If You Grew Up in a Nigerian Neighbourhood, These 15 Memories Will Hit Differently

If you grew up in a Yoruba household or in a Lagos neighbourhood with Yoruba influences, you will know exactly what this is. Irodun is a substance with near-mythical status in Nigerian childhood. It does not actually exist in any neighbour’s house. That is the entire point.

When a child was being mischievous but their offence did not quite warrant a beating, or when a mother simply did not have the energy to deal with the situation directly, she would deploy the irodun strategy. She would look you straight in the eye and say, “Go to Mama Kemi’s house and tell her to lend me irodun.”

You would go. Mama Kemi would look at you with a knowing expression and say, “I don’t have it. Try Iya Seun.” Iya Seun would send you to Baba Tunde. Baba Tunde would send you to the woman at the end of the compound. By the time you had visited eight or ten homes in the hot afternoon sun, chasing a substance that does not exist, you were so thoroughly exhausted that all the mischief had been drained clean out of you. You came home, ate whatever was available, and went to sleep.

The mothers of that generation were geniuses. Pure psychological engineering.

Every Nigerian neighbourhood had one. In my own street, we called ours “Oju Olomo O Otu” — a Yoruba phrase that translates roughly to “a place where your parents or guardians’ eyes cannot see you.”

The name told you everything. This was the field where the normal rules of the neighbourhood did not apply. You went there to play football, launch kites, race, wrestle, and generally conduct the kind of activity that could not happen anywhere near an adult.

It was glorious. It was also dangerous in the specific way that unsupervised Nigerian children in competitive situations can be dangerous. Fights broke out regularly, sometimes in the middle of a football match over a disputed goal or a bad tackle. Bullies knew exactly where to find you if they had a score to settle. If someone wanted to reach you and could not get you on the street, they would simply wait for you at the field on Saturday afternoon.

I look back on that field now and laugh. At the time, it was both the best and most anxiety-inducing place in the neighbourhood. You knew anything could happen there. You went anyway.

There was a particular cruelty to how NEPA, now rebranded under various distribution companies but forever NEPA in the memory, timed its power cuts.

It never happened when nothing was going on. It happened in the final minutes of a football match on the television. It happened the moment your mother put rice on the electric cooker for dinner. It happened at exactly 10pm when you were halfway through studying for an exam the next morning.

The sound of the fans slowing down, the television going dark, and then the collective groan from every house on the street at the same moment was a uniquely Nigerian soundtrack. Everyone heard it. Everyone felt it. And within thirty seconds, the generator noise from the few houses that had them would begin, creating a two-tier economy of light that everyone understood without it needing to be discussed.

If your house had a generator, operating it was a sacred process with specific rules that could not be shortened or improvised.

First, you checked the fuel level. You did not assume. You opened the tank and physically checked, because running a generator dry was a sin that could damage the engine and would result in consequences. Then you checked the oil. Then you pulled the cord, once, twice, sometimes six or seven times until it caught. Then you listened to the sound stabilise before you went back inside.

Once the generator was running, a strict hierarchy of appliances was observed. The refrigerator went on first. The fan was permitted. The television was usually allowed. The air conditioner, if the house had one, was a negotiation that depended on fuel quantity and how long the light had been out. Not everything could run at once. The generator had limits and it communicated them loudly if you exceeded them.

There were no cartoons before the house was clean. There was no going outside, no visiting friends, no any form of enjoyment until every assigned chore had been completed to a standard that your mother considered acceptable, not the standard you considered acceptable.

Sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, washing, dusting. The entire house. Inside and outside. The compound if you lived in one. Every Nigerian mother had a different threshold for what constituted clean, but they all shared the conviction that Saturday morning existed primarily as a cleaning exercise, with the rest of the day available only as a reward for completion.

The child who tried to rush through their chores to get outside faster always regretted it. A half-swept floor or a poorly mopped room was not accepted. You were sent back. Sometimes you were sent back three times. It was faster and less painful to simply do it properly the first time, a lesson that took most of us several Saturdays to fully absorb.

Your mother was cooking. The meal was underway, the pot was on the fire, and then she discovered she was missing one ingredient. It did not matter that it was almost dark, that you had already bathed, or that the nearest shop required walking past the section of the street where the older boys gathered in the evening.

You were going.

The instruction was always specific. “Go and buy two tomatoes, a Maggi, and groundnut oil. Tell Mama Chidi I will pay her tomorrow if she doesn’t have change.” You went, navigated the evening street, completed the transaction, and returned. This was not considered unusual by anyone involved. It was simply how households operated.

In a face-me-I-face-you compound or any shared yard arrangement, privacy was largely theoretical. Your argument with your sibling was heard by four other families. The meal your mother was cooking was known to the entire compound before it was served. When you came home from school, at least three neighbours observed your arrival and noted what time it was.

This system of communal surveillance was simultaneously protective and suffocating, depending on your age and what you were trying to do. As a child, it meant you were rarely in any danger because too many adult eyes were always watching. As a teenager trying to have any form of private life, it was a constant negotiation.

