an expectation of more semblance between both texts leads to misreading King-Aribisala’s authorial project. Critics of the novel who read it in terms of the Chaucerian framing tend to presume and demand the often-patriarchal frame of the English canon rather than recognize how King-Aribisala reinhabits Chaucer to challenge the patriarchalism of the English and the African literary canons (Gibbs Reference Gibbs1999; Halm Reference Halm2003; Anyokwu Reference Anyokwu2005). This results in missing the profound opportunities the novel offers to retheorize the postcolonial African state through the stories that women tell of their predicaments. They thus misapprehend the ways that African literary texts like Kicking Tongues grapple with enormous contradictions which “cannot be contained in a mimetic economy” (Nfah-Abbenyi Reference Nfah-Abbenyi1997, 21), hence the risky resort to play upon familiar narratives.

To be sure, Kicking Tongues raises many issues and women are not the only subjects whose stories are told in the novel. The tale of the palm-wine tapster is an instance worth mentioning: a palm-wine tapster tells a tale that reworks Tutuola’s mythographic spatiality in The Palm-wine Drinkard in order to activate questions relating to the consumption and preservation of natural resources (see Wenzel Reference Wenzel2006). Even so, readers of the novel cannot miss the fact that women’s actions or inactions serve as narrative undercurrents of many of the tales told in the novel. For instance, the palm-wine tapster’s tale overlays a concurrent domestic tale of his relationship with his “tree wife.”

Familiarity and control arise in Kicking Tongues as keywords for contemplating the narrator’s storytelling labor and the contestations that happen on the bus. The narrator of the novel, curiously named The Black Lady The, is the sole sponsor of this journey. She stresses this point at the beginning of the novel, as if to demand of the reader the right to control not just the journey but also the readerly experience. Sure enough, as soon as The Black Lady The requests that the pilgrims should tell their stories, Oba Oyelekan, a male traditional ruler and the veritable symbol of traditional patriarchy, asks that they draw lots to decide who tells the first story. At this point, The Black Lady The discloses her anxiety to the reader: “I was losing control and the journey hadn’t even gone underway” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 13). She firmly wrests the control over the story from Oba Oyelekan, who has now offered to pay for the coffee they have all drunk as they await their bus. Furious, The Black Lady The contests the Oba’s imposition upon her labor: she planned and paid for the journey, why should the Oba assume that she cannot afford to pay for the coffee she ordered for the pilgrims? In response to this admonition, the Oba activates the register of familiarity and endearment, as if The Black Lady The were one of his wives: “I beg your pardon, my dear” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 13, my italics), and The Black Lady The’s retort is swift: “My name is not ‘my dear’” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 13). Twice more on the journey, she resists Oba Oyelekan’s attempt to coopt her storytelling labor.

The narrative style of Kicking Tongues projects the narrator’s discursive labor as urbane and self-conscious, even whimsical in part. The narrator, The Black Lady The, enacts a compositive storytelling mode, a tapestry of genres and figures: puns, inversions, velaric consonance, sibilant consonance, and playful repetitions. This compositive narrative form supplements the text’s contestation of familiarity with and control of the narrator’s labor. Kicking Tongues moves lithely between poetry and prose, earnestness and play, laying out a mosaic of genres: fantasy, epistle, pastiche, and dialogue. By so doing, King-Aribisala casts Kicking Tongues against grand narratives about space-making, suggesting in the process that the story of women’s plights in a fast-changing postcolonial African city cannot be told with a disciplined focus on any one single character or style or subject matter. Playful stories such as “The Tale of the Palm-wine Tapster: In search of the fine tree gentlewoman” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 165) sit side-by-side with earnest allegories of the state such as “Bus Play.”

