Yankari

Yankari, Wikimedia

 The only place I remember baboons stealing things was at Yankari. We went there once on a special holiday. Yankari was special because of the swimming. Yankari wasn't a zoo, the animals were wild but in some kind or protected area. I see now it is called the country's "premier game reserve" and was established in 1956. I have a slight memory of some kind of tour to see wild animals but this memory pales in comparison to the swimming.

We were not allowed to swim anywhere in Nigeria apart from the Durbar pool and Yankari. That was because of bilharzia, a waterborne disease. Nigerians did swim in rivers, one would see the boys jumping and playing insouciantly into filthy rivers, but there was a lot of disease in Nigeria. We also weren't allowed to go barefoot anywhere, ever, boundaries we stuck to rigidly, through fear. The reason for this was hookworm, which would get in through your feet and do horrible things to you. Again, Nigerians went barefoot all the time, although most people had flip-flops. So Yankari was a liberation, at least in terms of the swimming.

The site was a huge vertical wall of rock which was heated by the sun. A warm spring emerged from under this rock. It was only like this for, I think, a hundred yards or so,because I have a vague memory that people washed clothes further down. But in that first stretch, we bathed as if we were in heaven, because Yankari seemed as like heaven as could be. We couldn't believe our good fortune, that there was such a place and that we were there. The feeling was a mixture of awe, delight and excitement: the eternal sunshine and the warm, safe, crystal clear water with a sandy bottom. It wasn't deep or or murky like the lakes we sometimes went to. There was no bilharzia, nor crocodiles nor dangerous fish. Everything was perfect. The picture above is recognisable, but not how I remember Yankari. It seems to have been much spoiled. I don't remember this concrete, though it might have been there. I remember a more sandy surface, which may be false, though again I don't have our photos to refer to. In some pictures I have seen online there is even an ugly low wall beside the water which definitely wasn't there. I don't recall grafitti on the rock at all. There were smallish trees lining the side of the spring where you see this barren concrete, because the baboons looked down at us from these. The water had a dappled effect, especially just below this pool, which was from the shade of the trees. I don't remember the water being bright blue like this. It was just clear.

The baboons, which we didn't see in Kaduna, added a microdose of reality and humour to this heaven. Once we got over the shock of their scandalous behinds we noticed they were very clever. They would sit in the trees above and wait for any opportunity to steal anything, especially food. I saw a baboon steal swimming trunks while another stole a Nigerian boy's long piece of sugarcane. People sometimes kept these to chew. They taunted him with it, holding it just out of his reach as he jumped up and down, squawking indignantly.

Each family stayed in a round, traditional round hut, except they were not made of mud, as in the villages, but some harder material. They had thatched roofs. The door had to be kept closed otherwise, the baboons or warthogs would enter and cause chaos, looking for food. Warthogs roamed freely but we gave them a wide berth. They were scary - like boar with huge, curly tusks. It's a wonder no-one was attacked - or maybe they were. But things were very different then.

Other people's memories

Baboon, Wikimedia

The person whose parents were in Kaduna, Nigeria at the same time as us, around 1979 - 81 was about 13 years old to my 7. As I said earlier, I didn't know her there as she was at boarding school in England while I went to a local international primary school, the Sacred Heart. At first she said about all she could remember was staring at the stars singing David Bowie.  The stars were exceptionally bright there.  I can remember standing with dad in the garden outside the patio next to the banana trees one night while he showed me the stars. 

I asked if she could remember the wife (of an officer) who got shot.  But in her version the wife was carjacked, dumped out of the car, shot in the leg so she couldn't get help while the thieves made off with the car.  In my version, a wife was shot during a burglary of the duplex (two level) houses and shot several times at that. I think both might be true. That's why we had m'guardis

She had a story about her brother accidentally hitting a local boy with a golf ball.  I don't even remember a golf course.  The brother apparently said: it's OK, you can have my sister.  And sure enough, the boy's father came around to request the white girl of the family. Barter was common there and disputes presumably were solved this way.

She said she remembered going to Jos and Kano a lot on trips with friends and the baboons would steal the mothers' handbags.  I don't remember Jos at all, though I know the name.  They were far away: four hours I see now, to Jos while Kano is three and a half.  Travel wasn't that safe.  Pretty much anything could happen despite the official presence of people British military people called "yellow peril men". The men directed traffic by standing on wide, raised circular wooden structures, like the kind of thing huge cables might be wound around. Their uniform was trousers, I think a hat, in the British military formal style, and a distinctive orange shirt. This is a shockingly racist term, a metaphor for the imagined threat of "Oriental hordes" from the East overtaking the "civilized" West. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but it was always used "humorously" by the adults.  I don't know how many adults understood the reference: I hope few but suspect more.  

During car travel, which was the only kind for us, apart from the school bus, I know my parents saw dead bodies left beside roads. The police stopped people and bribed them, though not the military because who were there teaching the Nigerian army and therefore, as far as I heard, were immune.  They perhaps did too good a job because there were three military coups in the 1980s and 90s starting a few years after we left.