Idyllic Kaduna

I realised today that it has been a week since I posted something new on my blog and even worse, I couldn’t think of anything to write about nor did I feel like I gave enough of a damn about anything to actually blog about it. So I reached out to fellow blogger Noni Moss for some help. After a few rather unhelpful suggestions: Her: ‘Write about politics’. Me: ‘Erm okay, vague much?’ She e-mailed me this rather good suggestion: ‘You can blog about your experiences in Nigeria - North vs. South. Give us southerners and typical Lagosians an insight into life in the North that is otherwise a clouded stereotypical view of bush illiterate Northerners with no amenities’. After I had finished bristling at that description of the North, I laughed and started write, so thanks Noni Moss!

I’m not going to compare the North and South because they’re very different, and also, I only lived in the South (Lagos) for a year so I don’t think I could write an informed piece about what it is like to grow up there.

I was born in Kaduna and spent the next nine years of my life there. What did I like the most? Well for starters, I loved our house. It wasn’t the biggest house in the world, but it is the only house that my dad actually built (that I know of and that I lived in). It was a bungalow (my parents didn’t think steps were safe for children) that in itself was very quaint but the absolute best thing about that house was the garden. My dad was the first to build in that part of Kaduna and he had secured a huge piece of land. Our house could have fit into the garden about ten times. It had a gravel road leading from the gates to the garage and behind the garage were the boys’ quarters. We also had a chicken farm, a farm that my grand dad set up for us when he came to visit, a strawberry patch, a small vineyard and our absolute favourite to play in, two pagodas linked together. One of them had a bar and we had all our birthday parties in them. We also played in them incessantly and it was the first place all our friends wanted to go to when they came to our house. We also had four dogs; Stella, Lina, Peggy and Speaky and a cat; Jemaima in the years we lived there. Jemaima was a Siamese cat who had been castrated and as a result was enormous. We had taken her and Stella in from some British friends of my father’s who were moving back to England and she never ever liked anyone except my father. We never saw her except for when my dad came back from work. He would go to his room, take off his shoes, go and sit in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him and one of the house girls would bring him his food. Then, and only then, would she come into the house and sit on his outstretched feet. And as soon as he finished eating, she would get up and leave the house to return the next day at the same time.

I loved that house!

But it wasn’t just the house I loved. Kaduna was a great place to grow up. We had so many opportunities I don’t know if we would have had if we had lived anywhere else. We took French lessons at Alliance Francais and had piano lessons down the road from there. We had Sunday lunch at the rugby club and had Karate lessons and ate suya at Kaduna Club. We took swimming lessons at Hamdala hotel and had English breakfasts with our favourite uncle at the Durbar hotel when he was in town. We watched my dad perform in ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ at the British Council. He was the peddler in one and the leader of the forty thieves in the other, if you’re interested. And we had so many amazing friends. Gosha and Danny, Susan, Samantha and Victoria, Sandra, Iko and Sylvia, all of whom we went to Essence International school with before my dad decided that the standard of education in private schools wasn’t up to scratch and sent us off to Air force school! Itohan, Ayo and Tunde, Isioma, Ogadi and Ngozi, Kaltume and Yakaka, Dili and Akalaka are all faces that made my childhood the amazing experience it was.

I know people talk about the North being backwards but I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment by any means. At the time, all the Northern factions of the embassies were based in Kaduna, Kano had an international airport, a cinema was built in Kaduna over 10 years ago and we had all the hypermarkets that are only just now springing up in Lagos.

I can’t possibly talk about my childhood without talking about Zaria. My Yaya and Papou (Grandma and Granddad) lived in Zaria and we spent all our school holidays there playing with the Greek boys that lived round the corner and eating my Yaya’s famous home-made ice cream while they marvelled at the fact that we would watch ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Oklahoma’ at least once a day everyday without getting bored. They had one house as well that stands out as being amazing to stay in. It had gorgeous rosebushes and a tire swing round the back. My Yaya is always telling us the story about how Papou was supposed to take us for dinner to our favourite Lebanese restaurant one evening and he came back really late from the farm so by the time he had a shower and drove us to the restaurant we were ravenous. Being the little impatient children we were, we filled up on the bread and hummus and by the time the main meal arrived (huge chicken kebabs if I remember correctly), we were stuffed and had even fallen asleep. Since we didn’t touch our food, my Yaya asked my Papou to ask the waiter to wrap it up so we could take it home with us. My Papou, being somewhat shy, didn’t want to say it was for the children so he said we wanted the left overs for the dogs. No harm, no foul … till the next afternoon when Yaya unwrapped the package in the fridge to serve it to three children and found out it was a pile of bones. I guess the poor people in the restaurant were like ‘Look at these yeye white people, they want to take good meat and feed it to their dogs, please jo, dogs eat bones!’

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m adamant that I’ll never ever move back to Nigeria. What they don’t know is that I’d move back in a heartbeat to Kaduna if it had remained exactly the same as it was when we grew up there.