In another life, I was the proud child of a humble village, so humble it could hardly tell the difference between endurance and blessing. We called it Okokomaiko of the Hills. It was a name spoken with the kind of reverence people reserved for places that have survived themselves. Outsiders, hearing it for the first time, often imagined rolling green slopes and cool evening winds that carried the smell of wet earth. But in truth, there were no hills. Only refuse. Mountains of it. They grew with a frightening obedience to the rain, as though every storm had been sent on assignment. Each rainy season delivered its own contribution: crumpled nylon bags that clung to one another like frightened birds, heaps of soggy garri dissolving into paste, broken spoons and buckets, torn school uniforms and bathroom slippers, secrets wrapped in black cellophane and thrown away without ceremony.
By August, the mountains rose higher than the zinc roof of our only school. They blocked the sun with the confidence of things that knew they would never be challenged. Morning light arrived late to us, filtering through slowly, reluctantly, like a visitor who had second thoughts. And when it did, it came thin and tired. Our classrooms stayed in shadow, their cement floors damp and smelling faintly of rot and chalk dust. We sat at our wooden desks, our bare legs swinging, our exercise books open.
To us children, learning under those shadows felt like studying inside caves. Sometimes, when the wind blew hard, the smell would find its way in—sharp, sour, and alive. It wrapped itself around our noses and stayed there, refusing to be ignored. Our teacher would pause mid-sentence, her eyes watering, but she would continue anyway, because stopping would mean admitting something none of us had the language to confront. Outside, the flies owned the afternoon. They rose in black clouds, settled, rose again. They understood this place better than we did, but we did not complain. Not because we were brave. Because we did not know complaint as a language available to us.
Complaint, we believed, belonged to people whose lives could be rearranged by the sound of their own voices. People whose fathers knew where to go when something was wrong. People whose mothers expected answers from the world. We had none of those expectations. To complain, you must first believe someone is listening. Who would we complain to? The mountains? The rain? The government officials who drove past with their windows rolled up and their eyes carefully fixed on somewhere else? Or to our parents, whose backs were already bent under burdens we could not see, whose silences were their own kind of prayer?
So, we endured.
And because we endured long enough, we learned to call it blessing. We ran barefoot along the narrow paths between the refuse hills, our laughter rising above the smell. We played football with balls stitched from old cloth. We chased one another until our lungs burned and our shadows stretched long and thin beside us.
We were experts at surviving the world we were given. We believed, with the stubborn faith of the young, that this was simply how villages were. That somewhere, beyond the mountains, there existed another version of our lives—but it belonged to another life, not this one. And still, when people asked where I was from, I lifted my chin with pride.
Okokomaiko of the Hills.
I said it as if it were the most beautiful place on earth. The elders, with their cracked voices and tobacco-stained teeth, swore those piles were proof of our abundance, as they called it. They said it with the authority of people who had buried too many disappointments to start questioning the ones still breathing. “A rich village must have waste,” they often declared, their heads nodding in slow agreement, as though they were witnesses to a truth the rest of the world was too foolish to understand. They would sit on their low wooden stools beneath the tired shade of the udara tree, their walking sticks resting across their laps. When they spoke, the younger men and the women listened. Their words did not need evidence; age itself was their evidence. They pointed at the towering heaps with something close to pride. “See how it grows,” one of them would say, squinting into the distance. “Only a place that has plenty can afford to throw things away.” The others would murmur in agreement.
Plenty.
It was a beautiful word. Round and generous. A word that made your stomach feel temporarily full. They spoke of the refuse as though it were a harvest. As though it had been planted deliberately, tended and grown as a sign of divine favour. And we, the children, listened. Because children will inherit any story that makes their home easier to love. I was small then. Small enough to believe that belonging was something you earned through agreement. So, I agreed. I nodded when they nodded. I smiled when they smiled. I swallowed their words whole, without chewing.
I believed that the smell was the scent of prosperity. I believed that the flies were simply proof that life, in all its forms, had chosen to gather around us. I believed that we were lucky. I believed it until the harmattan wind shifted one afternoon. It came without warning, dry and restless, moving like an old spirit with unfinished business. The air turned thin. The sky lost its colour. Dust rose from the earth and hung in the atmosphere, undecided. I was standing behind our house, drawing aimless shapes in the sand with my toe, when the wind changed its mind.
