My Journey To Nkanu East Maryanne E. Okeke   © Copyright 2026 by Maryanne E. Okeke

Photo by Teona Swift at Pexels.

The traveling was a rushed decision. My father's mother suddenly wanted to see us. If we had been informed earlier on, we would have traveled at the beginning of December as travel rates usually skyrocketed once Christmas was near. The rates that year were too much to pay -there were my parents, four brothers and cousin to consider. In total, we would spend almost half a million naira to pay for everyone. In the end, my father decided we would travel in separate cars. My cousin, two younger brothers, parents and I went in my father's car while my two older brothers and a hired driver, Ego, went in another car.

The journey started by 4 a.m. I remember my mother wouldn't stop talking about how angry she was that we didn't depart by 3 a.m, which was the originally agreed time. She also kept telling us not to make a noise in order not to alert our neighbors. Apparently, there was this fetish that they would send us evil charms -she specifically said 'juju'- if they found out that we were traveling. And so, that morning, we worked in silence, moving the few remaining unpacked items into the car and packing food items for consumption during the journey.

The journey began traditionally with a prayer led by my mother. Now, my mother usually organized prayers whenever we had to go anywhere. But that day, she unusually outdid herself -we prayed all the mysteries of the rosary! By the time we were done, hunger and sleep were already fighting in my head. Eventually, hunger won, and the Jollof rice and chicken we packed was opened up to be devoured.

While we ate, with the exemption of my father because he refused to let my mother feed him, I observed the places we passed and came to an undeniable conclusion: Lagos truly did not sleep at night as the saying went. As early as it was, with even the sun yet to rise, many people were already up and about.

Market women already had their goods on display, a majority of them being foodstuff shops and small canteens. Bus drivers shouted their destinations and prices over one another's voices while their conductors struggled to convince passers-by to board their vehicles. Motor park touts lurked everywhere, looking for unattended bags or phones to grab and run. Black market sellers -black market was what we called people who sold diesel and fuel illegally at a price slightly lower than gas stations- positioned themselves at the entrance of gas stations, convincing drivers and bikers to buy from them at a cheaper but much more messier price.

I remember a bus driver whom my father avoided colliding with. The man had gone out of his way to hit a stray dog and into our way in the process. My father had a brief argument with him. He explained that in his tribe, killing stray dogs brought good luck -I still do not understand this particular fetish- and my father let him go.

The rest of the journey till we left Lagos and probably passed some other states was a blur for me. I slept as soon as I finished my share of the Jollof rice and the road started revealing more bush areas than people.

The next time I woke up, my groggy eyes made out a crowded gas station and the car was no longer moving. My cousin had been the one to wake me up since everybody was coming down for a stretch of legs. She told me we were at Ore, in Ondo State and that we had passed Ogun State completely. My mother noted that the rice we packed had finished and my father was yet to eat breakfast. So, she suggested I followed her to the eatery behind the gas station to get more food while my cousin watched my two younger brothers. Ego was also there with my older brothers. They and my father went to find a usable toilet.

I simply cannot forget the eatery because I almost got reported as a missing child that day. As soon as we entered the eatery, I immediately told my mother that I needed to go. She was in the middle of scolding me and asking why I didn't speak up earlier so I would have followed my father when a waiter told us that the eatery actually had a toilet. I remember my mother's specific instructions: 'Urinate and come out quickly! Don't touch anything, even the walls and taps, just 'wee-wee' and come meet me here!'. I nodded vigorously.

I followed the instructions entirely. Well, almost entirely, till I discovered that the toilet had a device that poured soap on your palm so long as your palm was under it. Being the child that I was, I started to put my hand under it over and over again. The more soap it poured, the more excited I became. When my hands were filled with the greenish coloured liquid soap, it finally dawned on me that I needed to wash my hands at the tap. Suddenly my mother's words started to replay in my head, 'Don't touch anything, even the walls and taps...' My mother. I already spent almost over thirty minutes there! I raced back to the eatery. Where was my mother?

I rushed out of the eatery. I could hear the waiter shouting, 'shey o wa okay?' as I ran past her but I completely ignored her. She was asking if I was okay but there was no time to waste speaking. I even bumped into an elderly man selling paintings outside the eatery and fell down. He picked me up, dusting my clothes with his hands and speaking Yoruba.

