My Dream UNN
You didn’t grow up abroad. You only heard what it was like, and you imagined wearing a watch round the clock and trying to flick your eyes over everything very quickly and still managing to retain the details.
You grew up elsewhere, jumping puddles to an old library; standing on the balcony on wet nights after the rains, enjoying the cool breeze and trying to out-croak the frogs in the nearby puddles.
When you came to UNN, you found no puddles and frogs, but you had to begin flicking your eyes over everything very quickly. It was dizzying, but you were in ‘the’ University of Nigeria — you had to see all there was to see; to wander through the Nnamdi Azikiwe library; to climb the Vet mountain; to taste the cooking spoons of all those restaurants…
One thing, though, seemed to be written everywhere you looked: “To restore the dignity of man”. Like Obiora of Chimamanda’s Purple Hibiscus, you wondered when exactly man lost his dignity, and how. “Whatever they mean, it’s surely not just a motto for the billboards”, you thought.
Then, after lectures one day at the faculty, you felt pressed.
Your freshman friend didn’t know where you could go, but he was sure an edifice such as this would obviously have restrooms worthy of it. You later found one, but you found something else too: the door was locked, there was water on the ground in front of the door and an unfriendly odour was shooing you away. You asked someone for another option, and he pointed across the road to a tree behind some shrubs.
A man was leaving from there, belting his trousers. Someone else stood adjacent to him, facing the bush, or was that someone’s farm? You went closer. Around the tree and in all of that area, the ground was black, as if it had drunk some condemned oil. The bushes were buzzing with flies. You felt your dignity slipping away.
You ran to the hostel, but as usual their restrooms were worse, a depot of malodorous smears and liquids. There had to be a better option. A roommate showed you a bare expanse of land littered with dung, human dung, where he called ‘airport’.
That evening you went to the shops, hungry. You tried to focus on the fried-egg-in-toasted-bread you were buying, but the memory of the large black spots all over the ‘airport’ with the flies landing and taking off, wouldn’t go. All around you people walked, talked and breathed normal, mindless of the… the ghetto. You had found a word for that new image of UNN forming in your mind — ghetto. You shrugged it off into the descending darkness, took your meal from the seller and strolled away.
Now it doesn’t shock you anymore. And like this Student Union Government, you dream of a UNN without a ghetto in the picture.
