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[Nigeria]Nigerian glossary

2007-02-28

The Imam and the Pastor

Filed under: films,friends,VSO — kevin @ 11:36

Nentawe (a young guy working with local youth groups) invited us to the Kaduna premiere of a new film, The Imam and the Pastor. It’s a film about two religious leaders who, in their youth, belonged to religious militias in Kaduna but have since reconciled and joined to promote peace. Their organisation has its own web site: The Inter-Faith Mediation Centre.

It’s very well presented and interesting, a mixture of footage of the two going about their work and interviews about their past and present. There’s also some archive footage from the various clashes that they are working to present a recurrence of. The segment showing the mass graves at Yelwan Shendam is particularly powerful.

Afterwards there were to be questions and answers. This being Nigeria, instead we got speeches from the representatives of the various bigwigs who’d been invited but couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Finally, two questions were allowed. Both people asked if there were going to be more showings of the film, especially in schools.

It seems that the filmmakers are hoping for funding and support to translate the film into local languages and they also plan to show it internationally in other conflict areas.

2007-02-18

Waiting at the motor park

Filed under: General — kevin @ 12:55

I’m sitting in a car in the motor park in Bauchi, waiting for one more passenger before we can leave for Kaduna.

I spent the weekend at Yankari national park, we were lucky and actually saw some wildlife.

I’m writing this on my phone to pass the time sitting in the terrible heat.

Yankari National Park

Filed under: friends,travel,VSO — kevin @ 11:38

Thessa organised a trip to Yankari, partly to celebrate her birthday and partly as a send-off for Pete and Mary.

Most of us met up in Bauchi motor park and then chartered a minibus to take us to Wikki camp, where the accommodation is. The journey wasn’t too bad, the park is currently being renovated and this includes surfacing the road from the entrance to Wikki. The accommodation and facilities are a bit run-down but we were lucky and managed to see quite a few animals.
A large round building in ugly grey concrete A sign with several of the arms pointing at the ground INSERT ALT TEXT
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2007-02-15

Gindiri

Filed under: friends,travel,VSO — kevin @ 11:26

On our way to spend the weekend in Yankari National Park Marion, Kristel and I spent the night at Siv’s place in Gindiri, Plateau State. He’s working at the College of Education there.
Low sun through trees Small yellow house, three people standing on the verandah

It’s a lovely place and he has a nice little house there. The college staff club has the best suya I’ve had in Nigeria.

2007-02-14

Dead laptop

Filed under: General,site,tech — kevin @ 09:53

My lovely IBM ThinkPad laptop seems to be dead, it suddenly turned off last night and won’t come back on.

This means that I’m temporarily without access to my saved emails and most of the rest of my personal stuff. I’m hoping the hard disk is still OK and I can get all the useful data off it but until then I won’t be checking my email very often.

Looks like it’s just as well I’m taking a holiday back to the UK in April, the laptop is still under warranty and I’d rather have IBM/Lenovo’s UK people deal with it than send my laptop to the “service provider” in Lagos.

2007-02-13

Nigerian Census

Filed under: VSO — kevin @ 12:44

Last year’s census is still causing arguments here, with all sorts of wild claims flying around. One of the big problems has been the announcement that Kano state has a slightly larger population than Lagos state, when obviously there are more people in Lagos!
Map showing Lagos state overlaid on (and fitting inside) Kano state

Chippla’s Weblog has a very sensible post on this subject, pointing out the difference in population density between the two states.

Quite apart from the organisational problems of the census, one of the major difficulties seems to have been the tendency for people to travel back to be counted in their hometowns. In some cases this was being organised and promoted by ethnic organisations, to ensure that their numbers would be high and to increase their share of Federal jobs and money. So cities with large non-indigenous populations emptied around census time and, as a result, will have been undercounted and will probably be under-resourced in future.

BBC article on Abuja

Filed under: VSO — kevin @ 12:18

It’s good to see that the BBC has finally noticed the reality of Abuja rather than just following the official line about how shiny and modern the city is.

The contrast between the city centre and the “satellite towns” is amazing, from multi-lane expressways to dirt roads in a few hundred metres. Most people working in Abuja can’t afford to live in the city, having to commute in every day. Some of my former colleagues at Radio Nigeria travelled in from as far away as Keffi because that was the nearest place they could afford a decent home for their families. This isn’t easy or cheap given the lack of good public transport.

Although the FCDA claim to be enforcing the “master plan” they seem to be doing so in a way that ignores the idea of building neighbourhoods and providing housing for all levels of society. So long as your mansion is in a residential area and isn’t built on what should be a park it doesn’t matter that there should be tens of houses in the space you’re taking up for one.

On a technical note, the link to Google’s map of Keffi shows that their idea of where Abuja is is a bit wrong and some of the roads and place names are slightly suspect too.

Concert at Gamji Gate

Filed under: music,VSO — kevin @ 09:47

Last night I joined Monique, Kristel and Marion at Gamji Gate Auditorium for a free concert organised by the British Council and the Centre for Hausa Cultural Studies. They’d brought over a Muslim hip-hop group from the UK, Mecca 2 Medina, who were collaborating with a group of young traditional Hausa musicians from Kano, Arewa. The whole thing was called “Cultural Rap Rapture” and also included several local musicians.
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2007-02-05

Comments/Contact me

Filed under: site — kevin @ 12:23

If you tried to use one of the “Contact me” links on this site recently you might not have got a reply. I set my spam filtering a little too aggressively and all incoming comments were filed as junk.

I was getting huge numbers of junk comments, people thinking that the links they typed in would appear on the site. That’s not the case, it just annoyed me. I’ve now adjusted the way the “Contact me” form works, it should allow real people to use it but block computer programs.

2007-02-03

Saturday at NTI

Filed under: VSO — kevin @ 13:28

I’m taking advantage of a brief period of NEPA to boil water, listen to music and write this.

As usual for the weekend I got up fairly late this morning, I was out last night with Monique and my friend (and tailor) Otinu.

After breakfast I went kite flying again, Suleiman is getting quite good and the others are improving. The wind was pretty strong today so I had to keep reminding them of safety precautions like not launching the kite when people are in the way! Some of the smaller boys were getting dragged around a bit by the wind. I was watching carefully and made sure they used the safety straps (“kite killers”), that way they can just let go of the handles and the kite will drop out of the sky.

I just had some soup for lunch, I made it on Thursday to use up all the vegetables in the fridge. I think it was carrot, tomato, green pepper, garlic and “american cucumber” (a roundish yellow thing that I think is some kind of squash). As usual, after a few days and a spin in the liquidiser it was even better than when I made it. I enjoy my small culinary successes.

In a little while I’ll have to head off to the market to stock up again, the fridge is looking pretty bare.

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