I have recently found myself reminiscing about an incident I witnessed on the New York subway in the summer of 2018. This reminiscence was triggered by a conversation with one of my doctoral professors about the crazy things he too had witnessed on the same subway while he lived and worked in the Big Apple. New York is crazy, but the drama on that subway is on a completely different level.
So, what happened that day? Well, I was on the train. I don’t remember the specific route, but that detail is of no relevance to the story. I had been in meetings most of the day and felt like standing. There were other passengers on the train, and one of them was a young woman sitting and typing enthusiastically into her phone. She seemed to be smiling one moment and then, without warning or even a preamble, she started weeping, heaving with such heartfelt hurt.
My natural inclination was to ask what happened, if she needed help. But I noticed that the other passengers in the train, mostly males, had pretended as if they hadn’t noticed. It was impossible to miss because this was no silent cry. They looked into their phones or at the walls of the train, or out the window into the dark and dank underbelly of this city. Anywhere but at this girl. Hesitation crept into my mind. If the locals are turning away, what am I, a stranger in this weird and bizarre city, supposed to do? Is there a cultural cue I am missing or misreading? Besides, it was the era of #MeToo, and I feared my good intentions could be misconstrued. When I reached my stop, I wondered if I should have said something to her, something to soothe or assure her, but I couldn’t. Long after the train zipped away, I wondered if I had just been foolish or overly cautious.
I have never forgotten that non-encounter and the impressions it made on me. The realisation of how lonely people can feel in the midst of a crowd, in the heart of a bustling city like New York, struck me with unwavering clarity.
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Today, quite by accident, I came across the name of this phenomenon where a suffering person or someone being mugged or victimised in the midst of a crowd is often ignored. The Bystander Effect it is called. I became fascinated by this theory and its implications for our humanity.
I have been thinking a lot about my country, Nigeria, recently in the midst of economic gloom and a security quagmire, while looking for positive things to say and write about it. I know that if this scenario had played out on the Mararaba-Berger Bus or the Kaduna-Abuja train, someone would have asked, “Sista, wetin happen?” A random woman would have wrapped an arm around her shoulders and told her, “Oya, e don do. No cry, eh!” Someone would have offered to pray for her. If there is anything you can give Nigerians credit for, it is that it used to be incredibly hard to be lonely in this country. Used to. People looked out for each other. Strangers would knock or salaam at your door, and you would offer them water. In the past, especially in the North, people would spread out their dinner on their house façade so passers-by could join them for a meal. When your neighbours noticed the absence of smoke in your kitchen and the non-rattling of pots and pans, they would knock on your door with a bowl of food, a smile, and a joke.
The bystander effect, I was almost convinced, was not a Nigerian problem. That was until I realised that the premises of my assumptions are isolated and nostalgic. And instances of this scenario, maybe even worse, started flooding my mind of an afflicted man, struck by an illness, falling to the ground in pain. Unlike in these cities where people turned their faces away and walked past, Nigerians would crowd around the victim to watch. Some would mumble “Allah ya kyauta.” On occasions, a courageous person would intervene. Of course, one cannot overlook how authorities have disincentivised helping by promptly turning accusatory lenses on the helper who brings an accident or crime victim to a hospital or how they stress your life for it.
In 2014, SB Morgen Intelligence said that 43 per cent of Nigerians have witnessed lynchings. Every time videos of lynchings have trended, they would always feature dozens of bystanders watching the spectacle of a brutal killing for a crime or an allegation of it. People intervene in rare cases.
It is remarkable, though, that in this age, lynchings have remained popular in Nigeria. While one could draw corollaries between the act and the savagery of the actors, it would be disingenuous to overlook the failure of the justice system as an enabler of these crimes. Make no mistake, lynchings are crimes. But how often have reports of lynchings included the presence of police officers at the scene, floating about to see what was about to happen before melting away. Through these appearances and disappearances, they relinquish the state’s monopoly on violence, which conflict theorists argue is essential for state-building, and democratise carnage. Violence is the one thing you don’t want to democratise. The premise for lynching in the first instance is the mistrust of law enforcement because of the habitual collusion between lawmen and lawbreakers.
But lynching aside, we have often seen people in pain due to ill health allowed to roll in the dust and die from their pains, or the numerous times people whip out their phones to record the slow and agonising death of an accident victim. Bystander effect.
Driving on the Abuja-Keffi expressway, I once came upon an accident where a car had burst a tyre, lost control and severed the leg of a Gala hawker standing in the raised street median. I parked and got out, and there was the boy, moaning in pain, his foot cut clean by the car’s hubcap, lying among the scattered Gala on the street. The police were already there, three of them. One stood some distance away from the boy, directing traffic away from the foot; the other two stood over the offending car, whose driver had slunk away into the night. What were they waiting for? For the driver to return. Since the police were there, I believed the boy would be taken care of and proceeded on my journey.
The next day, upon my return, I stopped at the scene to inquire about the victim and was informed that he was not taken to the hospital until almost two hours after the incident. The police waited for the driver who never showed up, and, in the end, the other hawkers carried the victim on their backs to a nearby hospital. The police looked away.
And here is the point of this column: in a way, there is no country more greatly afflicted by the bystander effect than Nigeria. Nigeria is that boy with a severed leg, rolling in the median, surrounded by a dozen people, including police officers, waiting for someone to help, to lift a finger, to do something, the right thing. In our thrill, we do not realise that we are one with the boy and the boy is part of us. In the end, we are all bystanders watching the country bleed out from corruption, from mismanagement, from insecurity, and all the things afflicting this nation. Even when we agree that something needs to be done, we cannot agree on what should be done or how. So, we stand, or whip out our phones to record the life force, drain from our beloved country into the dust.
