“People in my village in Katsina called me to say they had heard rumours of Ebola in Lagos. I told them it is not a rumour because from where I am sitting now, if I jump 15 times, I will land in the midst of the hospital

land in the midst of the hospital,” he said.

Baba, an elderly man who sells garden eggs at the intersection, and was listening in on the conversation nodded. “There were no cars here at the time, they all stopped coming,” he said. “If you see anyone around, it is one of the hospital staff.”

“Cars stopped coming,” Malam Ashiru said. “Even when they drop a passenger over there, the passenger would hurry and leave. Some people were looking at us as if we were corpses.”

Despite the looks, Malam Ashiru was not concerned about his own safety.

“That time, people stopped shaking hands. You don’t shake hands. But I didn’t care. Even now, I have no guarantee that I am going to live for another hour,” he said.

He recalled how both he, and the hospital staff, who sometimes strolled out for company, would sit and talk while passersby looked at them with wary as if they were already infected by merely sitting there.

“We were together with them before the outbreak, should we then turn our backs on them because of it?” Malam Ashiru said. Baba shook his head.

Hamisu Ado also nodded his agreement. He was sitting on a stool, next to Malam Ashiru and has been resident in Obalende for some years now. He remembered some healthworkers often came to spray the hospitals with disinfectants during the outbreak.

“Often, they came and sat with us here. We would gist and talk about everything. We had no fear,” he said.

When the outbreak started, Hamisu had travelled to his native Kano to see his parents. The news reached him there.

“They said it is in this very Obalende,” he said, “but I knew since it wasn’t airborne then the risk was minimal. I jumped in a car coming to Lagos to resume my business.”

There was something about the trader’s bravery, something Quixotic perhaps.

“I swear to you that at the height of it, I went to the hospital to fetch wood planks that a carpenter used to fix my table,” Malam Ashiru said. “The moment I was enlightened about how the disease is spread, I had no fears.”

Fear was something that spread faster than the disease in 2014. Hamisu recalled the trepidations of his parents in Kano.

“My parents called to ask us to bath with salt water because Ebola was going to be airborne. I told them that was false information,” Hamisu said.

They spent a while discussing the “salt episode,” sharing anecdotes of people who had been misled into drinking salt solutions and bathing with same to keep Ebola at bay. A good number of people died from high blood pressure caused by the consumption of high quantities of salt. Others had narrow escapes. Hamisu thought if the government had sensitized people properly about the disease, those deaths could have been avoided.

But it wasn’t all gloom for the traders. Among the things Malam Ashiru sells is bitter kola, a substance said to have some efficacy in preventing Ebola infection.

“Since the Ebola period, its value and price has never gone down and it is being exported now because it is thought to help cure Ebola,” he said.

As if on cue, he reached for his bag of bitter kola, offered a piece and passed a piece each to Hamisu and Baba. Using his teeth, he scraped off the brown skin and spat it on the floor.

‘These people tried’

Ever since he had been at that crossroad, Malam Ashiru had never seen any signage on the hospital. It was an exclusive hospital, he said.

“Anyone you see going to that hospital must have a bellyful,” he said, using the Hausa expression. “The hospital is expensive.”

He too, like Hamisu, Baba and Gabriel, seemed awed by the achievement of the hospital in fighting the outbreak. “Honest to God, these people tried in stopping Ebola,” he said, bowing his head and falling silent for an instant, as if in respect to the dead. Lives were lost. Other things were too. “There was a big fig tree here,” Malam Ashiru said. “They cut it down, because they were saying Ebola originated from animals and there were bats in the trees. They brought a machine and chopped it down. There were hundreds of bats in the tree, close to the bank there,” he said pointing.

After the outbreak, the hospital too was forced to lose its equipment that might have been contaminated by the virus.

“Some of the things were burnt in there,” Hamisu pointed in the direction of the hospital premises. “Others were carried away in trucks and destroyed.”

“We were here when they packed all the equipment from the hospital,” Malam Ashiru said. “Then they brought new ones. We were here when [Babatunde] Fashola [then governor of Lagos State] came to reopen the hospital. Areas boys gathered here in multitude.”

“He stood right here even,” Hamisu said, pointing at a spot on the intersection.

They watched life trickle back to normal at the busy intersection and eventually, they watched as people felt safe enough to start offering handshakes. Slowly, Obalende got its groove back.

Again the men fell silent. But in their faces, there was relief that it was over.

“We were here and Ebola came and passed,” Malam Ashiru said, looking at the street as if he could see the shadowy figure of the disease walking past.