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.”
But Ebiere had listened too well. She had built a life where the water was clean, but her soul was dry. She had replaced the sound of village drums with the sound of Slack notifications. She had replaced the taste of fresh bush mango with the taste of anxiety.
“I never forgot,” she said. “I just buried it under marble floors.” Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
“ Ebiere! The little one who ran away to the white man’s school!” “I didn’t run away, Mama,” Ebiere said, her voice breaking. “I just… left.”
She left the blazer behind. She wore a simple kampala dress and rubber slippers. The flight to Port Harcourt was short, but the road to the village—Kporghor—was a battle. The asphalt ended three hours in. Then came the red mud. The driver, a young man named Tamuno, kept glancing at her in the rearview mirror. She remembered why she left
Lagos, 2026. Then Port Harcourt, 1994.
The air in Lagos tasted of rust and gasoline. Ebiere knew this because she had just licked her cracked lips after a dusty okada ride from Ojuelegba. At thirty-four, she was a senior analyst for a multinational oil firm—a woman in a blazer who spoke with a clipped British accent she’d acquired at a boarding school in Surrey. An oil company’s pipeline had burst
She hung up. Mama Patience handed her a hoe. “The yams need planting,” the old woman said. “You think you can remember how?”
An old woman emerged from a hut. Mama Patience. She had been the village midwife. She squinted, then her toothless mouth opened in a gasp.
One year later, Evi Edna Ogholi’s song played on a crackling radio in Kporghor village. The cassette was ancient, the lyrics scratched, but the message was clear: