At that time, I was a Fellow at the Ebedi International Writer’s Residency in Iseyin, Oyo State. During those first few days in Iseyin, I found it hard to write—for some reason my thoughts were scattered and ungovernable. I would stare at my computer screen for hours, writing a sentence or two and then erasing it. There was unsteadiness in my heart, an anxiety heightened by the silence in the residency, which was an otherwise perfect cocoon for any serious writer. The Residency had an expanse of green within the compound. I would wake up very early and go outside barefoot and feel the early morning dew on my feet. To the north, a heavy fog would hang over the Ebedi hills. I would sit on a dry log in the middle of the green, watching birds chirp and crow in the incipient sunrise and listen to the old watchmen converse in deep singsong Yoruba, which I did not understand. I loved the sound of the language on their tongues, and I felt drawn to the music of their tremulous voices intoning conversation like liturgy.
Sometimes in my room (which had the name ‘Abubakar Gimba’ pinned on the door), after another futile effort at writing, I would lie down on the bed and think of the details of my journey to Iseyin: the long bus journey from Onitsha to Ibadan with brief stops at the bustling towns of Ore and Ijebu-Ode; my fascination with the endless sprawl of Ibadan, with the way our bus meandered through a long road running from a rowdy place that had “Molete” written on the dusty signboards to the neat bus park in Samonda. There was the rickety bus I took from Ibadan to the town of Iseyin, a further 24 kilometres away, whose passengers, mostly rural women travelling into the Oyo hinterland, spent the whole time talking passionately in Yoruba about something that seemed to be particularly irksome to them. One of them hit her hand once, very loud, on the ceiling of the bus and the driver warned her in a sharp language. We passed many rustic towns, with stretches of forests and farmlands in-between. And the clear skies that illuminated some places quickly changed to brooding clouds, with tell-tale fantasies of rain, when we appeared near the shadow of hills or thick vegetation. Journeys always put me in the right frame of mind to write; I did not understand why this one did not.
*
On the fifth day, I began to take walks in the immediate vicinity of the Residency. Down Amao Road, I would greet shop owners in the Yoruba salutation that Madam Cecilia, the Residency housekeeper, taught me: E kaaro oo. At the end of the road I would join the Oyo-Iseyin Road and turn to my right, past the IDGS, past the Union Bank branch, walking a few meters more near the burnt police station, a relic of the #EndSars protests in 2020, before turning back. One or two people might stare, perhaps wondering at the origin of the strange face that had suddenly appeared in the vicinity. But it would not have been a mystery to them—seeing strange faces; by that time they would have been used to the monthly inflow of writers’ faces appearing in town for a while before disappearing altogether.
Ebedi hills rose gently behind the Residency’s building. The town of Iseyin crouched low on both sides of the hills so that if you were in one part of the town, you would not see the other part. The hills seemed to shield the town like a hen shielding her chicks with her outspread wings.
Sometimes I would climb the closest hill and stop on the edge of the forest that sat atop the gentle crest like dreadlocks on a young man’s head and survey the town below me. I imagined how this land must have looked three thousand years ago: the pristine forest undulating across the hills, the antelopes, the impalas, the gazelles, the leopards roaming freely, and the silver line of the river snaking across the thick green. But here we were with brown zinc roofs and red rutted roads crisscrossing the once primeval expanse of hills and little valleys. The October winds seemed more generous up there, teasing my body, billowing my shirt like a kite.
Back in my room at the Residency, after almost a week in limbo, I found myself again and began reworking a story set sometime in the future: I saw a man limping across a bare African valley chasing after a white woman; he appeared tired and seemed to be avoiding civilization. What could he be running from? Had human civilization turned on itself, like autosarcophagy? Nature against nature against its own kind, the implications of predatory life, the human cost of thoughtlessly living off the environment without adequate replenishment so that, after the passage of a few centuries, the flora would have disappeared and the fauna present only in taxonomy textbooks. The idea continued to expand in my head.
*
Two weeks later the management of the Residency informed us of a trip to a certain landmark somewhere within the Iseyin administrative area. The journey was part of the program designed for the fellows at the Residency.