Tucked in the middle of the novel, “Bus Play” serves as an interlude with dual purposes: the first is to allegorize the nation, and the second is to make visible the tension over narrative control that suffuses the atmosphere on the bus and drives the narrative. This interlude opens with the following lines:

The public bus in many African cities is a stage (see Tunca Reference Tunca2008), often in quite literal ways as King-Aribisala suggests. As such, it condenses the complexity of the large space of the nation. The bus also emphasizes a class divide that Kicking Tongues elides by bringing together characters from all social classes. In fact, only members of the middle class as well as impoverished urban dwellers are to be seen boarding public buses in Lagos; when opulent urban dwellers board buses, they do so to perform their connection to the impoverished other. The driver leads this metaphorical country, the bus-country, and the conductor is his minister. Lexical strings feature throughout Kicking, Tongues, serving either to lead the reader into a progression toward synonymy (as in “Conducting-conduit-conducting-conductor”) or to magnify the narrator’s tendency to play (as in “pop-popping-populous”). At other times, the lexical string reminds the reader of the complexity of the population: “Bus driver is nation leader. Is leader/Is/Leader-leading-leader of/The-not-so-easily/Led.” The narrator’s description of the bus and its driver parallels her own narrative position in the text as leader of the not-so-easily led, narrator of stories that are not-so-easily told. Although the narrator is not literally driving the bus taking all the characters on this journey she has instigated, she is nonetheless in a sense its driver: directing the conversation, the tales the passengers exchange, their “journeys into otherness/in hopes of discovery” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 7), as she puts it in the Prologue. Ideas reflect each other in the verses above as they do throughout the novel, mirroring one another through lexical strings, textual echoes, and allusions. Here, that the “Bus-country is large” echoes through the playful string of additive lexical progression, “pop-popping-populous,” which is in turn echoed in the following line: “Bursting at its siding seams,” and again in the final lines: “The many many benches crammed-stuff/With people-fulling.”

“Bus Play” is a montage of events akin to the everyday drama one might witness as a commuter on Lagos public buses. A squabble ensues between the driver and his passengers over the fare he has asked them to pay. The driver halts the bus, demanding double the usual fare, and then a beggar who reveals himself to be a madman comes begging for money. The domestic intervenes in this story as it frequently does in the tales told on this journey. In the altercation over the bus fare, the bus conductor, a rather skinny man, unbuttons his shirt in readiness to fight. In the process, he draws the ire of a passenger, a large man. Among the passengers who warn him not to enter into a fight he cannot win is a woman who wonders why he is malnourished: “Wetin you dey chop?” (“What do you feed on?”) she asks. The conductor interprets the woman’s question as a challenge to his virility and shoots back a retort gesturing toward sexual dominance: “Stupid woman. I can tire you!” For the woman, the question “Wetin you dey chop?” is a question of care mixed with wonder, an activation of the stock image of a woman’s domestic labor of nurturing her household; but for the conductor, it is an invitation to exercise bodily, sexual dominance: “I can tire you.”

Another event in the novel echoes this intensely masculinist exchange: the tale of the only white man among the pilgrims, Oyinbo White Maclean. Maclean used to manufacture umbrellas, and now that he has amassed wealth, he visits Nigeria to explore and take photographs of its land, its rich vegetation, and its women. Maclean’s tale implicates the camera, the prosthetic gaze of the colonizer and a veritable weapon of British imperialism.Footnote ¹⁰ That Maclean includes women in his wish-list of photo subjects recalls the double subjection of African women to the camera in colonial times: evidence of barbarism and object of erotic pleasure. Maclean does not disguise his erotic impulse: “I made many visits to your country and was constantly overwhelmed by its rivers, its vegetation, so very varied, and—dare I say it?—its beautiful women” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 89). The abundance of images of the woman’s body in the narrator’s introduction of Maclean already anticipates this progression of desire both geographic and corporeal. I offer but one instance: “He smiles at/Riverine Woman/With her pools of eyes/Her lake dress rippling/Her petticoats of surf almost/Sipping the banks of her thighs” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 85). Again, as McKittrick shows in Demonic Grounds, it is not new that the Black female body is apprehended in geographic terms, and examples of this move abound in the African literary canon. The opening quartet of one of Dennis Brutus’s sonnets in A Simple Lust, “A troubadour,” provides one instance: “A troubadour, I traverse all my land/exploring her wide-flung parts with zest/probing in motion sweeter far than rest/her secret thickets with amorous hand” (Reference Brutus1976, 2).

