My First Visit to Nigeria Essay -- Personal Narrative Traveling Essays

My First Visit to Nigeria In this strain I will reconstruct my first visit to Nigeria. The journey took browse when I was seventeen in aboriginal 1993, during which time Nigeria was under the troops rule of General Sanni Abacha. For the most part of my trip I stayed in Lagos, former capital state and unperturbed highly recognised as the commercial capital of Nigeria, although I did visit an other(a)(prenominal) parts of the farming including Ondo State and Jos. Between this time and the time I left, in early 1994, I experienced and learnt a lot about the Nigerian stopping crest. My of import focus will be on the particular aspects of Nigerian socialisation that I saw as relevant to me as a teenager at the time, and also on my views onwards and after the journey. Up until the point of this journey I had lived most my life in the city of capital of the United Kingdom and my cultural views were very much British. I was not very old(prenominal) with Nigerian culture, and th e parts I was familiar with, which came mostly through my parents and other family members, were not very appealing to me. Thinking back now I imagine that virtuoso of the reason things like that did not appeal to me was because it went so much against the British culture which I had already related to in full accepted as my own and deemed as normal. For example eating certain food, not including chips, with your right hand instead of with a poke and fork. Leading up to the time I left for Nigeria, I had neer really identified myself with the Nigerian culture even though twain of my parents where originally from Nigeria. I was the first born of my mother followed by my twain younger brothers, Steven and William. We were all also given Nigerian names along with are English ones mine was Femi and my brothers were Ayo and Bayo. My father was still studying along with operative when I was born and my mother was working also, when I was about three years old I was move to live wi th a white middle class nanny in a town called Warminster in Wiltshire. It was a common phenomena in Britain in that period to see West African being bought up by Foster parents while their parents worked or studied (Groody and Groothuues, 1977). I did my first devil or so years of primary school in Warminster before my parents decided it was time for me to return to live with them in London. I was one of very few blacks in Wiltshire at the time, so apart from the chance(a) rare visit made by my par... ... you is to experience it first hand. I found it much easier to accept traditional aspects of Nigerian culture when on that point where others, who like me were also infected with western popular culture, around me who apprehended also. I do not feel that this acceptance came from any miscellanea forced group conciseness, but more from having the ability to choose aspects of the culture which I liked in an environment where my choices were more sociably accepted. patch in Nig eria I also met a reasonable amount of other Nigerians who had had similar experiences while growing up as I did. showdown with such people was one of the significant aspects of my journey as it enabled me to reprimand and laugh about some of the things I went through as a child which originally made me feel socially excluded. It also helped me to reveal my cultural identity as a British born Nigerian. BibliographyBammer, A, (1994), Displacements, the great unwashed 15, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press Kureishi, H, London and Karachi, in, Patriotism The Waking and unmaking of British subject field Identity, Volume 2, Minorities and Outsiders Watson, J.L,(1977), Between Two Cultures, Oxford, Basil Blackwell