Passage I: The workshop on Adeniran Street
For most of the year, the workshop on Adeniran Street opens before the first buses begin their noisy run to the market. Mr Okafor, who has repaired generators there for twenty-two years, unlocks the iron door himself. He will not hand the key to anyone, not even to Chidi, the most senior of his four apprentices, who has been with him for almost five years and who, by his own account, could now strip and rebuild an engine with his eyes closed.
Chidi does not resent this. "The key is not a matter of trust," he explains. "It is a matter of order. When I open my own shop, my boys will wait for me too." He says this without irony, for the arrangement under which he learnt his trade is one that young people across the country still choose, even as universities multiply and certificates are prized above almost everything else.
The terms are simple, if demanding. An apprentice lives on very little, runs errands that have nothing to do with engines, and learns by watching long before he is allowed to touch anything of value. In return, the master teaches him the craft, introduces him to suppliers and, at the end of an agreed period, helps him to set up on his own. A master who sends a boy away empty-handed after years of service is spoken of with contempt in the market; one who settles his apprentices well finds that his reputation, and often his custom, grows with each of them.
Critics argue that the system is wasteful. They point out that many apprentices spend their first year sweeping floors, and that a good technical college could teach in six months what a workshop teaches in three years. There is some truth in this. Yet the college cannot teach what Chidi calls "the market": how to read a customer who claims he has no money, which supplier will give credit in a bad month, and when to refuse a job that will cost more in goodwill than it brings in cash.
Mr Okafor himself is less sentimental. He admits that he takes apprentices partly because they are cheap and partly because a busy workshop attracts customers. "But a man who trains no one," he adds, wiping his hands on a rag that was once a shirt, "dies twice: once when his heart stops, and again when his trade is forgotten."