NIGERIA: CHILD UNACCOMPANIED

 

One of my greatest feats when I was a kid, and it wasn't even that spectacular, was when, at five-years-old, I flew from Minneapolis to London by myself. It was 1975, and we had been living in Lagos for a year, and it was summertime. I was visiting my grandparents in Minnesota and Iowa while my parents toured Europe. I was thrilled to be with my grandparents, and to play with my cousins, though I was an oddity. I talked frankly about our steward and my nanny, and how the electricity and water went out for three days in Lagos once, and how I had to take malaria medicine every week to keep from getting sick. I told everybody I could speak French (I couldn't, but I had picked up the accent, so I could fake it pretty well). I did know some African Pidgin-English.  

The local newspaper in Adrian, Minnesota, where my mother's parents were from, wrote an article about me that summer. The title: A Young Traveler From Nigeria Visits Grandparents in the Midwest. The article said I was getting unusual exposure to travel for a pre-schooler because my father worked for the State Department. It explained that when I returned to Nigeria, I would fly to London and meet my parents there. 

My grandparents were nervous to put me on a plane by myself and worried over it, though later, it was a story they loved to tell as if it had been one of our greatest adventures. The story was always told as if my parents, who were the young hippie, loosey-goosey kind of parents from the 1970s, didn't fret about it at all, and assured everyone I'd be just fine. And I was fine. There were other unaccompanied children on the flight, and we were seated together, with our names tags around our necks, and each given a "Jr. Clipper Kit" to keep us busy, and airline pins to put on our shirts. I didn't like the girl I sat next to, and we quarreled about something, so she spat in my food when we were eating our dinner. This girl spitting in my food tainted the whole experience for me, and I told my mother later that I didn't want to fly by myself again for that reason.  

At Heathrow, when my parents spotted me walking out of customs, holding the hand of a stewardess, my dad shouted, "There she is!" We were all very happy to be reunited. We spent the last remaining days of my parent's vacation touring London, going shopping at Harrods, and visiting Madame Tussauds where I was delighted by the Chamber of Horrors. I was a typical bouncy, chatty five-year-old and thoroughly wore my parents out, reminding them why I had gone to grandpa and grandma, and they had opted not to take me on their European holiday.