Airports are not for happiness

Picture this in your mind. It is an image that has been playing in my mind for a long time, and I know it will somehow find its way into a future novel of mine:

It is of a luggage carousel in an unnamed airport. On it is a single piece of tagged luggage, still making the rounds. The airport is empty, and silent, save for the polite humming of the carousel.

In another part of the airport, there is a man, slumped over a toilet seat. He is the owner of the luggage. His heart stopped just as kidneys started, and now he is gone. His own journey has come to an end, never again will he be reunited with the bag that continues its own journey, on a luggage carousel, in an unnamed airport.

I recently realised that I have spent almost half of the last eleven months (not an unbroken stretch) outside Nigeria. What that means is that I have had my own fair share of airport-hopping. (Perhaps not in the class of a Tyler Brule, or to come closer home, our own Dele Momodu).

So, when, last week, at the Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, I heard Kate Adie, the BBC's former Chief News Correspondent, who has covered wars and unrest from Bosnia to Rwanda, from Iraq to Sierra Leone, from Tripoli to Tiananmen Square, declare that "International Airports are not normal places... they are full of anxious people", I paused, smiled and realised I owed her a lavish lunch for putting to words something I had always sensed but had never bothered to express.

In a sense Ms Adie was comparing airports to war zones. She should know, shouldn't she?

"Judge thyself, that you will not be judged" the Bible admonishes. It might as well have meant that for the heavy-laden traveller. "Weigh thyself before you leave home, that you will not be weighed at the check-in desk - and found wanting."

In February 2005, I missed a flight. I was due to board an Air France flight to Lagos from Paris. Before then, I had taken a train from Brussels to Paris, and as you might know, trains are less discriminatory than planes when it comes to luggage.

I, in the manner of a true Nigerian, had arrived at the airport with a box that felt like it weighed a few tonnes and with my concept of hand luggage creatively interpreted.

I therefore failed on both counts. My check-in luggage was nine or so kilos overweight. My hand luggage(s) - mostly books, was overweight as well. I offered to abandon the plastic bag of books which was part of my hand luggage. But in being a post-911 world, even that was no longer acceptable. I was told that no one was allowed to leave anything at the airport.

Eventually, because a lot of time was wasted pleading for mercy regarding my overweight luggage bill, I missed my flight. But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I found myself with twenty-four hours to spare, before the next flight to Lagos.

Air France politely explained to me that since it was my fault that I missed my flight, they would not be responsible for hotel accommodation for me. Fine. I put myself in a hotel, bought a Paris Underground day ticket, and visited the Eiffel Tower.

On all of that I spent only a fraction of the 270 Euros I would have paid for overweight luggage, and had all the time in the world to repack my bags. When I left my hotel room the next morning for the airport, it looked like a junkyard, littered with the stuff I had (overnight) decided I could travel without.

When I weighed my luggage again at the airport, I had managed to shed more than ten kilos.

A good number of those kilos had been transferred onto my person, I left Paris clad in about four pairs of trousers, and in almost as many shirts and jackets.

Since then I have gotten more adept at the business of travelling. But I haven't managed to come to like airports any better, or find myself happier in them.

I have come to the conclusion that airports were designed to humiliate human beings. To reduce us to the lowest common denominator of Dignity.

Or what do you say about a queue of well-dressed men and women, clutching all shapes and sizes of containers (that in an ideal world would be ‘classified information'; stuff meant to be viewed only in the deepest recesses of personal closets) - unimaginatively-squeezed toothpaste tubes, anti-balding creams, bleaching lotions, postmenopausal ointments etc - in transparent paper bags, advertised shamelessly for the whole world to see.

Or a Big Man, whose voice alone would probably drive terror into the hearts of his hundreds of employers; now stripped of belt and shoes, and poked and prodded by a bored, scowling security man.

What of finding yourself at the airport in a European capital, with only a few minutes before you board a plane? In your pockets are hundreds of coins, amassed over a few weeks. You have to spend them before you leave, of what use would Icelandic coins be to you in Lagos, Nigeria?

Sometimes there is a bit of comic relief, like the mindless questions you will be asked at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport when you tell those potbellied immigration officials that you are a "freelance writer." Or when a Belgian airport policeman (with a more modest stomach than his Nigerian counterpart) wordlessly switches his gaze from your face to your passport data page, trying to decide if you are truly the one, as though he actually had the ability to tell one black face from another.

Find me a happy person in an airport, and I'd show you a duty-free-shop owner, or an artefact dealer, making four-hundred percent profit from every item of merchandise sold to camera-clutching tourists.

It's going to get even worse. The discomfort is fast creeping from airport lounges, to airplane cabins. A few days ago I boarded an Abuja-Lagos flight whose pilot had decided that the air-conditioning wasn't coming on until we were about to take-off.

And, a few weeks ago, aboard a South African Airways flight from Lagos to Jo'burg, the pilot announced: "For safety reasons we do not allow passengers to sleep on the floor during the flight."

I should have protested, but I'm ashamed to say I didn't. If a Nigerian, having paid the full fare for his flight, decides that stretching out on the floor of a plane is more comfortable than being cramped into a seat better suited for a kindergarten class, what SAA should do is provide ‘floor belts' to strap passengers comfortably to the floor - not enact stupid prohibitions.

Can someone please tell me why the powers that be are bent on making air travel impossible for us all?