Verity Africa, lots of twins and me

North of Lagos has been a powerful communication tool connecting me to interesting Nigerians world wide. Ijeoma Emenanjo is one of those people. Working towards his masters at Harvard, he also is the founder of a media organization called Verity Africa. He found me on my blog and told me about his interest in working [...]

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My last day in Ibadan

Wednesday was my last day in Ibadan. I had a last meal of amala with my host mom’s delicious ground nut soup. I cried when I said goodbye to my host family. I feel like a real member of the family and it was difficult to leave them. I know we will see again soon. [...]

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Video: I escaped to Lagos

Dear Readers, I apologize for not blogging recently. The reason I have vanished is I am in Lagos and have been running around getting muddy at markets, attending art auctions (I went to the Art House auction at the Civic Center last night) and sitting in traffic. I threw this video together from some of [...]

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We eat butter

There are two types of people in Nigeria , those that eat butter and those that eat cassava. In modern day Yoruba, we call the former grope the ajebota and the latter, less fortunate group the ajepaki. The literal translation of these two word is “we eat butter,” and “we eat cassava.” An ajebota (pronounced [...]

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A trip to Badagry-a former slave port

It took months of reminding and asking our coordinator but we finally made it to Badagry as one of our “cultural tours” of Nigeria. Badagry is a coastal city on the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Guinea, between Lagos and the Republic of Benin. On entering Nigeria by road, it is the first city you [...]

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A Visit to Old Oyo National Park

I had the experience of visiting one of Nigeria’s national parks this weekend. In a typical Nigerian style last minute plan, my program set out on our journey to Old Oyo National Park early Friday evening, planning the trip that afternoon. Leaving from Ibadan around 3:30 p.m., we arrived at the park’s hotel in Sepeteri [...]

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White Girl Problems: Getting to Ghana from Nigeria

After extensive online research and going to the embassies in person, I have discovered that it is extremely difficult (I don’t want to say impossible, because nothing is impossible in Nigeria) for a non-Nigerian resident to obtain a Ghanaian visa in Nigeria. If you have a resident visa it is possible, but those of us [...]

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Lagos Vacation

As Banky W appropriately said, “Ain’t no party like a Lagos party.” He could have sang something like, “Ain’t no traffic like Lagos traffic,” but I doubt that track would sell thousands of copies and receive plentiful airtime. You can fill in the blanks with almost anything and it will make sense. “Ain’t no blank [...]

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Ghana failed

A tortuous trip to Lagos and back in one day resulted in every transportation company informing us that is impossible for us to enter Ghana. Under our time constraints we could not acquire Ghanaian visas. No one had a concrete answer for us about whether we needed one visa, two visas, zero visas. The whole [...]

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Ghana, here we come, finally

After a grueling three weeks of planning, re-planning and hitting roadblocks at every turn, we are almost en route to Ghana for a vacation. It is not easy to make plans to travel by road to other African countries if you have white skin. We have to be wary of border patrol ripping us off [...]

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