Jos, 2001.
I was five when I climbed a mountain for the first time. It wasn’t because I wanted to. We were running away from the flying bombs that were killing Christians in the once peaceful town of Jos. My mother, a woman in her prime, strapped my younger brother to her back and hurried the rest of us outside, into the waiting arms of neighbours and other runners fleeing into the mountains. Up we climbed. Like soldier ants tracing their pheromone to a food source. Take away the soldier in front, and we were just ordinary ants again, running, lest we be trampled under the foot of a hot pogrom that shook the entire city.
Jos was where I experienced nature in its purest form. Mountains. Giant trees. Large rivers. Big plantations. Hills that unfurl at every peak. Plenty of food, fruits, and vegetables. But also snakes. Scorpions. Wild baboons that throw stones at you. The harsh weather that forces you indoors when all you really want to do is play outside with your friends. And there’s Another Life Village, the community where I grew up and made my earliest memories. Here, you’ll find people of different tribes living and raising their children together. Many of their houses stand on foundations built on rocks. Including my father’s.
After the 2001 crisis, I would start climbing the mountains on my own. Nothing was chasing me this time. I just wanted to watch nature and be present with it: standing on the pointed nose of a rock, taking in the landscape spread before me; a bird shitting on my head and flying away, daring me to catch it; a paper kite calling to me, and when I look, I see another kid far away, holding its tether; the wind doing its business, blowing dry air into my ears, slapping my dress against my skin repeatedly. It made me feel like an eagle flapping its wings and soaring. That sense of freedom. That feeling of escaping or being free of something. That was what I chose to associate with the mountains.
When I started climbing the mountains to watch a small fraction of Jos city spread before me like a flowery doormat, I saw freedom take up space in my mind. On the mountains, I could shout into the void just to hear my voice echo back to me, without being reprimanded for being so loud. I could sway this way and that with the plants, allowing the wind to dictate our movement. I could pluck two lemon-grass leaves, weave them together, and plant them around my wrist as a bracelet. I could sneak out of the house to enjoy my own company, watching lizards nod in acquiescence to my rebellion as I go. Climbing the mountains was easy. Oftentimes, I would climb from our backyard; from the sloped rock that ran deep into the foundation of my father’s house, and go yonder into the mountains with my heart in my mouth. That was the thrill. Sometimes, as I climbed and manoeuvred my way around the rocks and shrubs on my path, I would see some of my friends trapped in their father’s compound doing one chore or the other. I’d shout their names and wave, they’d wave back excitedly—their hands high above their heads, as if reaching for the freedom on the mountain too.
I had my favourite spot on the mountains: a giant rock that looked like the head of a person. The face carries a knowing smirk or a smile, depending on the angle you look from. Behind it, the back of the head has a hollow with a flat surface where you can sit and watch the beauty of the mountains and the creatures in it. The face-of-God rock, I liked to call it.
Climbing down was another breathtaking experience. I would calculate my steps carefully, listen for unusual sounds, and take notes of the things I saw, to the tiniest detail. Two birds mating. A snail losing its grip and skidding over. A praying mantis playing dead. A tiny piece of cloth hanging on a thorn—a testament that someone else had been here, too. But on my way down, my exit point wouldn’t be my father’s backyard any longer. Instead, I would descend at Last House—we called it that because it was the last in our street, before the Mallam river, before the lone path that stretched to the next community—and walk down the street back home, all the while revelling in my adventure, my freedom from the weight of the world.
But freedom comes at a cost, too.
Usually, when I get back home from mountaineering, a motley of questions would be waiting on my elder brother’s tongue.
“Where did you go since?”
“You left all these plates for who to wash?”
I’ve been finding freedom. I could have said, in retrospect, but instead, I would beg him not to out me to our parents when they return.
I climbed the mountains so much that they gave me many beautiful stories. Once saw the hole of a rabbit that ran through a rock and led to god-knows-where. Sat on the face-of-God rock with crossed legs and palms pressed together, and a heart whispering things to God. Accompanied an older family friend to the part of the mountains he dubbed his training ground, to watch him throw angry blows at a boxing bag and hail him, “Ashiri. Ashiri”. Prepared for exams at our dubbed reading spot in the company of my brothers and some friends—a communal approach to making our parents proud. Went hunting for katangare (red-haired male agama lizards) with my twin brother and his friend, who planned to pound the carcass and mix it into a love potion for my friend, whose fresh faeces I was supposed to help them find after the escapade. The most thrilling was when some youths pursued a thief into the mountains. They dragged him back into town for us, the younger ones, to witness the spectacle they’d make of him—a subtle lesson on the consequences of stealing what belongs to others. As they beat him, he kept shouting, “Dan Scissors, Dan Scissors,” and begging for his life. By the time anyone realised he meant to say, “Dan Jesus” (a supposed plea) it was too late; the youths had decorated him with his own blood as a souvenir back to wherever he came from. Such were the kind of stories the mountains gave me.
