Two Days Beneath the Ark (Part 1)

A young man’s journey into the murky depths of the workforce…

Segun had always considered himself a hard worker. In school, he was always near the top of his class, not quite outstanding but never far enough behind that his mother would complain about his results. To him, life would always give you as much as you decided to put in and he had made up his mind long ago that he would get the most from life.

Born to a middle-class family in the suburbs of Lagos State Nigeria, growing up was not always so easy. In a place like Lagos, class distinctions weren’t quite as defined as they were in other parts of the world. In other words, being born to a relatively well-off home as his did not mean he had not grown accustomed to nights spent under the dry heat and mosquito infested Lagos air. When he was younger he and his siblings were regularly infected by the noisome pestilence known as malaria. Malaria was so widespread that a child presenting with a slight headache or a cough was quickly diagnosed with malaria and sent on his merry way with some tablets or injected for his troubles. 


Middle class simply meant you had more than many but still lacked enough that life was tough. But none of that ever got to him. He could see how hard his parents worked and was not too naïve to see that he had more than many of his friends. This instilled in him a sense of dignity in labour and caused him to never shy away from opportunities to better his life or those around him.

Opportunities to work, however, were non-existent for him. After school, his driver (his father’s driver actually, as a teacher once scolded him for calling the driver his driver) would be waiting outside the school gates to take him straight home. On the weekends he was never allowed to take a step outside of their compound, his mother was always wary of all the dangers that lurked beyond the front gates as she was constantly reminded by the evening news and ghastly morning headlines of how violent a place they lived. Lagos was no place for a young man to be out and about except going to school or church!

And so was his life during his teen years, he developed his mind and worked as hard as he could in classes but never had a reason to one day lift a finger to earn any money of his own. His parents provided everything he could ever ask for. So he understood the value of money and consequently of a hard day’s work but could never truly understand what it meant to work for a living or to know the real value of money earned. These were things he craved and wanted to experience though and he one day longed for the chance to earn his keep.

He remembered once, being stuck in traffic on his way back from school. The weather was typically dry and hot as the sun was at its highest point. The air conditioning in the car was on so he could not feel the pulsating heat coming from outside but the car thermometer read a blistering 38 degrees Celsius. He looked out at the passing Lagosians each one going about their daily grind trying to earn a living for their families back home. He noticed those strapped on the back of motorbikes (colloquially known as Okadas) holding on for dear life as the bikes meandered through the sea of traffic. And then his eyes drifted to those tightly packed into buses on their way back from work and wondered how the muggy afternoon air would affect those seated all the way in the back seats.


And then he saw one man whose job seemed to be harder than any he had ever seen or heard off. The man would have been in his mid-twenties by the looks of him, he had a bald head upon which he tied a ragged bandana. He was bare-chested and wore a pair of black patched trousers accompanied by what looked like his oldest pair of trainers. The man was tasked with pushing a wheelbarrow full of what could in no uncertain terms be seen as junk from one part of the city to the other. From the looks of it, the wheelbarrow including its contents was heavy and quite difficult for the young man to push and manoeuver through the dense traffic.


As Segun sat there in the backseat of his father’s car with the soothing cool breeze of the ‘air con’ blowing over his skin, he looked on as beads of sweat dripped down the young man’s chest as he struggled to control the overbearing weight of the wheelbarrow and navigate it to its final destination. He had no doubt in his mind that this was what hard work looked like. He could see the still but unimaginable dignity in the eyes of the young man as he pushed that wheelbarrow through the Lagos traffic that hot afternoon. A dignity and sense of pride that could only come from using your own hands to feed yourself. A sense of honour and fulfilment that only comes from eating from the sweat of your brow.

He would never forget the look on that young man’s face for the rest of his life and it only exacerbated his longing to leave this life of dependency behind. Little did he know that his chance to join the workforce was just around the corner.