We set off on a clear morning. The first taxi drove us for nearly forty minutes to a village on the outskirts of Iseyin Local Government Area. Here, we boarded another far less comfortable taxi heading towards Ado Awaye town. From the window I could see huge lone hills and rocky monoliths in the distance. The landscape was flat and green but was polka-dotted unevenly with solitary hills, steep cliffs and monoliths. And in the misty distance, they seemed to acquire the lapidary glitter of obscure topography—like the images of strange land formations in the space photographs of Mars.
When we finally arrived at Ado Awaye town, we were happy to be rid of the tight air of that rickety taxi. The town seemed quiet. The pastoral cluster of brown-roofed buildings was overlooked by the looming hulk of the Ado hill. At the tourist office, we paid and got a lanky, dark tour guide named Tunde assigned to us. Before us, just outside the tourist’s house rose a huge escarpment with massive cliffs and forest on the far side of the sheer incline. We began the long onerous climb to the top of the hill. There were steep slopes that proved difficult for some of my older mates, and sometimes we had to wait for one of them to catch their breath.
The topography of the hill spoke of millennia of human life. The rocks, the sturdy trees and shrubs hanging tenaciously to the outcrops, the primeval trails. I thought of the story I was writing. Perhaps, I could rewrite it and set it in prehistoric times. What were human ancestors doing then? And what kind of beings were they? What would my interest in the story be then? Would I just be telling a story to assuage my vanity or was there an inner—perhaps even spiritual—purpose I was trying to fulfill?
On the first plateau level of the hill, Ado Awaye town was already far below and all I could see were brown roofs stretching out like raffia drying in the sun. By the second level of the plateau the town had disappeared behind the expanse of rocks and large boulders. On the third level the landscape stretched out green, flat and magnificent amidst the ever-present monoliths standing like distant sentries in the plain. This was the landscape in this part of Oyo, Tunde told me, when I commented on how strange it all appeared to me. From the summit, the eyes could see dozens of kilometers in all directions. Tunde pointed to a white blur in the distance to the east and said that it was the state capital, Ibadan. I stood on that cliff, some thousand feet above sea level, lost in the mystery of this novel landscape. For me, it was not about our destination, it was about the experience of seeing the world as a bird, flying close to the clouds—the sudden abundance of imaginative outlets. The horizon was a blank sheet and kingdoms could be dreamed into existence here.
Tunde told the story of Ado Awaye. He spoke of an ancient war between kingdoms. The war displaced a lot of people who began to migrate towards east about four hundred years ago. Finally, the people took refuge in Ado hill. A prince of the Oyo Empire came to them and they made him their king. As we went, Tunde pointed to vague topographical traces of ancient habitation.
The rest of our walk (we did not climb again) on the hilltop took us directly to the center of escarpment where a small expanse of water shimmered in the sun, ensconced in a deep fissure. The water was trapezoid, beautiful, almost emerald, surrounded by the rocky outcrop of the hill. A tree blossomed impetuously beside the water, as if defying the aridity of the rocks. But these were not the significant things that troubled my mind at the sight of this ancient liquid formation.
On the surface, the lake looked deceptively small, even contrived, as if some creative persons had poured in gallons of water into a sizable orifice. A closer look and trepidation would sweep over the human standing on its edge: a strange feeling of profundity and the unknown. It struck me that this was no ordinary water or rock or hill; this was an old remnant of the non-human age—the age of glaciers and white spaces. How then did this small lake survive here on the top of a rocky hill for thousands of years? How was it that this water never really touched the ground? Tunde talked about how no one had ever gone into the water and came out alive, how no one knew its true depth. From local myths and historical accounts, the depth had remained unfathomable and possibly, it was speculated, led to the realm of the dead. My question to Tunde persisted: how was it that, like the other hanging lake in the mountains of Colorado in America, this lake has survived for millennia tucked into a tiny rustic corner of Nigeria’s south-west?
Tunde wouldn’t have known better, but it would be a good way for me to start, when I get back to my writing table.
Chimezie Chika is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His works have appeared in, amongst other places, The Question Marker, The Shallow Tales Review, Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, and Afrocritik. He is a 2021 Fellow of the Ebedi International Writers’ Residency in Iseyin, Nigeria. He is the Fiction Editor of Ngiga Review and currently resides in Nigeria.