Kasia in Abuja: Abuja Carnival

This weekend it was the annual Abuja carnival, the bradt guidebook tells us that this has been an annual event since 2005 but that there is little information to inform people about the events and that this might get better with time. No, no it hasn’t. The information online told us that the parade started at 7am and the opening ceremony at 4pm. We (rightly) suspected the 7am start time to be false and so after seeking some guidance from a friend as to where we might watch the parade turned up around 12.30 to find it still hadn’t started. It didn’t actually reach us for another couple of hours but had probably set off from its start point around 1ish. Apparently they were still putting their costumes on at 12.30.

I feel I should actually have titled this post 'The day Sam (my housemate) had the words ‘Please come and snap me’ written on her forehead'. It became very amusing for the rest of us but less so for her as she was repeatedly asked if she would be snapped with various random strangers and members of the carnival as the day wore on. We almost got roped into the carnival at one point quite early on, we were looking for some minerals (drinks) to cool us down as it was on the bloomin hot side of hot and we ended up in a random car park buying our drinks where we were approached by the staff of a lone carnival float promoting the Igbo Youth Movement. They wanted us to wear t-shirts and have photos taken with them, I managed to duck out of this and stay behind the camera but I present Sam looking very ‘happy’ about getting involved.

Sam hoping someone else will get involved

Looking thrilled to be a member of the team

They managed to recruit Jenny as well

After managing to avoid being put on the back of the float as they waited for the carnival to arrive so they could join in with the parade we found some shade to sit in and wait for the parade to come to us. Bless them, by the time they did get to us they had walked for some time (still had a fair distance to go it turns out) in the blazing sunshine in some of the most weird and wonderful outfits I’ve seen. Most of them were still giving it some to the Naija beats but you could also spot the ones who had clearly lost the will to shake it like a goodun a couple of miles back, either way much respect due to don some of those costumes in that heat deserves an A for effort anyway.