Abuja to Kigali to Accra to Abuja

This morning, I hung up a painting of a girl sitting on her father’s shoulder above my bed. It seemed slightly askew. The lightbulb above and the switch beneath are not centered on the wall. So I had to make a choice between the painting being in the middle or aligning with the other fixtures on the wall. I chose the former.

The original copy of the acrylic painting is close by. It’s done in white unlike its new counterpart. There are cracks from when I rolled it up to put it in a bag along with my other belongings as I was fleeing Nigeria for Rwanda.

I think about the painting a lot. What it represents. The person I was at the time I commissioned it. The woman that I am now. A lot has happened. A lot has changed.

In February 2022, I received a text from my mum. It said, “Daddy is not waking up.” I think I was probably at my desk in my one-bedroom apartment in Katampe Extension. I sat down on the tiny couch I had custom-made to fit the small space. It’s hard to recollect if I called my mum, but I know I was on the train the next day to Kaduna.

My dad was in a coma. His health had been declining for a while after almost a decade of being paralyzed on his right side after a stroke in 2011. For years, my mum would lift him up to sit, bathe him and go to work. A member of the family would serve him his meals. Even though he struggled, he’d feed himself. But for the past few months, after an altercation with his younger brother over my sister’s wedding, he had refused to eat and looked extremely sad. One day, he didn’t wake up.

Then began the wait.

I was still working at an agency during that time and was interviewing for a role at a new company called Float.com. I remember working while at the hospital and giving up because there was no network. My dad lay on the hospital bed hooked up to tubes, helping him breathe and pee. I touched him. I talked to him. I watched my cousin, who had lost his father to a stroke, pull the curtain around my dad’s bed when it was time to bath him. I watched my mum come in to speak to her husband, pleading for him to wake up. I watched the other families with male relatives or friends share the same grim wait.

On March 31st, the day my father passed away, I noticed my brother-in-law drive up to the front of the house and sit in the car for some minutes. My mum was already anxious because they had not come to get the pap in the morning as usual. She worried out loud. We shushed her, but we all knew. You see, I come from a family of overthinkers. And as much as we make up worst-case scenarios that don’t happen 99% of the time, this was a 1% moment.

Soon, the general overseer of our church arrived with his wife and the resident pastor. That moment. We knew. My mum fell to the ground screaming as she was told. The strangest thing was that at that moment, I didn’t think of myself and the fact that I had lost a father. I thought of her, I thought of how she had spent the last 10 years of her life in devotion to God and her husband, hoping one day he’d stand up and walk. That they’d be fine. That’d we’d be a family once again.

After missing the funeral of my father because of a fight with my uncle, I returned to Abuja. I returned to my apartment.

A few weeks later, I bought my first car and installed blinds in my apartment. I also got a nose ring and colored my hair red. I asked my friend to help me find clothes that fit me better.

Now that I think of it, seeing my dad pass made me understand that life was truly one and that my frugal nature was probably a bit too silly. I lived on less than 10% of what I made. I saved a lot. I barely spent on anything at all.

I wish I had used all the money I saved to fly my dad out of the country for treatment. But I didn’t feel rich enough, and that was a huge mistake.

At the end of last year, I asked Ifemi where the Stella of 2022 had gone. I told him that I felt like I got to be her for just a few months, and poof, she vanished. Stella of 2022 had just moved into her own apartment after sharing a very small cubicle with two friends and their pet dog. She was jogging in the mornings. She was writing for Zendesk. She had friends over. She bought a car. She was developing the facsimile of a social life.

He reminded me that my father died and then I moved away to a new country. Stella of 2022 was thrown into turmoil and didn’t get the chance to stick around for long.

In August 2022, an idea solidified in my mind: I was going to leave Nigeria and live elsewhere. I had always wanted to travel, but this was the first time that I seriously considered uprooting and leaving. I had briefly thought about it post-EndSars.

You could say the japa bug caught me, but there were other factors:

• I had just been rejected by France for a visa application to attend my team’s meetup on the grounds that I might not return to my country. I had money in my account and a job, but that was not enough. I slowly realized that living in Nigeria would potentially limit me.
• I was also having a lot of conversations about how unstable the country was becoming. There was a lot going on on Twitter back then and ever and I remember coming across a story of a YouTuber who was falsely accused by the EFCC and lost his page. I felt unsafe because I was a young Nigerian woman making an amount monthly that most civil servants would be content to retire with after years of service. That could easily be me.
• Finally, I had a friend feeding my anxiety. I remember that she’d call and talk about insecurity issues, such as the kidnapping and advancement of terrorist groups in the capital city. She’d talk about the possibility of Tinubu becoming president and us losing our freedom (lol).

I didn’t know then, but I was absorbing all of this fear and mixing it with mine, and slowly, it poisoned my mind. I had some terrible dreams about riots breaking out and being trapped. My family members and boyfriend had similar dreams. My primal brain came on, and all I could think of was I need to get out of here before Nigeria goes to war, and then I won’t be able to leave because the airports are shut down, and then I will be taken as war trophy by jihadist fighters when they overrun Abuja.

