Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home -

The air in Lagos tasted of rust and gasoline. Ebiere knew this because she had just licked her cracked lips after a dusty okada ride from Ojuelegba. At thirty-four, she was a senior analyst for a multinational oil firm—a woman in a blazer who spoke with a clipped British accent she’d acquired at a boarding school in Surrey.

A young boy was fishing nearby. Not with a net—with a plastic bottle tied to a string. “Any fish?” she asked. He shook his head. “But I catch hope,” he said, smiling. “Tomorrow, maybe.” Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home

She turned up the radio. Evi Edna’s voice filled the evening air. And for the first time in her life, Ebiere understood the song not as a lyric, but as a truth: The air in Lagos tasted of rust and gasoline

“I never forgot,” she said. “I just buried it under marble floors.” A young boy was fishing nearby

As the city faded, the oil pipes appeared. They ran alongside the road like black pythons, oozing rust and crude. Then the flares. Even in daylight, they stained the sky orange. This was the Niger Delta. Her home. A place the world had come to for oil, but left behind in poison.

She stood on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment in Victoria Island. Below, the city roared: generators hummed, street hawkers sang praises to their goods, and a thousand Danfo buses coughed black smoke into the sky. It was a Tuesday. She had a video call with the London office in ten minutes.