The long road to Abia – part 4

The feast of exhaustion and the paradox of homecoming

By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

1

The journey home this year unfolded against a backdrop of something quietly remarkable – a sense, whispered in conversations and confirmed by the evidence of one’s own eyes, that the state is finally beginning to breathe again. Many people I encountered spoke with a kind of upbeat optimism, the kind that comes when a long‑neglected house begins to show signs of repair. Roads that had once been synonymous with dread and delay are now, in several stretches, navigable in ways they haven’t been in years. Markets that used to be chaotic, unregulated sprawls now show the early outlines of order. Even the administrative machinery – that slow, lumbering beast – seems to be waking up, responding with a little more urgency, a little more coherence.

People attribute this shift to the Governor’s ongoing reforms, and whether one agrees with every detail or not, it is hard to deny that something is moving. Traders in Aba told me that the new sanitation and market restructuring efforts have given them back a sense of dignity. A man in Umuahia spoke of renewed attention to public schools, small improvements that mean the world to children who have known only decay. A group of young men at a fuel station debated the Governor’s infrastructural push with the kind of animated pride that only comes when people feel seen. Even in Abiriba, where skepticism is a cultural sport, I heard elders remark that the state “is beginning to look like someone is in charge again.”

These are not small things. In a region where governance has too often been a distant rumour, the visible signs of effort – of intention – matter. They shape the emotional climate in which homecoming occurs. They soften the edges of the journey. They allow the traveller to arrive not only with nostalgia but with a cautious, grateful acknowledgment that the homeland is not merely surviving but attempting, earnestly, to renew itself. And so, as I began this year’s pilgrimage back to Abiriba, I carried with me not only the familiar dread of the road and the anticipation of the December whirlwind, but also a quiet appreciation for the fact that the state, under its current leadership, seems to be rediscovering its sense of direction.

2

The quiet we had so desperately, almost childishly, hoped to harvest after that punishing seventeen-hour journey home has turned out to be one of the cruellest and most instructive illusions of our adult lives. This was not a failure of the place, but a significant misreading of our own place within it. We did not arrive in a sanctuary awaiting our weary presence; we arrived as a component into a vast, pre-existing, and perpetually churning machine. Abiriba, the town that lives in the diasporic imagination as a still photograph – a place of slow evenings on sun-warmed verandas, of familiar faces softened by memory, of the deep, consolatory scent of remembered earth after rain – revealed itself instead as a restless, thermodynamic engine. Its pistons are powered not by crude oil, but by a more potent and volatile fuel: a compound of ancestral obligation, fierce social ambition, and a collective, unspoken anxiety about vanishing relevance. The machine is always humming, always demanding, always consuming – not maliciously, but with the indifferent necessity of a system that must perpetuate itself. What we met was not rest, but relentless rotation. Not stillness, but frantic circulation. A social ecosystem where the calendar, the deafening loudspeaker, and the weighty, unyielding expectations of the collective hold far more authority over our bodies and minds than our own private exhaustion ever could. We had navigated the physical gauntlet of the road only to be conscripted into a different, more insidious marathon: the marathon of performed belonging.

In the disorienting weeks that followed our arrival, a colder, clearer understanding crystallised. The village of our nostalgic longing – the Abiriba of childhood memory, of lantern-lit compounds where shadows danced with storytelling, of unhurried conversations that unspooled like thread under the brooding, watchful presence of the Okpu Achi – has not disappeared. Rather, it has been overlaid, like a fragile parchment, by a new and far more demanding palimpsest. Historians and ethnographers rightly describe Abiriba as an ancient Enuda kingdom, a place of deep, intricate traditions, a finely calibrated age-grade system that structures life from cradle to grave, and a long, proud history of long-distance trade and strategic mobility. We grew up internalising the mantra that we hail from “Small London,” a town whose people are mythologised for their preternatural enterprise, their expansive generosity, their unique alchemy of building formidable houses and fortunes in far-flung corners of the globe only to return, cyclically, with visible, tangible proof of their success etched in concrete, imported cars, and lavish ceremony. That story remains true; it is the bedrock of our identity. But there is a second, parallel story now, one that is less flattering, less romantic, and infinitely more tiring: Abiriba as a permanent, high-season festival ground, a place where the year’s end has been transformed from a natural season of agricultural rest and spiritual reflection into a densely packed corridor of compulsory, competitive social obligation. The return is no longer a gentle homecoming; it is a quarterly reporting ritual for the diaspora, a live audit where the balance sheet of one’s year abroad is publicly assessed.

The most striking feature of this new reality is its sheer, oppressive density. From mid-December through the first brittle weeks of January, the community’s social calendar undergoes a state of critical mass. It becomes a continuous, looping reel of mandated ceremonies – a cacophony of funerals, weddings, child dedications, thanksgiving services, chieftaincy coronations, age-grade meetings, town union congresses, and the now-ubiquitous, vaguely defined “end-of-year” parties whose primary purpose seems to be the consumption of resources and the assertion of presence. This density is not organic; it is a engineered phenomenon. A critical anthropology reveals a disturbing logistics: many of the burials we solemnly attend in this compressed period are not for the freshly departed. They are for those who passed away six, eight, sometimes twelve months prior. Their bodies have been held in a state of suspended animation in the cold storage of mortuaries in Umuahia or Aba, awaiting this narrow, optimal window when the diaspora – the financiers, the audience, the validating crowd – is guaranteed to be present. The funeral is thus deliberately postponed to maximise spectacle, attendance, and, crucially, financial contribution. By the time the ceremony finally unfolds, the sharp, rending edge of raw grief has long since dulled. The tears that were meant for the moment of loss have already been shed in the lonely privacy of a Lagos flat or a Houston apartment. What remains is a ritual hollowed of its core emotional truth – a logistically intense, socially elaborate, yet emotionally thin pageant. The body is less a beloved departed than a central prop in a drama of social accounting.

This leads to the most psychologically unsettling observation: the eerie, pervasive absence of visible, collective mourning at these delayed events. People arrive, not with the heaviness of loss, but with the practised efficiency of attendees. They greet, they eat, they dance to the hired DJ’s upbeat playlists, they exchange business cards, and they move on to the next event. The formal language of grief is meticulously preserved in the printed programmes, the condolence registers laid out on plastic tables, the solemn intonations of the hired pastor. But the atmosphere they conjure is not one of shared, cathartic sorrow. It is one of transactional obligation, thick with the unspoken pressure of social ledger-keeping. We are there because absence will be noted, meticulously discussed, and remembered – a debit against one’s social capital. We are there because, in a community like Abiriba, physical presence has been weaponised into the primary currency of loyalty, and this end-of-year season is the frantic trading floor where that currency is most aggressively bought, sold, and evaluated. To mourn quietly at home is a private act; to be seen mourning in public is a social deposit.

The soundscape of this period tells its own brutal, unvarnished story. The nights are no longer governed by the ancient, rhythmic symphony of crickets, the distant, complex patter of talking drums, or the soft, murmuring weave of neighbours conversing under a canopy of stars. That acoustic world has been colonised and erased. Now, the very air vibrates with the physical pressure of competing sound systems, each one an avatar of a family’s stature, each determined to dominate the shared atmosphere in aural warfare. Wake-keeps, which once represented sacred, liminal vigils held in the tender, ambiguous hours between midnight and dawn – spaces for storytelling, quiet prayer, and the communal bearing of sorrow – have undergone a grotesque metamorphosis. They are now full-scale productions, complete with professional DJs, live highlife bands, and blinding floodlights that annihilate the night, turning darkness into a harsh, unforgiving artificial day. The speakers are stacked like modern metallic altars to the god of noise, and the music is not a background element; it is the main event, the engine of the gathering. A perverse equation has taken hold: the louder the sound, the farther it carries, the more “successful” and well-attended the gathering is presumed to be. It becomes, in effect, an acoustic arms race – a contest measuring who can commandeer the auditory commons, who can drown out the neighbouring event, who can assert sonic dominance as a proxy for social power.

We move through this relentless sonic battlefield with bodies and nervous systems that are already bankrupt from the journey. The very road that brought us home – newly improved, smoother than in years past – felt at first like a tangible blessing, a physical sign that the state had finally remembered its eastern citizens. But the ease of that physical arrival has been utterly negated by a different, more psychic kind of difficulty: the difficulty of never truly arriving anywhere emotionally or spiritually. We are in a state of perpetual transit, even when we are physically stationary within our family compounds. Our consciousness is fragmented. One moment we are standing in a funeral tent, nodding at a relative; the next, we are in a church for a wedding, forcing a smile for a camera; then, we are at a tense town union meeting; later, we are back at another wake, the faces blurring into a continuous stream. The same half-mile stretch of road in Ameke can host three entirely disconnected realities in a single afternoon: a burial with white canopies in one compound, a marriage celebration with vibrant aso-ebi in the next, a children’s birthday party with bouncing castles just a few houses down. People drift between these parallel universes, spending an hour here, a distracted thirty minutes there, their attention shredded, their presence rendered thin and performative.

3

The visual field is equally saturated and demanding. The aso-ebi system – the practice of selecting uniform fabrics to mark solidarity with a hosting family – has evolved from a gesture of support into a complex, mandatory semiotics of belonging. It turns the village pathways into a flowing, disjointed patchwork of competing colours and patterns, a living mosaic of fractured allegiances. Each event demands its own sartorial uniform, its own visual tribe. We find ourselves engaging in absurd, hurried metamorphoses in the backseats of cars, transforming from the “we” of the blue-and-gold funeral fabric to the “we” of the pink-and-silver wedding attire. The car ceases to be merely transport; it becomes a mobile wardrobe, a temporary confessional, a sealed capsule for stolen moments of silence between exhausting public performances. We are not just attending events; we are constantly, anxiously adjusting our very skins to fit the uniform expectations of the next gathering, our identities becoming as changeable as our clothes.

Food, which in most human cultures is a fundamental, quiet language of care, sustenance, and community, becomes here a public metric of success, a key performance indicator. Enormous, industrial-sized pots of jollof rice, stews simmering rich with palm oil and costly spices, whole goats and cows roasted over open pits – these are not simple acts of hospitality. They are loud, unambiguous statements of capacity, of “doing well,” of meeting and exceeding a communal standard. People notice, with forensic attention, who served what brand of rice, how much meat was allocated per plate, how quickly the servers replenished the trays, and to which guests priority was given. Later, in the private kitchens and behind closed gates, these details are dissected with the seriousness of stock market analysis. “They tried o,” someone will say, a phrase laden with condescension. Or, “For a man of his status, that offering was… small.” The communal meal is thus transformed into a public report card, a socially administered exam. The generosity is often genuine, but it is performed under the harsh, unblinking spotlight of communal surveillance. We eat with gratitude for the sustenance, but also with a gnawing awareness that we are participating in, and being judged by, a larger theatre of economic display.

For the generation over fifty – the unspoken pillars, elders, and financial anchors of the community – this season is a quietly brutal, often dangerous gauntlet. Many of them carry the invisible, heavy burdens of hypertension, diabetes, and stress-related ailments, conditions that pay no heed to the demands of the social calendar. Yet, night after relentless night, they are found sitting under these same canopies, drinking strong local gin or expensive cognac, eating heavy, oily meals long past midnight, and pushing bodies whispered to them by doctors into zones of severe risk. They do this not out of mere carelessness or a love of revelry, but because the structural pressure to show up, to host, to reciprocate past kindnesses, to visibly “belong” and lead, is immense and inescapable. In a town where status within one’s age grade and extended kinship network is central to identity and respect, to withdraw is to risk social erasure, to become a footnote. And so they stay. They endure. They sacrifice their health on the altar of social capital, paying the physical price later in silent hospital visits, sudden collapses, and managed declines that are rarely admitted into the triumphant public narrative of “a well-celebrated life.”

The conversations that manage to occur in these frenetic spaces are as fragmented and fatiguing as the events themselves. Communication becomes a struggle against physics. We shout ourselves hoarse over the wall of music, lean in uncomfortably close to capture half-sentences, nod vigorously at stories whose details are lost to the bassline. There are precious, fleeting moments of genuine connection – the firm, knowing grip of an old friend’s hand on your shoulder, a shared, ancient joke that briefly cuts through the noise like a shaft of light – but they are ephemeral, washed away by the next wave of arrivals. More often, the talk is hurried, interrupted, and ultimately unfinished. Politics, the national sickness, inevitably infiltrates the mix: heated arguments about stolen elections, the crumbling value of the naira, the latest failure of leadership flare up with alcoholic fuel and die down just as quickly, often drowned out by the DJ’s next track or the arrival of a more important guest. By the night’s end, we are not filled with the warmth of communion but depleted by the effort of attempted connection. Our ears ring with a persistent tinnitus. Our bodies ache from hours of plastic-chair confinement. Our minds feel scattered, unable to hold a coherent thought. We retire not with the calm satisfaction of deep fellowship, but with the peculiar, hollow emptiness that follows prolonged sensory and social overstimulation – the feeling of having been busy among many, yet deeply alone.

Morning, in this economy of exhaustion, does not bring the respite we crave. It merely introduces a different genre of demand, one that feels more intimate and thus more taxing. The family house, which should be a fortress of privacy and recuperation, is transformed into an open-plan reception hall and administrative office. From the first light, people arrive – a steady stream of relatives, neighbours, distant acquaintances, and often individuals we barely recognise but who know us, or know of us and our perceived metropolitan resources. They come with warm greetings, yes, but these are often the velvet wrapping around a core of need. A child’s school fee that must be paid before resumption. A looming hospital bill for a protracted illness. A business proposal for a block-making machine or a hairdressing salon that requires seed capital. A community project to tar the next stretch of road that needs a “leading contribution.” These requests are not illegitimate; they are the very fabric of interdependency, often urgent and heartbreakingly human. But they land on a nervous system that has not recovered, on a psyche that has had no quiet moment to process its own accumulated fatigue. We find ourselves lurching between roles: from sleepy host to emergency benefactor, from returning child to local patron, from family member to impersonal resource node. The emotional math of homecoming becomes a draining calculus of guilt, duty, and diminishing personal reserves.

The day’s schedule, meanwhile, fills with the inevitability of a rising tide. A funeral in a neighbouring village by noon. A critical town union development committee meeting in the afternoon, where ambitious projects are debated and financial levies apportioned. A child’s dedication ceremony in the late afternoon. A cousin’s “December birthday” party at night. Each event possesses its own internal logic and emotional claim. Each one matters to someone we love or are obligated to. But consumed in sequence, they form a relentless, depleting parade that actively annihilates any possibility for introspection, for idle conversation, for simply being. We are in constant motion, a perpetual adaptation to external expectations. The cherished “holiday” – the holy day of rest we once mythologised as a pause, a sacred chance to breathe, reconnect with self, and recalibrate our inner compass – reveals itself as a gruelling marathon of compulsory appearances. The vacation is a fiction; this is unpaid, emotionally costly social labour.

Sociologists who study the intricate dynamics of return migration and homecoming rituals in West Africa have deftly charted this transformation. They note that the ancestral village is no longer merely a passive place of origin; it has been actively reconstituted as a vital stage upon which success, loyalty, and authentic identity must be publicly performed and ratified. The anthropologist Mirjam de Bruijn, in her work on mobility and belonging, captures this precisely: “Home is not only where one comes from, but where one must continually prove that one still belongs.” That sentence echoes like a haunting refrain in our minds as we rush from one brightly lit canopy to another, acutely aware that our presence, our demeanour, our contribution, is being recorded in the invisible, unforgiving ledger of communal memory. Absence is an actionable offence, a withdrawal of social credit. Presence is the costly, exhausting price of maintaining one’s line in the family and community ledger.

4

What renders this whole experience profoundly disorienting, a kind of psychosocial vertigo, is the stark, almost violent contrast between the outer and inner landscapes of our being. Outwardly, we are immersed in a theatre of vibrant abundance – overflowing food, pulsing music, dense crowds of familiar faces, ceaseless movement and colour. It is the picture of communal vitality. Inwardly, however, a great many of us harbour a silent, growing sensation of depletion, a quiet hollowing out. We embarked on this long road home with a yearning to reconnect with something essential, something grounding and authentic. Instead, we find ourselves ensnared in a cyclical economy of performance that leaves us more spiritually fatigued, more emotionally fragmented, than we were in the alienating grind of Lagos or Abuja. The long road to Abia, romantically envisioned as a journey back to our core selves, begins to feel instead like a corridor leading us deeper into a labyrinth of other people’s expectations, a maze where the minotaur is our own fear of social exile.

And yet – and this is the central, painful paradox – beneath the layers of exhaustion, beneath the resentment and the noise, there persists a stubborn, undimmed love. There remains the primal, magnetic pull of belonging, the irreducible warmth of a face that has known you since you were knee-high, the profound comfort of a dialect and a humour that require no translation, that operate on a frequency understood in the blood. There are stolen moments – brief, fragile, and therefore precious – when we catch a startling, clear glimpse of the Abiriba we carry in our hearts: an elder’s silent, weighty hand of blessing placed on your head, the unfettered laughter of children playing in the red mud of the compound, a simple, shared bowl of ỌTỌ and UDARA eaten in companionable silence on a back porch, far from the tyrannical loudspeakers. These moments are the small, stubborn embers glowing in the ash of the festival. They are the reason we endure the ordeal. They are the timeless currency that the machine of performance cannot devalue.

But we can no longer afford to romanticise or ignore what the season has metastasised into: a Feast of Exhaustion, a Paradoxical Homecoming that leaves a significant portion of its pilgrims feeling more scattered than settled, more drained than replenished. We are learning, through a slow ache of realisation, that a community can be saturated with events and yet be starved of genuine, restorative rest. That a town can be electrically alive with activity and yet be struggling to access its own capacity for deep, collective feeling. That we can be physically surrounded by our kin and yet be desperately, silently searching for a quiet corner where we can simply sit, breathe, and remember who we are when no one is watching.

In that fertile, troubling tension – between deep love and profound fatigue, between the yearning for authentic belonging and the reality of social burnout – lies the essential, urgent question that this leg of our journey forces upon us: What kind of home are we collectively building with all this furious energy? And what is the ultimate, hidden cost – to our individual bodies and minds, to the quality of our family bonds, and to our shared, evolving soul as a people? The feast is abundant, but it is time to ask if we are nourished, or merely full.

Participating in this relentless cycle, we begin to feel a strange and steadily deepening disconnect – a chilling sensation that the very substance of homecoming, its nourishing marrow, is being consumed by the spectacular blaze of its own performance. It is not a sudden epiphany but a slow, cumulative seepage, a recognition that filters in during the interstitial moments of stillness. What should have been a return to grounding, a reunion with the foundational earth of self, instead starts to feel like an ascent into a furnace: bright, crowded, noisy, and oddly hollow at the centre. We are Sisyphus in aso-ebi, pushing the boulder of social expectation up the hill of each day only to watch it tumble back down with the setting sun, the next day’s itinerary already a heavier weight. The more we move from event to event, the more we sense that something essential is slipping through our fingers, something we cannot quite name but feel acutely in the quiet moments between obligations, in the brief, sacred silences when the generator sputters, cuts off, and the speakers fall still, leaving a ringing vacuum in the ears that feels louder than the noise it replaced. In that sudden auditory void, the mind, so long battered into submission, stirs. It is in those rare pauses, standing alone in the dark compound under indifferent stars, that the question rises, uninvited and insistent: is this what we came back for? The question hangs, unanswered, because to answer honestly would be to admit a significant betrayal – not of the community, but of our own longing.

