Crazy Jos, November 27

After a smooth ride down here on Sunday, and a relatively smooth day of office-shopping on Monday, Tuesday came as quite a shock to our team, when a violent demonstration led by okada drivers (commercial motorbike drivers) paralyzed the town. Road-blocks were erected all over the town center and the immediate outskirts (including the neighborhood where my guest-house is located), leaving several of my RAs stranded on their way to meet me at work. One of my RAs was chased by an okada driver while on her way to work, and another very nearly missed being gassed by anti-riot policemen. The rest of us found ourselves stranded within the walls of my guesthouse compound all day. It was a harrowing experience.

The most interesting part of the whole event, though, took place during the first few hours of the day, when nobody in our area really knew what was going on, and rumors started to circulate that the “crisis in town” was a religious riot. We were terrified by these rumors, given that we were all sitting in the main lobby of a Lutheran guest-house located right in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood. High walls or not, it was a scary experience. I was especially fascinated to see how the “crisis” immediately got coded as religious violence, even before there was any real information available to people on the outskirts of town.

Several of my Muslim and several of my Christian RAs began to argue at one point about the cause of the “religious crisis,” after one of the Muslims mentioned that his Imam had advised them in mosque the night before to go out and protest against the building of a brand-new CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria) secretariat in a Muslim neighborhood, and against the tearing down of a local government secretariat building to make way for the CAN structure. Hearing this, one of my Christian RAs chimed in by saying that “these young Hausa boys should just stop making trouble, why can’t they just leave here and go back to the far North?”… I tried my best to defuse the tension and we ultimately decided to just wait for news before jumping to any conclusions.

Several of the guest house staff had been in town earlier in the morning and had seen young guys, some of them armed, rampaging on the streets. Again, without really looking into the matter (for obvious reasons, they raced to get home inside the compound walls), they coded the crisis as religious.

We spent the entire day locked up in the guesthouse, not sure what was going on, and unsure of the safety of some of the RAs who’d gotten stranded in different parts of town. I spent a good deal of time imagining what I would do if our compound came under attack. It was not until about 2 in the afternoon, when the woman who owns our office building drove into our compound to updated us and tell us that things were quieting down that we realized it was an okada drivers riot – and that they were protesting the imposition of an 8 pm curfew for all okadas (i.e., they’re not allowed to operate after 8). We were immensely relieved, not only for the safety of people in Jos, but also for our project – since you can imagine that it would be tough to get permission to do a survey on religious conflict right smack in the middle of such a tense situation.

In any case, the tension died down and by 4 pm we were able to make our way to our office without any problem. And everything has been just fine since. All in all, a pretty scary situation, but one that made me think quite a bit about the priors of ordinary people in a post-conflict environment.