Maclean further mentions to his listeners that he, pleasantly surprised, finds that the Nigerian man measures his worth through the women in his life. He recounts that he often travels in danfos, the minibuses that have become iconic representations of urban transportation in Lagos, and on one such trip, a “large fat beautiful woman sat beside a thin and ugly man” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 89). At some point in the journey, the woman inadvertently nudges the man in the ribs, to the man’s displeasure. In the altercation that follows, the man has the final words: “Be quiet! I have one of your type in my house!” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 89). Here Maclean’s narrative again enters the domestic into the public space of the bus. The invocation of the domestic space reminds the woman in Maclean’s story of her subjection to her husband’s authority, a charge to the woman to know her place. King-Aribisala might as well have lifted this statement from real-life events. I have observed that altercations between men and women on and around public buses in Lagos ultimately take this turn where the man asks the woman to keep quiet because “Mo ní irú ẹ ní’lé” (I have your type at home).

This public exchange mobilizes a rhetoric of control brought over from the domestic domain. In the public space, the woman addressed is not quite the subject under the domestic control of her male interlocutor, but the man asserts familiarity with her, the not-quite subject, the woman-in-public-space. Extending familiarization to the not-quite subject of control—“I have your type at home”—this discourse of control undercuts the woman’s authority and threatens to override her discursive labor, her right to be heard and to participate in the contestation of urban space. Such registers of familiarity and control leave much unsaid and much understood all at once; it is elliptical: “I have your type at home, therefore….” Kicking Tongues invites us to puzzle over the twin operations of familiarity and control through instances like the ones cited above and even more profoundly through the novel’s language. It seems crucial to King-Aribisala’s authorial project that we ask how we can undo the social and linguistic registers that render women’s discursive and re/productive labors familiar and therefore controllable.

King-Aribisala’s fictitious bus spares no sphere of social existence in its social criticism. As the journey ends, when stories told on the bus take a religious turn, the notion of control is brought up again. The most evocative of those tales is “The Tale of the Deaconess: The Pauline Tongue: So long, a long letter in short.” The tale—an allusion to Mariama Bâ’s 1979 classic epistolary novella, Une si longue lettre translated into English as So Long a Letter—mirrors the epistolary form of religious writing that often enshrines the subjugation of women. By ventriloquizing Bâ in the closing moments of a journey that has proved to be largely convivial, philosophical, and spiritual, the novel invokes the notion of female solidarity that frames Bâ’s epistolary tale: “I feel sometimes at one with my sister from Senegal, Mariama Bâ” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 222). The Deaconess’s tale is not quite a tale but a letter to the Apostle Paul in which she challenges Paul: “I classified you as a misogynist par excellence. … I was told you had only one good eye. The bad eye was directed at us females. It seemed to me that you feared our powers … and therefore sought to subjugate us under the guise of Biblical injunctions” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 222). As her letter ends, the Deaconess revises Paul’s view of women, having clarified to herself that the woman is “the creative generating force of man … the womb-man … the custodian of generations unborn … [whose] power is awesome in the extreme” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 225). Paul’s redemption, at which the reader arrives at the end of the letter, thus comes through the Deaconess’s reference to women’s originary labor. Indicating, as the entire novel does, the holistic ethics by which women’s discursive labor operates.

