Taxi!

Taxis are one of the most useful elements you can think of for city residents. They always seem to know everywhere, they can be found at almost every street corner, they deliver you right to the doorstep of wherever you wish to go to and, unlike buses, you can actually doze in one and-get this-the driver will actually wake you up when you get to your destination. Not a moment before and not a moment after. He certainly won’t elbow you awake with a cheeky grin and gleefully inform you that yes, this is indeed the last bus stop, three bus stops further than yours. Bloody buses.

Yes, a taxi is extremely convenient and ideally ideal. There is one cloud on the horizon of this realm of perfection. So heavy is this cloud, it is tantamount to three clouds. The tendency that taxi drivers have to be talkative has to be one of the greatest jokes life plays on us. There are some things more annoying than a cabbie that won’t shut up, I’m sure, but those things are a precious few.

One day, I had to leave work a few hours early because I had very unwisely gone to the dentist during my lunch hour (which turned into lunch three hours) and through the haze of pain and novocaine, I managed to stumble into a cab and after three labored tries, successfully communicate my destination. As I laid back, groaning, I shut my eyes and tried to mentally plead with the Lilliputian Nazis that were slamming sledgehammers into my jaw.

“Sister, this traffic na wa oh,” said the cabbie. I grunted in reply. Really, it was all I could manage, and I assumed he would pipe down since I said nothing.

Reader, I assumed wrong.

“Na this our government dey cause kata kata for us for this country,” he said. At the mention of the word ‘government’, my eyes flew open in horror. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not the government. Anyone who has ever had to listen to the ‘government’ speech from a cabbie/bikeman/welder/plumber can understand my panic. The speech only comes to an end when you press money into their hands and make a quick escape.

Let me not torture you as I was tortured. By the time we were turning into my street, I was staring desperately out of the window, scalding tears of rage rolling down my cheeks. He did not shut up for ONE second on this thirty-minute journey. The worst part was that he kept asking prompting questions, mentally elbowing me with “you get it?”s and “you know?”s until I gave another miserable grunt. I gazed at the back of his head and wished that he would lose his voice. I wished his children would be struck dumb. I wished he would have a lunch hour dental appointment with my dentist.

Another day, I went on a date with this seemingly nice chap and on our way back, we took this taxi with a seemingly-quiet driver. We gabbed on, date and I, with the mutual but tacit understanding that we would lock lips sometime during the ride. I was all but quivering with anticipation: me, on a proper date in this Nigeria where people just fall into a relationship, and the (very good-looking)guy was going to kiss me in the cab. I could have sighed out loud with the romance of it all.

All went smoothly until I had the ghastly misfortune of catching the cabbie’s rheumy right eye in the rearview mirror. I took the mistake to a higher level by smiling broadly at him (in my defense, I was giddy from the whole day and smiled broadly at even the police officer that relieved us of two hundred naira, but still.) Immediately, that accursed right eye lit up.

“You are the carbon copy of my daughter,” he croaked.

My broad smile wavered. If his daughter looked anything like him, this was not a compliment.

“Really?” I murmured.

“You don’t believe?” he cackled, feeling about in his glove compartment with one hand until he produced a stack of photographs and tossed them over his shoulder into my lap.

At this point my date was looking incredulously at the old man, who, oblivious to our astonishment, launched into an epistle about his paragon of a daughter. How she lost a tooth at five, how she cooked a bird at twelve, how she went to Gabon at sixteen, how she’s doing her youth service at eighteen. I hated the overachieving little cow by the end of the night.

But my poor date. As the old man waxed more and more poetic about his offspring, my date’s face got stonier and stonier. When the old man produced achievement certificates for us to coo over, my date handed them to me with hands shaking with fury. The moment the cabbie pulled up to my hostel door, I scrambled out, intended kiss forgotten. Heck, I almost forgot my leftover popcorn in my hurry. I left them there, faintly hearing the cabbie describe a special stew his daughter made him and made a swift escape.

Talking cabbies, if you ask me, should be outlawed. These people have the ability to drive a toddler to drink. After a hard day’s work, peace still eludes you at the back of a cab. And these are men. I shudder to think of what might ensue if I stumble across a female taxi driver. Now, they’re not all bad. Or so I hear. I still patiently wait for that one day when I will enter a taxi and be treated to blissful silence all the way. Certainly, this cannot be too much to ask.

