The Queue

The queue formed on Tuesday morning outside the municipal building and by Tuesday afternoon it had gone round the corner, and by Wednesday it had a name.

People called it The Queue. Nobody called it anything else. Attempts to establish what it was a queue for ran into a difficulty, which was that everyone in it had joined because it was there.

This sounds like idiocy. It is not idiocy. Consider the position of a person arriving at the municipal building on Tuesday morning with a form to submit, finding two hundred people ahead of them, and reasoning — correctly — that whatever is happening at the front is happening to two hundred people who got up earlier.

By Wednesday the front of the queue had been at the front for a day and a half, and the municipal building had not opened, and this had become extremely awkward for everyone.

The man at the front was called Osei. He had come about a parking permit.

By Wednesday afternoon Osei had been interviewed by two local news outlets and had become, without seeking it, the queue's head of state. People brought him things. A woman from the flats brought him a chair, which he accepted, and then a footstool, which he felt was going too far and accepted anyway.

He could have left. He thought about it hourly. But there is a specific psychology to having been at the front of something for thirty hours, and the psychology is: not now.

On Thursday the queue developed an economy.

Kwabena, sixteen, discovered he could buy water at the shop for one price and sell it two hundred metres along the queue for a different price, and by Thursday evening he had four employees and a cart. A woman called Serwaa began charging to hold places, at a rate that rose with proximity to the front, which everyone recognised immediately as fair.

On Friday the queue had eleven hundred people, three food carts, an unlicensed but excellent barber, a lost property system, and — this is documented — a wedding.

The municipal building did not open on Friday either, because the municipal building had been closed since the previous Monday for the installation of a new counter system, a fact that had been announced on the council's website in a section of the website that no living person has visited.

Nobody in the queue knew this. Several people in the queue worked for the council. They had joined the queue on their way in and had not made it to the door.

By Saturday there were opinions about the queue.

The first camp held that the queue was absurd and everyone should go home. This camp was small, extremely loud, and entirely composed of people who were not in the queue.

The second camp held that whatever was at the front must be worth having, on the grounds that eleven hundred people cannot be wrong. This is not a good argument. It is, however, the argument that built most of civilisation, and it held the field.

The third camp — and this is the camp that ended it — held that it no longer mattered what the queue was for.

Serwaa put it best, to a reporter, on Saturday afternoon, and it was quoted everywhere:

"On Tuesday I was on my own in my flat. Today I know the names of forty people and I have a business. What exactly am I queueing for? I've got it."

The municipal building opened on Monday.

The staff arrived at eight to find four thousand people, a barber, and a queue-management system considerably better than the one they had spent a week installing.

Osei went in first. He got his parking permit. It took four minutes. He came out holding it, and four thousand people applauded, and he held it above his head like a trophy, and it was — he would say later — the single greatest moment of his life, over a laminated card permitting him to park outside his own flat.

Then everyone had to decide whether to go in.

Most did. It took two days. The clerks worked extraordinarily hard and were, by all accounts, magnificent.

But about sixty people did not go in at all.

They stayed outside. They said, when asked, that they had come to the front and found they did not actually want anything from the building, and that they would rather keep the bit they had.

The council, to its enormous credit, put in a bench.

The queue is still there. It is much shorter now — thirty or forty on a good evening, mostly regulars, the barber on Thursdays.

Nobody has ever established what it was for.

The prevailing view is that this was never the point, and that the people who keep asking are the ones who were not there.