1. 

This should be straightforward. I start this essay beside the broad window that opens to the veranda at the back. The smell of accumulated dog piss is just the aroma for this time of the night. When the louvre is pushed open in the morning, the aroma is present already: a song that may wane but never vanishes. It is worst at noon. The heat is insufferable. The aroma is undesired. Yet a choice has to be made. Or at least, a compromise. So I either completely flee the window side, where my mother's sewing machine and white plastic chair stand or shut the louvre almost completely. The dog whose piss aroma harasses us is our neighbour’s dog. His fur used to be white. No more. We are fond of him and he knows our faces. If we let him, he will move from our neighbour's veranda to ours, then to our kitchen to our parlour, then either on to the rooms or out on the veranda at the front depending on where we are gathered. It is us he wants to see. But he has everlasting ticks that has dropped around our house like seeds. Our hands are tied on the matter. We let him near the kitchen entrance when we are in the mood for play or have some peace of mind to spare. He is barking a melody as I write this. My sister has accused me of never lifting the curtains in the morning. She accuses me again. I refute this accusation. She lifts the curtain stripped with colour beside me. There is morning light on the yellow page. So I write. 

The questions of where I live, why I live there and how I live there are critical to me. Is it often the case that people with no houses of their own carry an abiding ache through the world, an illicit nostalgia for a house of their own so that they might begin to project of transforming it into a home? And in between the “thousands of people [who] ain't got no place to go” of whom Bessie Smith speaks and the millions of people drifting through this world without houses of their own, without standard housing, without affordable and sustainable housing, this condition of ache is multiple, local and global. Before I tell you where I now live, I want to tell you the places where I no longer live. 

I have lived most of my years here in Ìbàdàn. I was born in a room in the family house in Akínyẹmí, Ring Road. We left before my brother was born. Our exodus as a nuclear family had begun. The house at Adebisi Layout, NNPC was our first foreign wilderness. The house backed a transformer. The house was painted with cement. A path led to it; at the end of which the house stood on the left. We had a dog called Major. The patio was awkward. Major lived there. Beside the house, if we had had the time or conceit, we could have supplanted the patches of weed with a respectable garden. We are practical people so it would've been a garden of vegetables. The parlour was big enough. To the west of the house stood the toilet. There was no kitchen. So we all slept in one room and my mother cooked in the other. I can still remember the clothes I and my sister wore to sleep. Her trousers were red in the spirit of blood and it was beautiful in an ineffable way. We watched Àdùnní Ẹ̀jẹ̀ in this house and teased my sister with it. It was in this house that my father sold Major away when the landlady denounced the dog again and again. We heard of Major’s gruesome death. I cannot remember if my sister and I mourned him. 

We returned to this house one day and the rain had tore the roof out. Our parlour was a pond. The rain beat the TV, the rug, the chairs, everything. All the rooms in that house was open to the rain's hands, save for the room where we slept. When we closed our eyes we could not sleep. Language is inadequate in the face of wretchedness. When we were not still, listening for the damages of the rain, we worried about our situation and refused to mention the real possibility of homelessness. Comforting one another through that night sounded ridiculous, wasted, impossible, but it was a necessity. Without it, that night would have been more forlorn, our situation more damned and our pain heavier for us to withstand. 

My sister called out from the darkness of the room, 

“Mummy, this house e have wan’ to break o. Is going to break o. Mummy, Mummy, do something.” 

Our mother called back to my sister, 

“Má jẹ̀ẹ́ kó tíì break o, ọkọ mi. Ṣàánú ajé. Is not going to break yet. Sleep. Sleep. Nothing will happen.” 

And to our father she said in Yorùbá, 

“This house is going to break. What will happen? Where will we go?” 

We lived like this for two months while our parents gathered money for a new room nearby. Our mother confronted the landlady. The landlady rejected any blame. Until her roof flew off, too. Until she saw the extent of the disaster in our house. When we left that house, it lasted three days before it crashed down like a hope deferred. 