As the days pass, marked not by the sun’s arc but by the sequential consumption of peppered goat and bottles of stout, the influx of returnees intensifies, and with them comes a flood of stories that sound less like casual travel updates and more like oral epics of endurance, Homeric sagas recited not of gods and heroes, but of clutch plates and traffic police. Each arriving car is a canvas, coated in a thick, grey, uniform film of laterite dust, the kind that seems to seep past closed windows into the pores of the skin and settle as a gritty phantom in the deepest recesses of the lungs. You can almost read the journey’s biography on the bodywork: the long, punishing hours vibrating over corrugated laterite stretches are etched as fine cracks in the clear coat; the sudden, jarring braking is evidenced by a cleaner patch on the bumper where dust was blasted away; the idle hours in unmoving traffic are written in the fine pollen of exhaust soot that blackens the tailpipe and rear windshield. In living rooms fuggy with heat and the scent of insecticide, under canopies that billow like the lungs of some great, weary beast, at roadside bars where the beer is never quite cold enough, people recount their journeys with a mixture of exhaustion, perverse pride, and a lingering disbelief that borders on trauma. These are not casual anecdotes swapped over drinks; they are testimonies, ritualized depositions given to an audience of fellow survivors. The telling is part of the healing, and part of the credentialing.

The narratives follow a grim liturgy. Someone, their voice still hoarse from shouting over engine noise, speaks of a thirty-six-hour standstill on the Benin – Asaba axis, that notorious stretch of federal highway that has transcended mere infrastructure failure to become a kind of national metaphor for arrested development and collective impotence. They describe it not as traffic, but as a sprawling, spontaneous city of stranded metal and despair – a parking lot of human frustration under a merciless, metallic sun. Engines are switched off to conserve precious, overpriced fuel. Windows are cracked open, admitting not a breeze but a viscous, exhaust-laden heat. Bodies, too many to a vehicle, contort into hieroglyphs of discomfort: necks cricked against headrests, legs draped over gearsticks, children sprawled across laps slick with sweat. Tempers, frayed to their last filament, flare over inches of gained space or the last warm bottle of water.

Through this immobilized landscape move the entrepreneurs of stasis: hawkers weaving between vehicles with the agility of spirits, selling overpriced sachets of “pure water,” stale bread, boiled eggs, and a palpable, resigned acceptance of the absurd. Another person, their eyes underscored by bruises of fatigue, talks about the impossibility of true sleep. They describe a half-conscious vigilance, sleeping upright in the driver’s seat, one eye half-open, one hand still resting on the steering wheel as if ready for a departure that never comes, the body humming with a residual tension that no position can alleviate. Others, often the self-appointed logisticians of the journey, recall the constant, gnawing mental calculations performed on a loop: the fuel gauge’s slow, hypnotic descent towards empty; the mental inventory of cash, factoring in anticipated “settlements” at a dozen unofficial checkpoints; the anxious, sympathetic listening to the vehicle’s groans and rattles, diagnosing with amateur dread whether the next pothole will be the one that finally snaps a tie-rod or surrenders a shock absorber.

The financial cost of these pilgrimages, when laid out plainly on the mental spreadsheet kept by every adult returnee, is staggering – a figure that makes a mockery of the economic logic of “saving money” by avoiding the flight. It is an accounting of attrition. Fuel is consumed not in liters but in tankfuls, a significant line item that drains wallets as surely as it powers engines. Roadside meals, universally mediocre and often hazardous, are bought at prices inflated by the captive-audience economics of the stranded traveler. Emergency repairs, negotiated in the dust with mechanics whose expertise is as questionable as their prices are non-negotiable, are paid for in crumpled, damp naira notes. Tolls are levied not just by the government, but by a shadow civil service of police, army, and local vigilantes, each transaction a small tax on motion. By the time many people finally roll past the welcoming sign into Abiriba, they have spent sums that rival or decisively exceed the cost of a one-hour flight from Lagos if you can get a ticket. Yet, crucially, they recount these tales of fiscal hemorrhage not with regret or anger, but with a kind of grim, performative satisfaction. The suffering itself, the economic martyrdom, has been metabolized into part of the ritual, a necessary sacrificial levy that proves the depth of their commitment. It is the proof that they have earned, through tangible hardship, their place at the communal table. The scar becomes the credential.

In quieter corners of these same gatherings, however, away from the performative bravado, another layer of reflection emerges, whispered like a heresy. Someone, leaning close, the smell of exhaustion on their breath, admits almost inaudibly that if they had truly known the journey would be that bad, they would have flown without a second thought. Another confesses, under the guise of a joke that doesn’t land, that they considered the unthinkable: turning the car around at the height of the Asaba gridlock and driving the twelve hours back to Lagos, defeated. The shame at the thought of arriving back at their starting point without having “touched home,” of facing their family’s silent disappointment or their neighbors’ unspoken judgment, was a heavier burden than the road itself. A third person says nothing at all, but their eyes, ringed with the deep purple of significant fatigue, tell a story of quiet desperation that words cannot capture. Beneath the communal bravado, the competitive laughter about who suffered most, there lies a shared, subterranean awareness – a dark, pooled understanding that something about this annual ordeal is fundamentally irrational, even self-punishing. It is a collective action that mirrors the definition of madness: doing the same thing year after year while expecting a different, less painful result. And yet, with a resignation that feels like fate, year after year, we do it again. We submit our bodies, our bank accounts, and our sanity to the asphalt god.

5

Anthropologists who study the intricate dances of migration and return often speak of “moral geographies” – the powerful idea that certain places on the map are not just physical coordinates but landscapes of ethical obligation, inscribed with duties that bind across time and distance. Home, in this framework, is not simply the location of one’s birth or childhood; it is a site where one’s moral account is kept, where presence is a deposit and absence a withdrawal. To stay away, especially during the sacred calendrical window of Christmas, is to risk more than being forgotten. It is to risk being misinterpreted as prideful, assimilated, or lost. It is to invite the quiet, corrosive judgment that whispers, “He has become too big for us,” or “She has forgotten where she comes from.” To come back, therefore, no matter the exorbitant physical, financial, and emotional tariff, is to perform a vital declarative act. It is to shout with one’s entire, weary being: “I still belong. We have not abandoned you. My story is still inextricably woven into the fabric of this place.” The road to Abia, then, is not just a ribbon of asphalt and dust; it is a corridor of duty, a gauntlet one must run to keep one’s moral standing in good credit.

Layered onto this geography of obligation is the powerful, often unreliable magnet of memory – a force that expertly edits the past, softening its edges, heightening its colors, and silencing its dissonances. We remember childhood Decembers not as they were, but as we needed them to be: seasons of unadulterated magic. The memory is a curated gallery of sensations: the crisp, thrilling feel of new clothes against skin; the once-a-year aroma of special meals cooking for days; the electric excitement of cousins materializing from the distant, glamorous cities of Lagos and Port Harcourt; nights that felt endless, filled with unsupervised adventure, uninhibited laughter, and stories told in the dark that bound us to generations. We remember, above all, the profound, cellular feeling of being held – of existing within a dense, unquestioned web of relationships where everyone knew not just your name, but your father’s name, your mother’s village, your grandfather’s famous temper or generosity. This memory, however selectively edited, exerts a gravitational pull of immense power. We are not just returning to a place; we are attempting to return to a feeling. We want to give our own children, raised in the anonymizing concrete grids of the city, a taste of that primal, secure belonging, even as we ourselves struggle to find it amidst the cacophony. We are chasing a ghost, trying to bottle for the next generation a climate of community that may have existed only in the specific, vanished ecology of our own childhoods.

Intertwined with memory and duty is the significant, often inarticulate spiritual and ancestral dimension. For many of us, home is not just where our living parents age; it is where our dead are rooted. It is the plot of earth where the graves of grandparents and great-grandparents lie under the whispering shade of ancient trees, their headstones slowly being reclaimed by moss and vine. It is where names are spoken aloud in libations during prayers, where the invisible, watchful community of the departed is believed to hold a vested interest in the fortunes and conduct of the living. To stay away from that hallowed ground for too long, to fail to “show face” to the ancestors, feels – at a level deeper than rational thought – like a dangerous neglect, a rupture in a sacred contract. It is a metaphysical withdrawal. Even when our educated, modern minds rationally understand that God is omnipresent, that love transcends geography, a deeper, older consciousness persists. It whispers that there is a particular blessing, a specific kind of fortification for the journey ahead, that can only be received while standing on the ancestral soil, breathing air thick with the spirits of those who came before. The homecoming, then, is also a pilgrimage to the family altar.

And yet, in a twist of cruel irony, when we finally arrive, having paid the toll of the road and fortified by these noble intentions, what greets us is not the quiet, contemplative homecoming of our road-weary fantasies. Instead, we are immediately swept into a second, parallel ordeal: the frantic, psychologically draining theatre of the social calendar. The very people who endured sleepless nights in the claustrophobic confines of their cars now endure sleepless nights under rented canopies, assaulted by sound and social demand. The same bodies that cramped in ergonomic nightmares of car seats now cramp in the unforgiving plastic chairs that are the furniture of our festive season. The same minds that performed heroic feats of navigation and hazard-avoidance on the lethal highway now must perform equally taxing feats of social navigation – remembering faces, tracking obligations, modulating demeanor for different audiences, and managing the complex politics of contribution and appearance. We move from one event to another with the same dogged, joyless determination we used to move from one police checkpoint to the next. The journey, we realize with a sinking heart, does not end at the village gate; it simply changes form, exchanging physical peril for social peril, the anxiety of accident for the anxiety of transgression.

This dual ordeal – the brutal, physical trial of the road followed immediately by the relentless, emotional gauntlet of home – creates a cognitive and spiritual whiplash. It forces a deeper, more uncomfortable question to the surface of consciousness, one that cannot be placated with platitudes. It is no longer sufficient to recite the stock answers: “We came because it is Christmas,” or “We came because this is what our family does.” The sheer scale of the sacrifice – quantified in time, money, health, and mental peace – demands a more honest, unvarnished reckoning. We are compelled to ask: What exactly, in this modern iteration, are we chasing? What unresolved need are we attempting to fill with this torrent of activity? What are we, on a significant level, trying to prove – to our parents, to our peers, to the watching ancestors, and, most hauntingly, to ourselves? And conversely, what are we so deeply afraid will happen if we stop? If we choose the quiet holiday abroad, the simple Christmas in Lagos, the peaceful New Year without a single funeral to attend? What is the nature of the void we fear our absence would create, both in the community and in our own sense of self?

Psychologists examining patterns of compulsive behavior might frame this annual ritual as a collective compulsion – a repetitive action pattern that persists despite its clear negative consequences because it is inextricably knotted with core identity, a sense of belonging, and primal fears of exclusion and erasure. The anxiety of not going becomes greater than the known misery of going. Sociologists might frame it as a necessary, if costly, ritual of reaffirmation for a diasporic people. In a nation that often feels hostile and in cities that demand assimilation, the annual return is a way for a dispersed tribe to physically reassemble, to touch the template, and to reassure itself through sheer, overwhelming numbers that the community still exists, that the cultural center, however beleaguered, has not fully collapsed. Theologians and philosophers might detect within our exhausted migrations a distorted, secularized echo of ancient pilgrimage – a journey undertaken towards a sacred centre in the hope of renewal, forgiveness, or blessing, even if the form it now takes (the loud party, the competitive gifting) is a far cry from the silent, contemplative journeys of old.

But beyond the academic theories, elegantly framed in journals and lecture halls, there exists the raw, un-theorized lived reality: the thousand-yard stare of a man listening to a third round of speeches; the silent calculation on a woman’s face as she mentally deducts another hefty contribution from her January budget; the frayed tempers that snap over trivialities, spilling the accumulated stress of the journey and the season into family conflict; the quiet, private moments of doubt that flash across a face in the middle of a laughter-filled room. In those moments, when the borrowed generator finally runs out of fuel and the house is plunged into a sudden, significant stillness, the question returns, not as a whisper but as a sharp, clear demand: What for?

We can, as we have done, name its components – duty, nostalgia, fear of judgment, a significant longing for authentic connection, reverence for the dead, the sacrificial desire to gift our children a sense of unshakable origin. But the act of naming, while clarifying, does not dissolve the essential unease. It merely catalogues the ingredients of the trap. Because alongside these understandable, even noble human motives, there coils something darker and more insidious: the gnawing sense that we, the children of this vibrant, demanding culture, are caught in a self-perpetuating cycle that no single individual feels empowered to interrupt. It is a cycle that operates like a social Ponzi scheme, demanding ever-greater investments of energy, money, and performance from each successive generation, while the emotional and spiritual returns seem to diminish proportionally. We are pouring the richest wine of our lives – our time, our youth, our health, our precious peace – into a ritual that threatens to become its own empty justification.

And so, we find ourselves standing, dazed and depleted, in the very heart of this magnificent paradox: We love this place with a fierceness that defines us, and it exhausts us to the point of breakdown. We yearn for home with an ache that feels physical, and home, in its current festive manifestation, drains us of the vitality we brought to it. We endure the epic trial of the road to reach this sanctuary, only to be presented with a second, subtler marathon upon arrival. Somewhere in the liminal space between the choking dust of the Benin – Asaba highway and the harsh, flat glare of the floodlights over a dance floor, between the agonizing cramps of the car seat and the familiar ache of the plastic chair under the canopy, a quiet, unsettling question settles deep into our bones, becoming part of our own marrow:

What if the very way we are performing homecoming – with its escalating scale, its compulsory joy, its transactional attendance – is slowly, inexorably eroding the fragile, precious thing we are so desperately trying to preserve? What if our method of celebrating community is, in fact, a sophisticated engine for its attrition?

It is not a question that can be answered in a single season, or resolved within the pages of one essay. The social forces at play are ancient, powerful, and woven into the fabric of our identity. But it is a question that, once truly contemplated, will not leave us alone. It will accompany us on the long road back to Lagos, sit with us in the silence of our city apartments, and wait, patiently, for our return next December. It is the ghost at the feast, the silent guest in every crowded room, the sobering truth that may, eventually, compel us to imagine a different way to belong.

6

The answer, we have slowly – and against the roaring tide of collective sentiment – come to realise, does not lie in the gentle, sepia-toned nostalgia of popular imagination. It is not contained in the soft-focus, highly edited reels of childhood Decembers we curate in our minds, nor is it fully captured by the sentimental, handed-down mythologies we recite about the sacred, non-negotiable act of “going home.” Those are the symptoms, the yearning, the beautiful lie that fuels the engine. The true answer, the brutal and sustaining core, lies somewhere far more complicated, somewhere in the tortured, brilliant, and conflicted centre of the modern Igbo psyche. It resides in that restless, protean, and rapidly evolving psychology of belonging – a construct that is equal parts unbreakable resilience, significant existential longing, and a subtle, often unspoken social pathology. What we enact each December, in the mass migration of millions across impossible roads, is not merely a holiday ritual or a seasonal break. It is the most sacred of our secular rites, an institution more binding in its social enforcement than many formal religions. It is a collective choreography of return so deeply embedded in our cultural DNA that it has survived the Biafran War’s scattering, the relentless pressures of global migration, the atomizing force of late capitalism, and the dissolving acids of modern, urban anonymity. It is the one story we insist on living, even when the living of it breaks us.

The Christmas homecoming is, at its heart, our annual, defiant declaration of ontological security in a world that constantly, insistently demands our assimilation and erasure. It is the moment we stand physically before the abstract, powerful worlds of Lagos, Abuja, Houston, and London and insist, with our presence, with our endured suffering, “I am from somewhere. My root is not metaphorical.” In the anonymous, mercenary, and transactional landscapes of these megacities, where identity becomes a fluid, functional tool – a costume to be worn for professional advancement or social survival – this journey is our yearly re-tethering to the source code of who we believe, at our most essential, we must be. It is a vote cast not with a ballot, but with our feet, our finances, and our frayed nerves. It is a reaffirmation of lineage and loyalty written not in the perishable ink of social media posts, but in the indelible ledger of kilometres endured, in the thousands of hours collectively lost to gridlock, in the somatic cost exacted by the road upon our spines, our livers, and our peace of mind. It is the physical proof of a metaphysical claim.

The suffering, we must understand, is not an unfortunate byproduct; it is the central, necessary sacrament of the ritual. It is the proof. It is the burnt offering that makes the homecoming valid. Anthropologists like Peggy Levitt and Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, who study the rituals of return migration, often note that hardship becomes a unique form of moral currency – a costly offering that legitimizes one’s claim to belonging, especially for those who are physically absent for most of the year. For the Igbo, a people historically defined by mobility and trade, and whose modern identity was crucibly forged in the trauma of displacement and the civil war, this homecoming has evolved into a secular pilgrimage where the ordeal itself is the primary credential. The broken, dangerous, unpredictable road – that glaring symbol of state failure – has been culturally reappropriated as our modern initiation ground. The asphalt gauntlet, with its phalanx of potholes and predatory checkpoints, has replaced the physical trials and bush schools of old. Every jolt that travels up the spine, every negotiation with a uniformed man at a roadblock, every sleepless, anxious night spent in a stationary vehicle on the Benin-Asaba road, becomes a whispered, physical declaration to the ancestors and to the community: I value this connection enough to suffer for it. My belonging is not a fair-weather friendship. My loyalty is worth this tangible price in discomfort, danger, and depleted savings.

In Abiriba, time does not simply pass – it becomes elastic, porous, ungovernable. It bends and folds in on itself until the very idea of a calendar feels like a distant, urban invention with no real jurisdiction here. Days dissolve into one another with a dreamlike fluidity, as though the town exists in a parallel temporal dimension where clocks are decorative and dates are optional. I have woken up on what I later learned was a Tuesday fully convinced it was Saturday, only to find that no one around me could confidently correct me. People shrug when asked what day it is, as though the question itself is slightly absurd. I once overheard two grown men – both meticulous professionals in Lagos – argue for several minutes about whether it was Wednesday or Friday, only to abandon the debate entirely when someone reminded them that “Chief’s event is tonight.” That settled it. In Abiriba, the true calendar is not Gregorian but social; time is measured not in days but in events, not in hours but in obligations. The week is structured around who is hosting what, whose canopy is going up next, whose compound is the next pilgrimage site. Sunday becomes just another square on the board unless it happens to coincide with a wedding or thanksgiving, in which case it is swallowed whole by the festivities.

I am not immune to this temporal disorientation. If anything, I am often its first casualty. Were it not for my daily Bible readings – my one fragile tether to linear time – and the diary entries I force myself to scribble each day, I too would drift into the communal fog. Even with these anchors, I have found myself pausing mid‑conversation to ask, “Wait, what day is today again?” And the responses I receive are never judgmental; they are empathetic, almost relieved. “My brother, I don’t even know,” someone will say, laughing as though we are both participants in a harmless, shared hallucination. One afternoon at a Lounge, a childhood friend looked genuinely startled when I mentioned that it was Sunday. He blinked, frowned, and said, “Ah! No wonder my mother was dressed like that this morning.” Then he shrugged and returned to his peppered meat. And then there was the couple whose argument I stumbled into by accident: the husband furious that he had missed an event he had been looking forward to, the wife equally furious that he had not reminded her, lamenting the small fortune she had spent on her dress. Only later did I learn that both of them, on the very night of the missed event, had been seen at no fewer than three other gatherings – laughing, dancing, posing for pictures, utterly unaware that time had slipped through their fingers. These loops are treated as normal, even charming, as though the suspension of time is part of the enchantment of the season. And perhaps it is. But it also unsettles me, this collective amnesia that spares only the things that exhaust us.

Because here is the paradox: while we forget Sundays, we never forget the next round of binges. The same people who cannot recall whether yesterday was Thursday can recite, with perfect accuracy, the entire lineup of events for the next five days. Ask someone when they last slept properly and they will look confused; ask them what time the next bachelor’s eve starts and they will answer instantly, with the precision of a Swiss train conductor. It is as though the town emits a frequency that overrides the brain’s natural rhythms, replacing circadian logic with a kind of festive delirium. I have watched people who ordinarily live disciplined, structured lives in the city transform into nocturnal creatures who sleep at dawn, wake at noon, and move through the day as though propelled by an invisible stimulant. And perhaps that is exactly what it is – a stimulant, a communal drug, a seasonal intoxication that alters perception and dissolves boundaries. Sometimes I catch myself wondering, half seriously, what strange hallucinogenic compound must be circulating in the Abiriba air, what invisible vapour we are all inhaling that makes us forget the sacred rhythms of rest while remembering, with religious fervor, the next opportunity to exhaust ourselves. It is both hilarious and haunting, this temporal distortion, this festive fever that grips us all. And yet, year after year, we surrender to it willingly, as though the warp in time were not a glitch but a feature of home itself.