'Nibo iya ati baba e?,' he asked me and I burst into tears. He was asking where my parents were but I was convinced I was lost. I heard my mother call my name at that moment. She was almost in tears too and she spoke with the elderly man for a while, saying mostly 'thank you' before taking me away.

I wasn't allowed to go down from the car again after that.

Somewhere between Benin and Delta states, we saw so many statues. Before then, I had never seen a statue in my life. But the roads there were decorated with massive statues doing different poses. My mother became so lost in the awe and taking photos that her phone nearly fell out of the window. My father took it as a sign and wound up all our glasses almost completely.

The sides of the road which had previously been lined by many people soon gave way to hills and dense vegetation. All that was visible was a highway that went on for miles with hills surrounding it. My father broke into a lecture of all the things he had experienced during his travel days and how 'experience was the best teacher only for a fool', urging us we to simply learn from his own mistakes. My mother kept nodding her head devotedly throughout his speech and I started to wonder what exactly she was doing.

My younger brother suddenly started whining about needing to pee halfway through my father's sermon. My father said we couldn't stop as robbery was rampant in closed areas like where we were at that time. In the end, he was told to pee in a bottle. My cousin and I had to close our eyes while he urinated. Later, we joked about the urine, tossing it around and calling it apple juice till my mother threatened let us all have a sip of our beloved apple juice. We were told to be quiet and sleep.

The next time I woke up, it was to loud arguments. My cousin told me as soon as I opened my eyes that we would soon be in Anambra -she had grown up there- and that she would show me Oji River in a while. We found out through eavesdropping that Ego had been pulled over by a police vehicle for over speeding. The police had let him off with a simple warning but my father would not stand for it. He told Ego that he would dock his pay if the incident happened again.

Our next stop was the Niger Bridge.

Evening was already settling in well by then. My mother started another prayer but it was only brief. The traffic before the bridge was hectic and the slowness of it allowed me to observe properly.

For the first time that day, I was extremely grateful for my life.

Usually, I was always complaining, comparing myself to everyone I thought was better than me but something about seeing children half my age moving quickly between cars to sell snacks, water, food and so on brought me to tears. There were children everywhere; many passed by our car windows. They were hawking wares dangerously, in between moving cars and running after some of those cars for their payments. A motorcycle hit one of the boys selling sausage rolls and zoomed off. People shouted at the rider as he zoomed away. The young boy simply got up, poured cold sachet water where his knee had been grazed and put his wares back on his head. People said a lot of 'sorry' but he just shrugged it off, like he was used to being knocked over.

We left the traffic after almost an hour.

I had never seen so much water in my life! The water was everywhere beneath us, taking up so much pace that I forgot about land for a bit. It was really a sight! I've never seen anything of the sort since then. My mother told us about River Niger and the Benue River. We even watched a few educational videos. I also remember a new bridge was newly being built then too though it was unfinished when we traveled so we couldn't pass it.

My cousin was unable to locate Oji River in the end.

After that was a lot of driving and more sleep. My mother bought a bunch of banana, some wraps of fried groundnuts and snail meat kebab in Anambra. We refused to eat the snail meat kebab. Thinking about it now feels quite silly, I love snail meat.

We arrived at the village the next day by some minutes past 1 a.m.

It wasn't until morning that I was able to see the village properly. My father's compound contained three buildings. The first building contained two rooms, one for his mother and the other housed his deceased father's grave. Beside it to the left was my uncle's story building where he stayed alone with his family. On the other side to the right was my father's bungalow where his last born sibling lived with his wife. In front of the compound was almost an acre of unused land. My uncles often talked about how we would develop the village after we finished schooling because the government listened to educated people. We always smiled politely whenever they said so.

My youngest brother took to the village quite easily. He even made best friends with my grandmother's four puppies and their mother. As for me, I had phobia for literally almost everything that moved in fours, excluding crawling babies, so I meticulously avoided all the animals in the compound.

The village was quite different from the city.

In the first place, the nearest market was almost two miles away and the people lived mostly on farm produce. The implication of this was that we were always cooking the same meals successively. Everyone seemed fine with the arrangement too. There were nights when I went hungry because my body refused to have the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another thing was that there was no proper sewage disposal. Hence, we had to go into the bush in large numbers to use the toilet. My mother warned us not to use the abandoned toilet in the house, but I still did and caught an infection.

Also, there were only two drums in the house and they were for fetching drinkable water so we all had to carry our dirty clothes in buckets to the village central well to do laundry once every week. I didn't like that we had to wash together with so many people and fetch water from the well so many times that my back would almost break.