In the new room, we rearranged our lives. We bought red chairs and stacked them to the ceiling in a corner. There was incompleteness to the whole house. There is an orange tree at the backyard of that house. The oranges are always green. The branches prick. There is bush all around. The fence is low and partial. There is a slim tree of sweet guavas near the end of the fence. One afternoon in that backyard, my brother played with a green snake. Either he brought it into the house with him or I saw him play with the snake, quickly three men from the house flew to the backyard with raised machetes and struck the snake till death. 

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2. 

We lived in a room and a parlour with ancient windows in Dogo, Àpáta. My brother was born here. So clean, so fair, so tender like my father. When my mother first saw him, she looked at his black hair and wondered how close he came to being born albino. His naming ceremony was a true celebration. One of my uncles gave me Don Simmons to drink and I staggered around the house in amazement until I tore down the curtains in the parlour. In this house of my brother's birth, the bathroom was hideous, the backyard was a gutter of green in itself and the toilet was always unclean. This was where we learnt the necessity of potties anew. The well at the front of the house was so low you had to crouch to take water from it. The well had no proper lid, only a board of wood nailed together. How did we not die of poisoning from that water? On Saturdays, while I and my sister played in the morning sun with unwashed faces and our neighbours from around the slum tried to fight a compromised battle that was already lost: the fight for decent hygiene in the ghetto, our parents walked up to Calvary or beyond with kegs and basins for clean water. We were too little to carry any meaningful bucket so they left us home with the house. Our brother slept in the room and we checked on him. And when our parents returned from water hunt, both of them bearing kegs and a basin with care, deft in the morning sun like thunder cracking a coconut, they brought NICE biscuits with them. For us. Eating biscuits that wear sprinkles of sugar in that morning sun made our hearts giddy with rest and however briefly, we enjoyed the unexplained joy of children. 

On to Ìyànà Cele of broad untarred roads and a house whose red gates stood outside unfixed. A room and a parlour. Classic. Let me tell you about the toilet. There is a smell that twists your neck, there are sights that wound the eyes and this toilet of staggering stench, of unbearable piss that makes you dizzy, of stray maggots on the floor, of floating shit that vexes the spirit, that had no cistern, this toilet caused all of these and more. Some of our co-tenants were in the habit of urinating in the bathroom. Some of them pour water after the piss. Some leave the piss for the next person who comes in to handle. There are afternoons when the stench rises with the sun from the bathroom and the toilet into the long corridor and all the eight rooms downstairs, punishing us alongside the heat. The well here has two steps and a metal lid. It is so deep the adults wouldn't let us look into it. What if the water likes our faces and pulls us closer until our bodies pollute the well? Nobody has a child to spare for the well to eat. This was the house where I first felt a throbbing hunger for eclectic music and wanted to seal the music in my soul; it was a sublime Ọ̀wọ̀ song with a dancing troupe all brown bodies all black bodies wearing white. 

At Ọladele New Town, our room and parlour don't open into each other. They are rooms that face each other. The well here is planted under a tree. We are now old enough to go on the water hunt. We go mostly without our parents. They have to work late, our parents. And this is the least we could do to make their lives easy. There is a house with ivied walls and two taps at the front on the next street. They open from 5-7pm or till whenever the water lasts. Sometimes we walk farther to find clean water. Our mother joins us when she can. The toilet here is a latrine and the landlady is proud of it. Everybody in that house used that one latrine. The bathroom is so plain it is vulgar. The cement on the bathroom floor is smooth, if nothing else is. This is the house where my siblings and I spread in reckless play and boundless imagination with other children of the house. We bought TANG, mixed it with water and pretended it was genuine juice. We saw shows on Disney Junior and believed we could build a tree house on the moringa tree in the backyard. We braided grass stalks into impermanent fans. We sang loud songs like thugs into the moon at night and were convinced we were in God's gaze. In the meantime, contentions arise. Contentions rise. We move to a room in Ọ̀gbágbá. 

