The land we came from: The green hills of Kaltungo

I grew up in the city, with concrete sidewalks and tarred roads, and for me, the village was an endless adventure.

In this series “The land we came from”, we asked writers to reflect on the environment they grew up in and how it has shaped their lives. Here, author Helon Habila recalls the stories his father told him of growing up in Kaltungo in northeast Nigeria, a beautiful landscape, with a horseshoe of hills surrounding the town, a place he himself has fond childhood memories of. I did not know my father’s exact age. But I know that he fought in the second world war in Burma (now Myanmar) when he was about 18 years old, and that he died in 1989. If he was about 18 during the war in the early 1940s, that means he was probably born sometime around 1924. That would have made him about 62 when he died. He also fought in the Nigerian civil war, from 1967, the year I was born, to 1970. He had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which was undiagnosed because no one knew what it was at the time. It affected him all his life, manifesting in mood swings – from occasional bouts of temper to a tendency to be withdrawn and introverted.