In Calabar, southeastern Nigeria, the roadside has become the recurrent setting of rumours. While the unknown taxi driver was once the archetypal villain in these urban legends of brainwashing and stolen Naira, a new genre of roadside rumour is emerging in which young women and their anonymous lovers are the main protagonists. In these tales, young women waiting on the roadside for a taxi are said to be actually trying to enchant a male driver into giving them a lift and also lavish sums of money. In other enigmatic stories, young women who get lifts from unknown men, in so doing ignoring the advice of Pentecostal pastors, become the victims of occult attacks. Mundane yet dangerous, the roadside - and the mobility it offers - hence provides the master backdrop for residents’ moralising efforts about an insidious threat to urban living: young women’s sexuality.
Focusing on stories of roadside encounters, this paper explores how young women cultivate an image of feminine respectability in urban Nigeria. As the city’s Pentecostal churches demand singletons to be chaste yet materially blessed, young women must negotiate the tensions of concealment and revelation, private and public, if they are to stay out of others’ gossip. Yet, as this paper argues, rather than shying away from rumour, gossip and other forms of uncertain information, young women actively engage with them, using the spoken word to fashion themselves as ‘good’ Christians. Engaging with anthropological theories of gossip and rumour, this paper demonstrates how people create social truths about themselves amid uncertainty.