The kitchen is the kitchen of slums as all of the kitchens I have known are. Everyone upstairs is supposed to share the kitchen. The other kitchen belongs to the landlady. The toilet downstairs is a terror. All the sixteen rooms in that house share that single toilet. The toilet has no lid. It stands like a desecrated statue in the middle. Within the toilet and around it, accumulated spread of shit smear the toilet. That toilet will never be white again. It will never be restored. The toilet has a smell that simultaneously is both of waste and transcends waste in a sickening way. Nobody with dignity, common sense or sensitivity would ever put their arse on that godforsaken toilet. I hear that some people did. This was where we most realized the critical necessity of potties. Whenever someone washed the toilet, some others would return it to its former ruin. It disgusted all of us. The bathroom is narrow and small. The walls are untouchable from crust. There is slime on the floor. Some of our rather unfortunate co-tenants pissed in the bathroom here as well. Why make Hell more unbearable for everyone? All of us upstairs shat in the bathroom when we could and then we would take the potties downstairs. There are no railings by the steps in the backyard. My sister fell down those stairs one Monday morning. On another Saturday morning, my brother while chasing a goat was dragged down the stairs by the goat he held on to. This was the house where I read Purple Hibiscus, wrote a story I never sent in for Caine Prize on my Nokia and saw Silver Lining with my family without weeping until one night when Ira was separated Isha in the orphanage and everyone took time to be devastated. 

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3. 

We lived in Charity in an obscure house that was vulgar demarcations and desperate inventions. There were nights when rain flooded the parlour through the sockets and the walls and we shoved water in buckets for hours. The house was so built that the soakaway was near the entrance. We walked over it everyday. Sometimes in the morning, afternoon, evening and night, the smell of rolling waste would rise up and take hold of our house. Those who are suffering take care as much as they can not to have critical awareness of their pain because when you look and see all the chains holding you down and turn to see that this suffering is created and reinforced by the immoral government, by those who rob the poor and destitute in return for inferior commodities, by national and spiritual crises from which countless charlatans profit; when you turn to see that the way out is narrow, vanishing, non-existent because these structural injustices are perpetuated so deeply, one response is to despair completely or surrender to insanity or be consumed by a consuming wrath. Those who are suffering know they are suffering and they say it sometimes but they understand the risk of critical awareness. Those who benefit from the sufferings of those who are suffering understand all these, too. So they sedate the consciousness of those who are suffering, they make resources so scarce those who are suffering claw at themselves like the proverbial crabs, they deepen the wretchedness of those who are suffering through inadequate, overpriced, dehumanizing houses and criminally inept education and active recruitment into projects of civil destruction and an inaccessible, underfunded healthcare system and a systemic erasure of justice. All these catastrophes are the wounding realities of millions of people in this country. 

And then we lived in Béḿbò. The toilet in that house was bitter. Urine and waste water pool near the toilet. When you sit on it and look down, you can see your face reflected in the pooled urine. Covering your nose won't save you. Holding your breath won't work. And apparently, speaking with co-tenants about the situation as my mother did repeatedly until they made her complaints the problem, was ultimately dead on arrival. The bathrooms were ugly in a specific way. Nobody cooked in the kitchen on our wing because it is impractical for a number of reasons: the door would not close let alone lock and its window overlooked the soakaway. We cooked in the room. This was the house where I mastered everything in Àṣá and Brymo’s discographies, discovered the compromise and implications of reading PDFs and the pleasure of reading novels by midnight and was terrified alongside my family by Pennywise from IT. I left home for school in 2022 and already I was homeless. 

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4. 