Arnold van Gennep’s classic tripartite theory of rites of passage – separation, liminality, reaggregation – maps onto our December odyssey with an uncanny, almost prophetic precision. The moment we lock the door of our Lagos apartment, we initiate the stage of separation. We are severed, physically and psychologically, from our urban identities – the professional, the tenant, the anonymous city-dweller. Then, we enter the limen, the threshold, the long, ambiguous corridor of the road. This is the prolonged, transformative liminality. We are betwixt and between, neither fully of the city we left nor yet of the village we seek. We are suspended in a mobile purgatory, a steel capsule hurtling through a landscape of hazard. In this space, our urban accretions – our impatience, our individualism, our illusions of control – are systematically stripped away by the great equalizers of fatigue, shared frustration, and significant vulnerability. The road humbles. It forces a communal patience. By the time we finally see the familiar hills of home, we have been softened, emptied, and psychologically prepared – whether we realize it or not – for the stage of reaggregation. We are ready to be reabsorbed, as a purified and proven member, back into the warm, demanding body of the community.

But here is where the psychological script, so elegantly outlined by theory, takes a fascinating, dysfunctional turn. Upon arrival, a subtle yet seismic cognitive shift occurs. The very magnitude of the struggle, the sheer scale of the sacrifice made to get here, creates a powerful, often unconscious, psychological imperative: we must justify it. We must validate the suffering. We must make the monumental ordeal worth it. This imperative births a frantic, almost hysterical compression of lived experience. We attempt to cram twelve months of deferred social obligations – the networking necessary for business, the intimate family bonding, the resolution of lingering disputes, the complex signalling of success and solidarity, the mandatory participation in community meetings and projects – into two short, frantic, breathless weeks. The calendar becomes a monstrous thing, every slot filled, every evening claimed. It becomes a form of temporal bulimia: a desperate, ravenous binge of experiences, relationships, and performances, followed by the inevitable emotional and physical purge of departure, leaving us feeling emptier than before. We are trying to ingest an entire year’s worth of belonging in one sitting.

7

In this compressed state, we chase a phantom of fulfillment through sensory overload. We seek it in the overflowing, groaning plates of rice and soup, as if the calories could translate into connection. We seek it in the countless bottles of beer and stout, as if intoxication could shortcut intimacy. We seek it most paradoxically in the deafening, chest-thumping music that ironically drowns out the very quiet, sustained conversations that could give the season genuine meaning. We move from one brightly lit canopy to another with the urgent, haunted air of people trying to outrun a quiet voice of dissatisfaction. We tell ourselves and others that we are “reconnecting,” but so often we are merely performing connection – checking boxes on a social ledger, making visible appearances, proving our loyalty and belonging through the public fact of our presence rather than through the private, slow work of intimacy. It is connection as a spectator sport, where being seen is more critical than being known.

Beneath this frantic activity, beneath the laughter and the loud greetings, there thrums a quiet, unspoken, and deeply anxious truth: we are terrified. We are terrified of returning to Lagos, Abuja, or London without having “maximized” the trip, of facing the long city months ahead with the nagging sense of opportunities missed. We fear, at a cellular level, that if we do not compress everything – every greeting, every event, every obligation – into these two precious weeks, the already-strained thread that binds us to home will fray beyond repair. We fear that if our face is not seen at Uncle’s funeral or Cousin’s wedding, we will be quietly edited out of the narrative, our name spoken with a hint of betrayal. We fear that if we do not participate fully, conspicuously, and expensively, we will lose our hard-won place in the ongoing story of our family and our town. This fear is the hidden engine of the exhaustion.

This, then, is the significant paradox beating at the heart of the modern Igbo homecoming: we undertake a heroic journey seeking rest, but we find only a different, more social form of motion. We cross continents and endure tribulations seeking deep connection, but we often drown in a sea of noise and superficial interaction. We yearn for authentic meaning and a renewal of spirit, but we become overwhelmed by the demands of relentless performance. We leave one form of exhaustion for another, trading the fatigue of the metropolis for the fatigue of the festival.

And yet – and this is the final, confounding truth – year after punishing year, we come back. We book the tickets, we service the cars, we brace ourselves, and we return. Because beneath the layered exhaustion, beneath the glittering spectacle, beneath the frantic, unsustainable pace, there persists that ancient, stubborn, and undeniable truth: we are a people, perhaps one of the last on earth, for whom home is not a leisure option or a sentimental choice. For the Igbo, home is obligation in its most sacred form. Home is identity itself – the foundational answer to the question “Who are you?”. Home is the sacred geography where the living and the dead meet in an unbroken, whispering chain of memory, responsibility, and awe. To abandon the return is not merely to skip a party; it is to risk a kind of spiritual disinheritance.

But the cost of maintaining that chain, of performing that identity, grows heavier with each passing cycle. The financial burden deepens, the social expectations escalate, the performances become more elaborate, and the quiet spaces for genuine being vanish. And so the question we must now confront – individually in our silent hearts, and collectively in our town union meetings – is not whether we should return, but how. We must ask, with clear eyes and without defensiveness: Is the way we are currently “doing” homecoming – this festival of exhaustion, this performance of belonging – slowly, inexorably eroding the very qualities of depth, authenticity, and sustainable community we are trying to preserve? Are we, in our desperate effort to keep the flame alive, accidentally smothering it with too much fuel?

That question lingers. It lingers in the heavy-lidded spaces between events, in the fatigue that masks our smiles in family photographs, in the hollow silence that follows the last, echoing note from the loudspeaker after a wake-keep. It is the ghost at our feast, the sober guest in our midst. It is a question born of love, not of rejection. And it is a question we, the children of this resilient and demanding culture, can no longer afford to ignore. For the road ahead, both literal and metaphorical, depends on the answer.

The holiday – this so-called holy day of rest, this sacred pause promised by the very word – disappears almost as soon as we arrive, swallowed whole by a restless, ego-driven commerce of visibility and obligation. It is a transaction dressed in the garb of tradition, a barter system where the currency is our presence and the goods are social validation and the temporary alleviation of guilt. We have a phrase for it, a phrase that captures the entire, exhausting psychology of the season with unnerving, surgical precision: “showing face.” It is not enough to be home, nestled in the quiet of your father’s house, breathing the air that formed you. One must be seen to be home. One must circulate through the public squares and private compounds like a politician on a canvassing tour, appearing at the mandatory checkpoints of grief and celebration, greeting, nodding, smiling until the facial muscles ache, sweating through expensive aso-ebi in the humid night, enduring the sonic assault and the greasy food and the repetitive conversations. One must be accounted for in the invisible ledger, one’s name ticked off on the mental register kept by aunts, age-grade leaders, and community busybodies. Absence is a debit; presence is a deposit, however small and wearisome its making.

And so we move through the disorienting stretch of days like veteran performers in a sprawling, cyclical play whose script we did not write but somehow know by heart, our lines consisting of the same set of questions and answers, our blocking a weary shuffle between plastic chairs and buffet tables. The strain of this performance is not merely psychological; it is profoundly somatic. It accumulates in the body, a toxic residue of lost sleep, poor nutrition, and adrenaline let-down, until the physical vessel begins to stage its own quiet rebellion. Someone wakes in the grey dawn after yet another late-night “vigil” with a pounding, localized headache behind the eyes and immediately labels it “holiday malaria” – a folk diagnosis for a sickness born not of mosquitoes but of overload, a convenient biological scapegoat for a culturally-induced malaise.

Another, perhaps an elder aunt, collapses briefly, feeling faint during a particularly crowded wake-keep, and those around her cluck sympathetically and blame it on “the weather,” the oppressive harmattan haze, rather than the sheer cardiovascular strain of weeks of relentless activity on an aging heart. A cousin pulls you aside in a rare moment of privacy, her voice a conspiratorial whisper, to confess that her blood pressure medication is no longer holding, that the numbers have spiked again, but she cannot possibly stay home to rest today because her age-grade is hosting visitors from a neighbouring town and her absence would be noted as a dereliction of duty, a failure of solidarity. The social contract overrules the doctor’s orders. A friend from Lagos, a man who had spoken for months about his need for this break, is seen abruptly loading his bags back into his dust-coated SUV after only six days. His face is drawn, his movements hurried. As he slams the boot shut, he catches your eye and offers a weary, knowing smile. “I came here for rest,” he says, the statement hanging in the air between you. “I’m leaving with less of myself than I arrived with.” It is a perfect, devastating epitaph for the season.

We laugh when he says it, a short, sharp exhale of recognition, but the laughter is thin, devoid of joy. It is the laughter of shared surrender, of mutual acknowledgment of a trap we have all walked into willingly. We know exactly what he means. We feel it in the hollow space behind our own ribs, in the persistent low-grade fatigue that coffee cannot touch, in the strange sense of being both surrounded by kin and yet profoundly alone amidst the throng.

The calm we so desperately crave – that deep, restorative silence that would allow us to truly hear home again, to feel its ancient, slow pulse beating beneath the frenetic noise of the present – is buried under an avalanche of actions. These actions feel urgent and non-negotiable in the pressurized moment, charged with the weight of “tradition” and “expectation,” yet they dissolve into a haunting irrelevance when examined in the clear, cold light of a solitary morning. They are tasks without lasting meaning, motions without genuine emotion. We chase these obligations the way children chase fireflies in a summer field: breathlessly, instinctively, captivated by the fleeting points of light, running from one to the next without ever stopping to ask why we are running, or what we will do with the light if we ever actually catch it. The chase itself becomes the point, a dizzying, circular game that leaves us panting and empty-handed.

8

On the evening of the 22nd, I found myself trapped at a wake-keep that was a masterclass in this dissonance. The music was not merely loud; it was a physical entity, a wall of sound so dense and vibrating that the very ground beneath my feet seemed to tremble in sympathetic agony. The DJ, a young man with a practiced swagger and a towel draped over his shoulder like a boxer between rounds, kept shouting into the microphone with aggressive cheer, “Make una feel at home! This is your house!” But the irony was so thick it was almost suffocating. Nothing about the moment felt like home. The air, once capable of carrying the scent of night-blooming flowers and woodsmoke, was now a chemical broth: the acrid bite of diesel fumes bleeding from the chugging generator, mixed with the sharp, greasy tang of suya roasting over open coals, and underneath it all, the faint, sweet-sour perfume of spilled beer soaking into the dry earth. A group of young men, their voices slurry with drink, argued with escalating heat about a missed football penalty near the gate, their disagreement a spark looking for tinder. A woman resplendent in a sequined gown complained loudly to no one in particular that the food service was taking too long, that the caterers were incompetent. Somewhere behind the vast, billowing canopy, hidden from the glare of the floodlights, a child cried inconsolably, his raw, helpless wails repeatedly swallowed and erased by the apocalyptic thump of the bass, as if his distress was an inconvenient, low-priority signal on a overwhelmed frequency.

At one point, seeking a sliver of quiet, I moved to the periphery, where the light was dimmer. There, an elderly man I recognized as a retired teacher from my school days leaned slowly toward me, his movement stiff with age. He didn’t shout. He simply let his words, measured and clear, cut through the sonic chaos. “This,” he said, his gaze sweeping across the scene of forced revelry, “used to be a vigil. A real vigil. We prayed through the night. We kept watch. We told stories about the person who was gone. Now…” He paused, and a significant weariness settled in the lines of his face. “Now it is a concert. And we are the unwilling audience.” His voice was steady, devoid of bitterness, but his eyes carried a deep, settled sadness, a grief not for the newly dead, but for a world of meaning that had died long before. That sadness lingered with me, a quiet companion, long after I extracted myself from the cacophony and drove away.

The next morning, the 23rd, driven by a claustrophobic need for air, I stepped outside just before dawn, hoping to steal a moment of uncommodified stillness. The world was suspended in that magical, transitional blue. The sky was a pale, hesitant canvas, the last stars fading like distant memories. The air was cool and clean, carrying the faint, metallic smell of dew settling on red earth, a scent so primal it bypassed thought and went straight to the soul. For a few precious, unmeasured minutes, the village felt like the one I had carried in my heart – quiet, gentle, unhurried, a place where time was a river, not a stopwatch. I could almost hear my own breath. But the illusion was fragile. Then, from a compound down the lane, the first generator of the day coughed, sputtered, and roared to life with a violent, mechanical clatter. As if on cue, a rooster crowed, not a pastoral sound but a strident alarm. A car horn blared impatiently from the main road. Somewhere nearby, a woman began the morning ritual of sweeping her compound, the rhythmic, abrasive scrape-scrape-scrape of a stiff broom on concrete cutting through the fragile silence. The spell was broken. The day had officially begun, and with it, the familiar, grinding cycle of performance and obligation resumed its inexorable turn.

Later that same morning, seeking a different tempo, I visited a neighbour’s compound where a small, somber group had gathered under the sprawling shade of an ancient mango tree to plan a burial scheduled for the 27th. The logistics were complex: canopies, chairs, a caterer, a sound system, the order of service. The deceased, a matriarch, had died back in April, in the quiet loneliness of the off-season. The family had made the conscious, economically rational decision to wait, to preserve the body, to hold the funeral now in December because, as the head of the family stated plainly, “people will be around. The crowd will be better.” As we sat there, discussing costs and timelines, one of the deceased’s daughters, a woman in her forties with a tired, kind face, spoke up. Her voice was so quiet we all had to lean in. “I cried all my tears months ago,” she said, not looking at any of us, her eyes on the dust. “When she first left us. In the hospital. In the empty house afterwards. Now… now I am just tired. Tired of planning this… party.” Her stark, unvarnished honesty cut through the procedural chatter like a shard of glass, laying bare the raw nerve the whole elaborate ritual was designed to hide. No one rushed to contradict her or offer hollow comfort. No one quoted a scripture about celebration. We simply sat in the heavy, acknowledging silence, each of us, I am certain, nodding not just at her truth, but feeling the echo of our own private, accumulated fatigue in her words.

In the afternoon, compelled by yet another obligation, I attended a dedication. Here, the atmosphere was ostensibly one of pure, unfettered joy. The pastor prayed with theatrical fervour, his voice soaring. The choir sang with vibrant, harmonious joy. The young mother, radiant in a lace iro and buba, glowed with a pride that was beautiful and genuine. Yet, even here, beneath the surface of sacred celebration, I could sense the same frantic, subterranean energy that powered the funeral planning – the same desperate need to compress a year’s worth of living, of milestone-marking, into this narrow, shared window of communal attention. Standing beside me in the crowded pew, a man I knew vaguely from my Lagos life leaned close, his breath smelling of mint and exhaustion. “I have three more events today,” he whispered, his eyes glazed over. “A meeting at the town hall, a cousin’s wife’s birthday, and another wake at Umuoboro. I don’t even know how I will manage the driving, let alone the talking.” He then let out a short, dry laugh, but it was a laugh devoid of humour. It was the sound of a man already stretched perilously thin, a man counting down the hours until he could legitimately retreat.

By evening, the village roads, so wide and empty in my dawn reverie, were clogged arteries again. Cars, SUVs, and tricycles crawled forward in a frustrated procession, their headlights cutting intersecting beams through the swirling, red dust kicked up by the day’s traffic. The smell of frying plantain and akara drifted from a bustling roadside stall, a greasy, comforting aroma that now felt less like a treat and more like fuel for the marathon. A group of teenagers, resplendent in matching, neon-bright aso-ebi, posed for endless smartphone photos beside a rented canopy, their laughter sharp and performative. A woman balancing a tray of bottled drinks on her head shouted a furious stream of invective at a driver who had nearly clipped her, her anger a bright, hot spark in the dusty twilight. Everywhere, in every direction, people moved with a focused, driven purpose, as though the season itself were a looming deadline, a project that had to be completed with maximum visible effort before the calendar turned and the opportunity was lost.

And through it all – through the noise, the movement, the smells, the fragmented conversations, the performed joy, and the acknowledged fatigue – a troubling realization began to crystallize. It did not arrive as a thunderclap, but rather seeped into my consciousness during the stolen interludes: the deep, precious silence of the night after the last generator finally sputtered and died; the serene, blue stillness of the early dawn before the first visitor’s knock. It came in fragments at first, like scattered pieces of a puzzle observed separately – the retired teacher’s eyes, the daughter’s confession, my friend’s loaded statement, the whispered complaint in the church. But by the evening of the 23rd, as I watched the purposeful chaos swirl around me, these fragments snapped together into a coherent, inescapable shape.

We are not merely celebrating. Celebration implies a spontaneous overflow of joy, not a scheduled, budgeted, and socially-mandated production.

We are not merely reconnecting. Reconnection implies a slow, mutual unfolding, not a frantic exchange of greetings over a wall of noise.

We are not merely coming home. That implies an arrival at a place of rest.

We are engaged in something far more desperate and poignant. We are trying to physically grasp the intangible, ethereal idea of “home” – that feeling of unconditional acceptance, of rooted peace, of seamless belonging – by filling every single waking second with sensory, undeniable proof of it. We are manufacturing evidence through sheer volume: noise to prove vibrancy, food to prove abundance, constant movement to prove life, a sea of faces to prove community, a mountain of obligations to prove embeddedness, a flawless record of appearances to prove loyalty. We are building a deafening, dazzling fortress of activity to ward off a quiet, insidious fear: the fear that the home we remember, the home of the heart, is slipping away from us, transformed by time, distance, and our own changed selves. We are trying to drown out the terrifying possibility that the deep, restorative peace we journey thousands of miles to find may no longer exist in the form we remember, or that we can no longer access it amidst the very rituals designed to deliver it.

And in this frantic, collective endeavor to capture a ghost by drowning it in light and sound, we achieve the opposite of our desire. We exhaust our bodies with travel and then with performance. We overwhelm our spirits with a flood of shallow interactions that leave us thirsting for depth. We lose ourselves in the role of the perfect returnee, the dutiful son, the generous cousin, the visible member, until we can no longer find the quiet, weary individual who simply wanted to rest, to be, and to remember.

The hurricane of activity, therefore, is not just outside us, in the vibrating speakers and the crowded roads. It is inside us. It is the storm of our own anxiety about belonging, our own fear of loss, our own compulsive need to prove we are still part of the story. And the most significant, unsettling truth of all is that we have all agreed, silently, collectively, to stand in its eye. We have mistaken the terrifying calm at the centre of the storm – the brief, illusory stillness created by our own dizzying spin – for the peace of home. And we keep spinning, faster and faster, praying the storm never ends, because we have forgotten how to stand still in the sun.

This exhaustion that settles in the bones like a persistent, low-grade ache – the heavy-lidded mornings, the short tempers flaring over nothing, the craving for solitude in a sea of kin – is not merely personal. It is not simply the fatigue of an individual who has traveled too far and done too much. To dismiss it as such would be to misunderstand its significant origin. What we are living through, in these frantic, sun-drenched, and cacophonous weeks, is the fevered, collective symptom of a deeper, systemic cultural dissonance that has been quietly, inexorably building for years, like tectonic pressure along a forgotten fault line. What we are witnessing and participating in is not simply a “busy season” or an especially vibrant Christmas; it is a grand, intricate, and often heartbreaking communal pantomime of togetherness. It is a meticulously stage-managed performance of “community,” a pageant whose original, organic script was authored for a slower, more geographically rooted, and psychologically integrated society. That ancient script, written in the language of shared harvests, daily interactions, and the unbroken rhythm of seasons, has been torn up. In its place, a new, hastily assembled, and almost desperately improvised script has been drafted, rewritten by the brutal, defining pressures of our age: mass economic migration, pervasive financial scarcity, the erosion of local industry, and a compressed, almost violent hunger for authentic belonging that lies dormant for eleven months only to erupt each December with the ferocity and chaos of a seasonal storm. We are not celebrating a living, breathing reality; we are acting out, with increasing volume and decreasing conviction, a museum-piece version of “home” that no longer exists in the form we nostalgically remember. Yet we cling to the performance with a ferocity born of terror, because the alternative – to collectively pause, look around, and admit that the very ground of our shared identity has fundamentally shifted beneath our feet – feels too existentially frightening to confront. It is easier to turn up the music than to face the silence that might contain an uncomfortable truth.

