OYIBO DUSTBIN

My name is Kunle Omope, I’ll like to tell you a story. During the mid-’80s to ’90s, as kids living in the Police Barracks, Ikeja, we used to have a lot of exciting adventures. Let me tell about one that we called “OYIBO DUSTBIN”.

At about the period in question, a lot of White People used to live in G.R.A. On weekends and school holidays, we’ll walk in groups like a gang of scientists. Just after Archbishop Vining Memorial Anglican Church, we’ll begin to rummage through the trashcans that were behind the fences of these Oyibo’ houses.

I remember their houses were mostly solid bungalows built by PWD.

Let me digress a bit. It was not until my senior secondary days that I got to know the real meaning of the acronym PWD.
PWD is an acronym for Public Works Department, but all through my childhood, my mates and I were told that PWD meant People Work and Die. And we believed this name to be true. Why? Because the houses they built had walls so thick that nails could not bore through them, no matter how hard the hammer worked. You had to use a drilling machine to make a hole to hang your photo frame on. So in our young minds, we felt those that constructed buildings that strong must have died while working, hence why, they were referred to as People Work and Die – PWD.

Okay, back to the story.

As we searched through the OYIBO DUSTBIN, we’d find all kinds of treasures, mostly toys. From toy cars with missing tyre(s), to dolls with missing arms or legs or eyes. Some very lucky ones amongst us will find complete toys and still looking very new.

When we returned from our adventure, we’ll begin to fix the broken toys, replacing plastic legs with wood; missing toy car tyres with our own tyres made from bottle covers stuffed with foam from damaged slippers. Dolls with missing eyes got transplants of eyes made from a single bean.

With engineering carried out and surgeries done, we enjoyed our new creations- a creative combination of Oyibo starting and barrack sense finishing.

The exploration of OYIBO DUSTBIN went on for a few years until we got to a point when we felt we had gotten enough inspiration to create our own stuff. So, we progressed to fabricating a lot of toys from scraps of any and everything.

We made toy cars, helicopters, dolls, airplanes…anything our minds conceived, our little hands created. Some of us became ‘genius engineers’, while some supported, but everyone contributed to our collective happiness.

We even created our own casinos using milk tins and agbalumo seeds; musical instruments with torn balloons stretched over hollow plastic cans. During festive seasons we took one look at those Christmas decorations and made ours from paper designed with crayons. Some of these decorations were so beautiful that our mothers were proud enough to hang them up in the sitting rooms.

At a point, we were so high in our creativity that our excitement flew into the air in the form of our paper and nylon kites with long tails for balance and beauty.

I am sorry reader, my story does not have a high point or climax…it ends with a question:

Why do we as a country still pride ourselves in rummaging through OYIBO DUSTBIN? Only now, it has new names like Tokunbo, Okrika, Akube etc.

The End.