FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

Category

Non-fiction

Non-fiction

Remembering My NYSC Experience by Adeoye Deborah Adenike

There are two categories of frustrating people: the disobedient ones who will hear but will never take heed, and the ones who do not understand. For the hundredth time, my mother shouted from the kitchen, asking if I had packed everything I would need, and I replied in the affirmative. I remember her saying that it would be better to put my stationery in my handbag, as I would need…

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Non-fiction

The Nakedness of Experience by Joseph Omoh Ndukwu

I: Morning The world here is open spaces and quiet afternoons. But it is also slow misty mornings. I sit one Sunday charging my phone and waiting for a taxi going to Saki, the first stop on a journey to Ibadan, and I take to look at this place. It is early morning. There are noisy weaver birds in a mango tree just to my right. The ground that falls…

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Non-fiction

My Tale of Five American Cities II by Olukorede S Yishau

I conquered five American cities in five days: Janesville, Milwaukee, Washington DC, Madison and more of Chicago. Janesville was a stranger to me. So was Milwaukee. I barely knew about Madison, save for the University of Wisconsin, which occupies a sizable portion of its beautiful landscape. I had not been to Washington but it was not entirely strange to me. I had read about them in books, seen them in…

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Non-fiction

The Hitchhiker by Emma Wilkins

We’d spent the weekend in Westerway, Tasmania, a town whose population could fit on a large bus. He was waiting on the main street, one bulging pack strapped to his front, another to his back, seemingly unbothered by the load. He was tall and strong with generic good looks. I took one look at him and I knew his story. I knew the second pack belonged to his girlfriend –…

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Non-fiction

Rediscovering Happiness at Ebedi by Isaiah Adepoju

Leaving is self-abnegation; something always wants you elsewhere. Once, when I was fifteen, I spent a week away from home. My Mum clutched me tight the afternoon I returned. I’d suffered where I went – starved, wandered, and begged. She knew; I knew; everybody knew. At night, I lay my head on her lap as she popped my pimples. ‘My child has suffered,’ she told my brothers, with her small…

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Non-fiction

Ilé-Ifẹ̀: A Cradle in Crumble by Isaiah Adepoju

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ begins with a boulder, then a crevice. It splinters at the lap, opens into legs, into toes, then rejoins at the hair, the nape. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ rolls and rolls in a way Ibadan doesn’t. Metallurgic: the perfect linguistic alchemy to describe Ilé-Ifẹ̀. From the adjoining road that leads to Ondo, you remember that this place now embodies the migration of the ancient people of Ilé-Ifẹ̀; that this present location of…

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Non-fiction

Postscript: The Last Act of Transaction by Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè

Now, thinking about my travels as an art of movement and transaction, I recall the Argentinean author, Luis Jorge Borges, who had a habit of visiting libraries in his childhood to read encyclopaedias. Travel, for me, is another way of engaging in this kind of learning. I often imagine travelling is like browsing through a huge library where many books on different subjects are opened before me all at once. This infinite immensity was the constant imagery in my mind as I rode in a van across landscapes, as I travelled in a speedboat, even as I sat in a plane meditating the brilliance of clouds. 

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Maa Temple Jammu
Non-fiction

Vaishnadevi Yatra: A Pilgrimage by Mitra Rupsha

‘She khanik thake shunyer opor, khanik thake neere’ – Lalon Fakir (thy prevails in the empty sky sometimes, thy sometimes prevails in the waters)  Katra was glistening before my eyes as we huddled along with all our spirits heightened to an ideal – an absolute peak. I was unaware of how much we needed to walk; rather I was just preoccupied with scaling the ragged heightening slopes of the hill for…

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Non-fiction

Of Tattoos and Mangoes by Kevin Dimetres

The dark lines of ink covering her tattooed face couldn’t dissuade eye contact, and for a moment, we both caught each other staring. The woman’s stretched earlobes dangled under the weight of her circular earrings. I almost couldn’t look away. She held a mango in one hand and pointed directly at me with the other, signalling for me to kick the mud off my sandals before climbing up the steps…

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