The most annoying part for me was the lack of Internet! We had to go to the highest floor of my Uncle's story building and raise our hands as high as it would go -the building had no roof then- just to get little Internet access. It was frustrating, especially for me, because my school gave holiday assignments online.

Finally, everyone knew everyone else! They even moved around freely in one another's houses. I grew up in an enclosed home -our house literally has a high fence around it and we live alone- so I wasn't used to the constant barging in. Infact, many of the neighbors slept in our house because it as the only brick house in the area and the weather was getting cold.

On the bright side, I got to go to a village square for a dance festival! The dance festival is till etched vividly in my mind because before then, I had ever experienced anything like that.

There were masquerades, big and small, pretty and ugly. There was a particular masquerade nicknamed 'monkey no fine but him mama like am' because he was a masquerade greatly favored by the 'gods' but very ugly. There was also a lady dressed in white with chalk markings all over her that moved so gracefully it felt as though she was one with the wind. Children tied their mother's wrappers and wore their father's oversized shirts, feeling cool and bragging to all their friends. There were also so many drums covered in what I think should be animal skins.

I did not usually wear native clothes, unlike my siblings. My fashion sense always leaned more into English clothes. So, I went to the festival in a pleated skirt and basic top. Before then, I had never been stared at so much. I had never even known people could stare so much! But they all did. They also kept whispering, 'O nwa Sikiti', which is Igbo for 'she's a child from the city.'

One crew of skilled drummers called themselves the Ogene crew. I noticed that their drumming style was a little different and more rigorous than the normal drumming. The elderly women did a dance performance to the drumming and people cheered loudly, throwing money at their feet. I asked my mother why they didn't spray the money on the women and she told me it had been banned after the death of a famous Igbo musician from 'juju money'.

The flute performance was the best part of the event. It reminded me somehow of DaVinci and I wished the flutist would get exposure in the future to monetize his talent.

All that time, we had been in my father's side of the village. Later on, we visited my mother's side. The difference was clear.

Both my maternal grandparents, two of my maternal uncles and one of my maternal aunts were deceased, giving the compound this eerie feeling. I didn't even know until one night, during a family discussion, when my mother had old we were sleeping on her father's grave. It was custom to bury a man in his room and a woman by her door in the village. My uncles' graves were in different parts of the yard. Unlike my father's compound, my mother's was divided into two since her father had married a second wife.

My mother's side was more advanced than my father's somehow. There was Internet connection and phone calls could be made. There was also a personal well so we didn't have to do community washing. The market was a stone's throw from the house; we didn't have to repeat the same meal so often. But the dogs were almost ten and there were cats too. And the trees in the compound shed too many leaves so we were always sweeping.

I did not like my stay there because of my cousins.

We had all grown up in Lagos, in the West, while a majority of them had grown in Anambra, in the East. So, they were forever finding faults in everything we did. I remember the time we went to gather firewood for cooking. One of them threw a piece of wood at me that cut my finger. When I started crying from the pain, the others laughed calling me a 'weak Lagos child'. Another time, I almost got carried away by the strong currents of a river we passed on our way to carry plastic chairs for my aunt's grocery shop.

I don't remember being angry, just constantly confused and wondering what I was doing wrong again.

Our trip came to an abrupt end when I suddenly fell very sick.

I had already been in poor health before the journey, it was just manageable. The illness started as common cold and took many different directions. The diagnosis kept suggesting a different illness. One said appendicitis, another said changes from just beginning my period cycle, yet another said chronic typhoid and much more. At some point, my mother concluded that hospital treatment in Lagos would be better and finalized my father's pending decision to go home.

I can't remember anything of the journey back home. I was on many drugs, most of which made me drowsy. Though, I do remember that Ego's two ones joined my older brothers on the journey back. His car got pulled over again for over speeding and my father docked his pay by half as promised. My cousin also got carsick and she threw up so many times. Besides those, I was probably sleeping or subconsciously mouthing 'Amen' to my mother's incessant prayers.

The house felt too small when we got back home and I recall wondering if the building shrunk, we grew or we had just simply been outside of it for too long.

It's been five years since I last traveled to the village. My father says we won't be going again until 2030 and my older brothers argue that they won't be going again at all if the village doesn't undergo a major infrastructural development.

I'll still go even if it doesn't. I like the feeling of traveling.