Wetin an wetin
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 23/Jun/2010 22:55, 34 days ago
So, I jabbered on about the travelling last time but didn’t actually mention anything about our three day stay in Akwanga, which was the point of it all – and actually the best thing about the whole incredible experience thus far. Akwanga’s quite a rural place, certainly compared with the vasty boulevards of Abuja.  We were staying with Lucy, who works at the College of Education there and has a flat like the other lecturers.  Mostly (though not entirely) the lecturers are male, so their wives work as cleaners, and most have a small plot of land on the college’s considerable estate which is covered in a range of crops.  We went for a walk through those fields.  In one sense, they look really European– at the moment mostly still growing yam and millet – just very green individual plants stretching on in neat rows for acres, with buildings in the distance and mountains beyond that.  But, in a much deeper sense, it feels completely other.  Maybe it’s just that the bird sounds and leaf shapes are different.  Maybe that a number of individual trees are left to grow in the middle of crops, so there isn’t quite the neat rigidity of our setup.  But I think that, for me,  the whole environment smells, sounds and tastes absolutely, fundamentally alive and potent.  It reminds me of a bit in‘The magician’s nephew’ (prequel to ‘The lion, the witch and the wardrobe’) when the earth itself is alive, and has a very rich flavour for Diggory and Polly, the kids from tired, grey London. On that walk, we passed through a Fulani village (established before the land belonged to the college, and so‘permitted’ to remain there) – a group of about ten round huts (most for storage rather than living in) with walls of mud brick, I think, and rooves of thatch, most of them twisted to a point at a cheeky angle.  As we walked on past their water hole, a young man joined us, walking to his own village, and he generously explained the crops and ways of life as we passed.  Incredibly (to my limited comprehension of such things) it’ll rain so heavily in August that the land we walked over – mostly bone dry even after a violent storm the preceding evening – will become a paddy field for a small crop of rice.The Fulani are a nomadic, strongly Islamic tribe of herders and traders– it was probably them who brought Islam to the north of what is now Nigeria from across the Sahara in the fifteenth century.  They have small herds of the kind of thin, white, horned cows that (in my mind) are more associated with India.  So (now) the men and boys are mostly somewhere with the herd, away from‘home’ for weeks and months at a time.  Just about 10 minutes walk from their village were a few linked settlements of Christian Hausas (the Hausa are generally Muslim too, but not all are), in more permanent homes made of mud bricks.  It’s incredibly hard to not just see these as picturesque: there are goats, with playful kids, and hens all over the place; gorgeously dressed women pounding yam in mortars with massive, shoulder height pestles; and many, many beautiful children some of whom won’t have seen white people before andall of whom are fascinated and frightened in equal measure of these weirdos.  I’d imagine that Roman Abrahamovic would be delighted to know that one of them was sporting a Lampard shirt from a couple of seasons ago.Anyway, that was that wonderful walk– and I haven’t even mentioned the wildlife!  I think Jen’s slightly concerned that I might become a geeky stereotype, interested in nothing but birds and butterflies.  But, really, they’re so beautiful and active and varied – and their dawn chorus is really intense; songbirds in Britain make a lovely, tuneful noise which I always find it hard to understand as the territorial storm of battlecries and sexual predation which it is.  But here, I can really believe in competition– desire for space, for mates, to be heard and acknowledged.  Some are similar (there’s a very pretty small dove which makes various sounds, one similar to a wood pigeon), but they’re mostly raucous, rhythmic cries.  I’m already yearning for books – one each on birds, butterflies, basic flora, and reptiles / small animals in general (the lizards are just brilliant: leaping, press-up making, cheery little fellas).  Probably best that I don’t get even one, though.  I’d never speak to a person again. Right, one more thing from Akwanga and that’ll be enough.  It was obviously desperately important to watch the football (key to any conversation, and most meetings, here– we’re both already plotting the metaphors and diagrams for training / management / teaching), which we did next door to Lucy with the Apache (that’s obviously not how it’s spelt) family.  The football (both Nigeria’s and England’s second games) was obviously brutally miserable to the point of tedium – like reading Dryden while Browning is recited in the background – but the family summed up much of the joy I’ve felt here.  They were massively relaxed and welcoming– not in that kind of tiresome British way which makes the whole encounter some kind of nervy dance over biscuits, but in a way which just felt like being at home – only with tons of beautiful, laughing children and slightly battered furniture.  I think I was fully prepared to be capable of engaging with and entering into a different / many different cultures here - most people I encounter make me feel like an alien anyway, so it wouldn’t be anything new – but I was never really prepared to feel so comfortable, so entirely happy, here.  Maybe that’ll change when work starts, but somehow I think that tedious, pointless, endless meetings and massive professional frustration won’t feel so unusual for me… (I’m trying to put a different phrase from Pidgin or Hausa aseach subject, mostly because I can never think of good titles, and they mostly won’t have anything to do with what I’ve written.  But this one– in Pidgin – means ‘what and what’; used when there’s lots to ask about.  e.g.‘wetin and wetin dey happen?’  I trust that these entries will become shorter as I get more used to enjoying most moments of life.  This one’s taken so long I have little ditches of laptop sweat on each leg.)