“Ma, you sure about this place? No network there. No light since 1998.” “I know,” she said. “Drive.”
Lagos, 2026. Then Port Harcourt, 1994.
But Ebiere wasn't thinking about spreadsheets. She was thinking about the photograph in her hand. It was creased at the edges, faded into sepia. A girl of about nine, wearing a yellow plastic bangle and a torn dress, stood in front of a thatched hut. Behind her, an oil rig burned in the distance—a flaring tower of eternal fire against a mangrove swamp. Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
She remembered why she left. She was nine. Her father, a fisherman, had died because the creek he fished in was coated in crude oil. An oil company’s pipeline had burst. They paid the village a pittance. Her mother sold her gold earrings to pay for the bus to the city. “Don’t look back,” her mother had said at the bus park. “Make a life where the water is clean.” “Ma, you sure about this place
And there is truly no place like it.
She typed back: “I resign.”
“No matter where you roam, no matter how far you go… there’s no place like home.” “Drive