The Black Lady The casts the postcolonial influence on the storytelling in sharp relief by centralizing her discursive subjectivity—agentive, relational, and partial. Many African feminist scholars, including Karen King-Aribisala, concur with postcolonial theorists that all modes of representation and knowledge production are self-reflexive and agentive. The Black Lady The does not shy away from announcing her partiality: “Objective/I am/Not/I speak/Plain subjective truth” (King-Aribisala Reference King-Aribisala1998, 11). Her subjectivity throughout the story, her assertion of herself as a storytelling agent, and the partiality she declares further underline her discursive interventions throughout the novel. Besides that, her puzzling appellation over-specifies her subjecthood, to the point of warranting some meditation. “The Black Lady The,” an anomalous noun phrase formulation enclosing the nominal and its modifier in definite articles at both ends, indicates a boundedness that at once marks the appellation as unfinished, as if the reader should expect more. Cast as grammatical subject or grammatical object, the phrase renders any sentence awkward, befuddling the reader. The phrase over-specifies the singularity of the female narrator as much as it tells us nothing at all about her. The Black Lady The may well be every laboring woman for whom to create space is to doubly insist on the right to inhabit space, to resist familiarity, and to exceed control.

If we further enter the palindromic tendency—which is just a tendency—of the appellation into discussion, we find within the befuddling sobriquet the promise of inversion:

This inversion is not out of character, for the narrator herself delights in it; refer again to: “Objective/I am/Not.” Such inversions train the reader to modify their own expectations, to modify what they know and take for granted. The palindrome forecasts the end from the beginning, an enclosure within which lexical items are bounded in a singular semantic configuration—read from the beginning or the end, we invariably arrive at the same meaning. The inversion within it also indexes an opportunity to make new that which is already familiar. In other words, that the signifier of a woman’s subjecthood is all too familiar does not foreclose the opportunity to defamiliarize it, to point out the aberrations inherent in such familiarity. In the section below, I take this idea a step further by turning attention to a short YouTube video showing an interaction between a female driver and a female journalist in Lagos.

Huge buses, global journeys, and men in women’s bodies

In a 2015 special news focus on a female bus driver posted on YouTube by a rising media outfit, an excited female news reporter opened her segment thusly: “Venita is a very pretty woman, but she is a man in a woman’s body because she does what men do. She actually drives this huge bus. You can see how big the bus is. So, let’s take a walk inside the bus and meet her” (Battabox 2015). Upon getting on the bus, the reporter calls her viewers’ attention again to the bus as the camera pans across the large bus: “So, this is the bus. You can see how big the bus is.” The double emphasis on the size of the bus in the opening minute of the short video is not merely an affirmation, but a note of triumph. Twice, the reporter marks the adjectives “huge” and “big” by elongating the vowels in both words, realized in the video as “huuuuge” and “biiig.” Speakers of West African Pidgin and speakers of Nigerian English often lengthen vowels for emphasis. Apart from fulfilling the need to emphasize certain lexical items, a common situation for such vocalic elongations is issuing and responding to calls. In this instance, I would suggest reading the vowel lengthening as a call to witness: witness the triumph of the modern woman over the huge bus; cue: the note of vicarious triumph in the reporter’s own voice.

The significance of the huge bus referenced in the video manifests on two levels. First, it indicates the inclusion of both women—the female journalist and the female bus driver—in the global market, for the genealogy of buses like the one in reference situates the women on two axes of global connection. On the first axis of global connection, the bus belongs to the fleet of large buses operated as part of the Lagos Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) scheme, the funding for which partly came from the World Bank (Mobereola Reference Mobereola2009, 1). Notwithstanding the inadequacy of road infrastructure and the poor maintenance of the few arterial roads in the state, the democratic government of Lagos in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic approached the World Bank to fund the Lagos Urban Transport Project (LUTP), a move that resurfaced questions about Africa’s consignment to what James Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2006) has called “global shadows.”Footnote ¹¹ The other axis of global connection to the genealogy of Venita’s huge bus runs through the Global South, for while Lagos looked to the Global North for funding the project, it primarily sought models and material from the Global South: Brazil and Colombia served as models for the BRT system, and the BRT buses were bought first from Ashok Leyland, a commercial vehicle manufacturer in India, and later from Yutong, China’s leading manufacturer of commercial vehicles.

