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I knew the holiday was going to be difficult, I just didn’t know it would be this difficult. My boyfriend and I had spent the final week of school complaining about the distance like two people who had just been informed that Nigeria and Ghana were now on different planets. “We won’t see each other
An honest little conversation about masculinity, image, pressure, and the exhausting business of proving you are a man. I have a question. Actually, I have several, and I promise I am asking them because I genuinely want to understand. Nigerian men, who are you performing for?Who is sitting in the audience?Who is keeping score? Because
I don’t watch the news.There, I’ve said it. I don’t watch BBC, not Sky News, not Nigerian news, and not even those Instagram pages that wake up every morning determined to inform you that the world is ending. I don’t even open Twitter anymore…Or X…Or whatever we’re calling it this week. I have a very
University has a way of teaching you things that are nowhere in your course outline. It was a Thursday night and the weather was unusually cool, which in Lagos simply means you could sweat a little less than normal. Our room sat at the very end of the hostel corridor. Most rooms accommodated four students,
There are three things every Nigerian should avoid if they value their sanity. Going to the bank on a Monday.Driving when it has just started raining.And deciding to visit a local market after office hours. Guess which genius ignored the third one.Me. The annoying thing is that this whole adventure could have been avoided…If I
Dear Diary,I think Nigerians are allergic to straight lines. Not geometric lines, just queues. There is something about seeing people standing neatly, one behind another that awakens an irresistible urge in some of us to… improve the arrangement. You know the scene…Everybody has been standing there, some for ten minutes, some for thirty, and some
I have been rehearsing this evening in my head for weeks, not because I’m shy, well…maybe a little. But mostly because I genuinely wanted this to mean something. I’ve been in America for a few months now. Long enough to know which supermarket has the cheapest eggs, long enough to stop converting every dollar to
Lessons I Didn’t Expect to Learn from the World Cup. Now, before some of you roll your eyes and say, “Ria, please don’t start talking football,” relax….This is not really about football. Football simply volunteered to be today’s classroom. The lesson is about life. By the time the World Cup reached the third-place match between
I have been thinking about houses lately, not because I suddenly have billions of naira to spend (unfortunately). No.I have been thinking about houses because of something I read about South Africa. In the middle of all the protests, the anti-immigrant sentiments, and the fear, there were reports of Nigerians and other African immigrants abandoning
I have been thinking about bride price, not because I am getting married tomorrow, Nigeria and I already have one complicated relationship; I am not looking for a second one immediately. But the subject keeps finding me.A conversation here.A marriage story there.A woman quietly saying, “He changed after the wedding.”A man loudly saying, “I paid