The Air in Akwanga

There are places that live in you long after you’ve left them. These are places that cling to your memory not with grandeur, but with a happy kind of insistent familiarity that brings you out of a creative slump. I have wanted to write but I couldn't because somehow life currently feels like the meeting point between limbo and action. But I met with Akwanga and let me tell you that there's something about the air in Akwanga.

A small local government in Nasarawa, not loud like Keffi, not hurried like the other parts that scramble to become newer, shinier versions of themselves. Akwanga resists that pull. It remains, a steadily & gloriously itself.

There is something about Akwanga and it is not the kind that rushes past you unnoticed on your way to somewhere more ‘important.’ The air in Akwanga is like a fresh memory of your father carrying you up as a child. It carries the warmth of the past and the soft promise of a life that is always meaningful. It feels like the song “Call me After You Hear This by SAINt JHN”

It is not Keffi, where the rush of modernity has replaced the calm of memory. Nor is it Lafia, where ambition whistles too loudly for the kind of elderly reflection Akwanga offers?

Akwanga stands apart, still, like an elder seated on a verandah, humming tunes only those who grew up around kin can recognize. It smells of home—of Sunday mornings and street corners with names only locals know.

In Akwanga, the houses are numbered in faded paint, the kind of numbering that refuses to disappear no matter how much time tries to scrub it away. Mud brick houses, standing steady like the preacher of a Baptist church proudly mid-prayer. These houses speak of the resilience of people who built it.

The air in Akwanga doesn’t rush. It settles around you like your mother's wrapper tied gently at the waist, comforting, firm, intimate.

It smells of the home where your name is known beyond your compound. Where children run barefoot to the market and someone always stops them to ask, “Whose child are you again?” The kind of home where the paint may chip, the walls may lean, but they stand still, and carry history.

There is a College of Education that sits almost matter-of-factly, commanding your respect. It makes you remember the time when education was a valued achievement in our country. The walls have seen and heard laughter, arguments, love stories born between semesters, and the rustling hope of students who dared to dream from right here. You can see the quiet dreams forming behind the eyes of many early teachers who were the first in their families to walk through educational doors.

And the churches. I watch the Girls’ Brigade and the Boys’ Brigade children marching in white and navy, their faces washed clean and shining, their caps sitting just so. They look like royalty with their ironed caps, head held up with pride. The pride that comes from belonging. Pride in knowing that Sunday is about community and sermons.

They are steadily holding fast to what I knew growing up. Boys in pressed uniforms marching proud with wooden batons and a deep sense of duty. They remind me of the Catholic Sunday practices and whispered giggles of choirs and the joy of belonging to something bigger than myself.

You can smell the freshly brewed brukutu before you even see the calabash. It lingers, earthy and warm, mixing with the scent of fried meat prepared in anticipation of post-service gatherings.

A scent of celebration, of a people who know that even on lean days, joy can be found in the smallest things.

The fruits here hang lazily on trees, as though they know they are wanted. Mangoes so yellow they look like drops of sun, guavas with their sweet perfume calling out long before your hand ever reaches for them.

Akwanga has greenery in a way that feels deliberate. Mango trees line the roads like old friends guarding the secrets of passersby. There is something deeply romantic about the stillness here, something that tells me my love does not need glitters to shine.

It is the kind of place where you could fall in love slowly. Daily. Where romance feels like a rhythm with everything. Like I find the idea of washing clothes together by the stream, sharing roasted corn on the roadside, walking hand-in-hand under a sky unbothered by high-rise ambitions fine in Akwanga haha.

If you and your partner are made for the soft life, truly soft, the kind that costs nothing and gives everything, Akwanga will hold your love gently.

There’s a community school here, born in 1997. It stands broken now. Not tall, not grand, still it stands proudly. I bet this school has taught more than subjects. It taught grit. Gratitude. The education where leaders were raised and they mattered. Akwanga does not pretend to be a perfect city. But it is surely whole.

Akwanga feels like possibility to me. A shared bench. A shared laughter. A shared mango. Rain on a zinc roof, walking barefoot on packed earth, listening to stories from elders, you could fall in love here every day. You really could.

Sometimes I wonder why we chase cities when places like Akwanga exist. Places that remind you to slow down, to look up, to breathe deeply.

Our current world often demands shine over soul, however in Akwanga the air remembers you. Because truly, there is something about the air in Akwanga. And for each time I’m here, I will recognize what it means to belong.

With love, always,

Win

Thanks for reading.