LUST IN THE CITY OF RED ROOF

When posted to Oyo state for your NYSC, your wish is to be posted to the largest city in West Africa, the city of red roofs: IBADAN, a city of the perverted, a city where being a celibate deems you sane and where promiscuity denotes normalcy. From the dirty canals and the pot-holed roads comes the finest women the west of Nigeria has to offer dressed in the brightest of colours God has to offer, colours that are a risk to combine and the tightly clad jeans encompassing the very (and I insist...very) heavy behind and like our brothers in America would say “lotta junk in tha trunk”.

Against the stereotype that Ibadan girls are cheap and easy to lay, I found out that was concluded based on the fact that Ibadan people (not just the girls) live for the moment and go for what they want irrespective of the cost or risk involved. They might not be the best project managers but they make the best entrepreneurs. Ibadan people are rich on the extreme and contented on the average, they might not be as “do or die” enterprising as their Lagos counterparts but make do with what they have and has a way of giving back to the society!

You can’t attempt to talk Ibadan and not make remarks to their loud mouth, from the small boys I see running in panties around my house yelling “iya baba e” to the students I teach in class saying “corper fiyen le, mawo oju e....ooloogun gan o”(corper, leave it be, don’t interrogate.....he’s fetish) to the bike man cursing everybody on the way to the park touts popularly coined “agbero” taunting themselves all day (and they would never fight, but at the tones of their voice, you’d think they would devour each other) to the women at gbagi market (who are either making passes at you cos you are a handsome young man or cursing you for negotiations) to the pot bellied men at bars in company of a much younger girl making promises and yelling how much they made that day or how much they bought their latest cars or how much tuition in their sons’ private university has soared in recent years.

In the one year I used, I became a celibate, alcohol addict, a playboy, a better lover, a DJ, a project manager, salesman, teacher, poet, and so many things I dare not try to describe. I learnt from my friends in Ibadan that “Reality is an illusion created by lack of alcohol.”a lot can happen when you have a little alcohol in the system and to make it more fun, most people around you are just as alcohol imbibed as you are. Even girls offer you drinks as a gesture of good faith (faith that you’d make them a happier person) and a party in Ibadan is like a beer fest, unlike lagosians that opt out for spirits and beers like star lager beer, Ibadan has a thing for beers I never knew existed till I got to Ibadan(turns out their ex governor was also a fan), beers like “33”, “trophy”, “wilfort”, “kronenburg”, “satzenbraun” became names I quickly reckoned with as they were always out of the regular brands I was used to

After I suffered a severe heartbreak, I thought I would never get on my feet again, it turns out in Ibadan, I never needed my legs because I was taught to fly and soar in heights never imagines before, out of these heights I have a lot of memoirs worth sharing, lots of tales worth telling, lots of pictures worth showing and lots of gals worth...
culled from Tharev