It carried the smell to me. Not the familiar dull smell we had learned to live beside, but something sharper. Something intimate. It was the sour perfume of rotting beans. And beneath it, heavier and more honest, the unmistakable stench of dead rats. The smell did not arrive politely. It entered me. It forced its way into my nostrils and settled there, thick and undeniable. I froze. My body understood before my mind did. My stomach tightened. My throat grew hot. My eyes watered, not from emotion but from recognition. For the first time, the refuse did not smell like normal. It smelled like truth. I remember looking at the mountains then—really looking at them, as though I had never seen them before. They did not look like abundance. They looked like something abandoned. Something unwanted. Something left behind by people who had the privilege of leaving things behind.
In that moment, the elders’ words began to loosen inside me. Not all at once. But enough. Enough for doubt to enter. Enough for a crack to form in the story I had been living inside. That was the day I learned that not all abundance is worth celebrating. Some abundance does not feed you. Some abundance does not clothe you. Some abundance does not protect you. Some of it only gathers around you, growing larger, heavier, more impossible to ignore. Some of it smells like survival. And once you have smelled it, truly smelled it, you can never again pretend not to know the difference.
I grew up watching our leaders hold their grand council meetings under the old mango tree. It stood at the centre of the village like a patient witness, its bark scarred and peeling, its branches stretched wide in permanent surrender. If trees could speak, that one would have cleared its throat many times and told them all to go home. Its roots, thick and stubborn, pushed deep into the earth as though searching for truths the men sitting beneath it had long stopped looking for. Those roots were more reliable than any promise the elders ever made. They arrived slowly, ceremonially, one after the other, dragging plastic chairs behind them like reluctant companions. The chairs always protested—groaning, bending, threatening collapse—but they never quite gave in. There was something poetic in that: even the chairs knew how to endure weight without complaint. The elders lowered themselves into their seats with the heaviness of men accustomed to being watched. Their bellies came first. Round and full, like harvest moons, stretching the embroidered fronts of their agbadas into proud display. The fabric carried faint, familiar smells—gin, groundnut oil, old sweat, and something else too: the quiet comfort of being well-fed in a place where hunger lived openly. They spoke slowly. Not because they had nothing to say, but because saying it slowly made it sound important. At the centre of them all was Chief Nnanna.
Chief Nnanna, the self-acclaimed village philosopher. Chief Nnanna, the man who believed wisdom was something you could wear like a title. He always arrived last, as though timing itself waited for his permission. He would clear his throat first, then adjust his red cap. Always the cap. He treated it like a crown that needed constant reminding of its importance. Once satisfied with its position, he would lean forward, rest both palms on his walking stick, and begin. “My people,” he would say, his voice cracking at the edges like dry earth, “Rome was not built in a day.” He said it with solemn dignity. As though he had been there. As though he had supervised the laying of each stone with his own hands. The other elders would nod immediately, eagerly, relieved to be handed a sentence that required no further thinking. They repeated the words under their breath like a prayer.
“Rome was not built in a day.”
“Rome was not built in a day.”
“Rome was not built in a day.”
Yet nobody asked him the question that lived quietly in all of us. Nobody asked why Rome, in the storybooks, kept stretching toward the heavens, its buildings tall and proud and defiant, while our only road melted into red mud each time the clouds so much as sneezed. When it rained, the road disappeared. Completely. The red earth softened, surrendered, and swallowed itself. Feet sank into it. Bicycle tires refused it. Cars avoided us altogether, as though our village had briefly ceased to exist. But under the mango tree, Rome was still not built in a day.
I remember my mother standing at the edge of those gatherings. She never sat. She stood just close enough to be seen, but not to belong. Her wrapper was always tied tight around her waist, her blouse faded at the shoulders where the sun had rested too often. And her hands—her hands told the truth her mouth never did. They were cracked. Not the soft cracks of dry skin, but deep, stubborn lines. Crooked lines of struggle. Lines carved by years of hauling buckets filled with water drawn from a borehole that coughed more than it poured.
The borehole was a moody thing. Some days it gave water. Most days it gave excuses. Each bucket she carried home left its memory behind in her palms. Still, when Chief Nnanna finished speaking, my mother clapped. She clapped politely. Her palms met and separated, met and separated, performing belief. But I watched her face. Her eyes never joined the applause. They stayed distant. Elsewhere. Watching something the rest of us could not see. Her applause was polite, but tired. As if her hands knew better than her mouth. As if her palms understood what her voice was too loyal to say, that promises, no matter how beautifully spoken, do not quench thirst.
