Caboose

I just spent a couple of days working in Bauchi. My colleague Niyi and I had to install some software and set up some computers at the North-East zonal office, as part of the plan to decentralise some of NTI’s enormous data entry activities.

We took a bush taxi from Kaduna on Monday morning, making the mistake of choosing the back row. Along the (atrocious) road to Jos my head kept banging off the roof. Getting to Jos took quite a while because of the many police and army checkpoints, each one requiring the usual twenty Naira dash before allowing us to pass. After Jos the road is much better, so the rest of the journey wasn’t too exciting (I’ve become quite casual about ridiculous near-death overtaking manouevres).
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The New Gong magazine has a website with various interesting articles and pictures. Because of my interest in the history of Nigeria my attention was drawn to one about Mungo Park, often claimed to be the “discoverer” of the river Niger.

The article points out that he himself never claimed the discovery and that he was very glad of the hospitality of the African people. For once an old British explorer comes out as not being a monster, interested in people and their lives rather than glory and empire.