If you have never been, picture a city of maybe a million people spread over low hills, with a cathedral, a university, two polytechnics, a football stadium, hundreds of churches and a market for everything. Douglas Road and Wetheral Road run through the middle. Okada motorbikes and keke tricycles carry everyone everywhere. The rains come in April and leave in October and in between the red earth turns to red mud. In December the harmattan arrives from the Sahara and the whole city goes grey and dry and cool for a few weeks, and people wear jackets and complain.
Obinze, where we lived, is on the road south, past the Federal Polytechnic at Nekede, near the airport turn-off. Close enough to Owerri to be part of it, far enough that a bus into town was an event when I was small.
What it gives you
Owerri gave me my language, Igbo, which I still think in when I am tired. It gave me a sense that a person belongs to a place and a place belongs to its people, which is what I would later recognise in the Biafra movement. It gave me music from every doorway, food I still cannot find in England, and the specific Igbo talent for arguing about everything with love.
It gave me church, too. Owerri has more churches than pharmacies. Sunday is not a day of rest, it is a day of work: dress, service, second service, fellowship, visiting. I loved the singing. I loved the sense that the whole city was doing the same thing at the same time. I am not being ironic. I still love it.
What it takes
In a city where everyone knows everyone, there is no such thing as a private life. Your neighbour's cousin's pastor knows what time you came home. A boy who does not chase girls is noticed. A boy who is seen too often with the same friend is discussed. In Lagos or Abuja you can vanish into a crowd. In Owerri you cannot.
Owerri taught me to be watched. It is the most useful and most damaging thing I know how to do.
The police in Owerri are the same police as everywhere in Nigeria, which means a gay man does not go to them when something is done to him. I describe what that costs, exactly and in order, in Owerri to London. It is not a book about a bad city. It is a book about a good city that has no place to put people like me.
Where I stand now
I write about Owerri from England with more love than anger, which surprised me. When the clips on this site were filmed, in July 2025, I was standing in the sun outside a house in Owerri, smiling, and I meant it. The city is in me. The problem was never the city. It was the law, the fear, and the silence, and those are things that can be changed.