mmoa_writes

We travelled so much over the course of the holiday. I loved it, but my siblings didn't appreciate the heat (one afternoon in Onitsha market was actually insane. Everyone - including my aunt - was just excreting gallons of the stuff. It looked like we'd been caught in the rain which for Onitsha, is actually just as likely).

Starting from the furthest (erm... to Lagos), there was Enugu which was pretty much everything my aunt promised it would be. Once they get the inner-city roads worked out, it'll be wonderful. The governor has kickstarted Enugu's transformation with a public transport service, from which I suppose he can use the revenue to improve the roads... I hope. Otherwise it'd seem like the usual superficial solution, the sort espoused by Conservative(!) politicians - there's no good having amazing, air-conned buses when they can hardly travel around for want of decent roads.

Speaking of Enugu, I think one particular experience pretty much summed up why I'm such a leftie. After I learnt that the people living on our road numbered a couple of government ministers and businessmen from overseas, I started to get incredibly righteous about the state of our neighbourhood roads, saying that all it would take would be for all of us to get some local fund going and have the roads done as a collective. Turns out my beloved father - conservative that he is - had tried to get something similar going, but no one was interested. No one thought the work was necessary in spite of the fact that there was always a minimum of three blown tyres per day thanks to potholes and debris. It just goes to show, I thought. Sometimes you need government intervention because people can actually be just plain selfish. Makes me wonder why it's liberals and lefties that are always being called bleeding hearts whereas the first thing one accepts - if one considers government intervention a necessity, regardless of it's extent - is that human society is naturally flawed and humans working within that society aren't always out for their self-interest.

Anyhoo. Visited the National Museum of Unity (which admittedly sounds like an initiative from Stalinist USSR), which was both really amazing and utterly disappointing. Now, I know museums are never that popular with the people who actually live in the area, but we (I and my mother in this case) were the only people there - apart from our tour guides (another bit of silliness which meant I couldn't make as many notes as I'd have liked). It didn't help that the entrance fee is N150, which most locals would better spend elsewhere and the frequent power cuts left one in darkness a lot of the time, but even so. It was still very enlightening and some of the exhibits are fearsomely old - with all the new development in Enugu, I wonder how many other treasures are being inadvertently destroyed and thus lost to the museum. The masquerades in particular were very well preserved, for which I had only admiration for the museum staff.

The, err, 'giftshop' was a letdown. It had a stunning display of one feature, a badly printed paperback inventory of the Museum's contents, complete with a copy of each section's introduction. Did the museum have any links with local archaeology groups, University history/archaeology departments? Any access to papers on local history? Who knew, who cared. Well, that's cruel, because the tour guide certainly cared but without money, without any links outside the state... Let's hope Chime makes good his promise and starts getting some tourists/funding for that museum.

From the hill city of Enugu, down to Abagana, our family's hometown. We mostly rested here and destroyed/lost our laptops, iphones and itouch respectively. Didn't get to go to any of the shrines as I'd intended, but my mother promises for next time and my uncle (one of the few elders left so I am determined to ruthlessly squeeze as much history juice as possible out of him) has taken up - as a solemn duty - an archival of any family documents that are left, which will be easier now that everything is relatively calm within the clan.

Next came Onitsa, which was the most fun as this was where we were reunited with my mother's cousin for the first time in something like 6 years. She's had three children since then and gotten married to one of the funniest - and opinionated - guys I've come across. Our second cousins are all girls - Chiamaka, Amalachukwu and baby Chinyenye who we have decided is the cutest thing in the world:


We're not sure if she's actually cute or if we're under some sort of weird, hormonally-induced enchantment. She's currently at that weird teething stage where anything harder than jelly becomes a target for her overeager little mouth, including hands, knees, combs and laptops. Here, she is dining on my brother's shoulder.


The weather was generally stifling - humid as hell in Enugu which is expected, but Abagana was much warmer than it usually is in the rainy season. There weren't many floods either as far as I heard, though Onitsha market was incredibly muddy one one occasion. Bleargh. To be honest though, Onitsha is always muddy - I guess being on the banks of the river Niger can do that to a town.