STORY, STORY (2)....ACROSS THE NIGER BRIDGE BY FERRY.

...At our family level, some of the information here would help you to continue with your ‘Family Tree’ project.


As much as I can recollect, I remember my father travelling with myself and my brother (uncle Sunny, your cousin Benjy’s father), in a vehicle with a lot of people inside it.

I cannot remember whether we travelled from Aba, or from Port Harcourt, but we were travelling to Lagos.

This was early in 1965; just about five years after Nigeria got her independence from Great Britain.

We left my mother (grandma), my brothers Dede (big Daddy), Ade (Bj’s daddy), Innocent(your cousin Ada’s daddy) and Victor(your cousin Erinma’s daddy), and my sister Meg (your cousin Kachi’s mummy, big Aunty).

My grandmother and grandfather, and Uncle Chidi and Aunty Gloria were also with them back in the east in Omoba.

As we travelled farther away from them, I missed my mother.

But I was excited because I was going on a journey with my father, and I was going to start school, and to see the other members of our family in Lagos.

The journey seemed endless, and I slept most of the way.

One of the times I was I awake, I remember I saw a lot of water, my father said it was River Niger. We waited a long time by the river at Onitsha, and it was dark when what I now understand as a ferry came and vehicles and people got on and after some time, we were on the other side of the river at Asaba. You remember the place where we stopped to take photographs by the bridge, when we travelled to see grandma in Osa-Ukwu with the black Golf in 2006?

That is the Niger Bridge head at Asaba. Asaba is the town where we all slept in 2005 as we were travelling to see grandma with Bj, his daddy, Dolapo, Olaachi, and their mummy, when the Pathfinder got spoilt on the way because of the flooding that also made us, to sleep in Benin city two days earlier.

There was no bridge across the River Niger from Onitsha to Asaba when I travelled with my father then...

----BIAFRA:LEST WE FORGET!