Friday, August 4, 2017https://www.vistanium.com/p/northeast-travel-guide
It’s a few minutes past noon, and this is when shit starts to get real. We’re in an office with a bench for a seat. – four of us are seated on it – Jesuloba, Chris, Mansur and me. To our left and right are two wooden windows – when they swing, the hinges cry gently.
A man is seated behind a table facing us, and I can’t tell if he’s smiling or his face just looks like that. Let’s call him Mr Smiley.
There are two people behind us.
“That’s why I brought them here,” one of them says. He has just explained everything that's happened in the thirty minutes leading up to this moment. Mr Smiley thanks him and dismisses him. He shuts the door behind us.
The other man behind me is quiet, uncomfortably – Mr Quiet.
“Who’s the leader of this group?” Mr Quiet asks.
“I am,” I say.
On New Year’s Eve of 2016, I told my Editor-in-Chief at Pulse about my strongest itch. “I want to travel around Nigeria in one stretch, every state.” He thought I was mad, but he was just as mad, so he told me to come up with a plan. Two weeks later, I presented him with an itinerary outlining everything I’d be doing on the road for three months.
“Fantastic,” he said, “we’re doing it.”
I worked at Pulse, a newsroom in a media company with a little less than 200 people. For the next few months, I tried to get every unit to buy into the project by selling them their benefits. Sales could get sponsors. Editorial could get content. The first day I was supposed to travel was in March – it got cancelled. While I was dealing with not travelling, I wandered into an exhibition on one of my night gallivants. Fati Abubakar, a photographer from Borno State, was exhibiting photos from everything she’d seen back home.
It’s while I was telling her about the road trip I wanted to go on that someone overheard me and went, “I want to come! Abeg.” He was wearing a scally cap and had a camera in hand.
He talked about a trip he’d just finished with photographers, where they travelled across some parts of Nigeria by train, taking photos everywhere they went. I told him I’d be travelling for work, but he promised he’d never get in the way of any decisions I was making for work — the more, the merrier.
“I’ll keep you posted,” I said after we exchanged numbers.
When the office finally approved the travel date, about one month before departure, they also added that I’d be travelling with someone else – Chris, from the video team.
We’d barely interacted before the trip. All I knew of him was his first name, where he sat, and the videos he edited.
When we eventually left, it was a Saturday, July 2, six months after I first pitched it. Beyond the things we were making and dispatching back to Lagos, our only link to the office was a WhatsApp group with our support team back at the office.
“What is your mission here?” Mr Smiley hits me with the follow-up.
“We’re journalists,” I explain. “We’ve been travelling around Nigeria for the past twenty-seven days, and this is our current stop.”
He pauses, then asks again, “What is your mission here?”
I repeat my answer. He asks again, and as I begin to answer, I’m a little irritated. “We’re journalists – Jesuloba, Chris, and me. Mansur is our friend here in this town. We’re travelling across Nigeria, and this is our Biu stop.”
Mr Smiley is in mufti, but he’s a soldier, and we’re sitting in the Intelligence Office of the Biu Military Cantonment, Borno State, the front lines of Nigeria’s war against Boko Haram.
“Hmm. Journalists,” he looks at us as if expecting to spot journalism in our eyes.
At the time of leaving Lagos, I’d worked in a newsroom for over two years, but this trip is the first time I identify as a journalist. I’ve covered beats from celebrity reporting to tech and even metro stories. Of course, I’m talking man-kills-neighbour-over-piece of yam metro.
Because I spent most of that time sitting in an office, curating stories, monitoring trends and writing about them, it felt less like journalism and more like regular content creation. Something to make a person stop scrolling, click, and read. But on this trip, I’ve worn journalism like a badge, but mainly as a shield. Like when a truckload of police officers crossed us in Benin, we could either be cultists or journalists. Or, when we reached checkpoints in border towns, we could either be illegal immigrants or journalists. I’ve called myself a journalist so much on this trip that I’ve started to feel like one.
He asks again. At this point, I’m not sure if it’s the fourth time or the umpteenth, but I outline our itinerary.
A month earlier, we left Lagos from Oshodi on a Sunday at dawn while one megaphone threatened Hell to everyone in weaves. Another was calling people for morning prayers, and a third was telling women squeezing through the parked buses not to break the side mirrors with their breasts.
Our first stop was Ijebu Ode, where we went to the tomb of a dead queen, which living women aren’t allowed to enter – only men. Then Idanre Hills, where we climbed 682 steps and instead of Heaven, we found the remnants of an ancient people who lived on the hills for 800 years but descended a century ago because of colonialism.
When we reached Benin, our first stop was the Oba’s palace, where even though we couldn’t see the king, we got to hang out with the virgin boys who dedicate their lives to the service of their kingdom. Waiting for us outside the palace was Jesuloba, carrying a backpack and holding a camera – it’s where his trip with us began.
In Asaba, we met a septuagenarian who escaped the Asaba massacre of ‘67 but still suffers survivor’s guilt. Onitsha is where we saw the new Nollywood – it’s also where we saw the first glimpses of Nnamdi Kanu’s Biafra.
