Chapter 13: Stories for the Future

My mother cried until she was tired.

She wept the way only someone who has lost everything can. She pressed her forehead to my hands, whispering a prayer to the ancestors. I hugged her, and gently told her stories.

I told her about the surrender of the colonizers, about the salutes at the independence celebration.

I described the joy of a people finally raising their own flag, of elders who danced in the rain, ululating and beating drums, children waving green-white-green flags. I told her about the heavy rain on the banks of the Niger, about the gun smoke in the southern forests.

I painted for her the pictures of a nation’s birth, the hopes and sorrows entangled. And about going to the village, starting businesses.

I told her of women who owned their own shops, of girls who studied to become doctors and engineers. Electric lights and telephones, televisions and computers.

The wonder on her face made me smile. Mobile phones and tablets—phones wey fit snap picture, call people from Sokoto to Calabar—tall buildings and bridges.

I described the Third Mainland Bridge, stretching long and proud over the lagoon, cars flying like birds. When I ran out of words, I grabbed some paper and started drawing for her.

My fingers shook as I tried to capture the world she never saw. I drew a big green-white-green flag.

The eagle in the center, bold and free. I drew rockets flying into space, drew buildings shaped like giant drums.

She laughed at the thought—a house as big as a talking drum! I drew microchips that could store all the world’s books, drew trains running underground.

Her eyes widened in wonder, mouth open in disbelief. My mother sat beside me like a child learning to write, listening eagerly and watching me draw.

Each line was a bridge between our worlds. I gestured and explained, and she did her best to imagine.

Her brow furrowed as she tried to piece together the strange and new. To imagine all the things that were normal to me, but she’d never seen.

When she truly couldn’t picture it, she’d just smile and say, “Good, really good.”

Her voice trembled, thick with longing. There was so much emotion in her eyes.

I couldn’t fully understand it.

But I wanted to cry, I felt so much regret.

I wished I could fold time in my hands and give her just one day in my Nigeria. Regret that I couldn’t really let her see the New Nigeria that would come after.

It pained me to know that all I could offer were stories and sketches—never the warm sun or cool breeze of freedom she fought for.