The second reason for the significance of Venita’s bus is the more obvious one. The size of the bus doubly emphasized the “manliness” of the woman who, as it were, could safely guide the bus through Lagos’s deteriorating mainland roads. Although the Lagos state government proclaimed the success of the Lagos BRT, it was a more modest project than those of Bogota and Curitiba. Unlike Bogota, where the city government spent about US$6 million per kilometer, Lagos spent less than one-third of that per kilometer. According to the World Bank report of the project, the first phase of the Lagos BRT scheme aimed for “fast-return investments, such as road maintenance or rehabilitation and junction improvements” (Mobereola Reference Mobereola2009, 5). By 2014 when the government of Lagos decided to train women drivers, the roads were generally back to their state of disrepair, and one need not mention that the Lagos bus rapid transit system had become anything but rapid. The reporter does articulate her wonder as soon as she starts talking to Venita: “It is not easy to drive on Lagos roads,” she says as the video cuts to a line-up of vehicles caught in traffic congestion ahead of the bus. “How do you cope?” she asks, camera returning to show her squat beside Venita, who perches regally on the driver’s seat. To clarify her question, the reporter adds: “Lagos drivers [that is, “men”], they are … they can be very frustrating.”

Venita’s response, clear, sharp, and authoritative, can be summed up in her final sentences: “When I get to meet any of them [the male drivers], I tell them straight … I tell them, I say, ‘Look, no matter the proverb that says what a man can do a woman can do better, I don’t give a damn about it. I will never, I will never compare myself to a man because I am a woman.” Venita here insists that she does not feel any pressure to prove her aptitude at any activity in comparison to any man, for to do so amounts to consigning her labor to the shadow of the labor of her male counterparts. Venita, in control of her bus, renders the bus as a geographic space, a space holding human action and bearing meaning, thus redeeming the struggles of the “modern woman” coping with urban life in the African postcolony. The context of the geographic-ness of the bus grants depth to the reporter’s insistence on according some form of manliness to Venita and Venita’s pushback.

Here, I return Venita’s BRT bus more squarely to McKittrick’s theory of the geographic in order to underline the rhetorical ends of her discursive labor which may not be immediately apparent. Although McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds does not dwell upon African female subjects, its key phrases allow me to accentuate the knowledge of the social and economic impediments which Venita and her interlocutor subtly articulate. A particularly incisive note running through Demonic Grounds is that Black women’s geographies—the sites they inhabit, from claustrophobic garrets to cars, to buses, to homes, and to presidential palaces—are fundamental to our conceptual understanding of and relationship to those spaces. The site of women’s labor always demands engagement with all social processes working concurrently both to challenge and sustain women. It is as true of African urban women’s geography, of their interaction with space, as it is of Black geography that its affordances are both material and metaphorical. Taking seriously those affordances of the bus and the presence of the female driver, one can observe how that presence charges the geography of the bus otherwise reserved for the control of men. It is therefore not surprising at all that a male passenger on the bus offers to “talk to” Venita, to ask her to change her profession, for driving does not befit a lady. As Joshua Grace’s example of Tanzania in African Motors shows, this sentiment about women’s labor on public buses is not limited to Lagos. Grace remarks that the discursive construction of public transportation in Tanzania often orients women’s mobility toward the domestic space of the home; a woman is not expected to venture onto the “wild” road (Reference Grace2022, 243).

There is a representational tension in the interaction between Venita and the female journalist: Venita avers that she is a woman and asks to not be compared to a man, but the female journalist refers to her as “a man in a woman’s body because she does what men do.” She repeats at the end of the video that “what a man can do, a woman can do better” despite Venita’s denunciation of the comparative analytics that frame her position as a woman vis-à-vis masculinity. Although both women’s statements run along divergent currents, taken together, they deepen how we may read urban women’s labor and their own theorizations of their labor. The journalist possibly uses the phrase “a man in a woman’s body” literally, as do many of the interlocutors to whom I have related this exchange between the women. They fear that the phrase undermines the labor of the women it purports to praise.