You might laugh as you read this, but it was all very real to me then.

A friend of mine had just moved to Rwanda from his country, Benin Republic. I had visited Rwanda once and looked forward to returning. Maybe it could be my new home. It seemed right. It was quiet and peaceful. It had a functional government. Also, it was a country my boyfriend could also access and move to. I reached out to ask some questions about living there and started making plans.

Another thing that added to the urgency of the situation was that my rent was up for renewal, and I was torn between acting on my idea and paying for another year in my small apartment. My neighbor who had lived in the UK thought it was a good idea to wait and maybe consider another country with more prospects — a Western country. But I waved the idea away. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I just didn’t think it was possible.

My mind set, I traveled to see all my family members and let them know I was leaving. I told my elder sisters that I wanted to travel and see the world before getting married and having kids. I told my mum I wasn’t safe in Nigeria. They were sad but supported me.

I sold my car and my furniture in the span of a month and was on a plane to Kigali on the 28th of October.

I arrived in Rwanda and within a few days, I started worrying again. I didn’t feel at peace because I had not secured a long-term visa and needed to figure that out quickly. The business visa option I was considering had a lot more paperwork and other requirements for it and I just wasn’t interested in pursuing it. Aside from that, I slowly realized that visiting a country and living in one was different. There was a language barrier and Rwanda, in all its glory, had its own systemic issues. Lastly, I was a foreigner, so I felt at sea in this new country.

I extended my visa once and then had to leave for a new country when it was close to expiring. I decided to visit Ghana. It was in West Africa and it was close to home but not home itself. I arrived there widely unprepared and had to switch between six Airbnbs in less than a month. Most of which cost almost $100 per night. I was bleeding money. I hated feeling unanchored.

But it was in Ghana I had clarity. One night as I sat outside the ridiculously overpriced BQ I was renting in East Legon, I just knew it was time to go back. I realized that Nigeria was a terrible place but I couldn’t keep skipping countries to get away from my problems. It cost me time. It cost my productivity (I was struggling at work because of constant changes in my work environment). It cost me a lot of money. And I had no path to stability because I was on short-term visas.

It was time to go home.

My boyfriend, who had come to join me in Ghana, rode with me to the airport in an Uber. He walked with me to the counter and waved as I went past immigration (this can never happen in Nigeria, by the way). I had booked a short-let in Wuye for a month. I planned to house hunt on the weekends until I found a nice place to stay.

If I’m being honest, I felt ashamed of coming back. I meant I had to admit to my friends and acquaintances that I had failed in the act of immigration. I had failed to make the jump from a life in a badly run state to another one with seemingly better prospects. When I called my sisters to say I needed to come home, none of them looked at me differently. I am thankful for that.

I was also glad I could afford to come back and start life here again. I found an apartment in Jahi that was perfect for me. It was on the ground floor and the only available unit. The windows were big. The kitchen was large. It had a store! I saw myself growing plants on the veranda. I moved in and furnished it slowly. A bedframe from Taeillo. An orthopaedic mattress from Vitafoam. Some blinds from a guy recommended by a friend. A rug from Alibert. Kitchen appliances from my best friend’s mum. Plants and pots from Ekondo.

I slowly started inviting my friends and family to my new home. One thing I didn’t mention earlier was that I missed everyone I loved terribly and wished I had spent more time with them. So now that I was back, that’s exactly what I did. I invited my female friends for quarterly sleepovers, threw a tea party, went out more, and asked my sister to stay for the weekend. My home became a place of joy and memories.

One day, while going through my phone gallery, I saw a picture of the little girl and her father. I remembered that I had left it in Rwanda along with two other bags in the hope that I would come back. Almost a year had passed, and it was still rolled up as a Ghana must-go. I knew it was time to make the final trip to a country I called home for a few months and pick up the rest of my bags.

I delayed for a year.

Finally, in 2024, I flew to Kigali and packed my belongings into two boxes and two bags. It was a short trip. I planned to recreate some old memories but barely had time since I was busy with work. The night before my flight, I unrolled the painting and saw some cracks in the acrylic. I frantically asked my friend Jonathan if he could fix it. He said yes, bring it when you’re home.

Two months later, Jonathan called to say he couldn’t fix my painting. He had to make a new one.

Jonathan delivered the new painting with the old one in February. A few days later, I wrote this essay and showed it to him. I’ll share some thoughts he had on small details in the paintings that reflect my story.

In the picture below, the two paintings lie side by side. You’d notice the differences. The girl is bigger and rests more surely on her dad. He seems more at ease carrying her and supporting her. The purple hue mixed with black dots seems like an acceptance of life’s pleasant and less joyful moments.

Therein lies the metaphor: the Stella of 2022 and all the other years past and present are still there somewhere, but she’s a bit different now.

The new picture is the first one to go up on the bare walls of my new apartment in Katampe Extension. It’s a full circle moment that took me three years.