Posts

I struggled to not slip into an overly pessimistic, dystopian view of Nigeria with all its troubles. In the few intervening years I have been away, the Nigerian tragedy has hit close home. As with most other people, it turned out that the Dana air crash had claimed a fairly recent acquaintance of my father’s as it did a couple of friends of friends of Sister #1. It also transpired that she - whether by some quirk of fate, divine orchestration, or plain old chance - had resigned from her poorly paid job as a doctor in the police officers hospital the Friday before the Monday Boko Haram’s bloodbath hit the IG’s offices. One day late and that could have gotten really personal. ...

MMA International On a clear, cloudless day, Amsterdam from above looks like a patch work quilt, its greenery criss-crossed by a network of canals, an endlessly repeating pattern; broken only by the shore line, and a little further out the silhouettes of oil rigs, an enduring monument to the Dutch pride of place in the scavenging of North Sea Oil. On the morning of my return to cold, wet and windy Aberdeen, I find myself half asleep, mentally pulling myself up by my very own bootstraps to remain awake as my City Hopper makes the hour forty five minute hop from Amsterdam to Aberdeen. Ever since an ever so slight snore embarrassed me a few years ago, I have tried to minimise future risks by limiting how often I fall asleep in public places. There were mitigating circumstances then - EJ might be best placed to tell if I indeed snore as a matter of course - I had stayed up all night studying just before a class test and I was very very knackered. ...

My return to Benin was less about closure than reacquainting myself with the past all over again. As feared, there was an immediate fall out from the wedding – the next morning, Mother was at the door of the room I was sharing with the kid bro wanting to chat, and there could be no uncertainty about what her primary objective was. It was thus expedient to engineer a move away to the relatively low pressure of Aunt G’s back in Benin. I had an official reason for upping sticks and bailing - chasing up transcripts for the Welding Engineering PhD I may or may not require after all. The other unofficial reason was to catch up with Cousin E and her baby, Dara, the fifth and final member of the clan born since the last time I was out here. ...

You know that the bride’s wedding gown will be ultra conservative as will be those for the bridal train. There will be no low cut, cleavage accentuating, eye candy-ish, strapless nonsense, and the hems will be at least an inch below the knee. You know that there will be at least ten different preachers – each with the belief that he is a colossus in his own right - and where both bride and groom are PKs, they might be nearer fifty than not. You know that the program will be tweaked to provide an opportunity for every one of them to do something – give a word of admonition, pray, or lead the reading of the vows, or take a thanksgiving offering. You know that every speech and every prayer will be interminably long, as though there were an unofficial contest with a prize for the longest, most colourful speech. You know that it will be baking hot, and dry, because the powers that be have ‘decreed’ that there will be no rain. ...

Deserted... The House on the corner of 3rd and 12th. The sun had began to lose some of its unblinking menace by the time my overloaded bus laboured up the final incline and began its descent into Ekpoma. Although we had made steady progress on the Lagos to Benin leg, navigating the maze of the Uselu - Lagos road and finding my way to the Big Joe motor park across town had taken a while and it was well past four pm before I found my not particularly comfortable seat on a bus to Ekpoma. ...

Hawker, Lagos Plan A was to catch a flight from Lagos into Benin and then a bus for the final leg of the trip to the small university town of Ekpoma, where the wedding was to hold, but the events of the last few weeks ensured that the one thing my mother insisted on was that the journey out of Lagos would be by road. I thus had to brace myself to navigate the tortuous 3oo km+ trip from Lagos into Benin with minimum fuss. ...

As I stand, satchel slung across my shoulder waiting for the call to board the KLM flight from Schipol to Lagos, I think back wistfully to a similar scene just over three years ago, when I stood within the Departures Lounge at the Murtala Mohammed Airport making the transit in the opposite direction. Then, as with now, it was a wedding - that of Sister #1 - that had lured me across the miles, outside the safety of what had been a year of near total insulation, back to Nigeria. In truth, the time and the distance have been mere blips on the timeline of life, but so total has the lostness been that it almost feels like I need to be reacquainted with everything all over again. ...

Back, knackered but thankful… To big resets, (almost) clean slates and ninth lives….

A few weeks ago when I sat down to identify the five or six things that would make 2012 the perfect year, one of the things that eventually came to the fore was carrying over zero holidays in to next year. That by itself shouldn’t have been significant, but between hoarding my holidays for what I thought would be quarterly jaunts westward and my eventual withdrawal into my time honoured silo, I ended up needing a flurry of trips late in the year to claw back what was a huge holiday backlog. Even that was not enough, I ended up losing four days having carried over the maximum seven days into the new year. ...

In one of those strange turns that life alone can throw up, one of the lasses the guys were trying to get me to hook up with a scant two weeks ago got married in Nigeria. I had ambled on to Facebook early on Sunday monday for a quick look around when I saw another friend had liked a picture on my stream. It was a picture of a dark skinned lady and a caucasian, so my interest was naturally piqued. Upon clicking further, it became clear that it was said lass getting married. Considering she lives and works in my city, there is no plausible explanation for all this being hatched and delivered in the two weeks since my buddy had tried to make the hook up. So much for his assertion that he was completely plugged in! ...