Mangu Memoirs: Part I
We have wardrobes at the camp at Mangu, Plateau State, and strong, metal bunk beds that run endlessly - it seems - down a large rectangular hall that’s one of three in a block. The girls are assigned 4 blocks, and the boys have 6 (there were more boys than girls in my batch). Each block has 3 of those large, rectangular halls. You get assigned a bed space in a hall as soon as you walk into the hostel and you’re not allowed to pick another bed anywhere else without the hall officer’s permission. If you do want to change your bed for any reason, the hall officer comes to inspect your bunk personally, and then decide if you will be assigned another one. If a particular bunk bed is really bad, it’s taken away and replaced. If your bunk bed just has balance issues but is otherwise solid, it means you don’t get an upstairs neighbor, for safety.
Each hall has 16 bathrooms on two sides, with 8 toilets in between. There’s a huge mirror in the toilet fore-room with washing hand basins, and in my head, that took the camp from basic to luxury. (I’m Nigerian, I have very low expectations. Please consult other people’s descriptions of their camp for the reasons for my low expectations.)
I figured we weren’t allowed to bring forks, table knives, scissors and extension boxes into the camp, because of their potential to be turned into weapons in a fight (i can’t imagine why extension boxes were banned), it did occur to me that the mirror would be a ready weapon if anyone really felt like stabbing someone.
For all its conveniences, I often felt like a prisoner, but I would agree that Mangu camp was a beautiful prison, with the most interesting “inmates”.
The gates of the camp lead to short wide main road that cuts the first part of the camp into two. This short dirt driveway leads to a long wide, tarred road, running perpendicular to it that marks the beginning of the second part if the camp. With the parade ground right next to the road, and directly opposite the driveway, the hostels to the right, and the auditorium and mami market to the left. The link to the driveway from the main road is marked by a small bridge, and that’s your limit as an “otondo”.
On most days when I walked past the gate, on my way out of the hostel, it occurred to me that the camp uniform for corps members, white shirt, shorts, shoes and socks, was probably designed to pick out anyone who strayed too far away from approved areas, from as far away as possible, even in low light. Prisoners wore bright orange too.
The white uniform sometimes hid a person’s age, and so it wasn’t unusual to find people in their 40's, wearing all white with no makeup who looked 20-ish at first glance. The white was also brutally unforgiving to my body, and flabby stomachs and back rolls had nowhere to hide. Surrounded by a sea of white, the uniform also made me feel invisible and alone once the frenzy of the first three days of registration was over.
Being in camp was a huge struggle for me. I had never been away from home all alone before, and the complete lack of privacy and space to be myself was draining me. This was my first time surrounded by my peers who numbered more than 5 at a time, and for longer than a day. I was not able to just turn it all off, and be angry, or tired or snarky or gross or human. Everyone was a stranger, so I felt obligated to put my first impressions persona on. This is where I tell you that I have a terrible need to appear normal and fit into society’s dictates of behavior. This means I have my act up 24/7. Always smiling, always helpful, carefully polite.
The dark clouds made their appearance soon after. It wasn’t sudden, this arrival. It built up slowly, tried to catch me idle, and it did on the night of the third day. I managed to convince myself on the first two days that it was normal to feel as alone as I felt, most people went everywhere alone anyway. It was harder on the second day, when most people had formed duos and by evening, there were whole cliques of people sitting at tables in mami market and getting dinner in queues.
The third day was worse.
I tried to sleep early that day. Because I had nothing to do, and the thought of socializing made me very tired. The hall was pretty noisy, and the cacophony of 80+ girls mingling and getting to know each other made it quite difficult to sleep, so I tried to join in. My voice didn’t sound like my own and I mostly just wanted to be home. I couldn’t reach out to anyone familiar either. The cell towers were far away and so reception was either very weak or non-existent. My phones and the internet usually offered chief distraction from depression, but I didn’t even have that this time.
The voices piled on me like bricks and I struggled to catch my breathe, and then I started to cry. I tried to stop, because what kind of 23 year-old cries at camp. It was both ludicrous and pathetic at the same time. I had the bottom part of the bunk bed, and I found that every toss and turn my upstairs neighbor made on her bed made me wince and become all the more aware of how far away I was from home.
I left my bed because it was too bright in the hall, and someone would have seen me and asked why I was crying. I spent the next two hours before lights out crying in a dark corner on the steps on the pavilion. I tried to call a few friends on the phone, and sometimes the calls went through, but broke so badly. It was like they were right there, but couldn’t reach me to help.
I went to bed. I had survived 3 days and I had 17 to go.
Man o’ war
I tried very hard to be “present” those first 3 days, getting up in the morning and putting on clean white clothes was the best I could manage on most occasions. Man o’ war morning drills, which ended after the first three days, kept me going on those early days.
I was suffering from low self-esteem and particularly self-conscious because I was the fattest I’d ever being, but spending the first two hours of my day with other girls as fat as or fatter than I am, and singing the most ridiculous songs with the weirdest sexual connotations made me feel better. Sex isn’t something I liked to talk about sober and in public, so the songs made me uncomfortable at first. But everyone indulged in it fully, and it was as if these songs became an outlet for sexual frustrations built by the forced celibacy on camp.
I made man o’ war friends. Nana, a smallish pretty girl, and Zainab, a chubby girl who was also about 5’4" and the most cheerful human being alive. Dodo and I made plans to drink with every time we ran into each other outside man o’war drill hour, usually on our way to get food or to our different halls, and then completely forgetting all about it. This trend would continue throughout camp and through the entire service year.
Zainab and I became what I would call “food friends” in camp. We usually ran into each other at the mami market around breakfast or lunch time, and so we had lots of meals together. On our very first meal together, she would take me to what eventually became my favorite camp buka.
The buka would become my safe haven and escape space, somewhere I sat quietly with no one paying me any attention or me feeling the need to be more than just what I wanted to be. I joined the OBS and this meant that I kept different hours from every other corps member. So I usually went to eat at times when most of them were busy with group activities or napping. I would sit down, order the same thing every single time - a plate of noodle, fried eggs and chips - and wait about 30 to 40 minutes, while reading a book. I would finish my meal, and still spent an extra 30 just watching and leave when the crowd came in.