The wake-keep, that most sacred of Igbo rites of passage, has become the starkest, most painful symbol of this significant transformation. It was never meant to be a party. Traditionally, it functioned as a sacred, liminal threshold – a hushed space suspended between the world of the living and the realm of the ancestors. It was a place where the veil was thin, where stories about the departed were not merely told but summoned, where elders, their voices softened by time and respect, wove the narrative of a single life back into the larger cloth of the lineage. The night itself was a participant, its darkness a respectful shroud, the air thick with the scent of night-blooming egbu flowers and the smoky whisper of a single lantern. People gathered not to be seen, but to witness. They whispered recollections. Someone would hum an old, mournful hymn, the melody a fragile thread holding the gathering together. The silence between words was not empty; it was potent, alive with memory and shared loss. I remember, as a small boy, sitting on the hard-packed earth beside my grandmother at a vigil for a great-aunt. The only light came from a kerosene lantern that painted dancing shadows on the faces of the elders. My grandmother’s hand, dry and cool, held mine. She didn’t speak much, but her presence was a quiet anchor. The grief in the air was palpable, a tangible thing, but it was a clean grief, unadulterated by distraction. It felt heavy, but honest.

Now, that significant, honest silence has been systematically banished, hunted into extinction by the roar of generators. The wake-keep has undergone a grotesque metamorphosis into a turbocharged, open-air social stock exchange and entertainment complex. The moment you step into the compound, you are assaulted by the transformation. Your chest cavity vibrates with the physical throb of speakers stacked like modern, black-plastic altars to the god of noise. Blinding floodlights, powered by chugging generators, bleach the delicate fabric of the night into a harsh, shadowless, artificial day, erasing mystery and intimacy. The air, once scented with flowers and earth, is now a chemical cocktail of acrid diesel fumes, the fatty smoke of suya grilling over open coals, and the sweet-stale odor of spilled beer soaking into the ground. The gathering’s purpose has been utterly reframed. In shadowy corners, connections are brokered with the efficiency of a Lagos boardroom – a man pulls you aside, his breath smelling of gin, to discuss a “solid” contract for sand supply; a woman asks, with strategic casualness, if you know of any job openings for her son who just finished his NYSC in Abuja. Social and economic status is no longer whispered; it is screamed through metrics: the decibel level of the hired DJ’s sound system, the number and size of cows slaughtered (their horns sometimes displayed as grisly trophies), the vastness of the multi-colored canopy, the brand of Scotch on the VIP table. And somewhere, almost an afterthought in this orchestrated spectacle, sits the immediate family of the deceased. Their raw, personal grief is rendered irrelevant, a private inconvenience drowned beneath the public, mandatory noise. They are hosts at a party they never wanted to throw.

At one such wake-keep last week, held for a respected community elder, I found myself trapped in this dissonance. My eyes were drawn to a young woman – perhaps a granddaughter or niece of the departed – who sat perfectly still on a white plastic chair at the edge of the main canopy. She was an island of stillness in a churning sea of forced motion. Her eyes were red-raw and swollen, her face a mask of numb exhaustion. Around her, the “festivity” raged. People dressed in vibrant, matching aso-ebi danced the latest steps to a blaring Afrobeats remix. Raucous laughter erupted from a group near the drinks table. Men shouted greetings and clapped each other on the back, their voices competing with the music. A man in a glittering, silver-laced shirt, smelling strongly of expensive cologne and life, slapped my back with jovial force. “My brother!” he bellowed into my ear, a wide grin splitting his face. “This one go loud! This is how to celebrate a life well spent!” He said it as though volume and expenditure were the purest metrics of love and respect. My gaze drifted helplessly back to the young woman. At that precise moment, she looked up, and our eyes met across the crowded, flashing space. There was no anger in her gaze, only a deep, bewildered sorrow, and a question that seemed to hang in the air between us: When did this happen? When did mourning become a spectator sport with a cover charge? I had no answer for her. I could only offer a slight, sympathetic nod before the crowd swallowed the moment.

9

We are no longer merely honoring the dead. That primary function has been supplanted by a secondary, more desperate imperative: we are performing vitality for the living. We are using these gatherings as a stage to shout our continued presence, relevance, and success into the wind, a defiant proclamation aimed at the distant, anonymizing cities that claim us for most of the year. It is a potent, collective act of existential reassurance, a mantra screamed not with words but with watts and wasted meat: I am still here. I still belong to this soil, to these people. I have not been completely erased, assimilated, or dissolved into the lonely concrete of Lagos, the manicured isolation of Houston, or the cold anonymity of London. The wake-keep becomes a bulwark against erasure, its very excess a proof of life.

This relentless, draining performance does not courteously end with the night. Its invasive tendrils snake their way into the sanctity of the morning, colonizing the hours that by all natural and human right should belong to slow waking, to private reflection, to the simple, unobserved pleasures of rest. The early visitors arrive with the first pallid light, their footsteps a purposeful crunch on the gravel driveway, their voices – bright, rehearsed, laden with unspoken agendas – carrying through the thin walls of the house into the bedroom where you are trying, and failing, to steal an extra hour of sleep. They come not empty-handed, but armed. Files and folders are tucked neatly under arms, containing proposals, invoices, or application forms. Requests have been carefully polished, stories of hardship sanded down for maximum emotional impact and logistical clarity. They are not, in their essence, being exploitative; they are engaging in a poignant, heartbreakingly time-sensitive transaction. They have watched the calendar with the anxious precision of astronomers tracking a rare comet, waiting for the brief, predictable annual return of the diasporan – the one who “has gone out,” the one who is perceived to have “made it,” the one who must, by the unspoken laws of this rewritten social contract, return bearing tangible proof of that success, not just in stories, but in solutions.

One such morning, just as a grey dawn was dissolving the starscape, a man I vaguely recognized from my secondary school days appeared at the gate. He was thinner than I remembered, his clothes neat but faded. He greeted me with the elaborate, performative warmth meticulously reserved for returnees, a script of honorifics and familial references that established our connection. Then, seamlessly, he launched into his narrative. His daughter, “a brilliant girl,” had gained admission to study pharmacy at a state university. The fees, however, were “chasing him.” He had sold his motorcycle, but it was not enough. As he spoke, weaving a cloth of paternal pride and financial desperation, I noticed his eyes. They kept flicking, almost involuntarily, past my shoulder to the vehicle parked in the driveway. It was not a gaze of envy, but of assessment – as if the car’s make, model, and cleanliness were a live spreadsheet, a public barometer of my capacity to help. Behind him, waiting with the patience of those accustomed to queues, stood two women I did not know. Each clutched a brown, well-handled envelope, their bodies telegraphing a mix of hope and resignation. The air in that moment was crystalline, smelling of chilled dew and the first woodsmoke of the day from a neighbor’s hearth. Somewhere, a rooster crowed, a sound that should have felt pastoral but instead felt like a timer going off. In my chest, a heaviness settled, dense and cold. It wasn’t resentment toward the man – his need was palpably real. It was a significant sorrow, a grief for the beautiful, simple idea of homecoming, now overgrown and weighed down by this dense, inescapable ivy of expectation.

Later that same day, at a different, more casual gathering under a tree, I overheard a snippet of conversation that laid the mechanism bare. One man, his face etched with the worries of a small-scale farmer, leaned in close to his companion and said, his voice low and urgent, “If you don’t ask now, when will you ask? By January 3rd, his mind is back in Lagos. The door is closed.” His friend, a teacher whose salary had been irregular for months, simply nodded, his face a tight mask of focused urgency. Their conversation lacked any malice or greed; it was stripped down to pure, pragmatic survival logic. It was the quiet, undeniable truth of a community where formal opportunities have evaporated, where government is a distant rumor of failure, and where the annual return of a relative from the city represents one of the few predictable windows of possible respite, a fleeting alignment of need and perceived capacity. It is the economics of hope in a landscape of scarcity.

This is the hidden, often unspoken underbelly of the festive season – the intricate emotional and economic ecosystem that undergirds, and indeed fuels, the visible festivities. The wake-keeps, the lavish parties, the ceremonies dripping with ritual: these are the dazzling, noisy surface. Beneath that shimmering veneer lies a deeper, more fragile, and far more consequential ecosystem of raw need, clinging hope, and strategic survival. And we, the returnees, occupy a uniquely fraught position within this ecosystem. We are both active participants in its rituals and potent symbols within its economy. We are walking repositories of hope, living portals to a world of perceived possibility. We carry the immense, often invisible weight of these collective expectations on our shoulders even as we stagger under the familiar, personal weight of our own accumulated exhaustion. We are hailed as sons and daughters, yet functionally processed as temporary relief agencies.

In the rare, stolen moments of true stillness – when the last generator finally gasps and sputters into silence around 3 a.m., when the compound is plunged into a sudden, significant quiet so deep you can hear the rustle of a lizard in the thatch, when the night breeze, finally cleansed of fumes, brushes against your skin like a cool, forgotten memory from childhood – a more troubling realization begins to crystallize, sharper and clearer than the morning star. The exhaustion is not fundamentally about the noise, the driving, the late nights, or the rich food. These are merely the instruments. The true source of the depletion is the dissonance. It is the psychic strain of constantly navigating the widening, aching gap between what “home” once meant in our hearts (a place of unconditional acceptance, restorative quiet, and unperformative love) and what it has undeniably become in practice (a stage for managed presentation, a marketplace of obligation, a loud denial of change). It is the soul-deep ache of trying to desperately clutch a fading memory, to hold onto the silhouette of something precious that is slipping through our fingers like mist, even as we are compelled to perform its existence with ever-increasing, almost frantic, intensity.

And in that fragile, truthful quiet, as the first birds begin their tentative songs, we begin to understand that the fever we feel in our bodies – the weariness, the irritation, the longing for escape – is not just personal biology. It is communal. It is cultural. It is the fever of a collective body, a people in the painful, protracted throes of trying to reconcile the indelible truth of who they were with the complex, uncertain reality of who they are becoming. And they are attempting this monumental, existential reconciliation in the only way the inherited script currently allows: loudly, collectively, desperately, beautifully, wastefully, generously, and often painfully. The party is not just a celebration; it is a symptom. The noise is not just joy; it is a question screamed into the void. And our exhaustion is not just tiredness; it is the cost of listening for an answer that hasn’t yet been written.

The ache begins long before the plane touches down or the bus arrives the roundabout , a low hum of anticipation and dread that vibrates in the bones. They have allocated their hope, their proposals, their needs to this narrow, golden window when the person who has “made it” is physically present – momentarily accessible in the flesh before dissolving again into the distant city, reduced back to a voice note, a WhatsApp call, a periodic transfer. The space between arrival and departure becomes a pressurized chamber, filled not with the easy air of homecoming but with the thick, expectant silence of accounts pending. And the returnee, in turn, often feels less like a beloved child of the soil and more like a walking ATM, a mobile resource centre, a node in a vast, humming network of obligations where the emotional balance sheet is perpetually, overwhelmingly in the red. The irritation that rises, the guardedness that forms like a thin film over every interaction, is its own kind of grief – a mourning for the simple, uncomplicated welcome of childhood, for the curiosity about your world, for the conversation that doesn’t end with a request or a pitch. That simple welcome feels lost now, a casualty of time and the harsh calculus of economic disparity that has rewired our relationships, turning affection into a transaction waiting to be finalized.

This dissonance, this quiet sorrow, becomes even sharper, almost violently so, when we shift our gaze from the imagined solemnity of burials to the chaotic splendour of weddings and casual gatherings – those events that should, in theory, be lighter, freer, more joyful. Instead, they have become their own kind of ordeal, their own theatre of excess, their own punishing rituals of appearance and endurance where the body is both the star and the sacrificial offering. The festive occasion is no longer a spontaneous celebration but a meticulously staged production, a performance of success and belonging that demands a pound of flesh, a liter of sweat, and the complete suspension of physical comfort.

Take the weddings, for instance. They are no longer ceremonies; they are marathons of staged euphoria. They begin in the blue gloom of dawn with makeup artists arriving like emergency responders to a crisis of appearance, armed with ring lights and suitcases of powders and palettes that gleam with industrial promise. I once watched a friends daughter sit for three unblinking hours in a plastic chair while her face was meticulously sculpted into a version of herself she barely recognized, her features rendered in strokes of high definition and shimmer. By the time the makeup artist was done, dabbing a final constellation of glitter on her cheekbones, she looked stunning – a photograph made flesh – but exhausted, her eyes already glassy from the heat of the lights and the immense, invisible weight of expectation. She whispered to me, her lips barely moving to preserve the perfect contour, “I haven’t eaten since yesterday. If I eat now, the makeup will shift.” And then she laughed, a brittle, careful laugh that cracked at the edges like old porcelain, a sound that confessed more about strain than any sigh could.

The physical demands escalate with the sun. At another wedding, under a sky of sheer, blazing heat, I saw a group of young men resplendent in stiff, heavily embroidered ishi Enyi – garments so thickly layered and ornate they could have doubled as medieval armour. They stood as monuments to tradition and newfound means, the intricate threadwork glinting like chainmail. The sun was merciless that day, a visible weight in the air, and the men glistened with a perpetual sheen of sweat, their faces strained as they attempted to dance with a grace that contradicted the suffocating embrace of their cloth. One of them, during a brief lull, leaned toward me, the scent of camphor and perspiration rising from his brocade, and muttered, “My brother, this cloth is killing me softly. But how will they know I have arrived if I don’t wear it?” He then adjusted his cap, a stiff peak of matching fabric, straightened his shoulders against the drag of the garment, and stepped back into the pulsating dance circle, performing vitality and ease even as his body silently begged for mercy, for a breeze, for the simple relief of cotton.

The women, navigating a different but parallel gauntlet, fare no better. I recall a bridal shower where the dress code was a deceptively simple “touch of gold.” What arrived through the gate was not a touch but an avalanche – a dazzling assault of sequins that caught the light like shattered glass, metallic fabrics that hissed with every movement, glittering shoes that pinched toes into unnatural, painful shapes. The room was a kaleidoscope of manufactured radiance. One woman, a friend of a friend, stood statue-still by the refreshments table, her smile a fixed curve. In a moment of shared silence amid the din, she confessed that she had been standing in her heels, delicate instruments of torture, for six hours straight. “If I sit,” she said, her eyes scanning the room for judging glances, “my dress will crease, and the story will be that I looked crumpled.” She smiled wider as she said it, a beautiful, painful mask, but her ankles above the straps were visibly swollen, her gait, when she finally risked a few steps, was unsteady. The price of beauty, of maintaining the flawless image, had become a quiet, private suffering endured on blistered feet, a martyrdom to perception. As Abiriba Proverbs says “Nganga da eme unhara”

This performance extends beyond the formal to the ostensibly casual. Those supposedly relaxed hangouts with old friends in familiar compounds carry their own subtle, insidious burdens. One night, at a small get-together under a sprawling mango tree, I watched as people arrived not for companionship but for inspection, dressed as though attending a fashion editorial shoot. The men wore designer shirts so taut they restricted breathing and movement; the women wore dresses that required constant, discreet adjustment, a flick of a strap, a tug at a hem. The air itself was a layered sensory experience – the smoky perfume of grilled fish, the cloying sweetness of expensive perfume, and beneath it all, the faint, metallic tang of sweat held defiantly at bay. Conversations were loud, animated, performed for an audience, but often they were shallow, a skimming of surfaces – life updates delivered like polished press releases, achievements listed with the casual precision of bullet points, each one subtly vying for airtime. At some point, deep into the night, someone shouted a joke that hung in the air, “If you don’t look good, did you even come home?” Everyone laughed, a roaring, united sound, but the laughter had a sharp, knowing edge to it, a truth too uncomfortable to acknowledge directly: that even in relaxation, we were on display, our value assessed by the gloss of our shoes and the label hidden in our shirts.

And then, as if the body has not been tested enough, there are the after-parties – the late-night gatherings where constitutions already pushed to their limits are subjected to a final, grueling trial of stamina. I found myself at one such event, standing under a canopy lit by the harsh, unforgiving glow of fluorescent bulbs that bleached color from every face. The music was not a rhythm but a physical force, a deafening throb in the chest cavity. The drinks were endless, the dancing relentless, a compulsory expression of joy that became a mechanical exercise. A man beside me, his expensive shirt now a translucent, sweat-drenched second skin, shouted over the noise, “This is enjoyment! This is life!” But his face, in the stark light, told another story entirely – his eyes were red-rimmed and tired, his movements sluggish, his breath laboured as if he had been running a race. He was, like everyone else, performing joy, not feeling it, his body a puppet to the expectation of relentless celebration.

These events, though outwardly festive, are as tasking and grotesque in their physical demands as any somber rite. They require us to contort our bodies, our schedules, our finances, and our emotional reserves in ways that border on the inhuman. We willingly subject ourselves to punishing heat under synthetic fabrics, to tight clothing that leaves red marks on the skin like secret hieroglyphs of sacrifice, to endless hours of standing on aching feet, to forced smiles that ache in the jaw, and to the constant, exhausting pressure to appear vibrant, successful, unbothered. We push our bodies beyond their sensible limits in the name of fashion, personality promotion, and the unspoken, ruthless competition that underlies every handshake and cheek-kiss, a race where the trophy is fleeting approval.

And woven through all of this, the foundational lore, are the stories from the road – those harrowing tales of the Benin-Asaba standstill, the nights spent sleeping in upright car seats surrounded by the symphony of impatient horns, the hours and days lost to gridlock under a pitiless sun. These narratives are repeated like tragic epics or heroic sagas at every event, over plates of jollof rice and glasses of warm wine. They serve a dual, complex purpose. They are, on one hand, testimonials of shared suffering, a bonding over common misery that creates an instant, grim camaraderie. But on the other, they are also badges of honour, credentials of authenticity etched in frustration and fatigue. The longer and more horrific the ordeal, the greater the perceived depth of one’s commitment to the homeland, the more legitimate one’s presence at the feast. To have flown in on a plane is, in some circles, to have cheated, to have skipped the necessary pilgrimage of pain. To have endured the gauntlet of the failed highway is to have earned your stripes, to have paid the physical toll required for entry.

This creates a perverse cultural incentive where the catastrophic failure of the state – its significant inability to maintain a basic federal highway – becomes a twisted, unifying rite of passage. The collective suffering inflicted by the crumbling road strangely strengthens tribal and national solidarity, forging identity in the furnace of shared inconvenience, even as it subtly absolves the distant, faceless powers that be of their fundamental responsibility to fix the very infrastructure meant to bind the nation together. We become complicit in the celebration of our own hardship.

We weave our victimization by infrastructure into the heroic mythology of who we are.

We turn justifiable anger into a strange, dangerous source of pride, a story that earns nods of respect.

We transform systemic dysfunction into a core component of personal and collective identity.

We baptize ourselves in the suffering of the journey and call the exhaustion that follows belonging.

And in doing so, we continue to perform a version of home that exhausts us, that demands the grotesque from our bodies and spirits, even as we cling to it with a desperate, trembling devotion, mistaking the ache in our feet and the emptiness of the performance for the warmth of a true welcome, forever chasing the ghost of that simple, uncomplicated embrace in the glittering, grueling theater of our return.

10

Thus the philosophical challenge deepens, widening from the narrow corridor of personal fatigue into a vast, unsettling question of identity economics, a labyrinth of motives and investments that would confound any ledger, yet one that every soul from here instinctively navigates with a map drawn in memory and blood. What, truly, is the return on investment for this monumental annual expenditure of time, money, bodily strain, and psychological depletion? If one were to hand the matter to an accountant – one of those cold, precise minds Balzac loved to sketch, men who see the world as a ledger of credits and debits, their eyes pale and sharp as icicles, their hearts steady metronomes clicking only to the rhythm of profit and loss – the conclusion would be swift and merciless: catastrophic loss. A hemorrhage of resources poured into a soil that appears, from such a frigid perspective, to yield only further demands. A ruinous ritual with no tangible dividend, a festival of fiscal imprudence.

