Ama Udofa

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The day my spirit leaves Lagos, my body has just spent seven hours in traffic for an 8km journey. The year is 2019, and I am already fed up with the Lekki floods. I am in the second month of my NYSC, managing operations at my aunt’s logistics company at Ikota Shopping Complex, VGC. One evening in November, I leave the office at 5 PM for a 15-minute drive home. Throw in Thursday evening traffic at Ajah Under Bridge and Abraham Adesanya, and I should be home in no more than 45 minutes.
Ex...

At the beginning of 2010, Yar Adua was still Nigeria’s president, Wizkid was still an upcoming artiste, Blackberries were still class dividers, was still just an idea, and I was still hopelessly crushing on Faith in SS1 at St Paul’s Comprehensive Secondary School.

Game of Thrones wasn’t even a thing yet.

In January 2004, when Kamu Kintu is lynched by a vicious crowd, a woman says, “that is what happens to a race that fails to raise to raise its value on the market.” While Kamu’s body lies unclaimed in the mortuary, we follow the Kintu lineage back to the 1750 Buddu kingdom, when the ambitious Ppookino (governor) Kintu Kidda journeyed with his tribe across the perilous wasteland, o Lwera, to swear fealty to the Kabaka of Buganda Kingdom, and unleashed a curse that would plague his descendants for generations.

If you are the kind of person to judge books by their covers, then you may be expecting a sun-filled, fun-filled read in the Land of Always Summer, when you pick up Here Comes the Sun. But it only takes the first three pages for Here Comes the Sun (HCTS) to jolt you out of your fantasy.

Cool evening breeze wafts lazily through the settlement, whipping up red-brown dust and loose dirt that head for people’s eyes. It is this kind of breeze that soothes and sometimes tickles your armpits.
It is on evenings like this that men like to sit on their verandahs discussing politics, playing draughts, while downing shots of ogogoro that seem to never finish. The ogogoro makes them laugh boisterously at intervals, punctuating their animated discussions in dramatic fashion.
On such eveni...