My Home Town

When I get asked 'Where are you from?' I'm not sure what answer to give, or even what answer people expect to hear. At least I don't get the follow-on question 'Yes, but where are you really from?' That's because I'm a white person living in the UK, though I was born in West Africa, a fact that several of my past girlfriends have used to wind their parents up. ("Well don't think you'll be bringing him home!") 

The traditional answer to the "Where are you from?" question used to be the place someone was born and spent their formative years, where they have family roots. It was so much more clear cut in the old days when social mobility was the exception.

Right now (at least since 2013) my home town is Blackpool, jewel of the north, but  my only real tie to the place - though I love it and it feels like home - is to the football team. It's why I ever came here at all, because a young lad growing up in West Africa 3,000 miles from the nearest English football league club has no natural affiliation, except that Blackpool won their only FA Cup in the year I was born and that has been good enough for me.

As for my original home town, and the house in which I spent those formative years, that was in a place called Afon, in Nigeria. You've never heard of Afon. It wasn't very populous in the 1950s and was described in the somewhat tribal chronicles of the region as an ancient “walled” town which has never been conquered in history by any other town. Its residents were mostly farmers and their families, the farms being spread around outside the town walls. The nearest big town was Ilorin, about twelve miles away. You've probably never heard of that either. 

our house in Afon, Nigeria, 1950s

During the time I lived in Afon, neighbouring Ilorin was about the size of modern-day Blackpool, population approximately 130,000. It had a royal chief (or Emir) who lived in a palace and whom I had the privilege of meeting when I was about four years old. It was the administrative and commercial centre of the region, with a Moslem law court, several large markets, including a night market, shops, hospital, high school et cetera. It still has an Emir in fact. His Royal Highness, Alhaji (Dr.) Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, is the 11th Emir of Ilorin. He ascended the throne in 1995. I may even have met him, for he would have been in his late teens when I was presented to his father. Afon and Ilorin are both in Kwara state, in southwestern Nigeria. (Google Maps if interested.)

Of course, Nigeria has changed almost beyond recognition since I was born and grew up there. Afon itself may still be relatively rural, a farming town of some 20,000 inhabitants, approximately the size of Penwortham or Buxton, but nearby Ilorin has ballooned from its 130,000 into a major city (Nigeria's 7th largest) with a population today of over 1 million. It boasts an international airport, contains Nigeria's largest university and now has a National League football club, ABS FC or Abubakar Bukola Saraki Football Club, named after the man who owns it. (Can you imagine Simon Sadler FC?)

Nigeria itself claims to be the wealthiest country in Africa. It certainly is the most populous, with some 230 million citizens (making it the 6th most populous in the world after India, China, USA, Indonesia and Pakistan). That wealth is largely built on its oil industry, followed by chemicals, machinery, food and drink, leather and textiles. Some assert it has become one of the most corrupt countries, with bribery rife. I don't know. I've not been back there since I was a boy, and have no desire to do so now,

Afon in the 2020s

As to why Nigeria was the land of my birth and Afon my home town, that was down to social mobility of a most specific kind. My father and mother were devout Christians who met shortly after World War II at an evangelical event in Huddersfield. He was training to be a minister of religion, she was a midwife. They fell in love and, fired by a belief that they had been "called by God", they decided to get married and offer themselves for missionary work in Africa. I suppose they were almost the last of a long line of well-intentioned Christians who had gone overseas since mid-Victorian times, to spread the word of Jesus and generally 'improve the lives' of the native peoples by building chapels, schools and medical facilities, all under the benevolent arch of colonialism. Nigeria was not yet an independent country when they embarked on their mission in 1951.

My father went trekking through the bush to all the villages and towns round about, converting people to Christianity. Many up to that point had been worshipping their ancestral tribal gods and getting their medical aid from witch doctors. Many others were Muslims whom he sought to persuade to change allegiances. He organised the building of chapels and schools for the new congregations of Nigerian converts. My mother ran the local medical centre and dispensary in Afon until my arrival, the first of their three children to be born there.

I suppose I had a happy enough though quite isolated childhood and all of my early years memories are of our big old thatched-roof bungalow (without electricity or running water), the expansive garden with its fruit trees, our pet peacock, ducks and rabbits, the constant warnings about snakes and scorpions, the occasional sightings of elephants and other wild life, and it always being warm, even in the rainy season. I just accepted everything, in the way children do. It never occurred to me to wonder why everyone was a different colour to me and my parents, or to question the fact that we had a gardener and a 'houseboy', the nearest I had to a friend. I learned to speak some Yoruba (the local language) though I've forgotten most of it. I was schooled at home, can still remember a time before I could read for myself and what a magical mystery books seemed until I mastered the skill. And I loved music, played on my parents' wind-up gramophone.  

But of course I and we never really belonged to Afon or the land of my birth. Roots, aunts, uncles and grandparents, were in faraway England. They used to send Christmas cards with snow on (how strange I used to find that) for our Christmas days were always hot and sunny. They would send books, football annuals and the like, and I was always conscious that we lived a somewhat exotic existence in our town of mud walls, thatched huts, red dirt roads, beds with mosquito nets on, and diet of yams, maize, groundnut stews, with  poultry, mangos, bananas and grapefruit from the garden..

picking grapefruit with my (pregnant) mum in our Afon garden

It was an unusual and in some ways quite privileged childhood. I never knew what cold was until we returned as a family to England, a much better option in retrospect than my parents sending us off to boarding school. But as I said earlier, I have never felt any desire to return to Nigeria. I follow the progress of their national football team with interest, and I enjoy the country's Highlife music (Fela Kuti, Prince Nico, Sunny Ade), but as for the rest, it has all changed so much. The best and worst parts live on in memory.

The very worst part of all was our house burning down and me having to watch it do so. That traumatic event has given rise to today's poem. Some burning grass from a nearby field had been carried about half a mile on the wind and landed on the tinder-dry thatched roof of our house, which went up in flames. 

I've titled the poem in reference to Morimi, the Yoruba goddess of fire. She got invoked when flames were used to prepare the earth for new planting. She was also known for deliberately setting the countryside on fire. So there's an irony somewhere in the fate of our Christian missionary house in Afon. We lost everything in that blaze. When nowadays I see footage of houses being consumed by wildfires as a result of global warming, I know just how those poor people feel.

Morimi Strikes Alight

A roar like motorbikes approaching

but the road is empty, no dust rising,

clear to the vanishing point. Yet still

they sound, nearer, louder. And then

smoke comes billowing down, spikes

of burning thatch, a rain of scorpions.

We leap up from the veranda, run out,

turn back to see the roof ablaze. I'm 4

and my house is on fire. We had just

started tea, my brother, mother and I.

Soon come shouts and men running,

our father, villagers, armed with cans

and buckets, anything to carry water

in a human chain from the water tank

to hurl it at the flames. Through door

and windows we see the thatch fall in

setting the whole insides alight. I fret

my parents might try to rescue things

but the fire is so intense, scorching us

as we stand and watch it, mesmerised,

horrified. If I have any concept of hell

it's just being realised before my eyes.

By evening, my home is a charred and

flickering shell. We all stink of smoke,

are smutted and thirsty, my teddy bear

burned, my books are ash, but we four 

are safe, if homeless. I don't know how 

we'll sleep tonight, or where we might.

our house in Afon after the fire, 1958

Ku ni ilera.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)