We didn’t meet Kanu himself until five stops later, where he was living a walking distance from the Governor of Abia State and surrounded by believers. When Kanu stepped out of his house, a woman in crutches burst into tears at the sight of him. She’d come from Asaba. Another man brought a ram as a gift and asked him to bless it. Finally, at six pm, the Biafran flag in the compound, the only flag, was lowered to mark the end of the day.
Our next stops were Calabar, Uyo, down to the rice marshes in Ebonyi, then up the old coal mines in Enugu. Next was Makurdi, then Jalingo, and up we went to one of Nigeria’s highest towns, Gembu. When we descended, we were off to Jimeta-Yola, and after Yola, we began to see what a country at war looked like. In Mubi, we found entire sections of buildings chewed away and blackened by Boko Haram’s firepower. On our road to Maiduguri, we passed Chibok and the school that brought Boko Haram global infamy.
The road from Lagos to Biu. Illustration by Mariam.
“So, why did you choose to come to Biu?” Mr Smiley cuts in before I can reach the part about how we got to Biu from Maiduguri.
“Instagram,” I say, trying to remember the specific message amidst the hundreds I’d received in the past month. “You can even follow everywhere we’ve passed through from Instagram.”
“What?”
Let’s start from the day before we came to Biu.
Thursday, August 3, 2017.
We’re at the park, waiting for a bus headed for Potiskum in Yobe State when someone sends a DM on Instagram.
“If you’re still in Borno, you should go to Biu. Our people are so brave; Boko Haram has never conquered them.” It had my attention.
The sender is Nafisah. I have no idea who she is. But I also did not know who Sugar in Abakaliki was, Abubakar in Kakari, or Ebuka in Oguta. So paranoia didn’t bring us this far.
“Chris, I think we should go to Biu,” I say.
Chris thinks it’s a bad idea. “But it’s not on our itinerary na,” he says. Chris’ first instinct has always been to say no to anything that puts our safety to question. He had concerns about visiting a dissident’s home and problems with getting help from strangers everywhere. Chris is a reasonable man, but we didn’t end up here by saying no.
“Gembu wasn’t on our itinerary,” I say, “but we went there, and we didn’t regret it.” A biker we met in Port Harcourt said, “if you must go around the country, then make sure you go to Gembu.” So we went. Gembu was breathtaking for the scenery with greenery for as far as the eyes can see, and its below-fifteen-degree temperatures.
The biker is Inyang, who once rode across every border state in Nigeria in one stretch. Another time, he rode from Lagos to Austria in less than 40 days – he ferried his bike into Spain at a port in Morocco.
Chris is throwing reasons why we shouldn’t go; I’m countering with reasons why we should until I suggest that we leave it to chance.
“I asked her if she can give us someone’s phone number there,” I say, “if she doesn’t send it in 20 minutes, we’ll go to Potiskum.”
The number came in 12 minutes. It’s her uncle’s, and he’s a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force, CJTF, a coalition of civilians – hunters, vigilantes, and people tired of sitting around, waiting for providence to save them from Boko Haram.
The road to Biu is cratered and treacherous, but the military checkpoints are the main event. First, you have to step out of the vehicle, then walkthrough with your hands up, while the driver has to step out and push his car through.
My old friend Musa, in whose Teaching Hospital dorm we stayed while we were in Maiduguri, told me about his first time at one of these checkpoints.
“I was walking through a checkpoint just outside Maiduguri when someone called me. As I dropped my hand to grab the phone, two soldiers screamed and almost opened fire.”
Phones are an ingenious way to trigger bombs remotely, and the sight of one at a checkpoint always triggers soldiers.
We reach Biu about five hours later, but it’s not her uncle waiting for us; it’s her baby brother, Mansur. He’s tall, dark, and it’s not hard to tell he’s a teenager. His uncle joins us minutes later – he’s small and frail, and for a moment, you forget that this man has taken up the duty to hunt down Boko Haram fighters.
He shows us to a hotel just on the outskirts of town, opposite a military checkpoint, and tells us that by morning when he returns; he’ll be taking us to the leader of the CJTF in Biu.
“Tomorrow is going to be lit,” I tell Chris and Jesuloba. Chris just nods.
Our good morning at Biu on Friday is at the makeshift office of the CJTF – it’s an old school with two blocks that haven’t seen a student since the holidays began, but that’s not our first stop. First, we need permission to speak to the CJTF from the Local Government chairman, whose office is right beside the school, looking equally dilapidated.
“He’s not at the office,” Mansur’s uncle says, “let’s go to his house.” It’s only a few minutes from the office, and when we reach there, there’s a man supervising people pouring sand and gravel on the eroded part of his residence.
He’s displeased that we’ve walked from his office to his house at past ten in the morning. So he yells at us to wait for him at his office or the CJTF office until he’s ready to work. It’s ten in the morning.
We head back to the CJTF office. About a dozen men are sitting in the room. They look like regular people – traders, or farmers, or vigilantes. Everyone in this room is here because they signed up to protect their people from Boko Haram. At any cost.
Sometime in 2014, the CJTF patrolled this town with impaled heads of dozens of Boko Haram fighters. When you’re in a room like this, you keep an unassuming face while thinking, who did the killing, who did the beheading? Which of these hands impaled those heads?
source http://www.nairaland.com/6694445/northeast-travel-guide-unhinged
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