David Hundeyin@DavidHundeyin
One day in September 2001, when I was a tiny 11 year-old starting secondary school at Atlantic Hall, back when it was located at Maryland, Mrs Adepoju the class teacher announced a group exercise as an icebreaker. All of us were to write our dream holiday location on a piece of paper, and one by one we would read out what we had written.
She started from the other end of the class, so I got to hear multiple answers before it got to my turn. The answers were basically "London", "America", "London", "London", "London", "London", "London", "UK", "London", "London"...
Now for context, I was already reasonably well travelled at the time, and even though my family was not the kind to go off on a jaunt to London at every given opportunity like some of my new peers, I had been privileged to travel fairly extensively around Africa, and I was visually familiar enough with the places being mentioned to know that people from London generally looked forward to going on holiday to warmer parts of the world in Africa, Asia, Southern Europe and Latin America.
I also knew from personal experience that people from "America" and "London" could be found in their thousands enjoying holidays in Lomé, Zanzibar and Accra. You would often find me as the sole African kid surrounded by white kids playing together in the lobby or private beachfront of Lomé's Hotel Deux Fevrier or Hotel Sarakawa whenever my family was in town.
In addition, the travel sections in the Newsweek, TIME and Readers Digest magazines that my dad bought every week made it clear that safari tours in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa were among the most highly rated holiday experiences on earth. These experiences were so exclusive that it would actually be easier for a Nigerian to take a trip to London than to go on safari in Kenya.
I'm providing all this context to explain why it seemed pretty obvious to me that writing "Kenya" as my dream holiday destination was a valid and reasonable choice. Instead, what happened when it got to my turn was that I read out "safari in Kenya" - and the rest of the class burst into laughter and giggles. I was utterly confused at first. Did they not hear me correctly?
They did.
As one of them helpfully explained in between subsequent chortles, "We're talking about places like London and New York, what is *Kenya*?" The inference of course, was that *Kenya*, located in Africa as it was, did not belong in the same conversation as "London" when discussing destinations.
What constituted a "dream holiday" for these children of Nigeria's elite was a Virgin Atlantic economy class ticket to Gatwick Airport, a 4-week stay with their NHS auxillary nurse aunty and her 2 kids in a cramped 2-bedroom council terrace in High Wycombe, and an Oxford Street shopping rampage yielding 50kg of excess baggage for the return trip, filled with WH Smith pencils and Primark clothes to show off to each other at the end of term party.
While the actual inhabitants of London used monthly payment plans to save up for their once in a lifetime Thomson package holiday tour in Kenya, these ghettofabulous sons and daughters of the Nigerian "elite" looked forward to a cold, uncomfortable experience on a miserable umbrella island as their "dream holiday". Not because it was a dream holiday, but because that was the social expectation they all enforced on each other.
And if you knew better, they *laughed* you.
That day was the first time I experienced something that I have gone on to experience many, many times over the intervening 25 years of my Nigerian life - the existential dread of being surrounded by people whose information level is so far below the one I operate with that we genuinely have almost nothing in common.
It's an experience I am so used to that I no longer bother to explain myself to Nigerians. The people who think that London is a dream holiday destination definitely think that "Iran is a terrorist regime that murdered 30,000 protesters."
Of course they do.
