The okada motorcycle taxi has long been a feature of the urban landscape in
many West African cities. Some riders are even fashion icons. They provide a
fast way to get around gridlocked cities, and have spurred a wave of ride-hailing
innovation in the past couple years. Yet they also take part in a dangerous form
of travel; accidents and fatalities are common. During the past year, in Lagos,
there has been a battle between commuters who rely on this means of travel and
politicians who want to tamp down on the riders.
Joseph, the motorcyclist we meet in “Blood Rider,” a documentary by Jon Kasbe,
is an angel of life. Suited up in a black Fox Racing suit and red helmet, with the
city lights of Lagos reflected on his face, Joseph speeds against traffic and time
to deliver blood to a hospital. Danger and fear is not an obstacle here. “I can
remember the first time I rode a motorcycle. I was scared at first,” he confesses
early on in the film. “I saw my friends riding the bikes, and I was, like, they had
one head and I had one head also—if they can do it, then I can also do it.”
Weaving through the grain, and at times walking among stopped vehicles, Joseph
expresses only this learned calm, and an earnest, determined manner. Here, his
aim, and the drama at the center of the film, is to deliver blood to Deborah, a
pregnant woman who is rapidly losing blood.
The phrase “postpartum hemorrhage” is what came up in a Google search, many
years ago, when Temie Giwa-Tubosun went looking for what was killing women
in Nigeria. Born and raised in Nigeria, she moved to America at the age of fifteen
to join her parents, who had won the green-card lottery and studied there. She
would go on to work as a health professional with the United Nations
Development Programme and the World Health Organization before resettling in
Nigeria as an adult. In 2014, Giwa-Tubosun herself had a close encounter with
death in the delivery room, despite having access to resources and giving birth
to her son in a hospital, in Minneapolis. She was perfectly healthy before
becoming pregnant, but experienced a number of complications—preëclampsia,
eclampsia, and then gestational diabetes. Her son was born prematurely. What
was supposed to be a straightforward process—an ancient, joyous one to be
celebrated and remembered—turned frightening. “It was one of those moments
when you know your life has changed,” she told me. She made a promise to
herself to focus on maternal health care.
More than six hundred women die every day while giving birth. Nigeria has one
of the highest maternal-death rates in the world. (The U.S. is among the
highest for developed countries.) Taking these numbers almost as a personal
affront, Giwa-Tubosun began the One Percent Project, collecting blood donations
and finding health facilities with excess supplies “about to be discarded,” then
delivering them to patients in need. Over time, the project became LifeBank,
which began managing real-time data to connect blood to hospitals and patients
and organizing its swift transport, by motorcycle and other means, on streets
clogged with traffic. “Blood is a living thing,” Giwa-Tubosun explained to me. “And
has to be kept in a certain way.” Few hospitals are equipped with the infrastructure
to keep it, and, for those that can, power outages and other system failures often
put the stored blood at risk. Since 2016, LifeBank has expanded to seven states
in Nigeria, and also to Kenya. By its count, the organization has saved ten
thousand and four hundred lives.
The lockdown measures that came with COVID-19 brought both challenges and
opportunities to LifeBank. Given concerns about exposure, all the riders and other
staff members had to move into the LifeBank headquarters. “There are babies
still being born,” Giwa-Tubosun said. With its large amount of data and know-how
already in place, the organization has been able to oversee the movement of
medical samples, medicine, and tests across Nigeria, including large trucks of
oxygen to support intubated patients. Giwa-Tubosun remains optimistic about this
moment. The pandemic, she said, had opened people’s eyes to what the needs
are and where there are holes to be filled in the system. “We have a better sense
for how to move testing kits around, gather inventory information about critical
things, figure out how to get people oxygen,” she told me. She is now thinking
about establishing a first-response infrastructure. “This is the generation and the
people we have been waiting for,” she said. “We can solve entrenched and
uncommon problems.”
Anakwa Dwamena is a former member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.