Enugu April 11th 1972
Yesterday we arrived in Enugu, capital of the newly created East Central State of Nigeria, after travelling for about ten days since leaving Kaltungo on April 1st. We stayed for several days with the chief Game Warden at Yankari Game reserve, a VSO named Dave Ball. At Yankari there is a beautiful warm spring, - the Wikki Spring – where the water temperature is about 90 degrees F, just cool enough to keep cool, but not so cold you can’t stay in the water for most of the day! The record was 13 hours, till 3.00 a.m. in the morning. One morning we went for a game drive – or rather I did, as Clive, the VSO from Yola who I’m travelling with - was suffering from a headache. We saw just about everything apart from lions and elephants - hartebeest, deer, roan antelopes, crocodiles, buffaloes, cougars and so on. By mid afternoon Clive had recovered and we went again, this time seeing a herd of over 50 elephants. We stayed here for four days, feasting on Hartebeest for dinner each night – it was and soft and tender as fresh breadcrumbs, a welcome change from the leather-like goat and dog meat you get in Kaltungo market.
From Yankari we drove on to Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State. We stayed here longer than anticipated as a vital screw on Clive’s Suzuki had lost its thread and he had to get it re-threaded. Jos was much cooler than Kaltungo – we even had a rainstorm on the way, the first rain I’ve seen since in four months since arriving in Nigeria, apart from a freak five-minute downpour last January. The climate in Jos is cooler all the year round and you can actually get fresh strawberries and cream, though at the somewhat extortionate (by Nigerian standards) price of 8 shillings a pound. We had a look round Jos museum and went to the cinema two nights in a row. Then we set off for to the south heading towards the former short-lived breakaway state of Biafra. The road south from Jos to Makurdi is unbelievably awful, even by Nigerian standards, for around 100 miles. It’s a dirt road with huge corrugations and enormous potholes, not to mention great rocks sticking up in the middle of the road all over the place. On one section the surface was so bad it took 3 hours to go 40 miles. Fortunately we had met a couple of volunteers from Lafia while we were in Jos and they had invited us to stay the night. I had a slight touch of fever – the mosquitoes in Jos really bite you to death – so I took a massive dose of Nivaquine and went to bed at six in the evening. This seemed to do the trick, as when I woke up at 6.00 am the following morning I felt as right as rain again, so we carried on that day to Oturkpo. We had the address of a VSO at Jesus College in Oturkpo, but he and the other volunteers at the college had locked up and gone off to Calabar for the week, so we stayed the night in a Methodist Rest House – quite spartan, but with a fridge and a cooker, and all for 3/9d each for the night. We cooked our own supper then got invited over for breakfast by teaching couple from Yorkshire, John and Betty Taylor, who had only been out here for a few weeks. By the time you reach Oturkpo there is a noticeable change in the landscape – the trees get taller, the grass lusher, and as we carried on yesterday to Enugu we really felt that at last we had reached the tropics, with palm trees and dense forest lining the road on either side. We’ve now passed through Tur country (round Lafia) and the Idoma tribe around Oturkpo and reached Iboland. In Enugu itself there are hardly any signs of the civil war – everything has been repaired at an unbelievable rate, and although there wasn’t a lot of damage here anyway (it was captured by the Federal forces fairly early on in the civil war) they certainly seem to have made a rapid recovery. There are still a few shell holes in the walls of shops and houses, and along the road we saw the battered remains of army lorries and tanks. When we got to Enugu we weren’t quite sure where we could stay, so we called on some CUSO (Canadian) volunteers who directed us to the house of a retired doctor from Canada who is now working as a volunteer at the University of Enugu. He has a massive house on the university campus and seems to keep “open house” for visiting VSO’s, CUSO’s and Peace Corps volunteers. You’d think on meeting him for the first time that he was the classic “absent-minded professor” – but apparently he is a world expert on brain surgery! We had dinner last night with another CUSO, Theodore Kay from Taiwan who teaches Pathology at the university. He told us that prior to the civil war the university was a breeding ground for the Biafran intelligentsia and had only been re-opened just over a year earlier, in 1970.
So far on our travels we seem to have avoided any serious mishaps. It wasn’t as terrifying changing to driving on the right as everyone had anticipated – in fact they have had police and soldiers on almost every corner directing the traffic. We had a spot of bother yesterday in a remote village when Clive went the wrong side of a bollard in the middle of the road and got threatened with being carried off to stew in a police cell in Oturkpo for a few hours. However after much pleading and grovelling apologies from Clive they finally let us go on our way. Usually when they stop you they are after the ubiquitous “dash”, but VSO’s advice is to stand your ground and not give in – although a few shillings might save endless delays and cost less in the long run!
18th April 1972 Port Harcourt
Since I last wrote we have done the south east and have now reached Port Harcourt, where we’re squatting in the house of a VSO who is, like us, away on holiday! We left Enugu just over a week ago and drove through the East Central (Ibo) State to Calabar all in one day. There was a superb new road, just like a motorway, all the way from Ugep to Calabar. We realised afterwards that we had hurtled past some interesting-looking rubber and palm oil plantations without stopping to take any photos, and we haven’t seen any more since then! The country in EC State is very different to the north, with dense tropical rain-forest and tall trees which have a canopy of leaves a couple of hundred feet up which blocks out the light and creates a closed-in, slightly oppressive, atmosphere. The villages are very diffuse – each house is surrounded by a little compound and has its own plot of land, so you feel you never actually leave a village and one village shades into the next imperceptibly. We spent a day looking round Calabar, an old slave port on the Cross River and a centre for early Christian missionary activity in the nineteenth century. The Hope Waddell Training Academy dates back nearly a century.