I was a fresher so I was guaranteed a corner in a room at my hall of residence if I paid early. My mother could not raise the money so I forfeited the room. When I finally had the ₦45,000 to pay, the hall wardens turned me away, there was no corner to spare anymore. So I started a torturous shuttle from my house in Béḿbò to the University of Ibadan for lectures and tutorials. My days were in a haze. I didn't understand how the system worked. I felt like a fraud in my German classes. My phone wasn't the best. To have been able to scream at the pressures harassing my life or to have had substantial financial support would have been tremendously cathartic. Neither happened. 

I cannot remember how it happened but a course mate arranged for me to be able to stay with a close friend of hers while I sorted a more permanent accommodation. Gratitude is a kin of relief. I might have had to defer my admission or drop out if not for their intervention. Time passed and things changed. The bathroom of that house is one of the most disgusting I have ever used in my life. The bathroom floor is spread like a wound bursting with gangrene, accumulated slime and the rot of disrepair. Only those who know of this bathroom or others like it can fully understand the reality of it. It is the kind of floor that makes you weep if your soap falls on it. The toilet had a peculiar odour of resurgent old piss but the ground was mostly always dry. It had a lock. I left for Nnamdi Azikiwe Hall, my hall of residence, in my second year. 

I have an entire essay on my time in Zik Hall called On Zik And Other Places That Claim To Be Home but for the purpose of this essay I will retell it briefly: Zik Hall and many other general halls of residence in universities across Nigeria are affronts. The rooms are in disrepair. Indestructible bugs reign in every corner of the rooms and the hall like the creatures of terror and trauma that they are. The toilets are living nightmares: overflowing, unflushed and assaulting, unbearable yet borne. Pools of dirty water crown the bathrooms; some of the bathrooms are in active stages of irrevocable decay and are permanently blocked by hideous things; everywhere you turn there is rust, filth and dysfunction to be found. That place is hideous. And I suffered through my stay there. Especially in my second year. Bedbugs bullied me off my mattress. I anointed the mattress with Sniper and kerosene so many times, in vain. There was a night when I could not sleep on the mattress because the bugs tore at my flesh and blood at every angle so I sat on a roommate’s chair in the center of the room, unable to rest, unable to sleep, only able to despair. There was another night when I could not sleep on the mattress because of the resurgence of the bedbugs’ attacks neither could I study for the German Literature exam I had the next day. I kept watch on a chair and the mosquitoes fell on me too. I begged for the day to break and the night only became endless and without respite. So I left the room to study outside some rooms away where there was a white bulb. I read some three pages before the bedbugs stung me again on the keg where I was seated. I could have bitten stone, I could have swallowed wood in that moment. But I swallowed my scream, my despair, my weeping and my fury because I was exhausted, disconsolate and there were others like me trying to sleep through the pain. 

There was no point to all of this studying, I thought, when we know the lecturer-in-charge won't give me an A in German Literature, when we know the lecturers and the University are frustrating me in small and big ways, when we know I will never get on that First Class I deserve, when after all of these sufferings there will be no gainful employment to be had in Nigeria. That midnight every struggle I had lived through felt pointless. I closed the book and stood up from the keg. Set adrift, I started to walk without destination. I walked the stretch of our floor (Room 16) on A Block countless times. Then I walked through the other floors. Then I spilled in to B Block. I was almost on my way to C Block when dawn first broke. I could have wept. My body was spent. I wrote that exam and almost fell into deep sleep in the exam hall. I did not have an A on that course. I have had nights when I raised the mattress, spread my towel in my corner and slept on it instead. Abject. 

When I returned home during breaks, I discovered we now lived in an interesting house in Akínnigáín. The house has a parlour, two rooms, an ugly bathroom-toilet and a desperate kitchen. Because it was last rented out to a ‘up-and-coming private primary school’ the house was painted acrylic blue and pink. In one of the rooms, cream paint joined the mix. The other room was half painted. The floor in the parlour was ugly. In the rooms, the floor was smoother in some places. The bathroom-toilet stands in between the two rooms. This bathroom-toilet has no door so we use a sweeping curtain instead. It has an hideous floor and a wall that soaks water and ruins the walls of the rooms. But at least, we consoled ourselves, it was a house for us. For now. This was not the face-me-I-face-you of my siblings’ childhood and mine. We were finally in control of our bathroom-toilet. And we took care of it. Took care of the house. Cut the bushes that surrounded the house thrice a month sometimes. Armed robbers once broke the parlour’s window and almost broke in. Countless lizards, on the other hand, broke in through the windows in the other room. We killed at least three monitor lizards of varying sizes inside and around that house. 

