I was woken by the pilot’s voice. In the drowsy hum of the airplane, his words crackled, and I thought I heard something about preparing to land. Could I have slept so long? I looked at the time. It was only three hours into the Lagos-to-Atlanta flight. The flight attendants were hurrying back and forth. The pilot was still speaking.
“We have an emergency onboard and we have had to divert the flight to Dakar.” I could feel the plane descending. It seemed too fast. A sweeping hollowness. My fog of sleep cleared instantly. Something was wrong, the pilot was too cryptic, the flight attendants too blank-faced, snatching up cups, urging seats straight. I thought: If I die, I hope it’s quick and I don’t know. The woman beside me crossed herself. Then the pilot’s voice came back on. It was a medical emergency, he said; a pregnant passenger went into early labor and had just had a baby. I sensed, around me, a collective hush of relief and wonder. A baby delivered on the plane! We landed in Dakar. It was 2 a.m. Medical personnel in orange vests hurried in, a man carrying a black box, a lanky woman dragging an IV stand, their eyes heavy with sleep. I wondered what the baby would need, and if they had what the baby would need.
Soon, the lanky woman left, cradling a bundle wrapped in cloth. The baby. I strained to see better, hoped I would hear it cry. Then the new mother emerged, a young woman with a tube dangling from her arm, and behind her came the other medical worker, trying to support her. But she didn’t need him. She strode past, straight and steady, so quick that I caught only a glimpse of her face. She looked stunned and frustrated. It seemed even more of a wonder to me, not only that she had just had a baby in midair but that there she was on her feet, normal and capable. The pilot came out of his cabin. A tall man with an easy air, he told us it was a baby boy, and both mother and baby were fine.
His American humor emerged. “Been flying a long time and this is a first for me!”. We, the Nigerian passengers, laughed with a shared sense of delight, as though by being present we had somehow shared in bringing this baby into the world. The American flight attendants were baffled.
“The mother said she was 24 weeks gone, but that baby looked full-term. Why would anybody take the risk?” one asked. We did not ask why. The new mother was travelling alone, nobody knew her, and yet we felt as if we did. We speculated about her circumstances. She probably had visa problems, got her visa later that she’d planned, or perhaps she had not planned it early enough, or maybe the chance to go to America emerged late in her pregnancy, and she’d chosen to do what she had to do because the sparkling worthwhile end was an American-born baby. I thought of her expression as she exited the plane, more frustration than worry, a lament for the American passport that now would not be. Some passengers joked about her poor luck.
“Now she has a Senegalese baby, ah, this is bad market for the baby!” one said. “A Senegalese passport is still better than a Nigerian,” another countered.
“They will give a Senegalese person a visa before giving a Nigerian.” “Good that the baby waited for the flight to take off, do we even have the right emergency services in Lagos airport?” someone else asked. We chuckled. Good will swirled among us.
Thank God it ended well, many people said, thank God. Risk taking was familiar to us. For too many in our world, this was the norm: the lack of choice and the dependence on chance. Again, the pilot’s voice brought news. A tire had deflated, and the airline did not have the resources in Senegal to fix it in time. We would have to spend the night in Dakar. As we left the plane and got into buses, we sent text messages and grumbled about the inconvenience of arriving a day later than planned. Still, the complaints were light-footed because what mattered was that the birth had gone well. In the hotel, some passengers posed for pictures by the fountain; why miss a good photo opportunity in a fellow African city they otherwise might never have visited?
“Please, my sister, do you have any sleeping pills?” a stranger asked me.
The next morning, slightly disoriented and starved of sleep, I skipped breakfast. When I finally went down to the lobby, most of the crew and passengers were gathered, waiting for the airport bus, faces dull and unrefreshed, voices a muted murmuring. As I joined the group, a woman asked me if I had heard.
“Heard what?” I asked.
“The baby died.”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a renowned novelist, the author of three novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), of a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008).
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