The compound also meant shared celebrations. When something good happened to one family, the entire compound knew before nightfall. When something bad happened, the same speed of communication applied, but the response was support rather than gossip. At least most of the time.

The moment any adult visitor arrived at the house, you were expected to materialise from wherever you were, present yourself, and greet with appropriate respect. Kneeling for women, prostrating for men in Yoruba households. Greeting properly in whatever form your specific culture required.

If you failed to appear, if the visitor left without you having greeted them, the conversation that followed between your parents was not pleasant. The failure to greet was treated not as a small oversight but as a fundamental failure of home training that reflected on the entire family.

The instruction “go and greet” was therefore not a suggestion. It was a summons with consequences attached.

When NEPA took light at night and there was no generator, the candle came out. Every Nigerian household kept candles somewhere, usually in a specific drawer that everyone knew about even if no one discussed it. The candle was placed in a plate or a glass to catch the dripping wax. The shadows it threw on the walls turned familiar rooms into something slightly mysterious.

Doing homework by candlelight was a normal experience for millions of Nigerian children. The trick was positioning your book and your body so that the light fell on the page rather than your shadow. Getting that positioning wrong meant squinting. Squinting for too long produced a headache. The headache was never an accepted excuse for incomplete homework the next morning.

In everyday life, your mother called you by your nickname or a shortened version of your name. She called you Tunde, Chidi, Ngozi, Amina, or Bisi.

When you heard your full name, first name, middle name, and in some cases family name, delivered in a particular tone, you knew something had gone wrong. The full name was deployed only in specific circumstances, and none of them were good for you. It meant she had found out about something. It meant a neighbour had reported something. It meant the thing you did last week had caught up with you.

The interval between hearing your full name and discovering what you had done wrong was one of the most anxiety-producing experiences of Nigerian childhood.

In neighbourhoods where pipe-borne water was irregular or absent entirely, the morning routine included fetching water before you were allowed to get ready for school. Buckets, kegs, and jerry cans were filled from a shared borehole, a communal tap, or a nearby water vendor.

This happened at whatever time the water was available, which was sometimes very early in the morning. The queue at the communal source had its own social dynamics and its own unwritten rules about whose turn it was and who had arrived first. Disputes at the water point were a genuine feature of neighbourhood life.

You went to school after this. The water fetching was simply the first part of the morning, not a reason to arrive late.

Monday mornings carried a specific pressure. Your uniform had to be clean, your shoes had to be polished, your socks had to be white, and your hair had to be neat. Schools in Nigeria enforced these standards at the gate, and arriving with an unpolished shoe or a dirty collar could result in being sent back home, being flogged, or both.

The Sunday evening ritual of polishing school shoes was therefore not optional. You sat with your tin of Kiwi polish and your brush and you worked until the leather had a shine that could, as the saying went, see your face in it.

Every Nigerian child who attended a proper party understood their position in the social hierarchy. You ate at a different time from the adults. You sat in a different area. You were served a different quantity. And you waited, sometimes for what felt like hours, for the food to reach your section.

But the dancing. No one told the children to sit still during the music. And no Nigerian child needed encouragement to enter a dancefloor when a good song came on. The owambe was where you learned to dance, where you saw how adults celebrated, and where you ate jollof rice that was always somehow better than any other jollof rice produced at any other occasion during the year.

Respect in a Nigerian neighbourhood was a full economic system with its own rules, currency, and enforcement mechanisms. You greeted every adult you passed on the street, whether you knew them or not. You did not walk between two adults who were having a conversation. You did not interrupt. You did not sit while adults were standing unless told to.

These rules were not written down anywhere. They were transmitted through observation and through the immediate social consequences of violating them. A child who forgot to greet an older person on the street could find that neighbour at their house that evening mentioning it to their parents. The enforcement network was wide and it operated at speed.

In most Nigerian neighbourhoods, the street lights coming on — when they were working — signalled one thing. It was time to go home. Not time to start thinking about going home. Time to already be on your way, so that you arrived before your parents had to call you.

On my street, those lights glowed dimly through the harmattan haze, that distinctive dry season atmosphere that turned everything slightly golden and made familiar streets look almost cinematic. When the light changed, and that glow appeared, the football game stopped, the kite came down, and children moved toward their gates from every direction.

It was not a rule anyone announced. It was simply understood. The street had taught you that the light was a clock, and that the clock had a specific message.

Home. Now.

Growing up Nigerian in an ordinary household in a modest neighbourhood was not always comfortable. But it was rich in a way that is genuinely hard to explain to anyone who did not live it. The compound life, the community surveillance, the shared water, the dimly lit streets, the coin-operated phone, the irodun errands that wore you out before you could cause more trouble — all of it produced something in us.

A resilience. An ability to read a room and navigate it. An understanding that community, however loud and intrusive, is also protection. And a particular kind of humour that comes from looking back at difficult things and finding, to your surprise, that many of them are actually very funny now.

What would you add to this list? Drop your own memory in the comments. We want to hear it.