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5. 

In my third year I stayed in a room in Agbowó with a course mate in an unremarkable house with a despicable agent and a lot of problems especially with electricity and insufferable bedbugs. I was in school when my family moved to a flat in Ẹlẹ́bú. The first night I returned home to this new place, I saw the four pillars that held the four flats and was dazed. Opulence terrifies me. There is an exuberance in it that I find obscene, a leaning towards wastefulness that I cannot bear. It wakes an innate melancholy in me for those who don't have access to it and an abiding even if displaced/unwarranted guilt. I told my brother once that poverty/lack can teach a kind of discipline. My family has that discipline. But in this flat within this middle-class ghetto of ugly houses, would that discipline endure? Initially, this flat felt like a privilege when it in fact was not. It should not have to be a privilege to have decent housing. Being able to afford an exorbitantly priced flat for some time should not be a privilege. Yet it is in Nigeria. 

There are no functional social housing projects in Ìbàdàn (and in many other places in Nigeria, from taking an informed guess.) Can you even believe that? The most populous Black country in the world does not have functional social housing projects for the poor and its other citizens. Punch Newspaper reported on 16 October 2023 that Nigeria has the world's greatest number of homeless people. 24,400,000 people are homeless in Nigeria. And that was in 2023. More than 100,000,000 people live in substandard, overpriced, dehumanizing houses in Nigeria. Yet neither the state governments nor the national government recognizes the housing crisis in Nigeria and its extents. Neither of them are interested in making the critical interventions to improve the living conditions of all Nigerians. No social housing project that is affordable, sustainable and of standard quality has yet been built. If anything we see poor Nigerians being illegally evicted from their houses in Ìbàdàn (Ọ̀nà Àrà LGA, Alalubosa Area and other affected communities), Lagos (FESTAC, Màkókó and other affected communities) and elsewhere. If anything we hear of thousands of Nigerians attacked in their homes, schools and farms by state-sponsored bandits in Adamawa, Niger, Bornu and Kwara. No governmental body is tackling the serious extortion of house-seekers by house agents or the ridiculous inflation of house prices even as the country goes through hyperinflation and more than 139 million Nigerians continue to live in multidimensional poverty. Buying land or building a house of one's own continues to be more impossible by the day for millions of Nigerians. 

I once wrote an essay on the foundational crisis of our educational system called Peril’s Tongue. One night I discussed the experiences behind the essay with a colleague from secondary school. And he said over the phone, 

“But you can't just keep talking about the crises and the problems without giving solutions nau.” 

To which I said, 

“First of all, giving solutions to systemic problems is not my job. The point of the essay is to bear astute witness and express my fury at all those wasted potentials. And besides, are we not all Nigerians? Do you think any politician or governor or president or corporate thief will listen to my solutions, will do something that will make the lives of all Nigerians better? Do you believe anybody wants the poor to enjoy better living conditions?” 

I retain that same position here. Any government with a working conscience knows what is necessary, what is right and will be committed to making systemic justice possible. From what any Nigerian knows of the Nigerian government, they are morally depraved, spiritually bankrupt and have no working conscience whatsoever. I will not plead to a non-existent conscience. I have told you all of these so that you can understand better what it means when a Nigerian of a particular class is asked where he lives. 

‘On the periphery,’ he would say. Pushed towards governmental erasure. Punished for being poor, punished for being Nigerian, punished for delaying a transformative revolution.