Then
The Reverend Waddell arrived in Calabar in 1846, accompanied by a teacher and a carpenter, and set up a Presbyterian mission station there. Several years after he retired and returned home to Dublin, the Board of the Mission in Scotland decided to commemorate his work in Calabar by setting up a school and naming it after him. Waddell, however, was unaware of the decision to name the school after him and never set eyes on this monument to his work, dying on April 18 1895, two days after the decision to establish the school had been taken. The Hope Waddell Institute was a prototype for a modern-day polytechnic, and offered courses such as printing and bookbinding, building and electrical technology, secretarial studies, and motor mechanics, with four units, a primary school and three specialist secondary departments an industrial department, agricultural department and a teacher training college. This was highly innovative at the time, when other schools in Nigeria offered only a very academic curriculum. Sadly today, the founders’ dreams are all but dead and the school operates like other secondary schools in Nigeria, offering a basically grammar school type of curriculum.
Downloaded/adapted from www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/travels/2005/feb/17/travels—17-02-2005-001.htm on 31.1.09
We took a trip up the river to a traditional village called Creek Town which had the most magnificent Portuguese-style decayed colonial mansions you could ever imagine. Creek Town, Duke Town and other settlements north of Calabar were founded by the Efik tribe who migrated south during the first half of the 17th century. One house with splendid Doric columns supporting the upper storey balcony had a tailor’s shop on the ground floor with a remarkable set of tailor’s dummies – a strange mixture of the humdrum and the extraordinary. The thing which struck us most about Calabar was how remarkably clean it was, no piles of rubbish burning at the sides of the roads, unlike most towns in Nigeria which are smelly, dirty and rubbish-strewn. We discovered later we should have go to see the grave of Mary Slessor – but by then we had arrived in Port Harcourt!
We stopped the night on the way here in Uyo, staying with a volunteer who’s been working at an Advanced Teachers College but is going home at the end of the month because they are overstaffed and don’t need him any longer. He took us for a swim in the river at a very pleasant spot called Abak, then next day we drove on to Port Harcourt. The town was quite badly affected by the civil war – you can still see the burnt out shells of various buildings, but otherwise you wouldn’t really know there had been major battles here. There is a midnight curfew. The first night we only left the house of a couple of VSO girls at 1.30 a.m. and got stopped by armed police every few hundred yards wanting to know where we had come from, where we were going and why we were driving during the curfew. Port Harcourt is absolutely swarming with soldiers – in fact virtually the entire Nigerian army seems to be quartered in the three south-eastern states. But its quite remarkable how quickly everything seems to have returned to normal, and how few physical signs of conflict are still to be seen.
We decided to go and visit a Canadian volunteer who lives right out in the Niger delta on a tiny island, only about a mile long, called Buguma, about 20 miles west of Port Harcourt. I took us two hours by boat to get there. The boat was supposed to leave at 11.00 a.m. but by the time they had loaded it up with wood and provisions it was getting on for 2.00 p.m. One boy had four large wicker baskets of bread, which he emptied onto the quayside in a large heap then proceeded to bang two loaves at a time together - we surmised to remove the ants and mildew - before putting them back into the baskets, now covered in dirt from the quayside as well! The Buguma islanders were a very friendly lot and the CUSO girl, Francis, seemed to be surviving remarkably well in extremely basic living conditions: she lives on a diet of garri, rice, yams, fish, oysters, prawns and snails! We had been asked by the British Council to grill the Principal of the school, the Kalabari National College, about what their facilities were like, because VSO is also thinking of sending a volunteer there. Apparently Francis was sent there in the first place as company for another Canadian volunteer who couldn’t stand being in such an isolated posting but finally cracked and had to be sent back to Canada. We would have really liked to visit Bonny or Opobo right at the mouth of the delta, but they told us it takes three days by boat from Port Harcourt and the boat ride is pretty gruelling. One bit of mangrove swamp looks pretty much the same as another, and even after only a couple of hours travelling to Buguma it was starting to get a bit boring, so I can’t think what three days through the mangroves would be like!
Now
Buguma today is a local government headquarters with 52 family compounds and a population of around 150,000. Each compound has a paramount ruler who oversees the affairs of the compound. The people belong to the Kalabari tribe. Buguma is one of the few riverine settlements in the region which is accessible by road. Traditionally the village depended on fishing and collecting periwinkles, oysters and shellfish from the mangrove swamps. Mangroves were used as building materials. But the coming of the oil industry to the Niger delta has destroyed the ecosystem and the habitats of marine animals and fish. The oil companies clear the mangrove swamps and forests leading to changes in the tidal currents, erosion and the destruction of the natural habitats, leading to a decline in the fishing catch, poverty, unemployment and environmental degradation. Since the Shell Petroleum Development Company began exploiting the oil reserves in the Delta, they paid compensation only for 5 years.
Downloaded from cas.umkc.edu/geo/LCAM/NIGER_DELTA/Pages/N_Buguma.htm on 31.1.09
Our next major objectives are Onitsha, where they used to be a famous covered market, the largest in West Africa. Onitsha was famous for its market literature, locally published pamphlets and books with titles like “How to Talk to Girls and Win Their Love” which were produced in the 50s and 60s, often in creole or pidgin, or using colourful non-standard English and racy plotlines. From there we plan to head for Benin, where they make the most beautiful carved wooden heads from ebony and other hardwoods, and also exquisite metal statues in bronze and silver.
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