Calabar was an old stripper the fans called Mama Ekaette from a club along Marian, but the old government shut it down a long time ago because the entire state just didn’t fit into their money laundering scheme.

Now she sold beer and cheap vodka in a Buka along Atekong for men with round bellies and women with sharp efik tongues. Calabar had always been old but now she was weary and time had drawn wrinkles on her skin that looked like rotting roads and a vandalized water side resort. There was a broken library by the stadium and an abandoned hotel close to Akampa that was now a 5 star cult resort. Calabar had always been old but now she was dying and the people simply drove through the broken town to their federal government jobs. 

Time was not a stagnant thing and as the Ekpe shook its circular body another government had come and the new people reopened the club. The old government didn’t leave enough for the quality of coke Calabar used to do, but the new people offered crack and she took it away.

Towns did not quite die like people because all you needed to rejuvenate a town was plaster and paint, so the new people placed the orders for the cement shipment. Someone still ran the Buka because there must be beer and 404 in Calabar, but now there was a club in Marian and a cinema in Marina.

The old thing was in the air, I couldn’t quite say what is was; this old thing, but it was back. For the first time in a long time December was not just a tiring 31 days that with dying street decor and an empty village square. This old thing that made them sing songs of Christmas in Calabar, that had people booking flights two months early because they simply had to see Calabar in all her glory, the one that filled the streets with celebrities and had state sponsored shows everywhere you went – the coke, Calabar was finally doing coke again. They had cleared the heaps of rubbish from watt and there were lights at Eleven Eleven once more.

Mama Ekaette may have been old but she was no longer weary as the plaster had filled her wrinkles with new stories. There were adornment on every roundabouts, not just the dying pieces the old people put out so they didn’t seem as nonchalant as they were and a stage in the stadium for every B – list singer the new people could bring. There was a boy in white shorts screaming Mayorkun songs as loud as he could and another blowing igbeaux at a Jossy show. The youth gathered to dance with the Ekpe at Utomo Obong and there was a constant song at the village square. Calabar now told stories of rejuvenated museums and a revamped tree lighting ceremony. There was life in the streets of Calabar again and the people were living it

So they did not gather to mourn an empty three days in December this year, because there was a festival, the grandest anyone had seen in a while. There was a float that looked like a giant horse and another was a hive flowing with bees and honey. The people matched down Marian road with their burning blunts as Calabar put on her best performance.

It was a beautiful thing; carnival. People filling the roads from stadium to Mobile, people you knew because you all grew up in the same town -boy you liked when you were 13, your former math teacher, a cleaner that used to steal meat from your mother’s fridge – the people of Calabar.

There was a mother excited to take pictures with her little boys in her colorful carnival costume, a drunk man dancing around with his drunker wife, and a woman sitting under the Marian bridge making her bright pink braids as she argued between master blaster and passion 4 with the hairdresser. The teenagers gathered at apples to complain about further maths and a girl from Loudres hoped to kiss a boy from Navy.

Everyone danced alongside the yellow and pink feathers as they filled their bellies with sachet gin from road side sellers. The Buka ran all through the night and the bush meat and palm wine were illuminated by fluorescents on the streets as echoes of laughter hung over the alcohol. Calabar was lifting her lungs again and the people were breathing it.

So this is a tale of the season of sweetness, the rebirth of a town, longing dying, now tarred roads in the Etta Agbor estates and a cinema in the waterside resort.