CHIVALRY IS DEAD....AND WOMEN KILLED IT

            Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Iseult. Lancelot and Guinevere. Ramsey Nouah and Genevieve. Common factor- these men have proven time and again that they would die for their women if need be (although I can't really vouch for the last couple, you know how deceptive Nollywood can be). They have slain dragons, and braved storms, and fought armies, and even drank poison to prove their love for the leading ladies in their lives. Over the years, chivalry evolved into being just that show of general courtesy-you know, when to a man, a woman’s a lady in every sense of the word. For men these days, chivalry is opening the door for a woman, getting up when a woman enters the room, giving up your place for a woman, the whole nine yards. I imagine men reading this saying in their minds,” for where?”

            This concept is so foreign to men of this generation because of the simple fact that chivalry is dead. Deader than Attila the Hun. The sad part is that the women killed it. Ruthlessly. Thoughtlessly. Brutally. Now I imagine women around the world (I like to think) reading this and going, “Oh no, she didn’t!” I am indeed sorry to say, Yes I did.

            Come now, think about it. Little by little, act after act, women methodically prove to the male folk that they are just not worth the bloody effort. I know there are a few good women out there, but just ask the guys, and they’ll tell you these women are like gold dust. They’re either in the convent or they’re married to assholes (who, by the way, can only be managed by the aforementioned few good women).

            The women of this generation don’t offer any incentive for men to even be nice to them, talk less about exhibiting chivalry. I’m sure that at this juncture, feminists reading this will be filled with righteous indignation (why the hell do we need them to be nice to us, etc). But let’s face it, the world was a much more civilized place when women were ladies and men were…well, whatever they were. The concept of liberalism has created an allowance for all things previously deemed inappropriate and decadent. At the risk of coming across as a prude (which I am most assuredly not, I assure you with full assurance), I believe that I would have liked to exist in those days of knights and their ladies fair. Think of all the heavy lifting I would have avoided. All the noses I have been dying to bloody would have been taken care of by a misguided chivalrous fool with just some discreet, well-placed nudging on my part.

            In those days, men would knock their own brother into next tuesday for even hinting at the intent to insult a woman. If you don’t believe it, refer to Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. In these women-wear-pants-too times, a man may meet his brother on top of his wife and the worst that will happen is that he may not speak to him for a weekend until they go to the family reunion and iron all their issues out. The innate respect that men have for women has been irrevocably stamped out by the antics of women. What man would waste the blood of a total stranger much less his brother over a slack-thighed woman (pardon my French) who didn’t even have the decency to have his dinner on the table before climbing into bed with the maiguard.

            Why would any man respect a woman who would climb into bed with every Tom, Dick and Calistus, who he met when he picked her up in some bar? What man would respect a woman who dresses like Cinderella after her sisters had snatched all their accessories from her-shabby, worn and naked?  How can any man respect a woman whose mouth is dirtier than a chimney sweep, a woman who could turn the air around her a ribald shade of blue with a handful of choice curse words? Show me that man and I will show you a transvestite feminist.

            Women live by the principle of “Give a little, expect a lot”. They want men to be men and women to be whatever they want to be. But it is a simple case of action and reaction. Women demand incessantly to be treated as the equals of men. The part that they did not shout out loud is that this equal treatment is only feasible when it suits them. The same woman who goes nose-to-nose with her husband over equal rights in the kitchen suddenly becomes skittish when he raises his hand to hit her. If she’s his equal (as she has spent all this time reminding the poor thing), then both of them should be able to go, as equals, equally into a physical combat. But no. It suddenly occurs to her that it is cowardly for a man to hit a woman. If that’s not convenient, I don’t know what is.

            There is a reason why men are created the way they are inside and out. They’re here to serve and protect their women, but to their utter astonishment, their women are no longer women (the servees and the protectees) but they have now evolved into this other creature which is a very convenient hybrid of man and woman characters, and which no one thought to inform the poor men of their existence. Left confused with these mutants (yes, I said it), they adapt the only way they know how-employ brand new relationship skills. Voila-and so we have the contemporary man-woman relationship.

            And so, friends, my point is proven. Chivalry is dead, and women killed it.