But human beings, especially our people, do not live by arithmetic alone. The soul has its own economy, one where the most valuable currencies are invisible, intangible, and non-fungible. The true ledger is kept not in bank statements but in the quiet vault of the spirit, where deposits are made in moments of recognition, in the sound of one’s name spoken in the full, round tones of the hometown dialect, in the fleeting, unguarded glance from an elder that says, without words, You are still of this place. For a people historically shaped by mobility, by the necessity of leaving home to simply survive, to breathe, to expand, by the restless enterprise that has scattered us like purposeful seeds across continents and cities – Lagos, Abuja, London, Houston, Toronto – the homeland becomes the fixed star in a sky of constant motion. It is the immutable coordinate, the true north, in a life otherwise defined by perpetual negotiation, by the daily adaptation of one’s accent, one’s appetite, one’s very expectations to foreign terrains. The homecoming, then, is not a mere holiday; it is the annual recalibration of the internal compass, the sacred, necessary ritual that prevents a final, fatal spiritual drift into the anonymous void of the global.

To skip the journey is to risk a kind of existential disorientation, a quiet unraveling of the self. It is to feel the essential tether to one’s own origin story loosen and fray, threatening to set one adrift as a permanent ghost, a specter belonging wholly to neither here nor there. We know this instinctively, in the marrow. It is why even the most exhausted among us, the ones who swear each year with genuine, shaking fervor that they will not subject themselves again to the road’s brutality, the performative exhaustion, the draining calculus of social obligation, still find themselves, come December, packing bags with a resigned determination. They still find themselves joining the long, serpentine procession of cars crawling inexorably toward the East, a modern pilgrimage of steel and exhaust fumes. It is why the stories of suffering on the road – the twelve-hour standstills, the predatory police checkpoints, the treacherous potholes like moon craters – are told not with complaint, but with the same peculiar, grim pride Balzac’s characters reserved for tales of financial daring or social conquest. The ordeal becomes proof of loyalty, a bloody badge of belonging, a credential of authenticity written in the body’s fatigue. The greater the hardship, the purer the claim to the soil.

And yet – and here lies the cruellest twist, the irony that would have made a Balzacian observer lean forward, his pen poised with delight – the vessel we return to, the physical homeland, is itself changing, morphing under the very pressure of our collective, compressed return. It is a living paradox: we journey to touch the eternal, only to find it in a state of frantic flux. The Abiriba we seek in our souls – the one of childhood memory, of slow, honeyed afternoons on the sun-dappled veranda watching lizards scuttle, of conversations that meandered like the old, forgotten footpaths through the palm groves, of interactions that were meaningful precisely because they were unhurried, because time was a vast, shared lake and not a series of dwindling droplets – is being rapidly overlaid by a new, hyper-socialized, performative version of itself. This new Abiriba is a palimpsest, where the old, faint script of quiet continuity is being boldly written over with the glittering, urgent text of dramatic arrival and departure.

This new reality is shaped significantly by the aesthetics of absence and the economics of remittance. It is a place where the sheer scarcity of our time has grotesquely inflated the value of appearance. Where the brevity of our return – a mere fortnight in the solar cycle – has intensified every gesture, every gathering, into a spectacle of condensed presence. Where the diaspora’s aching, romantic longing for home collides headlong with the home’s pragmatic, sometimes desperate longing for the diaspora’s resources, in a frenzy of mutual, often misunderstood expectation. The village square, once a place for idle gossip and the slow shelling of beans, is now a stage. The compound, once a sanctuary of familial chaos and quiet, is now a receiving hall for a procession of well-wishers whose well-wishes often carry the subtle weight of an invoice.

Balzac, that master cartographer of social ambition, would have recognized this world instantly. He would have seen in our Christmas gatherings the same feverish social theatre he chronicled in the parlours and salons of Paris – the desperate, smiling jockeying for visibility, the subtle competitions for status disguised as warm camaraderie, the way money circulates not just as currency but as symbol, as gesture, as a language of its own. He would have noted with a sociologist’s eye how every gathering, from the casual Ịbụmanyi to the grand wedding, becomes a stage upon which a complex drama of validation is enacted. Every outfit is a costume speaking of success in a foreign tongue; every greeting is a delicate negotiation of hierarchy and obligation; every smile is a mask that can, in a flicker, betray the strain of its maintenance. He would have understood perfectly the psychology of a people who, having been shaped by the experience of absence, now overcompensate with a torrential, exhausting presence.

He would have described the returnees as a new class of provincial aristocrats – men and women who arrive not with the quiet dignity of native sons and daughters, but with the palpable aura of distant, hard-won battles, the dust of Lagos traffic or the chill of London rain still metaphorically clinging to their tailored clothes. They carry with them an air of elsewhere, a mix of weariness and triumph, and the unspoken expectation of local reverence, of a deference owed to those who have ventured into the world and returned bearing its spoils. With equal precision, he would have sketched the villagers who watch their arrival with a gaze of magnificent complexity – a mixture of genuine admiration, sharp envy, and cool, patient calculation, their eyes missing nothing, knowing that this window of opportunity, of access, has a short, definite shelf life. He would have captured the entire, subtle choreography of the ask: the way a conversation begins with the warm, overlapping melodies of familiar kinship, then gently, inevitably drifts toward the recitation of a need – a leaking roof, a child’s school fees, a business proposal – before finally settling into the hushed, practical tones of negotiation, a dance as formalized as any minuet.

And with his unflinching grasp of tragedy, he would have understood the significant, central heartbreak of it all: that the very act meant to preserve identity, to recharge the essence of the self, is slowly, inexorably eroding the thing it seeks to protect. The ritual becomes an engine of transformation, and the transformation betrays the ritual’s original purpose.

For the Abiriba we return to is no longer the Abiriba we left. It cannot be. It is a place transformed, sculpted by the long shadow of our absence, by the concrete reality of our remittances which have built taller gates and wider houses, and most of all, by the immense, concentrated pressure of our seasonal return. The quiet, contemplative spaces of memory have been filled with the insistent noise of generators and competing sound systems. The slow, organic rhythms tied to harvest and season have been replaced by the frantic, artificial timetable of the “season,” packed with back-to-back events that must be attended. The intimate, knowing exchanges between people who share daily life have been swallowed by the broad, performative greetings of people re-introducing themselves annually. The home of memory, woven from sensory threads of wood smoke, morning dew, and uninterrupted time, has been replaced by the home of expectation, built of glitter, loud music, and the anxious awareness of a countdown clock.

We come seeking rest, a cessation of the metropolitan sprint, but find only a different, more socially perilous kind of motion. We come seeking deep, grounding connection, the kind that needs no words, but find only a series of performances where we are both audience and actor. We come seeking to touch the bedrock of ourselves, to remember who we are when the world is not watching, but find a version of home that mirrors and amplifies our own fragmentation, our own commodified public selves.

And yet, despite this knowing, despite this dawning recognition of a fading authenticity, we keep coming. The bags are packed, the tickets are booked, the prayers for safe journey are uttered. Because the alternative – the thought of staying away, of letting the thread snap, of becoming a voice on the phone, a face on a screen, a memory that gradually pales – is culturally and spiritually unthinkable. It is a form of social death. Because identity, unlike money, cannot be saved in a vault or invested in a portfolio to gather interest. It is a living tissue that must be enacted, renewed, reaffirmed in the physical presence of the clan, on the ancestral soil, however changed that soil may be. It must be witnessed.

This is the exquisite, painful paradox Balzac would have savoured, turning it over in his mind like a gem that catches the light to reveal different, conflicting colors: a people who undertake a heroic, costly pilgrimage back to their source to preserve themselves, to drink from the well of their origin, only to discover, year by year, that the well itself is being reshaped, the water subtly flavored by the very vessels they lower into it, by the distant sediments of their other lives. The pilgrims, in their multitude, change the nature of the shrine.

And so the question lingers, heavy and unresolved, hanging in the air thick with barbecue smoke and the scent of imported perfume: How long can a ritual sustain its original, animating meaning when the world that birthed it, the context that gave it soul, has already changed beyond recognition? We are left navigating a poignant gap, a chasm between the homeland we carry within us – a serene, enduring museum of memory – and the one that meets us at the gate: a vibrant, demanding, and sometimes alien theater of social survival. We perform the rites, we pay the physical and psychological tolls, not because they deliver the promised peace of the past, but because they are now the only fragile bridges we have left across that ever-widening chasm, the only ceremonies that still, however tenuously, connect the people we have become to the people we insist, in our hearts, we still are.

We are, with the best of intentions – a will to reconnect, a deep-seated fear of severing the ancestral tether, a significant and genuine love for the faces we have known since infancy – constructing a dazzling, noisy simulacrum of community atop the original, a phantasmagoric edifice of belonging. This construction, born of collective yearning, has taken on a life and logic of its own, evolving into an elaborate, exhausting façade that often feels as draining, as transactional, and as fundamentally alienating as the very distant metropolises we fled in search of rest, respite, and reconnection. The irony is a blade that twists in the gut: we cross continents, endure logistical nightmares, and expend financial reserves that took months to accumulate, all to escape one form of impersonal frenzy, only to willingly immerse ourselves in another, this one dressed in the familiar fabrics and sounds of home, yet pulsed by the same frantic, competitive energy. We have, in a poignant act of communal self-sabotage, recreated the emotional structure of the diaspora within the homeland, superimposing a grid of schedules, social obligations, and performative demands upon the once-organic landscape of kinship. And it is in this dawning, uncomfortable recognition, in the quiet moment when the laughter around you feels like a performance you are both watching and starring in, that the core of my aching disconnect reveals itself, naked and unequivocal.

11

I am homesick, yes – a sickness that is a dull, persistent throb in the center of the chest for most of the year, a phantom limb pain for a place that feels more real in its absence than many places do in their presence. But it is not for the home that now exists that I ache. The physical coordinates remain – the latitudinal and longitudinal lines still intersect at this patch of red earth, these specific hills still break the horizon, this same streams, though perhaps more silted, still winds its way through the valley. Yet the essence, the living spirit of the place as I knew it, has been metabolized by a new social organism. I am homesick for a home that lives more vividly, more poignantly, in the gilded vault of memory than in the overwhelming sensory and social present. It is a home encoded in neural pathways laid down decades ago, pathways that fire with the clarity of childhood impression, uncomplicated by adult comprehension. It is a home built not of brick and mortar, nor of the gleaming new storefronts that line the road from the junction, but of fleeting, indelible sensory impressions, of moments so ordinary they became sacred in hindsight, a mosaic of feelings rather than a map of obligations. The home I seek exists now as a haunting, a gentle ghost that lingers in the corners of the compound, just beyond the glare of the generator-powered floodlights, overshadowed by the overwhelming social machinery that now greets me with a crushing, loving, demanding embrace.

It is the specific, unmanufactured smell of red earth after a brief, surprise harmattan drizzle that I long for – that faint, metallic sweetness rising from the ground like a whispered, private welcome, a scent that spoke of cleanliness and renewal, not of dust and diesel. It is the fibrous, sun-warmed, honeyed taste of a mango plucked with a twist from the tree behind my father’s house, the juice running in sticky rivulets down my wrist as I stood barefoot in the cool dirt of the yard, with no one to witness the mess, no photo to be taken, just the pure, unmediated communion between child and fruit. It is the slow, meandering, unhurried cadence of conversations on the veranda at dusk, the kind that stretched into the velvety evening without agenda or performance, where pauses were comfortable, where stories unfolded in circles and digressions, where the only soundtrack was the chirping of crickets and the low murmur of other households. These are the true coordinates of the home I seek – small, intimate, atmospheric, uncommodifiable. They are waypoints on a map of feeling, not destinations on a social calendar.

Yet here I stand, a pilgrim who has traversed oceans and time zones, deposited in the heart of a magnificent, chaotic, lovingly orchestrated festival explicitly designed to soothe that very homesickness. This carnival of return, with its weddings, its title-taking ceremonies, its village meetings, its spontaneous rendezvous at the ukwu mango tree, is our collective balm. And yet, in its magnificent execution, it amplifies a different, more modern and piercing longing: a longing for depth over relentless breadth, for genuine presence over flawless performance, for a single, uninterrupted conversation that isn’t shouted over three competing soundtracks from neighbouring compounds, for a rest that isn’t shadowed by the gnawing guilt of missing a third event in a single day. I find myself, amidst the joyous throng, craving a quality of attention that the season seems structurally, perhaps even violently, incapable of offering. It is the desire for a gaze that holds you for more than the time it takes to assess your outfit, for a question that probes beyond “How was your journey?” or “When are you going back?”, for a silence shared that isn’t an awkward lull but a mutual, comfortable inhabiting of the same air. The economy of the season is one of quantity – of events attended, of hands shaken, of outfits displayed, of pictures uploaded. The economy of the soul, the one my memory traffics in, is one of quality – of moments absorbed, of feelings exchanged, of a sense of being rooted, not merely presented.

The German philosopher Hermann Schmitz’s notion of “atmospheres” captures this significant tension with unsettling, almost cruel accuracy. Atmospheres, for Schmitz, are the diffuse, pre-personal emotional climates that spaces and situations exude, which we step into and are immediately shaped by. I came, on that long flight and longer road journey, seeking the enveloping, soothing, maternal atmosphere of home – that specific emotional climate that once wrapped itself around me like a familiar, well-worn cloth, a climate of unconditional acceptance and unpressured time. It was an atmosphere composed of specific smells, sounds, and paces. Instead, I find myself plunged, immediately and totally, into the aggressive, demanding, electrified atmosphere of the event. This event-atmosphere is a force field. It is composed of pounding basslines, of shrieks of manufactured excitement, of the pressurized hustle of people moving from one function to the next, of the visual assault of sequins and brocade under harsh lighting, of the underlying hum of transactional calculation. The event has not merely occupied the homeland; it has colonized it. It has become the dominant weather system for these few weeks, dictating the emotional temperature of every hour, every interaction, every breath. To seek the old atmosphere is like hoping for a gentle, private mist while standing in the center of a hurricane. The hurricane is not malicious; it is a celebration. But its very nature obliterates the conditions for the mist.

And yet, with all this acknowledged, the path forward is not, cannot be, to abandon the carnival wholesale. To do so would be a form of cultural apostasy, a severing not just from people but from a rhythm that now defines our collective identity. That ritual is far too vital, too deeply woven into the double helix of our social DNA, too central to the choreography of who we are as a people in this globalized age. The carnival is not the enemy; it is the symptom – a vibrant, weeping, joyous symptom of a deeper condition. It is the exuberant, unruly, sometimes desperate expression of a people who have been scattered like stars across the map of cities and continents, who now feel the imperative to compress a year’s worth of longing, validation, and community into two frantic, impossibly loaded weeks. It is how we try to hold onto one another – through sheer volume, through shared spectacle, through the proof of our presence captured in a thousand smartphone flashes. We try to hold on through noise because the alternative – silence, stillness, one-on-one conversation – feels too dangerous, too revealing. Silence might allow the unspoken questions to surface: Do we still know each other? What is this bond based on beyond memory and blood? How much have we truly changed? The noise is a buffer, a glittering barrier against the haunting possibility that the tether has become more ritual than reality.

The significant and delicate challenge, then, is not to reject the carnival – an act of impossible and undesirable purity – but to find a way to consciously, deliberately coexist with it. It is to become a quiet cartographer of the overlooked, to carve out slender pockets of stillness within the orchestrated storm. It is to reclaim small, sovereign territories of presence within the overwhelming spectacle. It might mean waking up an hour before the household, just to sit on the veranda and watch the dawn break over the same hills, in silence. It might mean deliberately getting “lost” on a walk down a forgotten footpath, away from the honking okada and the glittering crowds. It might mean risking a social slight to spend an entire afternoon with just one ageing relative, listening to stories you’ve heard before, not for the plot but for the music of their voice and the texture of their memory. It is in these deliberate, quiet defections from the program that we might, if we are patient and attentive, rediscover the faint textures of the original home beneath the glittering, synthetic surface of the performance. For it is still there. Somewhere beneath the shuddering loudspeakers and the meticulously planned matching aso-ebi, beneath the endless procession of events that flow like a raging river, the original home still flickers – a fragile, persistent ember in the hearth of the place. It is in the way an old woman still greets you by your childhood nickname when you least expect it, in the taste of a meal cooked over woodfire far from the event canopy, in the sudden, unexpected snatch of that old, metallic earth scent after a rain that clears the dust. It is waiting, not in the center of the stage, but in the wings. It waits for us to remember how to be still enough, quiet enough, and patient enough to see it again, not with the eyes of a returning celebrity, but with the heart of the child who never really left.

12

The notion first landed as a throwaway line, a piece of midnight philosophy uttered between sips of warm beer and the distant, persistent thump of a rough band from a compound three houses away. I was in the midst of a futile, elder-brotherly attempt at persuasion, urging my younger friend – a man with the frenetic energy of a firework about to explode – to slow down, to rest, to stop flinging himself from one social binge to another like a man possessed, like a moth determined to immolate itself in every available flame. He laughed, a sound that was both weary and wired, shook his head as if pitying my naivete, and said, “Ete Kaa, don’t be angry, but I must say this, you don’t understand. Abiriba is dope.

Abiriba is a high-infectious synthetic drug that, once inhaled, once tasted, once allowed to seep into the bloodstream of your senses, leaves you high forever.” He said it casually, as one might comment on the weather, but the metaphor hung in the humid night air, thick and potent. At the time, fatigued and still clinging to the illusion of personal agency, I dismissed it as youthful hyperbole, the exaggerated poetry of a man justifying his own lack of restraint. But now, after weeks of bearing witness, of feeling the town’s gravitational pull warp my own best intentions, after watching it swallow people whole – respectable accountants, stoic engineers, cautious academics, and myself, a supposedly observant narrator – I am beginning to suspect he was not exaggerating at all. He was, with the crude precision of a street chemist, describing a biochemical and sociological truth we have all felt in our bones and our bank accounts but rarely articulate: Abiriba is a stimulant, a hallucinogen, a powerful mood-altering substance meticulously disguised as a hometown. Its addiction is not to a powder or a pill, but to a place, a time, and a collective state of being.

There is something deeply surreal – verging on the supernatural – in the way everyone, without exception, gets vacuumed into the town’s hyperactive lifestyle the moment their feet touch the red earth of the airstrip or their car rolls past the “Welcome to Abiriba” sign. It is as though the very atmosphere has been pre-charged with a specific voltage, a current that bypasses the cerebral cortex and goes straight to the primal nodes of social obligation and frenzied celebration. Personal intention, so solid and reasonable in Lagos or Abuja or Houston, melts like wax upon contact. I have seen it with my own eyes, a metamorphosis as dramatic as any in Ovid: people who, in their diaspora lives, are models of disciplined moderation, measured in speech, even profoundly introverted, suddenly and completely transform into nocturnal, omnipresent creatures of myth. They become capable of attending four events in a single night, dancing with abandon until the roosters crow, drinking as if their throats were connected to some bottomless well of vitality, and waking the next morning – or early afternoon – with a manic, glittering energy that suggests they have slept for twelve dreamless hours, not collapsed for three. It is not normal. It defies all medical and psychological logic concerning human limits. It is the opposite of sustainable. And yet it happens every December, with the predictability of a lunar cycle, as though the town itself, this ancient, proud settlement, were a mad scientist conducting a vast, uncontrolled experiment on the outer limits of human endurance and social hunger.

I watched this experiment unfold in real time, in high definition, this past December. A close friend, a financial analyst whose life in Lagos is a spreadsheet of calibrated risks and early bedtimes, had sworn to me over a video call, with solemn conviction, that he would “take it easy this year.” He spoke of reading books on his father’s veranda, of taking long, solitary walks to the old childhood sites, of genuine rest. This resolution lasted approximately eighteen hours post-arrival. By the third day, he was a ghost in his own father’s house, a rumour seen in flashes. He found himself, bewilderingly, at a traditional wedding on the 20th, a surprise birthday party for a secondary school mate’s cousin on the 21st, a bachelor’s eve that spilled from a compound into the streets on the 22nd, an impromptu hangout at the new, painfully trendy lounge on the 23rd, and a beach-themed pool party – a baffling concept in the heart of the hinterland – on the 24th. None of these were on any plan. When we finally collided on Christmas morning, his eyes were bloodshot maps of a conquered continent, yet he buzzed with a strange vitality.

