Christmas

Christmas Day smelled of jollof rice and fried chicken. It was and still is the happiest time of my life. Most of my childhood Christmases were spent in the bustling city of Benin. With my mother far away in Abuja, my father at work six days of the week and my older siblings practically ignoring me, there was ample time to mix with the area children,...

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The Hand That Giveth by Rakiya Galadima

Fall of 2007, at 3:25 pm, on a gloomy day, a beautiful, black girl in a pink woollen dress and a coffee brown sweater arrives at the busy Victoria Station from Brighton. As she awaits an interchange to Birmingham she discovers that she has lost her money. Confused, stranded without any money except a fiver, she is neither able to return to Brighton...

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The Village

The River Niger flows through my village in Delta State, from its source in far away Guinea, very close to my grandma`s miniature four bedroom cottage in Ashaka. I have no recollection of my first visit to Ashaka or of my grandpa who died soon after. I was only a few months old. My mother recounts the circumstances surrounding his death in one simple...

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The Death Clock By Ewologhene Marioghae

On one of my nightly rituals of browsing the internet after a busy day at work, I stumbled upon something called “The death Clock”. I opened the page and was greeted by the message “Welcome to the Death Clock, the internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second”. I paused as I contemplated keying in my details in order to...

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The Want Cycle By Rebekah Olayemi

When Aunt Stella asked me to be her guest blogger for the week, I thought long and hard about what to write. I was a bit rusty because it had been a while since I wrote a piece for “pleasure”, after all, the hustle has turned professional! (he he) God de o. Well, I thought long and hard, came up with a few ideas, did not pen them down and lost...

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The Return of The Girls

Last week, at Falomo Roundabout in Lagos, my car was almost hit by a dirty Danfo bus. As I expertly dodged the ochre-and-black stripes commuter bus, my gaze was drawn to a large group of photographs which surrounded the traffic circle like sentries. Numbering a hundred or more, they depicted a face with a red question mark at its centre, and a name...

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London

The first time I visited the UK, I recalled the story of a Nigerian boy who upon setting his eyes upon the city of London for the first time, asked innocently, " Na the London be dis? Why dem no paint am? " The first thing I noticed on the ride from the airport to my hostess' home, was the old buildings, some dating as far back as 2,000 years....

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Spare The Rod or Spoil The Child

Recently, American football star Adrian Peterson was indicted for whipping his 4 year old son with a tree branch, which he claimed was a method of disciplining the child. This got me thinking about how different the issue of discipline is here in Nigeria, how different it was when I was growing up.My parents, especially my mother was a believer in...

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The Hot Zone

A group of men dressed in space-suit-like outfits, cautiously throw a dead body into a grave, they pause only to toss in anything else they are wearing that came into contact with the deceased. There are no religious or traditional burial rites, no ceremony, no mourning, no family members, and no final goodbyes. It looks like a scene from the...

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Medical Marijuana

One of my earliest memories as a child was seeing a naked man for the first time. I was 5 years old.The man was not the least ashamed as he rummaged through the contents of a tall heap of rubbish at the end of the street. He was of medium height, very dark complexion, sturdy. His hair was long and bushy, even from some distance we could see the...

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Amsterdam-ed

The idea was born at 1.23 am at Schiphol airport. Almost at this same time last month. Born on a hard reclining seat, not at all comfortable, in one of the upstairs lounges where I lay huddled in my just purchased duvet, still in my jeans, socks, shirt and jacket. God was it cold! Finally, it was quiet in the lounge as my fellow travellers slept....

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