Nnamdi Okafor

I did not leave over anything. I moved to Lagos for work, and then I moved back, and in between I did not think about it much. People want a story. There is no story. I got a job.

What I noticed coming back is that nobody asked. I walked into the Tuesday reading in 2022 and a woman I had never met said the tea is through there. And later the rota clerk said, would you like a turn, and that was the entire readmission, and I had spent the drive rehearsing an explanation.

I will say the other side of it. In sixteen years nobody wrote to me. Not once. Which is the rule, and I know it is the rule, and the rule is right, and there were two years in Lagos when a letter would have been the making of me. Both those things are true. You cannot design a system where they are not both true.

The replanting ledger has my handwriting in it from 2003. Rows forty to fifty-two. About half of those trees are still there, which is a better than average survival rate, and I am absurdly pleased about it.