January 12, 2009
Nigerian vegetable helmets
You’d think with a story like this there’d be a picture.
Motorcyclists in Nigeria have been wearing dried pumpkin shells on their heads to dodge a new law forcing them to wear helmets, authorities say.
Road safety officials said calabash-wearers would be prosecuted.
The dried pumpkins are usually used to carry water.
Kano Federal Road Safety Commission commander Yusuf Garba told the BBC they were taking a hard line with people found using the improvised helmets.
“We are impounding their bikes and want to take them to court so they can explain why they think wearing a calabash is good enough for their safety,” he said.
Most of the calabash wearing offenders are motorcycle-taxi drivers called achaba in northern Nigeria and okada in the south. Okada is from the name of a now defunct ex-state governor’s airline, and
Achaba comes from a Hausa phrase meaning “double enjoyment”, referring to taxi drivers being paid for being close to women passengers.
Not only are the achaba / okada wearing the dried pumpkins because they are cheaper than helmets (and sometimes passengers steal them), but wearing real helmets causes them to lose passengers worried about dark magic.
“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.
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5 Responses to “Nigerian vegetable helmets”
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Sadly, this is true. The police use any means necessary to pummel the poor masses here, and the enforcement of the “helmet rule” is the latest in a long line of anti-poor measures cheered on by the rich elite.
Please organise a drive to collect old, battered, broken baseball helmets (all sizes) and send them to Lagos, Nigeria. It will greatly help people get around the “helmet rule” thereby helping the tens of millions of people who rely on motorcycle-taxis as the only reliable means of getting from home to work in Nigeria’s large cities, however dangerous the rides may be.
We’re hanging on by a thread here.
Thank you, Julius. I will email you for details.
Oh, that’s great! Let us know the details.
Having worked in the Delta region for over 5 years nothing amazes me about Nigeria anymore. If there is a Hell on this earth then it is Nigeria!
Kidnapped, held at gun point, abused, robbed, mental torture………. All in a day’s work!
I would never go back there again.
oh my, I’ll try to get a photo of a pumpkin helmet when we go there next month. Although by then there’ll be a law making those illegal and they will have moved on to watermelon.