The Women that raised my imagination
In Nigeria, there is Amakohia, a growing neighbourhood of people who loved life and lived it fully. It was a place I once called home. Amakohia was known for housing the only federal government-owned hospital in the area and a federal university. It was a meeting point of traders, civil servants, students, and dreamers; of women who fried akara by the roadside and boys who sold recharge cards and rented out their mobile phones for a fee.
It was in Amakohia that I met Ade. It was also there that I first encountered the many-sided lives of women: women who dared to dream and women who did not, women who chose convention and women who chose themselves, women who lived their truths despite what the world had to say.
Ade became my best friend, though our friendship came with its share of fighting, tears, and dramatic reconciliations. We were both five when we met and grew up together until I left for boarding school. Ade taught me how to enjoy my own company. He had a remarkable ability to shut out the noise of the world and disappear into his imagination. Watching him was like watching an entire cast of actors. Within seconds, he could become the mummy, the daddy, and the child, switching roles effortlessly as he played alone.
In our neighbourhood lived three women who shared a four-bedroom apartment. The arrangement existed because the government could not build enough barracks for women police officers who had children and husbands and still needed accommodation. There was my mother, Ade’s mother, and Aunty Maureen. Elsewhere in the barracks lived Aunty Chi and Aunty Sandra, sharing apartments with other women officers.
One day, Ade told me that Aunty Maureen liked men too much. He had overheard adult conversations where our mothers and their friends gossiped about the different cars that drove in and out of the barracks to pick her up and drop her off.
Aunty Maureen was beautiful and determined to outrun her melanin. She bathed with hot water even though the Nigerian sun already scorched the earth. She claimed it softened her skin for the expensive lotions she used. Her soap was transparent, her creams were imported, and she often boasted that they cost an arm and a bag of rice. It was a steep price to pay for the flawless “oyibo pepper” complexion she desired.
Sometimes her skin rebelled. It turned red and irritated; her knuckles darkened. Yet she always found a way to even out her complexion and continue her pursuit of lightness. Aunty Maureen smiled often. She dreamed of working on television one day and was studying Mass Communication at the university while serving as a police officer. Whenever her boyfriends visited, she spoke like the women who read the evening news and laughed like Liz Benson, not wide-mouthed, but just enough to reveal her perfect teeth.
I liked Aunty Maureen. Beyond the rumours and gossip, she had ambition. She graduated from university, got a job at a television station, and eventually married the love of her life.
Aunty Chi was different.
She did not smile much. She was the sort of adult who sent children back indoors to read whenever she found them loitering outside. No men came around to make her laugh like Liz Benson, but she enjoyed her morning jogs and often shared her fried eggs with Ade and me. When she laughed, it came from deep in her chest, usually after watching an episode of “I Go Dye.”
She was studying Nursing at the university while serving in the police force. She wore her hair cropped short and was constantly at war with her weight. She talked about fibre, exercise, obesity, and metabolism long before I understood what any of those words meant. It was from Aunty Chi that I learned that bodies changed, that health required effort, and that discipline was its own kind of beauty. She was also the first woman who made me aware of my own complexion. She called me “chocolate” and taught me to care for my skin, reminding me to use oils and stay moisturised. At the time, I did not understand the significance of those words; I only knew that she made caring for myself feel like an ordinary act of love.
Years later, I heard she became a nurse and remained in the force as a police nurse.
Then there was Aunty Sandra, my favourite.
Aunty Sandra was just a girl in a woman’s body. She loved makeup, fashion, and gadgets. She was the first person in the entire barracks to own a mobile phone. The women whispered that a man must have bought it for her.
“How much be her salary sef?”
Then one evening she returned with a flip Motorola. She wore it around her neck like jewellery and catwalked through the neighbourhood, her slender frame swaying from side to side. The women said she looked like an ogbanje and that beauty like hers could not possibly be ordinary.
I adored Aunty Sandra.
She played hide-and-seek with us. She listened to our stories. One holiday, she brought her younger brother, Chibuike, who was later caught kissing Silva, Ade’s older sister, behind the building. For weeks, that scandal fed the entire barracks.
To me, Aunty Sandra was the original IT girl. She smelled of perfume, possibility, and adventure. Her fridge was always full. She seemed to own the latest everything. Life appeared to unfold for her like a good story.
A few years later, we heard she had travelled to obodo oyibo.
Time carried all of us away from Amakohia.
Ade grew up and became a lawyer. Our mothers retired from the police force. The women who once filled those barracks with laughter, gossip, ambition, heartbreak, and resilience scattered into different cities and different lives.
Yet when I think of Amakohia today, I do not first remember the federal hospital or the university that made it famous. I remember those women.
I remember Aunty Maureen, who taught me that ambition could survive gossip. I remember Aunty Chi, who showed me that discipline was a form of self-respect. I remember Aunty Sandra, who carried herself as though life was meant to be enjoyed, not merely endured.
As a child, I thought they were simply women living in the barracks. Looking back, I realise they were teaching me different ways to be a woman. They were imperfect, complicated, talked about, admired, envied, and misunderstood. They were dreaming in the middle of ordinary lives.
And perhaps that is what Amakohia gave me most: not a place, but a gallery of women who taught me that there is no single script for womanhood, and that every woman, in her own way, is trying to write her own story.
