Gerd Meuer mit Nobelpreisträger Wole Soyinka
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Da man!

Well, really: I could hardly believe it! First of all I lose my passport and all my other documents, credit and health cards etc., on the second day of my stay in Nigeria. And yes: I did LOSE them all, and nobody STOLE them from me. That much is sure: the IDIOT is ME. And it’s small comfort that this is happening to me for the first time in 44 years of travelling to, or living in, Nigeria. ‘It had to happen once,’ I console myself, meekly.
It is small consolation, however. Now that I, the German ‘oyingbo pepper’, am now almost naked, with no document whatsoever to prove that I am still alive, or rather, that I got into Nigeria legally – how will I ever get out again? How will I ever be able to travel on, along the so-called ‘Lagos-Abidjan corridor’, along the West African coast?
Well, somehow I did manage to get an emergency passport which allowed me to travel on to Benin, Togo, Ghana and back home to Germany. 
And then the BIG suprise. Hardly had I arrived back home in Germany and opened my e-mail when I found THE surprise e-mail from Nigeria. Can you believe it! There was a gentleman who told me that he had “found my visa, credit card with other document (sic!) on transit” and that “every effect made to get you on phone proved abortive for the past five days”. And then he went on to give me his cellular number and that of his sister “for further information on how u can get your document or reply this mail or tell me where to drop it for u either in the police station or any of our Nigerian media houses. Thanks, yours faithfully. C.A.”
Now, if that isn’t a most welcome surprise from Nigeria then I don’t know what is! An honest Nigerian ‘finder’, coming on top of all the other welcome surprises on my trip across those many West African borders; a trip which I described in detail for the Nigerian ‘GUARDIAN’ (April 23rd edition). 
And although I do NOT believe in any of the miracles of Nigeria’s mushrooming band of preachers (!!!), I was inclined to consider this development to be a major miracle, or to put it more mildly and more secularly, as a most positive development in Nigerian society. 
But then I started to develop some second thoughts… Maybe it wasn’t a miracle after all. Maybe the explanation was a rather simple – or not so simple – one…
That smallish plastic wallet not only contained my passport, identity card, health insurance card, etc., but also, and most importantly, one single visiting card with the picture of KONGI and myself grinning charmingly into the camera at one of KONGI’s readings in Germany, a picture taken by an ‘Afro-German’ photographer whose own visiting card reads - really! - ‘Wild Yoruba’… 
By now I am SURE that the honest Lagos finder of my documents got the shock of his life when he discovered that picture of ‘DA MAN’ among them. And so he decided he had better…
Which again reminded me of the story that same ‘Man’ told me of losing his ‘Lap-Dog’ at Atlanta airport…
When moving up one of those moving belts, thinking about his next play, and with his lap-dog strapped on top of his trolley, he – at the end of that journey – suddenly discovered that his lap-dog had disappeared: SHOCK. He started shouting: to no avail. He reported his loss to the police, then had a friend print several thousand flyers to advertise his loss. But he heard nothing about his lap-dog containing the scripts for the next umpteenth NOBEL prizes… 
After some four weeks or so he gets a call from the Georgia police telling him that a lap-dog carrying bag had been found, “however containing nothing.” And so Kongi Wole goes to the Atlanta airport police station to have a look at that lap-dog bag. And when he lifts it, it weighs enough to convince him that the machine is – after all – inside! He asks the ‘fat black police woman’ (politically incorrect quote from his ‘Climate of Fear’ BBC Reith lectures) where his lap-dog was found?
According to the Georgia Police, the lap-dog had simply been deposited on the hood of a private car in the huge airport parking lot… 
And Kongi did not (...) tell me about his guess that the Nigerians who had stolen his lap-dog on the lift – or to whom his lap-dog had been offered on the cheap – when looking into its contents and finding out who the owner was – simply took fright and simply, no, rather frantically, decided to deposit it anonymously for it to be found and be returned to its ‘rightful owner’… just like my documents in Lagos:

               Circle closed.