Someone Else

Yankari Game Reserve

 

I’ll go back there some day, return and stand

underneath that row of gmelina trees,

I once dug at their roots with my own hands,

buried childhood treasures. Some memories

 

mixed in with the earth, inseparably twined

even then and more so now, turned to dust - 

as I too have crumbled, tumbled, groped blind

through miles of different grasses, chimneys, rust.

 

The town will have changed – in likely parallels.

Will she recognise my thumbprints, my footmarks?

Will I know the slopes of her surrounding hills?

Does the road home run straight past the Co-Op still,

the gmelinas still peel off their silver bark?...

I forget - that home belongs to someone else.

It has been a vague dream of mine for the longest time - to go back to the towns of the Sahel/Sudan Savannah in Northern Nigeria where I grew up. If you are a regular here, then you know me and my odd hankerings. Nothing new, just want to go home to Africa! :) That's one of the reasons why Fiji felt familiar, it combines many of the features of the Sahel towns of the previous century with a bit of modern internet and a different terrain.

The Net is a mixed blessing, because the satellite images are accessible, but I couldn't find anything there in the maps - my school has disappeared, the neighbourhood where we lived, the sports club, nothing is visible. Well, naturally - it's a long, long time since I was there. 

The population meanwhile has gone from 81,000 to 670,000 so everything must have been demolished and rebuilt to accommodate that growth.  I know I won't recognise a thing, but still, I just want to go stand there once. Unlikely in this lifetime as the security situation is not so great, travel advisories are firmly against foreigners' venturing there, so veering towards impossible. But one can hope. And dream on and write...