Dan Lawton : Journalist

This is the second of two posts I’ve written about nightlife in Lome, Togo. Check below for the previous article.

I will not die here. I am not meant to die here, in the rain, in Togo, tonight.  But if this motorcycle taxi keeps driving at this speed, if this cascade of warm African rain keeps falling, if the sun doesn’t rise soon, if we kill one more round of aperteshie, it  seems inevitable that something bad will happen.  But it doesn’t, so I continue to breathe and we continue to ride on.

My friend Baba is on the backseat of the motorcycle across from me and he’s snapping pictures with my camera.  Baba has polio and he can’t straddle the bike because of it so he positions his legs crossways and howls like a demon as he whooshes by me.  It’s 4 a.m., the streets are dark and vacant, and I’m soaked with rain.  There’s a memorial, or a statue, or some sort of icon in the middle of the city and we pull up to it and snap twenty out-of-focus pictures and then fly off, and as usual I’m in the dark about where we’re going but that’s fine.

These motorcycle taxi drivers have quickly become our best friends.  We hit bar after bar after bar with them and my wallet becomes lighter and my mind moves faster and now I want the bike to fly and NOW I want the bike to burn the asphalt off the road!

On the back of this bike, I know that at any second we could hit a slick and go careening into the blackness of the shoulder and my life would end, and I enjoy that fear.  Thoreau dug into the marrow of life in a shack in Concord, but he should have tried a motorcycle in Togo and I’m dripping with exhilaration and Jesus this rain is really starting to come down hard.

We slam to a halt in the middle of the street.  The night freezes.  I tumble off my bike and Baba does too, but somehow neither of us are hurt.  Instead we just laugh like we’re insane and then we’re back on again and he howls and I howl and the drivers howl and our yawps boom over the engines and I feel like I’m riding into battle.

A motorcycle taxi driver pours moonshine in Lome, Togo

There is only one taxi driver who wears a helmet, which is why I picked him, because I assumed that he was the safest, and sure enough he keeps that helmet on all night while he out-drinks everyone.  And he leads us, like a pack of lions, through the fog and back to his house. There I meet his mother who is just waking up to begin the day.  Her business is selling moonshine.  My man with the helmet takes out bottle after bottle and pours and pours. “Do you sleep with that helmet on?” I crow.

My man with the helmet takes me home at dawn.  Lome looks woebegone in the morning, like a sickly child.  I want to go to the beach–“Let’s swim I shout!”- but instead we piddle back to the hotel and I climb into bed where I sleep four abreast with strangers.

When I wake up at noon, I’m still dead drunk and everyone else is gone. The night clings to my mind like a strange reverie; I know it happened, but I don’t know how and why.  I know I loved it, but I’m not sure if I’m proud or frightened by that fact.  I look at the pictures on my camera and they make me shiver.

For more pictures of nightlife in Togo, check out the photo gallery.