He told me later, with a bewildered, almost awestruck smile, “I don’t even know how I got to half of those places. One minute I was at home trying to find my charger, the next minute I was in someone’s uncle’s compound drinking Hennessy and arguing about football. The town just… moves you.” Another friend, a software engineer whose natural habitat is a quiet room with multiple monitors, a man who actively avoids crowds and small talk, was spotted by multiple independent witnesses at three distinctly different events in one night. More astonishingly, he was reported to have worn three different outfits – a subtle, elegant senator for the early evening family gathering, a more flamboyant, patterned shirt for the mid-evening hangout, and a daring, sequined jacket for the late-night turn-up. When I finally cornered him and asked, with genuine anthropological curiosity, what powerful spirit had possessed him, he simply shrugged, a gesture of surrender, and said, “If you don’t show face, they will say you didn’t come home. The story will go around. You know how it is.”

And that is the first, most potent layer of the drug: the relentless, inescapable pressure of visibility. The moment you announce your arrival, you are instantly, irrevocably plugged into a living, buzzing social grid that demands constant, verifiable movement. You cannot sit still. You cannot disappear into a book or a private thought. You cannot claim the rest your body screams for. You must circulate, a social electron in a high-energy orbit. You must greet, appearing at the family house, the kindred meeting, the village square. You must be seen at the weddings, the child dedications, the title-taking ceremonies. You must be accounted for in the dim glow of the late-night lounges and the packed compounds. It is a performance of belonging that requires the stamina of an ultramarathon runner, the financial fluidity of a wartime commissar, and a willing, almost masochistic commitment to sacrificing your body – its need for sleep, for digestible food, for quiet – on the glowing altar of communal expectation. Your presence is your credential, and absence, even for the cause of necessary recovery, is noted as a deficit of commitment.

But there is another layer to this intoxication, deeper and more psychologically complex than the pressure to perform: it is the overwhelming, immersive atmosphere itself. Abiriba in December is a meticulously engineered sensory overload, a theme park of belonging designed by a collective, unconscious id. The air is a layered perfume, a competing olfactory symphony: the smoky, savory scent of suya and roasted goat meat twisting through the night; the cloying sweetness of expensive perfumes and body sprays battling the earthy, petrol-tinged smell of generator exhaust; the ever-present, fine red dust that coats everything, a tangible memory on the tongue. The nights do not fall; they ignite. They glow with the sterile white blaze of industrial floodlights washing over canopied events, with the sudden, staccato bursts of fireworks painting the sky in fleeting bruises of green and red, with the neon signs of newly opened lounges and “fast food” spots buzzing like trapped insects. Music is not something you listen to; it is the element you swim in.

It pours from every open doorway, every parked car with booming speakers, every hired PA system: the nostalgic guitar licks of old highlife, the thumping, insistent log drums of new amapiano, the soaring harmonies of gospel choruses preparing for the season, DJ mixes so bass-heavy they vibrate through the soles of your feet and into your sternum. The roads, usually manageable arteries, become pulsating, chaotic veins of life. They are alive with a dangerous, joyous dance of movement: cars honking not in anger but in celebratory recognition, motorcycles weaving with suicidal grace between lorries and pedestrians, people laughing in shouted conversations, calling out names – “Ogbonna!”, “Nnenna! See you!” – across the chaos. Everywhere you turn, at the pharmacy, buying airtime, in a queue for petrol, there is a face from a past chapter of your life – primary school, university, that NYSC camp in faraway Sokoto – someone who pulls you into a hard, back-thumping hug and says, “My guy! You’re here! Come, let’s go somewhere. People are waiting.”

Resistance is not just futile; it is antithetical to the very purpose of the pilgrimage. The town seduces you with the warm, potent drug of familiarity – these are your people, this is your soil – and then overwhelms your nervous system with a level of stimulation that would be labeled unsustainable anywhere else. You tell yourself, with firm, internal resolve, that you will go home after one drink, that you will leave the wedding by ten, that you will skip the after-party. But then a cold bottle of beer is pressed into your hand by a beaming cousin. Someone you haven’t seen in a decade begins a story that pulls you in. A song from your final year in secondary school, a track that holds the ghost of a first crush, booms from the speakers. A group is forming to go to the next spot, and your name is called in the list. And suddenly, as if by magic or malevolent time-warp, it is 3 a.m. You are still standing under a billowing canopy, your shirt stuck to your back with sweat, a fixed, genuine-seeming smile on your face, your entire body vibrating with the raw, electrical energy of a place that simply, defiantly, refuses to sleep.

I watched a coven of young women at a wedding reception – women who, in their default lives in Port Harcourt or Abuja, are serious-minded accountants, meticulous lawyers, compassionate nurses – undergo a complete and total transformation. They became glittering, unstoppable forces of nature, avatars of festive endurance. Their dresses were structural marvels, tight and gleaming. Their heels were instruments of sublime torture, elevating them to goddess height. Their makeup, despite the oppressive, soup-like heat under the canopy, remained flawless, a mask of impeccable glamour. They danced, not for fun, but with a ferocious, unified intensity that bordered on spiritual possession, a trance-state where the individual dissolved into the collective rhythm. One of them, her elaborate hairstyle now damp and clinging to her temples, her makeup shimmering with perspiration, threw her head back and shouted to the sky, to her sisters, to anyone listening, “I will rest in January!” The others screamed in ecstatic agreement, a vow, a prayer, a battle cry. They were laughing, the sound bright and sharp, but there was a significant, unsettling truth nested in the joke: rest is not permitted here. Rest is for the weak, for the outsiders. Rest is postponed, exported, a luxury item to be reclaimed only upon return to the sterile, orderly loneliness of the city you fled. To rest here is to opt out, and opting out is a social sin.

Even the older generation, the uncles and aunties who should be the custodians of sanity and early bedtimes, are not spared the infection. Men in their sixties and seventies, men with well-managed hypertension and whispered debates about diabetes medication, men whose natural rhythm calls for a heavy dinner and sleep by 10 p.m., were out every single night. They held court in plastic chairs under trees, drinking stout and arguing politics with a passion that belied the hour. They danced small, dignified dances, moving mostly from the shoulders, a subtle rocking that said, I am still here, I am still part of this. I saw my own uncle, a retired civil servant who treats his afternoon nap with the reverence of a religious rite, sitting in a plastic chair at 2 a.m. in a neighbor’s compound. The event was not an event; it was just a gathering, the entertainment consisting of a cooler of beer, a bottle of hot, and a small Bluetooth speaker playing smooth jazz.

When I gently suggested he might be tired, he looked at me with eyes that were both weary and fiercely alert. “My son,” he said, placing a heavy hand on my knee, “if I go home now, they will say I am old. And I am not old yet.” This is the pervasive madness: we are all, regardless of biological age, performing youth, vitality, unassailable relevance. We are all trying to prove something – to ourselves, to the watching community, to the demanding ghosts of our own nostalgic memories. We are trying to recapture a feeling of boundless, effortless connection that perhaps never truly existed in the sustained, mundane way we remember it. And the town, this entity, actively encourages this performance. It rewards it with recognition, with validation, with the addictive nectar of being seen as a “real” son or daughter. It feeds on the energy this performance generates, growing brighter, louder, more demanding with each passing year.

There is, woven through this, a darker layer of competitive intoxication. At one congested hangout, squeezed between a smoking grill and a parked SUV, I overheard a cluster of men, their voices raised in camaraderie and competition. They were not comparing professional accomplishments or investment portfolios. They were comparing tallies. “I have done twelve events since I landed,” one declared, sipping his drink. Another nodded, not to be outdone, “Twelve is small. I have done fifteen. My sister’s wedding alone was three events in one.” A third, a smirk playing on his lips, delivered the coup de grâce: “Fifteen? I have done twenty, my brother. And I still have energy. I am just starting.” They laughed, a hard, proud sound, clinked their bottles, and ordered another round. It was absurd, a parody of productivity applied to revelry, but also chillingly revealing: mere attendance, the brute fact of physical presence across a maximum number of gatherings, has become a key metric of social success, a verifiable badge of honour, a tangible way of proving that you are fully, completely participating in the condensed, hyper-real life of the community. You are not just home; you are immersed.

Simultaneously, the Fashion Olympics are in permanent session. People wear costumes that defy not only logic and climate but sometimes the very laws of physics. I have witnessed men swaddled in heavy, multilayered, intricately embroidered dresses standing like magnificent, suffering monuments in 35-degree heat, their foreheads beaded with sweat they dare not wipe too obviously. I have seen women in breathtaking, sequined gowns that scratch delicate skin with every movement, their smiles unwavering. Shoes are chosen for altitude and aesthetics, not for comfort, pinching toes into shapes that will ache for days. Elaborate wigs and head-ties trap heat like miniature greenhouses, yet they are borne as crowns. I saw a beautiful woman at a wedding reception suddenly go pale, her eyes losing focus, as she subtly leaned against a wall for support. When asked, she whispered, “The corset… it is too tight.” Yet she refused to have it loosened, not even for a moment, because, as her friend explained while fanning her, “pictures must be taken, and the line must be perfect.” I observed a man in a magnificent, plume-adorned hat remove it every five minutes to mop his streaming scalp with a handkerchief, only to place it back with ceremonial care, because, as he told me, “it completes the look. Without it, the outfit is naked.” We are all, in our own ways, suffering willingly for aesthetics, for optics, for the maintenance of a glorious, collective illusion of ease and affluence. The discomfort is part of the price of admission, a bodily tithe paid to the gods of appearance.

The most surreal moment of my personal descent into this collective high came a day after Christmas. I had achieved a minor victory: I was sitting in a friend’s relatively quiet compound, enjoying a moment of actual conversation that wasn’t shouted. I was exhausted, soul-deep, and had mentally committed to going home, to the sanctuary of a dark room and a fan. Then, without warning, the night erupted. A convoy of five cars, horns blaring in unison, headlights on full beam, pulled up in a cloud of dust. Bass from their sound systems shook the very leaves on the orange tree in the yard. Doors flew open, and a stream of young men and women poured out, shouting greetings, lifting bottles of champagne and spirit like trophies, all wearing matching, custom-made polo shirts that gleamed in the headlights.

Within minutes, what was a quiet gathering of six became a roaring party of forty. The cooler was emptied, a new playlist was jacked into the speaker, a dance floor cleared. Bewildered, I tapped the shoulder of a young man who was expertly opening a bottle of cognac with his teeth. “What is happening? Is this the event?” I asked. He grinned, spitting the cork into his hand. “Event? No, oh! This is just a small pre-party. We are just warming up. The main party is at Eze’s place by 2 a.m.” I stared at him, my brain refusing to parse the grammar of a social calendar that required a pre-party to adequately prepare for a party that itself would last until dawn. But everyone else in the yard, including my formerly quiet friend, had seamlessly accepted this new reality. They were already dancing, the earlier conversation forgotten, swept into the new, more potent current. This is the very essence of the drug: the total, unquestioning normalization of excess. The normalization of significant exhaustion as a status symbol. The normalization of a lifestyle that, in any other context – Lagos, London, New York – would be considered clinically insane, a recipe for collapse. Abiriba in December is a temporal bubble where the abnormal becomes the ordinary, where the extraordinary is not just expected but demanded, where the human body is not a temple but a tool – to be used, displayed, pushed, abused, and ultimately discarded in the single-minded, glorious pursuit of communal euphoria.

And yet – and this is the strangest, most addictive part of the entire bewildering equation – we love it. We crave it with a longing that borders on pathology. We anticipate it all year, the countdown beginning almost as soon as we board the return flight in January. We complain about it endlessly, in WhatsApp groups and phone calls, listing the financial cost, the physical toll, the emotional drainage. But we participate in it fully, compulsively. We swear, with genuine conviction in the moment of collapse, that we will not do it again. But as the next December approaches, a strange alchemy occurs: the memory of the pain fades, and the memory of the high – the laughter that hurt your stomach, the song that united a thousand voices, the embrace that felt like coming home – brightens, intensifies, pulls. And we return, every single time, with our bags packed and our resistance lowered, ready to inhale the drug once more, to let it seep into our bloodstream all over again.

Because beneath the glorious madness, beneath the crushing exhaustion, beneath the overwhelming spectacle, there pulses something vulnerable, real, and irreplaceable: a raw, human longing for connection, for unqualified belonging, for the terrifying and wonderful feeling of being part of something infinitely larger than your individual self. The town may overwhelm us, but it also embraces us without pretense. It may drain our accounts and our energy, but it also fills some cavernous, lonely part of our spirit that the diaspora leaves hollow. It may exhaust us to the very brink, but in doing so, it also reminds us, violently and beautifully, that we are alive, that we are connected, that we are from somewhere. That we are.

And so we keep coming back. We board the planes, we endure the roads, we submit to the grid. We keep inhaling the perfumed, dusty, electrically-charged air. We keep getting high on the noise, the love, the pressure, the joy, the sheer, overwhelming muchness of it all.

Because my friend was right. Abiriba is dope.

And once that particular compound enters your bloodstream, it becomes a part of your chemistry. It never, ever truly leaves.

13

The challenge, as it now reveals itself to me in the clarity of a quiet morning – a rarity purchased by a deliberate, almost rebellious act of staying indoors – is not to extinguish the magnificent, roaring fire of our seasonal homecoming. We could never, and perhaps in our deepest hearts, we should never attempt such a quelling. That fire, for all its dangerous, consuming heat, is the visible manifestation of a significant, collective will to belong, a bonfire built from the gathered kindling of a year’s worth of loneliness, ambition, memory, and love. To put it out would be to plunge ourselves into a colder, darker world, to sever the most vibrant connection we have to each other and to the soil that claims us. No, the true and arduous task is not one of annihilation, but of conscious, courageous curation. It is to learn, as skilled firekeepers, to carve out protected sanctuaries of authenticity within its very blaze, to find the cooler, breathing spaces close to the heat but not consumed by it. This demands a new kind of bravery, one far quieter than the performative bravado of appearances, yet infinitely more difficult to muster: the bravery to quietly, persistently redefine what a “successful” homecoming means within a culture that has, with understandable but tragic logic, turned sheer visibility into the highest virtue and physical exhaustion into the most reliable proof of authentic belonging.

This redefinition requires a quiet revolution of values, a personal and perhaps later communal insurrection against the tyranny of the schedule and the gospel of the grid. It begins with a simple, heretical thought: maybe success is not measured by the quantitative tally of our social conquests. Maybe the metric is not how many events we attend, checking them off a mental list like a tourist collecting landmarks. Maybe it is not the number of outfits we change into, each one a costume for a different scene in the same frantic play. Maybe it is not even the frequency with which our names are called across a crowded, smoky compound, that fleeting validation that feels like sustenance but evaporates by morning. Perhaps the true measure, the one that fills the soul’s ledger, is found instead in the unquantifiable depth of a single, unadorned moment – the kind of moment that exists stubbornly outside the economy of performance, that cannot be neatly framed, photographed, filtered, posted, or leveraged for social capital.

Consider, for instance, the significant structure of a long, meandering, afternoon-long conversation with an aging parent. This is not the hurried exchange over a meal before dashing to the next event. This is a conversation that unfolds in the shaded languor of a veranda, one that loops and doubles back through the tangled pathways of memory, that touches on old regrets with a lightness that comes from time, that erupts in laughter triggered by a shared, silly story from decades past, that dips, courageously, into the cool waters of unspoken fears about health, about legacy, about the quiet approach of endings. It is a conversation that requires you to be fully present, to listen not just to words but to the pauses between them, to the way the light falls on their hands as they speak. It leaves you both lighter, for having shared the burden of silent thoughts, and heavier, for the poignant awareness of time’s passage. Yet in that paradoxical weight, you find the anchor you sought. That kind of raw, unmediated communion – devoid of soundtrack, audience, or agenda – is worth more, is infinitely more nourishing, than three loud, pulsating, fundamentally interchangeable parties where the music is so aggressively joyful it actively drowns out any possibility of whispered intimacy, where connection is a product of proximity and volume, not of understanding.

Perhaps, then, a successful return looks less like a packed itinerary and more like families and kindreds making a radical, collective decision to institute “quiet hours.” Not as a punishment, but as a sacred, protected ritual. These would be designated pockets of time, defended with the same fierce commitment with which we defend our event attendance, where phones are deliberately put away in a drawer, where the televisions are switched off, where the generators are left silent to let the natural sounds of evening return. The only soundtrack would be the soft, mundane murmur of shared presence: the rhythmic scraping of a knife peeling oranges, the satisfying pop of groundnuts being shelled into a bowl, the low hum of a story being told – not an epic tale of diaspora success, but a simple, meandering recollection of a market day long ago, a story that has no moral except the quiet affirmation that we are still here, still connected by these threads of ordinary life, still capable of being simply, unremarkably human with one another. It would be time for simply sitting together in the same room, without the oppressive pressure to perform joy or vitality, allowed to be tired, to be quiet, to be still. In these spaces, the heart rate slows, the performative mask can gently be set aside, and the self that exists beneath the returning “big man” or “successful daughter” can tentatively re-emerge and be recognized.

Perhaps success could be reimagined on a communal scale as well. What if we decided, with clear-eyed and collective intention, to redirect even a fractional percentage of the prodigious, staggering spending on transient entertainment – the canopy rentals, the loudspeaker arrays, the mountains of rice and bottled drinks, the fireworks that blaze for seconds – into creating something of quiet, enduring substance? The resources exist; they are currently funneled into the spectacular, which blazes brightly and vanishes without a trace by January. Imagine a fraction pooled to build a small, well-stocked library in honour of a beloved community teacher who shaped generations. Not a grand edifice, but a clean, cool room with books, where the children we take countless pictures with might actually discover a future. Envision a modest, transparently managed scholarship fund for the specific, brilliant children in the community whose minds are brighter than their family’s circumstances, an investment in a legacy of knowledge rather than a spectacle of consumption. Picture a communal effort to clean and restore the local stream, so future generations might fetch water without fear of illness, a project that literally clears the murk and refreshes the source. These are the kinds of investments that outlast the Monday hangover, that do not evaporate with the last bottle of champagne or the deflation of the last canopy. They do not depend on the seasonal, physical presence of the diaspora to feel meaningful or alive. They are the quiet, humble infrastructures of a tangible legacy, the slow-growing antidotes to the fever of spectacle. They represent a shift from consuming the homeland as a backdrop for our performance, to nourishing it as a living entity that will outlive our own seasonal parades.

And yet, for now, in this present tense, I remain what I have always been during this overwhelming season: a participant-observer in the beautiful, chaotic, self-consuming fire of our own making. I move through its landscapes with a soul divided, harboring equal parts awe and significant fatigue. I am seduced by its incredible, generative energy – the laughter that seems to shake the stars, the powerful sense of being part of a vast, pulsing organism – even as I am palpably scorched by its relentless demands on my time, my wallet, my very sense of self. I dance when the music pulls me in, I greet countless faces with a smile that is both genuine and strained, I “show face” at the obligatory functions, I disappear briefly to a quiet corner or an empty room to simply breathe and remember my own name, and then, like a moth unable to resist the brighter flame, I return again to the whirlpool because its pull is visceral, tribal, irresistible. I am both inside the whirlwind, feeling its giddy spin, and outside it, watching its patterns with a writer’s detached eye. I am complicit in its excesses, yet critical of its costs. I am enchanted by its magic, yet deeply unsettled by the price of the ticket.