While I agree that the phrase, as used by the journalist, is problematic because it understates Venita’s labor, I am drawn to the awe with which the journalist makes the statement, for inherent in that awe is the possibility of reworking the phrase. By shifting attention in this way, I return the phrase to its mythopoetic origin. Among the Yorùbá, the phrase “a man in a woman’s body” has mythic origins and does not so much signal gender difference as it signals awe-inspiring energies. “Obìrin bí ọkùnrin” (man in a woman’s body) is a panegyric phrase associated with Ọya, the goddessFootnote ¹² of wind and storm who is said to mirror the fierceness and mercurial temperament of Ṣàngó, the god of thunder (Olajubu Reference Olajubu2003, 82). According to anthropologist Judith Gleason, “Oya’s patterns, persisting through many media—from air to the human psyche—suggest something like a unified field theory of a certain type of energy that [Western] culture certainly doesn’t think of as feminine” (Reference Gleason1987, 2). Ọya is not, however, the only goddess who expresses great energies. Ọ̀ṣun, the goddess of the waters, is reputed to exhibit that quality as well. Her oríkì, or panegyric chant, portrays her as a feared woman:

This etymology denotes the enormous energy that the goddesses are thought to embody. Used in secular instances in praise of women, the phrase indicates that the woman being praised displays qualities worthy of an òrìṣà, a goddess. That the Yorùbá language does not have words that signify masculine and feminine energies renders this point context-dependent. Yorùbá words “akọ” (male), “abo” (female), ọkùnrin (boy/man), and obìnrin (girl/woman) depend on contexts to reveal their more metaphorical meanings. This accounts for why the phrase “obìnrin bi ọkùnrin” (transliteration: a woman like a man) could be read as undermining the woman rather than an expression of the manifestation of energies akin to those of goddesses. Contemporary popular notions of masculinity and femininity in the cultural imaginary of Lagos now understate the mythic etymology of the phrase “man in a woman’s body,” retaining only the view of masculinity as a bodily, muscular feature thought to be manifested only by men, even when examples abound of women who are much stronger than men.

To read Venita as a goddess thus returns us to the image of the woman as the originary driver, the connector between the worlds of the unborn and the living. I am anxious, nevertheless, that my celebratory reading of her labor abstracts the tension at play between her and her male counterparts, and even her male passengers, one of whom offers to talk to her. In that sense, she bids us to take her and her labor very seriously: “I will never, will never compare myself to a man.” The statement does not discourage comparison per se. Rather, it calls attention to the density of her own labor and asserts that such labor as hers cannot simply be taken for granted or made hollow through such simplistic quips as the one she contests: “what a man can do a woman can do better.” Simply put, Venita might have no problem with being characterized as a goddess, but she discourages attempts to oversimplify her labor and her habitation of the driver’s seat. At the same time, she challenges the socio-spatial inequity that questions her inhabiting the driver’s seat.

Leaving things unresolved

The spatial story told in Kicking Tongues is unresolved, as is Venita’s insistence on her subjecthood and labor as a woman, which always winds up against a mode of address that already casts her labor in the shadow of men’s labor. This is no anomaly. Geographic stories remain unresolved and continue to hold the promise of contestation and with it the rigor of reexamination, lest the stories run the risk of enabling overfamiliarity. This exercise is akin to looking at the city through the windows of a moving bus. The vision drifts past entities rather than settle on them. The act of seeing through the window of the moving bus is an unresolved act. It remains so until the journey, the plying of the route, is repeated, an activity that recalls again the boundedness of the palindrome. But like King-Aribisala’s palindrome, there is the opportunity for inversions within the bounds of familiarity. When we ask questions of women’s labor in postcolonial African cities in this manner, we pursue a holistic articulation of their labor. At the very least, we may by doing so acknowledge women’s vital discursive labor and the ways that labor shapes modes of urban habitation. Tales of that labor and its socio-spatial effects cannot be unigeneric or unidimensional.