Driving Through Life as a Fully Veiled Muslim Woman

My mother bought me my first car; I was 22. Growing up, I was one of those ajebutter kids who were chauffeured everywhere. I recognize now, well over another 22 years since, that there is a potential conversation lurking here about privilege, and how life’s most tenacious values are instilled in the formative home and family of your childhood. And maybe we will have that conversation. Someday.

At the time, though, all I knew was a lifetime of my parents’ ‘protective’ parenting that curtailed my teenage outings to only what a car and driver could be spared for. Which wasn’t particularly confining for the loner my teenage self was. As long as I had books, I was content to remain curled up within the gilded cage of my parents’ expectations. Which, of course, left me wholly unprepared to navigate the hellscape that was the Nigerian public transport system, a menace I suddenly found myself in, on my own, as a university student in the historic largest city in West Africa. What can be said about the experience of Ibadan buses and kabukabu, except that the gift of a car meant freedom in more ways than I could articulate. All I needed was to learn how to drive.