But somewhere within the encompassing noise – beneath the competing soundtracks, the layered conversations, the roar of generators – I am slowly, painstakingly learning to tune my inner ear to listen for the quieter frequencies. They are always there, a faint, persistent signal beneath the broadcast. The sigh of an elder watching the frenzy with knowing eyes. The shared, silent smile between siblings during an over-the-top speech that says more than words. The cool quiet of the very early morning, before the town has woken to its own performance. These frequencies remind me, in a whisper, that home is not only the carnival, not only the frenzy, not only the glittering performance we have collectively authored. Home is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the pockets of stillness we deliberately carve out of the chaos. It is the meaning we insist on creating and recognizing in the small, unrecorded gestures. It is the tenderness we consciously choose to offer and receive, a tenderness that refuses to be abandoned to the logic of the spectacle. Home, in its most enduring sense, is not the spectacular inheritance we passively receive each December, pre-packaged and overwhelming. It is the sanctuary we actively, bravely, and quietly build – conversation by conversation, silent hour by silent hour, meaningful investment by meaningful investment – within the very heart of the magnificent, burning storm.

14

The Abiriba air – a dense, tangible medium thick with fine, talcum-like harmattan dust that coats the tongue and lines the lungs, laced with the acrid blue perfume of countless generator exhausts, and layered with the significantly evocative, soul-seizing scent of roasting Azuma over open coals, of Iwa Aki simmering in pungent, memory-laden pots, of ukwa breadfruit steaming in industrial-sized vessels, and those subtle, elusive native delicacies whose aromas alone can untie the knot of years – still smells, beneath the overwhelming cacophony of modern sensation, like belonging. It is a complex, contested belonging, to be sure, one that now comes with invoices and expectations, but the base note, the foundational scent, remains unchanged. It is the olfactory signature of a specific patch of earth, of a particular combination of clay, vegetation, woodsmoke, and human history that is imprinted on the cellular memory of anyone who has ever called this place home. Even in the vertiginous middle of the social frenzy, even when the noise from a hundred competing sound systems congeals into a physical force that seems to press against the temples and vibrate in the molars, there are fleeting, unpredictable moments when the atmospheric cocktail shifts, a temporary aperture opens in the chaos, and something ancient, patient, and deeply quiet rises from the ground itself to meet you.

It might be a sudden, clean gust carrying the old, metallic sweetness of earth after a rogue, evening drizzle that no forecast predicted. It might be the distant, lone cry of a hawk circling high above the noise, a sound that belonged to the afternoons of childhood. It might be the silhouette of the ancient udara tree at the boundary of your family’s land, its branches etching a specific, comforting pattern against a twilight sky. And in that unannounced moment, a neurological short-circuit occurs, bypassing the weary, critical adult mind and connecting directly to the limbic system of memory. Suddenly, vividly, you remember why you came home. You remember the primordial pull, the deep-seated, almost gravitational need that has nothing to do with social calendars or familial obligation. You understand, in a flash of pure feeling, why you endure the logistical madness, the financial haemorrhage, the performative exhaustion. You comprehend why that road – criminally broken, soul-punishing, legendarily interminable – still calls you back every single year with the stubborn, insistent, hypnotic rhythm of a drum that beats in time with your own heart.

One such evening, after a day spent in a state of perpetual, disorienting motion – ricocheting between a six-hour wedding ceremony where I knew only the bride, a cousin’s overcrowded hangout that felt like a stock exchange of gossip and networking, and a spontaneous “small get-together” that had somehow, magically, involved the killing, cooking and roasting of two goats and a DJ who believed volume was a moral virtue – I found my feet carrying me, aimlessly, down a path less traveled. I walked past the Okpu Achị, the ancient, revered meeting ground of the elders. The sun was in its final, spectacular act, dissolving into a soft, bruised palette of orange and purple behind the sacred grove. The ancient structure, its stones worn smooth by centuries of footfall and debate, its thatch a silhouette against the dying light, stood there in the gathering dusk. It was brooding, immovable, utterly indifferent to the temporary fever of the season. Its silhouette was carved against the sky not like a building, but like a memory older than language, a testament to a continuity that laughingly predates our contemporary anxieties. And then, as if commanded by the place itself, a miracle occurred. For one suspended minute, everything fell silent. The generators in the surrounding compounds coughed and sputtered off, perhaps for refuelling. The distant music paused between tracks. The ceaseless chatter of the town seemed to collectively draw breath.

Even the dry harmattan breeze [this year we had none in Abiriba], usually a constant whisper, paused in its passage. In that significant, gift-wrapped stillness, something deep inside my chest – a knot of tension I had carried since my vehicle arrived late that night – simply, gracefully unclenched. It was not a dramatic epiphany, but a gentle subsidence. A wave of pure, unadorned beauty washed over me, a beauty that had nothing to do with glitter or fabric or curated joy. It was a visceral reminder, felt in the bones, that beneath the frantic, dazzling spectacle of December, beneath the exhaustion that felt like a second skin, beneath the intricate, stressful choreography of attendance and appearance, there beats a quiet, enduring, stubborn heart. A heart that has witnessed countless seasons of madness and calm, of departure and return, and has not forgotten, will never forget, how to beat its slow, timeless rhythm.

But such moments of reconnection are heartbreakingly rare and fragile. They are like finding a single, perfectly preserved fossil in a landslide of modern debris. They are easily, instantly swallowed whole by the relentless, all-consuming carnival that now defines the season, a carnival that has grown to such proportions it feels like the town’s primary industry, its true reason for being. Abiriba in December transforms into a vast, open-air, Balzacian theatre – a human comedy of breathtaking scale, populated by a dazzling array of characters, each driven by potent ambitions, delicate vanities, and the intricate shadow economies that bloom in the fertile soil of seasonal demand like mushrooms after a tropical rain. Everywhere you turn, in every interaction, however casual, the engine of hustle is humming. The caterers, usually reasonable, now triple their prices with a shrug and a smile, knowing you are captive to tradition and have no time to negotiate.

The decorators, armed with miles of satin, forests of plastic flowers, and fairy lights by the crate, perform alchemy, transforming dusty family compounds into visions of Versailles or Miami Beach, all for a single night’s glory. The drink suppliers operate with the brisk, unsentimental efficiency of a military logistics corps, moving crates of expensive spirits and champagne as if supplying a besieged city celebrating its last night. The photographers, their cameras like extensions of their arms, circle like raptors, charging not by the hour but by the pose, by the curated moment of faux-candid joy. The makeup artists, their toolkits resembling those of forensic scientists, arrive at dawn like surgeons preparing for a delicate, high-stakes procedure, their artistry a shield against the judgemental gaze of the crowd. The tailors, eyes red-rimmed from sleepless nights, work in a frenzy of needle and thread, stitching last-minute miracles of fabric for clients who will wear the outfit once, for a few hours, under harsh lights, and then likely never again, discarding it like a wilted flower after its brief, spectacular bloom.

And presiding over this theatre of creation is its dark twin: the waste. The obscene, almost ritualistic, performance of waste. It is a spectacle in itself, a necessary corollary to the performance of abundance. You see it in the towering plates of food – jollof rice, fried rice, poundo, soups rich with meat – piled high by anxious hosts, much of which goes untouched, the delicate balance between generosity and prudence utterly lost. You see it in the coolers of expensive, imported drinks, half-full bottles of wine and spirits that are not saved but poured into the gutters at dawn, the alcohol mixing with the red dust to form a sickly paste. You see the half-eaten goat legs, the abandoned chicken wings, the congealing pools of soup, left on plastic tables like sacrifices to a god of excess. Behind every major compound, by the end of a big event, grows a small, tragic hill of disposable plates, plastic cups, and discarded packaging, a monument to transient celebration.

It is as though the town, and by extension we its children, must prove our hard-won prosperity, our escape from scarcity, through visible, tangible, almost aggressive evidence of surplus – even if that surplus, that symbol of success, ends up putrefying in a ditch, a feast for flies and stray dogs. I once stood, paralyzed, watching a young boy, no more than twelve, struggle under the weight of a large metal tray heaped with perfectly good, untouched jollof rice, its aroma still warm and enticing. He carried it to the back of a bustling compound, to a pit already overflowing with the leavings of the night’s feast, and with a practised heave, dumped the entire contents. The grains formed a bright orange cascade against the dark earth. He caught my gaze, my expression of disbelief perhaps clear on my face. He simply shrugged, a gesture of perfect, uncomplicated acceptance. “Dem say make I throw am,” he said, wiping his hands on his shorts. “Party don finish.” In that sentence was encapsulated the entire, brutal logic of the season: the party has a finite lifespan, and all its accoutrements, including nourishment, expire with it.

And yet, in the very midst of this grotesque, mesmerizing abundance, there persist – if you have the eyes to see through the glittering haze – pockets of pure, unmanufactured tenderness. These moments catch you off guard, a sudden balm to the soul. A grandmother, her back bent with years, sitting on a low stool under the shade of the ancient tree, patiently peeling a bowl of oranges for her cluster of grandchildren, her hands moving with a slow, loving certainty that belongs to another century. A council of old men, their faces maps of wisdom and laughter lines, gathered on rustic stools in a quiet corner, speaking to each other in the deep, musical, proverbial-laden dialect, their voices a low rumble, their occasional laughter rolling out like comfortable, distant thunder, a sound of pure, unperformative camaraderie.

A young woman, resplendent in her own expensive aso-ebi, kneeling in the dust to gently adjust her mother’s headtie, her fingers tender and precise, the act itself a silent poem of respect and love that feels, in its quietness, like a sacred prayer. A small boy, oblivious to the convoy of expensive cars and the blaring music, utterly absorbed in the primal joy of chasing a kite he has fashioned from old newspaper and sticks, his face tilted to the sky, his happiness a self-contained universe, unbothered and unimpressed by the chaos of the adult carnival swirling around him. These are the inner villages – not geographical locations, but emotional and spiritual spaces. They are the quiet, unadorned, recalcitrant pockets where the true, resilient soul of the place still lives and breathes, holding fast against the tide of performance.

But the disconnections, the sharp edges of modern reality, are equally real and impossible to ignore. The physical discomforts are a constant low-grade torment: the sleepless nights, the indigestible feast-food, the blistered feet from relentless standing, the dehydration masquerading as fatigue. There is the significant psychological sense of being both utterly at home and strangely out of place, a native and a tourist simultaneously. The haunting feeling that the town you love, the physical and emotional landscape of your origin, is slipping away from you, not through malice, but through a thousand layers of noise, curated performance, and spectacular expectation that you yourself, in your diaspora yearning, have helped to cultivate. There is the exhausting paradox of participating in a ritual that nourishes a deep part of your identity while simultaneously draining your emotional and physical resources to the point of depletion. The peculiar guilt that arises from wanting simple rest in a culture that has subtly, powerfully equated rest with social withdrawal, with being “anti-social,” with a failure to engage in the vital work of communal reinforcement. And beneath it all, the most poignant ache: the longing for a version of home that exists now more vividly, more perfectly, in the curated gallery of memory than in the complicated, demanding, glorious mess of the present reality.

I think often of my younger friend, the one who declared, with the certainty of a prophet, that Abiriba is a drug. I see now, with crystalline clarity, the significant truth he was groping for. The town is a powerful, complex intoxicant. It lifts you on a wave of collective euphoria, spins you in a whirlwind of recognition and validation, dazzles you with a pageantry of belonging that the anonymous city can never provide. It makes you feel electrically, vibrantly alive in a way that the routines of survival in Lagos or London never can. But like any potent substance, it has its cost, its crash. It also leaves you significantly depleted, nerves frayed and trembling, craving a silence so deep it feels like a physical void. It gives the sublime gift of connection in the same breath that it takes the price of your peace. It is a transaction where the currency is your very vitality.

And so the monumental, quiet challenge for us – the children of this relentless, brilliant, impossibly demanding culture – is to develop a new literacy. We must learn, with conscious effort, to stop confusing the blinding, choking ash of the spectacle for the genuine, warming, sustaining fire of connection itself. We must become discerning keepers of our own flame, learning how to feed the authentic glow of kinship and memory without blindly throwing ourselves onto the pyre of performative excess. It is about the courageous, daily work of carving out sanctuaries of authenticity, of vulnerable truth-telling, within the very heart of the carnival. It is about choosing, again and again, the difficult path of depth over the easy reward of breadth, the richness of true presence over the adrenaline of performance, the sustenance of quiet meaning over the addictive roar of noise.

15

We must collectively reimagine the pilgrimage. We must find a way, as a community, to come home to rest, not just to appear. To genuinely reconnect, thread by fragile thread, not just to circulate like commodities on a social trading floor. To remember and honour our shared stories and soil, not just to perform the act of remembering for an audience.

So that when the season inevitably wanes, when the last canopy is folded, when the final goodbye is wept, and we point our cars back toward the disparate cities that hold our working lives – Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Houston, London – we are not carrying a heavier, more debilitating fatigue than we brought with us. We do not leave with our spirits frayed to a whisper and our bodies trembling with the aftershocks of unsustainable celebration. Instead, we depart replenished in a deeper way. We leave anchored, our internal compasses recalibrated not by the whirlwind, but by the moments of stillness we found within it. We are fortified, not by the spectacle, but by the quiet, enduring, stubbornly beating heart of the place we so fiercely, so complicatedly, and so irrevocably love.

Because beneath the magnificent madness, beneath the dazzling spectacle, beneath the overwhelming noise, Abiriba still holds, guarded in its ancient stones and in the hearts of its truest stewards, something sacred and indestructible.

And if we can learn to listen carefully – beneath the groan of the generators, beneath the pounding music, beneath the layered laughter – we can still, just barely, hear it. It is calling our names, not in a shout, but in the whisper that comes before the dawn, reminding us of who we are when no one is watching.

What is to be done? The question hangs in the air like harmattan dust – fine, persistent, impossible to ignore, settling into the crevices of our every conversation, our every moment of exhaustion, our every flash of nostalgic longing for a simpler return. It is the question that dawns on the third day, when the adrenaline of arrival has worn off and the relentless schedule stretches ahead like a gauntlet. It echoes in the quiet of a borrowed room at 4 a.m., when the body is leaden but the mind races with the ghosts of conversations and the pressure of events yet to attend. And yet the answer, if we are ruthlessly honest with ourselves, cannot be a dramatic, sweeping renunciation. We cannot, in a fit of enlightened frustration, simply abandon the homecoming ritual. To do so would be a form of cultural and spiritual self-amputation.

That ritual, for all its evolved complexities and grotesque demands, is the lifeblood, the very bloodstream, of a people who have been scattered by history, economics, and ambition across the map of the world. It is the annual, synchronized pulse that reminds a dispersed nation – a nation defined not by passports but by shared memory and blood – that it still possesses a beating centre, a geographical and spiritual locus to which it can, and must, periodically return. To discard it would be to willingly sever the most vital artery that keeps our communal identity, in all its messy glory, alive and circulating. The task before us, then, is subtler, braver, and far more interior. It is the work of courageous, collective reimagining. It is not about destroying the vessel, but about consciously, carefully changing the nature of the voyage it undertakes.

This reimagining begins with the cultivation of a quiet, personal fortitude – the strength to sometimes, without fanfare or apology, utter a gentle but immovable “no.” This is not a hostile refusal born of contempt, nor is it a wholesale withdrawal from the fabric of community. It is, rather, a deliberate, conscious act of curation. It is the choosing of depth, of textured meaning, over the shallow, compulsive breadth of mere attendance. It is the active selection of a cracked, sun-warmed veranda where lizards dart in the afternoon light over a neon-lit, overcrowded canopy vibrating with sound. It is the preference for an elder’s meandering, digressive tale – a narrative woven half from fading memory, half from the timeless loom of proverb – over the fifth sonically indistinguishable party of the week, where the music is so aggressively loud it not only drowns out conversation but actively erases the very capacity for coherent thought, reducing interaction to gestures and shouted banalities. It is, at its core, the daily, moment-by-moment choice of genuine presence over polished performance.

I think often of a single, stolen night this past December, a night that has since become a touchstone in my memory. I had spent the earlier part of the evening at a crowded, opulent gathering – a child’s dedication that felt more like a product launch, with professional videographers, a live band, and a guest list longer than the family tree. The air was thick with perfume and competition. Feeling a familiar, claustrophobic ache for authenticity, I quietly slipped away, the noise receding behind me like a tide. I found myself, drawn by an unconscious pull, walking toward my uncle’s house. He was sitting alone under the vast, sheltering canopy of the old tree in his compound, a silent sentinel in the night. He nodded as I approached, as if he had been expecting me. We sat together in a companionship that needed no preamble.

He spoke slowly, in our deep dialect, the way true elders do when they understand that time is both the most abundant and the most precious currency. He did not ask me about my job or my plans. Instead, he told me stories. He painted pictures with words of the old market square as it existed in his youth, a bustling theatre of commerce and gossip now vanished. He recounted, with vivid detail, the awe and terror of his first journey as a boy to the distant, mythical city of Aba, a voyage that then felt like crossing an ocean. He described the night, decades ago, when a ferocious storm saw the sacred Achị struck by lightning, and how the entire village held its breath. None of it was urgent news. None of it was transactional. All of it was essential, a transmission of a world that exists now only in such tellings. That single, quiet hour under the stars, with the distant thump of the party I’d left as a faint, irrelevant echo, nourished my spirit more profoundly than the four frantic, expensive events I had attended earlier that day combined. It was a choice, a small “no” to the spectacle, and a monumental “yes” to the substance of home.

But the burden of change cannot rest solely on the weary shoulders of individuals making private, almost fugitive choices. For the ritual to be sustainably reimagined, our communities themselves require a gentle, wise recalibration. The elders and traditional leaders – those who still hold the moral and cultural structure of the town, who are the custodians of its long memory – could begin, not with edicts, but with a powerful, quiet leadership. They could, through subtle guidance and personal example, begin to moderate the runaway, competitive extravagance that has turned every gathering, from a child’s naming to a funeral, into a spectacle of one-upmanship.

This is not about issuing stern decrees from a high table or shaming families for their generosity. It is about something far more potent: modelling a different, older ethos. It is about the Ọkwara Ịkwụ or the eldest in a kindred, in his public prayers and private counsel, reminding us that the primordial purpose of any gathering is communion – the mutual sharing of life – not competition in loudness or lavishness. It is about community figures gently affirming that the true measure of a wake is not the sheer wattage of the rented speakers shaking the ground, but the depth and sincerity of the remembrance shared for the departed. That the beating heart of a wedding is not quantified by the number of cows slaughtered or the cost of the cake, but by the genuine, careful weaving together of two families into a new cloth. That the decibel level of an event has never been, and will never be, a reliable indicator of its emotional or spiritual meaning. This leadership by ethos would provide a necessary counter-narrative, a permission slip for simplicity that many secretly crave but feel powerless to enact alone.

And then there is the most radical, and perhaps most difficult, permission we must learn to grant – first to ourselves, and then generously to each other. It is the permission to rest. To be utterly, gloriously unproductive in the capitalist, transactional sense that governs our diaspora lives. To allow the body, pushed to its limits, to finally, fully exhale without the accompanying guilt of missing out. To collectively reclaim the foundational idea that home is not only a place of incessant, mandatory activity, but also, and perhaps primarily, a place of refuge – a sanctuary for the weary self. I hold dear the memory of the small, stolen moments this past season when, usually around 3 or 4 a.m., the last generator in the neighbourhood would finally sputter and die, its fuel exhausted. In the sudden, shocking vacuum of silence that followed, a miracle would occur.

The world would soften. The oppressive orange glow of floodlights would vanish, and the stars – obscured for weeks by light and dust – would reappear with breathtaking clarity, a ancient canopy of silent witness. The night itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, the air cooling and clearing. In those rare, velvety interstices, I would lie still and feel, for a fleeting but significant second, the true atmosphere of the home I remembered from childhood – the one the philosopher Hermann Schmitz might describe as enveloping, soothing, unforced. That authentic atmospheric presence never left; it did not die. It merely retreated, like a shy, sensitive animal, waiting for the unnatural noise to subside, waiting for us to collectively slow down enough, to become quiet enough, to notice its enduring presence once more.