And then I returned from the university. Me, miracle child of Okokomaiko. The elders welcomed me as if Moses himself had descended from the mountain as in the holy books, except, instead of tablets of stone, I carried a battered laptop tucked under my arm. They circled me with wide smiles and those tobacco-stained teeth, grinning hymns of hope: “You will bring light to our village!” At first, I thought they meant electricity, a promise that had been recycled for decades: always near, never caught. But no, their idea of light were government contracts, brown envelopes, maybe even as a representative in Abuja with a fat office and fatter pockets. They looked at me as if I were a walking connection, a bridge between their dusty dreams and the asphalt roads of the capital. And so I stood there, laptop sweating in my hands, already feeling the weight of the messiah costume they so eagerly adorned me with.
I tried, God knows I tried. I sat through endless council meetings beneath whirring ceiling fans that moved only but hot air, listening to old men recite “development” like it was a holy chant, a noun to be worshipped but never conjugated into action. Hours dissolved into us debating whether “modernization” should be spelled with a ‘z’ or an ‘s’ on the village signboard, while goats strolled in and out of the gathering, happily chewing away. Whenever I raised practical ideas like solar lights so children could read after dark, a small reading centre, even something as noble as a communal toilet, the elders would chuckle, pat their bellies, and say: “Ah, slow down, my child. Development is a journey.” And indeed, it was a journey, though from where I sat it seemed we were being carried along by a one-legged tortoise who stopped often to nap.
Election season arrived, just like harmattan, filling our mouths with grit and our ears with noise. Suddenly, the silence of neglect gave way to the roar of convoys. Convoys of SUVs gleaming like visiting spaceships, their tinted windows shielding the politicians from the same sun that roasted us daily. They spilled out of those cars in starched agbadas promising the earth and a small piece of heaven: free education, smooth roads, jobs for the youth. But in reality, what we actually received was “youth empowerment” in the form of T-shirts two sizes too big, tiny bags of rice and urgent two thousand naira neatly packaged in small brown envelopes. Still, the villagers danced barefoot, shouting slogans with their hungry voices: “Power to the people!”. I stood at the edge of the crowd, scribbling their chants into my notebook, and I asked myself quietly: which people did they mean? Because it certainly wasn’t us.
Then came the day the sacred Iroko tree—our village’s pride and landmark—fell without warning. For as long as anyone could remember, it stood at the centre of Okokomaiko, its branches stretched wide enough to cradle secrets, gossip, and the childhood games of half the village. Weddings had been blessed beneath its shade, quarrels settled under its roots, and more than one palm-wine gourd had been emptied in its honour. The elders boasted that the Iroko had survived storms fiercer than any politician’s promise, and so they trusted it would outlive us all. But no one noticed how, over the years, termites had crept in like sly politicians, hollowing it from the inside. Children carved their names into its bark, men stripped its branches for firewood bit by bit, and herds sharpened their horns against its trunk. It was neglect that killed our dear Iroko, the kind that begins with small bites and ends with sudden collapse. When it finally gave up, splitting the ground with a huge thud, the elders wailed and tore at their wrappers, declaring it a spiritual attack from jealous enemies. I, on the other hand, saw nothing mystical. To me, it was only termites and time, the two forces that undo everything African eventually. But while the women called for three days of fasting and prayer, shaking their rattles at invisible foes, I quietly folded my clothes into a bag. While their eyes searched the heavens for answers, mine were on the road out.
I left quietly at dawn, threading over puddles. The ground was still soft with the previous night’s rain. No one tried to stop me; departures had become as ordinary as dry-season dust, coating everything until people stopped noticing. The village had grown used to watching its children vanish one at a time, leaving behind empty chairs in classrooms and untended farms. As my bus rattled onto the main road, I pressed my forehead to the glass and watched Okokomaiko shrink. First, it was the cluster of rusted zinc roofs, then a faint outline against the sky, and finally nothing.
I have lived in many places since then. I have lived in cities where the lights stay on and towns where leaders build actual roads. Here, the rubbish is packed neatly into bins, carried off by trucks that actually come back the next day. The politicians still lie, of course they always will, but at least here, their lies come with decent roads and buses that make life easier. Yet sometimes, I hear Okokomaiko’s elders clapping and smell the sweet rot of abundance. E