Perhaps, then, we need to expand our definition of a “successful” homecoming. Perhaps its essence lies not only, or even primarily, in the large, collective gatherings that fill our camera rolls, but in the accumulation of silent, shared, ordinary moments. It is in the wordless, shared watching of a familiar sunset paint the same hills it has painted for a thousand years. It is in the meditative, unhurried peeling of oranges with a sibling on a quiet afternoon, the sticky juice and the companionable silence a bond in itself. It is in the quiet, deep companionship of simply sitting beside someone you love – a parent, a lifelong friend – without the need to speak, without an agenda to advance, without a performance to maintain, without any pressure whatsoever to prove your worth, your success, or your devotion. It is in the simple, revolutionary act of being present together, fully and vulnerably, in a space where the metric of value is connection, not consumption.

The goal is not, and should not be, to extinguish the brilliant, chaotic carnival. That carnival is an expression of our vitality, our joy, our hard-won capacity for celebration. We do not need to destroy it. We only need to remember, and to constantly remind each other, that the carnival is not the home. The carnival is the spectacular, swirling ash thrown into the sky by the fire. The genuine, warming, sustaining connection – to people, to place, to memory – is the fire itself. And if we can learn, as a community, to feed that essential fire with the proper fuel of time, attention, and vulnerable presence, rather than suffocating it under an ever-growing mountain of glittering spectacle, then perhaps – just perhaps – a new equilibrium can be found. Then, when the season inevitably closes and we turn our cars back toward the waiting cities of our daily striving, we will carry with us not a heavier, more debilitating fatigue, but a deeper, more resilient anchoring. A true replenishment of spirit. A solid, quiet sense that we have touched something real, something enduring, something that whispers of eternity and reminds us, in our bones, of the fundamental why – why we endure the road, why we spend the money, why we return at all.

That, then, is the sacred work laid before our generation. It is not the work of abandonment, but of careful, loving reimagining. It is not the work of withdrawal into isolation, but of intentional recalibration toward depth. It is not the pursuit of silence instead of noise, but the cultivation of the wisdom to hold both – to allow each its rightful, respectful place in the complex symphony of coming home. It is the work of learning, once more, how to listen to the heartbeat of the place, and in doing so, to remember the rhythm of our own.

16

The realization settles not with a bang, but with a slow, cooling weight, like the ashes of the season’s final bonfire. We can draft manifestos for sanctuaries of quiet, we can preach the gospel of depth over breadth, we can even imagine elders modeling a gentler ethos. But then you see it: the cousin who takes out a loan he cannot afford to fund a reception for three hundred virtual strangers, his smile strained with the panic of future repayments. You hear it: the aunty who declares, with absolute conviction, that a family’s status is now measured by the brand of champagne at their child’s baptism. You feel it in the relentless pressure to conform, a pressure that feels older and more stubborn than any new idea. This is the granite beneath the soil. You cannot legislate against ignorance – not the lack of education, but the willful, cherished ignorance of consequence. You cannot outlaw foolishness – the kind that mistakes glitter for gold, noise for joy, exhaustion for virtue. You cannot decree away the sheer, breathtaking human propensity for stupidity – the repetitive, self-harming choice of spectacle over substance, even when the cost is written plainly in fatigue and debt. That is the rub. The core challenge isn’t just reimagining the ritual; it’s confronting the immutable, messy material of human nature that the ritual so perfectly, and so tragically, ignites.

I tried to articulate this very tension to Chike, the pragmatic friend who lives in Enugu. We were surveying the wreckage of a party the morning after, plastic cups scattered like fallen leaves. “It’s a simple equation of prestige,” he said, kicking a bottle cap. “You spend one million to show you have five. The next person spends two million to show they have ten. It’s not ignorance of math; it’s a different mathematics entirely. The currency isn’t naira, it’s perceived worth. And you can’t pass a law against vanity. You might as well try to legislate against breathing.” He paused, watching a young boy trying to salvage unopened cans from a trash pile. “The foolishness is in believing the equation ever ends. That you can ever spend enough to finally be ‘enough.’ But telling someone that is like telling a man dying of thirst that the ocean is salt water. He sees the expanse, the shimmering proof of abundance. He will drink anyway.”

Later, at our Ọbụ in our village at Amaukwa, the conversation took a more philosophical turn with Ete Una, a retired civil servant. He sipped his drink and listened to my worries about the unsustainable spectacle. “You speak of stupidity,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “But is it stupidity, or is it a different kind of survival? Think. For generations, to be seen was to exist. Invisibility was a social death. Now, we have carried that to its logical, extreme conclusion in a world of cameras and WhatsApp statuses. To be quiet is to be forgotten. To be modest is to be poor. The ‘foolishness’ you see is, in their eyes, a fierce, competitive intelligence – a fight for relevance in a world that forgets you faster than ever.” He set his glass down. “You cannot pass a law against a survival instinct, however distorted it has become. The challenge is to change what it means to survive, to be seen, to matter. And that, my dear, is the work of a generation, not a by-law.”

The most deflating conversation, however, was with a group of the very young, the university students home for the break, the supposed heirs to this tradition. They were bright, critical, and fully immersed in the madness. “Uncle, you talk about rest, about quiet,” said Nkpa, a sharp-eyed law student. “But if I don’t go to everything, if my pictures aren’t everywhere, it’s like I wasn’t here. My mates will say, ‘Did you even come home?’ My social capital expires in two weeks. I have to max it out.” Another, Kalu Ifegwu, added with a cynical laugh, “The stupidest thing would be to come all this way and be a ghost. At least if you’re exhausted, you have proof. You have evidence.” Their logic was flawless, and it chilled me. They were not ignorant of the cost; they were meticulously calculating it in a different currency. The propensity for what I called stupidity was, for them, a rational investment in a social economy where visibility is the only verified asset. No legislation can touch that calculus.

So, this is the terrain of our reimagining: not a clear field where we can plant new seeds in neat rows, but a dense, ancient forest of inherited fears, competitive drives, and deep-seated longings for validation. The ignorance isn’t of the mind, but of the spirit – a forgetting that there are other, quieter ways to be valued. The foolishness is a tragic mimicry of success, played out on a stage where the applause is deafening but hollow. The stupidity is the repetitive hope that this time, the spectacle will finally fill the void it itself creates. You cannot pass a law against any of this. You can only, patiently, build alternative proofs of belonging. You must live out, and show, that a conversation under a tree can be more validating than a shout across a crowded canopy; that the memory of a shared, silent sunset can hold more weight than a hundred tagged photos; that true social capital is built in the slow, unphotographed exchanges that echo long after the generators have been sold off and the debts are being paid. The challenge is to make that quiet proof so palpable, so desirable, that it begins to compete with the roar.

In this dizzying, magnificent, and profoundly contradictory theatre of homecoming, I find myself perpetually cast in a role I did not wholly choose, yet one I cannot, in good conscience or by any feat of emotional will, abandon: the native‑stranger, the insider‑saturated with belonging yet standing perpetually one step outside the frame, the son whose blood and bone are of this soil yet whose gaze is now bifocal, watching the glorious pageant with a roiling mixture of awe, bone‑deep fatigue, and a fierce, unshakeable, almost desperate love. Abiriba formed me – not as a potter casually shapes clay, but as a forge shapes steel, with heat, pressure, and a specific, demanding intent. Its proverbs, those compact capsules of ancestral wisdom, do not merely reside in my memory; they live in the very marrow of my thinking, structuring my logic and my metaphors.

Its stubborn, defiant pride, born of a history of self‑reliance in the face of obscurity, is the invisible backbone of my professional resilience in distant, indifferent cities. Its legendary entrepreneurial spark, that restless alchemy of opportunity and grit, lit the fuse of my own ambitions long before I had the language or the latitude to name them. I am, in every cellular, psychological, and spiritual sense, its product, its export, its living testament. And yet, herein lies the exquisite paradox: the very lens through which I now observe and critique the frenzied excess of the season, this analytical distance that sometimes aches like a betrayal, is also, irrevocably, its creation.

This community – this “small London,” this improbable, brilliant, maddening crucible – has for generations not just valued but venerated a specific kind of intelligence: a street‑smart acuity, a canny, observational genius, a relentless drive to deconstruct any system, be it a market trend, a political puzzle, or a social ritual, not to destroy it, but to master it, to improve upon it, to turn it to advantage. It bred in us, its children, not just the instinct to participate fully in the life of the clan, but the parallel, often disruptive instinct to analyze, to assess, to reverse‑engineer the spectacle in search of its core efficiency. My unease, therefore, is not the cold, clinical detachment of a sociologist or an alienated outsider. It is the warm, pained, intimately invested vigilance of a child who loves the family business with all his heart, who owes it everything, but who now pores over the ledger in the back office, fearing that in its triumphant, roaring pursuit of quarterly spectacle, it is quietly, dangerously mortgaging its long‑term legacy, trading the durability of its name for the fleeting fireworks of a season.

I am, thus, a living paradox sheathed in the expensive, season‑specific Otú Enyi cloth. I am both the loyal, indebted son, performing the rites with a genuine smile, and the reluctant, pained auditor, mentally noting the unsustainable costs. My fatigue, which by the second week feels geological in its weight, is not merely the physical depletion from sleepless nights and endless standing. It is the significant, existential fatigue of holding two powerful, competing truths in a constant, aching tension within a single breast: a deep, cellular, unshakeable love for this place, for these faces, for this specific patch of earth that holds the grammar of my being, and a parallel, data‑driven alarm at the dizzying trajectory of its social energies, at the monstrous, beautiful engine of consumption it has become, and the terrifying human cost – financial, physical, spiritual – it extracts from even its most devoted children. I am a branch that grew far into the world, shaped by other winds, pruned by other norms, fed by other soils. But my sap – that vital, animating essence – still rises inexorably, stubbornly, from this one ancient, gnarled root. And because of that primal connection, I feel every tremor in its bedrock, every fever in its communal body, every convulsive shift in its social core with a painful, intimate acuity that no outsider could ever fathom. The celebration is my celebration; the exhaustion is my exhaustion; the crisis of meaning, if it is one, is my inheritance.

Abiriba, for its part, is no passive backdrop to my internal psycho‑drama, no static painting of nostalgia against which I pose my dilemmas. It is a living, breathing, pulsating organism with its own immense, undeniable gravitational pull and its own relentless, metabolic logic. It does not simply welcome returnees with open arms; it consumes them, with a love that is also a kind of hunger, metabolizing their condensed time, their hard‑earned resources, and their year‑worth of pent‑up emotional energy into the pure, high‑octane fuel for its spectacular seasonal boom. The community operates with a brilliant, organic, often gloriously chaotic agency, a collective intelligence that has turned our sentimental, individual homecomings into a powerful, if temporary, economic and social stimulus package of breathtaking scale. The deafening music that spills from every compound is not merely sound; it is the audible signature of vitality. The mountains of food that spill over plates are not just nourishment; they are a performative rebuttal to any historical ghost of scarcity. The competitive, gleaming displays of new cars, the freshly painted houses with imported tiles, the cascading aso‑ebi fabrics – these are not mere frivolities or expressions of personal vanity. They are the visible, vibrant, necessary signs of a complex social ecosystem reasserting its health, proving its potency in the global marketplace, showcasing its success according to the very metrics – visible wealth, conspicuous consumption – that the wider world understands. It is the homeland talking back to the diaspora in a language it cannot fail to comprehend.

A small boy, utterly oblivious to the convoy of honking, tinted‑window SUVs and the blaring, competing soundtracks, his entire universe narrowed to the primal, timeless joy of chasing a kite he has ingeniously fashioned from old newspaper and flexible sticks, his face tilted to the vast sky, his happiness a self‑contained, radiant universe, unbothered and unimpressed by the chaotic, expensive carnival of adult anxieties swirling around his bare feet. These are the inner villages – not geographical locations, but emotional and spiritual spaces, the quiet, unadorned, recalcitrant pockets where the true, resilient soul of the place still lives and breathes, holding fast like lichen on a rock against the tidal wave of performance.

But the disconnections, the sharp, uncomfortable edges of this modern reality, are equally, undeniably real. The physical discomforts are a constant, low‑grade torment that becomes the background score of the visit: the sleepless nights vibrating with leftover basslines, the digestive rebellion from a relentless cycle of rich, unfamiliar foods, the blistered feet from endless standing in unsuitable shoes on unforgiving ground, the dehydration that masquerades as existential fatigue. There is the significant, unnerving psychological sense of being both utterly at home and strangely, persistently out of place – a native and a tourist occupying the same body, a feeling that the passport to this place is stamped in a currency of memory that is no longer the legal tender of the present. The haunting, melancholic feeling that the town you love, the physical and emotional landscape of your origin, is slipping away from your grasp not through malice or neglect, but through a thousand layers of amplified noise, meticulously curated performance, and spectacular, collective expectation – an expectation that you yourself, in your diaspora yearning and your social media posts, have helped to cultivate and inflate. There is the exhausting, draining paradox of willingly participating in a ritual that nourishes a deep, non‑negotiable part of your identity while simultaneously draining your emotional and physical resources to the point of hollow‑eyed depletion. The peculiar, gnawing guilt that arises from the simple, mammalian desire for rest in a culture that has subtly, powerfully equated rest with social withdrawal, with being “anti‑social,” with a faint but perceptible failure to engage fully in the vital, compulsory work of communal reinforcement and visible solidarity. And beneath it all, underpinning every moment of joyful reunion, lies the most poignant and persistent ache: the longing for a version of home that exists now more vividly, more perfectly, in the curated, gilded gallery of memory than in the complicated, demanding, glorious, and often disappointing mess of the present, lived reality.

And yet – and this is the final, undeniable, saving truth – for all this swirling fatigue, for all the philosophical quandary, for all the clinical analysis and the creeping unease, it is still significantly, achingly, irrefutably good to be home. The beauty, the primal, magnetic pull, persists. It survives not in the large, organized events, but in the thousand intangible, fleeting filaments of experience that bypass the rational, critical mind entirely, speaking directly to the animal and the child within. It is in the specific, golden, honeyed slant of the late December afternoon sun as it filters through the dusty leaves of the ukwu mango tree behind the old house, a particular quality of light and shadow that is etched into the cellular memory from a thousand forgotten childhood evenings of idle play. It is in the instant, effortless, psychological shorthand of the deep dialect snapping a vast universe of shared understanding, humour, and history into perfect, crystalline place with a single, precisely‑inflected word or a knowing grunt. It is in the shared, uproarious, belly‑aching laughter that erupts over a recalled folly from twenty years past, a story that needs no exposition, no character introductions, no cultural translation for this audience of co‑conspirators from life’s earlier chapters. It is in the simple, solid, uncompromising, sensory fact of the ancestral soil – red, lateritic, and cool in the evening – beneath one’s bare feet, a grounding, earth‑to‑skin connection that no therapist’s office, no cosmopolitan balcony, no achievement in the distant world can ever replicate or replace.

17

The central tragedy, the cruel irony of our modern condition, is that these grounding, identity‑confirming, soul‑anchoring sensations are the hidden treasure we truly, desperately cross oceans and endure broken roads to find. They are the quiet heaven we seek. But they are too often drowned out, obscured, and made inaccessible by the very cacophony we ourselves generate in a frantic, misguided, and collectively agreed‑upon attempt to manufacture, amplify, and publicly prove the existence of the very feeling we are drowning. We are like a circle of desperately thirsty men, gathered around a spot where we know water lies deep beneath the surface, but instead of digging quietly and carefully, we each bring a larger excavator, throwing up such colossal, blinding clouds of dust and noise that we can no longer see the water we seek, we can no longer hear its quiet promise, and we choke on the very earth we are trying to penetrate.

The long, fabled, punishing road to Abia, it seems, does not end at the town junction or at the familiar, painted doorstep of the ancestral house. That is merely the end of the geographical leg. The true road winds on, infinitely and internally, through the labyrinth of our own choices, our inherited contradictions, our bottomless love, and our deepest fears. It is a relentless, generations‑long, and now accelerated search for a home that is both a place on a map and a state of grace, a condition of being. We must now, more urgently than ever, learn to visit this home not just with our eager bodies and our burdened wallets, not just with our social calendars and our camera phones, but with our weary, peace‑seeking, watchful, and fiercely loving souls. We must learn, amidst the glorious din, to be still. Only in the cultivation of that inner stillness, in the courageous creation of pockets of quiet amidst the roar, can we finally, truly, arrive.

And so we come to the end of this chapter in the long, winding meditation that is our return – this fourth movement in the symphony of going home and being undone by home. What lingers now, after all the noise and analysis and laughter and fatigue, is not a neat resolution but a tender, necessary clarity. The feast of exhaustion has revealed itself for what it is: not merely a cultural excess, not merely a seasonal frenzy, but a mirror held up to our deepest longings and our most unspoken fears. It has shown us how fiercely we crave belonging, how desperately we try to prove it, how easily we confuse the performance of connection with the thing itself.

Yet it has also shown us that beneath the spectacle, beneath the booming speakers and the endless events and the frantic choreography of December, there remains a quiet, stubborn truth that refuses to die. The truth that home is not the noise – it is the pulse beneath the noise. It is the ember beneath the ash. It is the familiar slant of sunlight on red earth, the dialect that unlocks a universe with a single syllable, the laughter that needs no translation, the soil that remembers our footsteps even when we have forgotten our way.

The paradox of homecoming is not a problem to be solved but a tension to be lived. We are both the children who long for rest and the adults who feel compelled to perform vitality. We are both the weary travellers seeking sanctuary and the proud inheritors of a culture that celebrates through exuberance. We are both the ones who crave silence and the ones who generate the noise. And perhaps the work of our generation is not to choose one over the other, but to learn how to hold both without breaking – to create a homecoming that honours the fire without choking on the smoke.

If there is a path forward, it lies in the small, deliberate acts of reclamation: choosing depth over spectacle, choosing presence over performance, choosing the cracked veranda over the fifth identical party, choosing the quiet conversation that nourishes over the loud gathering that drains. It lies in remembering that the heart of home is not the carnival but the communion. Not the frenzy but the fellowship. Not the display but the belonging.

And so, as we prepare to leave again – back to Lagos, Abuja, London, Houston, Los Angeles, China – we carry with us not just the fatigue but the flicker of something wiser. A recognition that the long road to Abia is not merely a physical journey but a spiritual apprenticeship, teaching us, year after year, how to return more gently, more consciously, more truthfully. Teaching us how to arrive not only with our bodies and our wallets, but with our souls open, attentive, and ready to receive the quiet gifts that still wait for us beneath the noise.

And perhaps this is where the Governor’s ongoing work across the State becomes more than mere governance and enters the realm of cultural stewardship. For all the noise, all the frenzy, all the contradictions of our December homecoming, what we ultimately seek is a place that can hold us – not just emotionally, but structurally. A place where the roads do not punish us for loving home. A place where public institutions do not collapse under the weight of our seasonal return. A place where the physical environment supports the spiritual longing that drives us back year after year. In this sense, the Governor’s infrastructural and administrative reforms are not simply political achievements; they are contributions to the emotional structure of home itself.

I saw this in small, almost invisible ways. The smoother stretch of road that shortened our journey from Umuahia to Abiriba by thirty minutes and saved many of us from unnecessary temper. The newly lit roads and junctions that made late‑night returns from events feel less perilous. The communal funded renovated health centre where a cousin took her child for a quick check‑up without the usual dread. These are the quiet, practical mercies that make a place livable, that make a homecoming less of an ordeal and more of a return. They are the kinds of improvements that do not trend on social media but settle into the bones of a community, altering its posture, its confidence, its sense of possibility.

And so, as I reflect on the paradox of homecoming – the exhaustion and the ecstasy, the longing and the overwhelm – I find myself grateful for the fact that the state is not standing still. That its leadership is attempting, however imperfectly, to build a foundation sturdy enough to hold both our bodies and our dreams. The Governor’s efforts, in this light, become part of the larger story of our collective search for a sustainable rhythm between rest and revelry, between tradition and modernity, between the home we remember and the home we are trying to build. If the long road to Abia is ever to become less punishing, less symbolic of our national dysfunction, it will be because leaders like Alex Otti continue to make choices that honour the dignity of those who travel it. And in this season, at least, it feels as though such choices are being made.

Part 4 ends here, not with a full stop but with a breath – a pause before the next movement. Because the road continues, as it always has, winding through memory and longing and contradiction, asking us, with every mile, to learn again how to come home.