There were stories of the mountains, too. The ones told with a grim smile: after months of planning an outdoor picnic on the rocks, youths dispersed in a commotion of flying bottles and agonizing screams, with the DJ’s music trailing off long after the chaos. The ones told in hushed tones: of scary, evil men who lurked in the mountains, waiting for any young girl foolish enough to wander alone—she would return home without her innocence, with her voice lost, and a story that is not hers to tell. The ones told with trembling voices: of wild baboons sighted in the mountains—they don’t run when you shoosh them away, instead, they pick stones and hurl at you. These stories were not the beautiful kind. They always made me think. Like the baboons, what if a more dangerous wild animal strayed too far and found civilization? What if it ate humans? What if a wild animal in human form was hiding somewhere, waiting? These inescapable thoughts made me wary of the mountains.
I turned to books.
At 12, I started reading my mother’s small library. In them, I found another type of freedom. The freedom to exist in your own world without a care about what goes on outside of it. And with that freedom came a yearning to set others free—through stories. I started burying my head in more books and forgot about the mountains, until one day, they called out to me. I was reading indoors when I heard loud moos outside. Rushing out, I saw some of my friends gathered around and jumping excitedly, chanting:
“Balbela balbela ina za ka
Allah ya kawo ka lafiya lau
Bani fari in baka ja
Bani fari in baka ja”
It was Awolu—the cattle rearer we children loved to imitate, especially how he whipped his stray cows—who had taken his herd to the mountains of Another Life Village again. Cattle egrets were circling above the herd, announcing their presence, as though competing with the cows to see who the children of Another Life Village loved the most. This was the mountains’ way of calling out to me.
So I started paying more attention. On some days, I would hear a bird singing, forming a sort of rhythm that spelt out my name. Or at least, that was how I chose to interpret it. On other days, I’d look up briefly from washing plates in the backyard, and I’d see a goat from afar, staring at me like a lost friend yearning to be found. Sometimes, it’d be the face-of-God rock, smirking at me, from the distance, like a parent scolding a disobedient child as I carry a bucket of water all the way from the Mallam river back home. And each time the mountains called, instead of climbing, I would try to write about them and the adventures they had given me, even though I couldn’t find the right words. But they never stopped calling to me.
On January 10, 2010, when a big trailer packed in front of my father’s house and swallowed every little item we owned inside its wide belly, I went to the backyard one last time to cast a long, nostalgic look at the mountains, as far as my eyes could see. I looked and bade the mountains farewell. The memories I shared with them. The scars I got from climbing them. But also the sense of freedom they gave me. Everything—I took and tucked safely away in the recesses of my mind.
They were all going to make a great story someday. I thought.
Abeokuta, 2019.
Just a year after completing my undergraduate degree, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I went back to my father’s house in Ijebu-Ode to think things through, like any new graduate would. I started taking courses, submitting my CV (mostly bare at the time), and applying for anything that promised to give me a great start to my career (which I was yet to figure out). From my pool of successful applications was a four-day leadership boot camp that took me to Abeokuta—a city I had vicariously lived in through my father’s tales of ‘home away from home’ when we were still in Jos. I had learned that Abeokuta is a bit like Jos, because it has naturally elevated landscapes like Olumo Rock. Even the meaning of the name Abe-okuta—under the stone/rock—gave it away, and I had always wondered if the rocks in Abeokuta were anything like the ones I grew up climbing in Jos. And so when our facilitators announced during the boot camp that on the final day, we would embark on an expedition tagged “Leadership on the Rocks” to see the reputable Olumo Rock, I was ecstatic.
Before then, I had seen pictures of Olumo Rock on Ogun State Television. The station’s theme song that played alongside the showcase of the tourist centre always drew me in as if it’s saying; “You’ll appreciate my beauty more when you see me physically”. And so it was that through every session during the boot camp, I looked forward to the final day, because I knew that, somehow, Olumo Rock would help me relive my childhood memories all over again after so many years.
Then, D-Day came. The first thing that caught my attention when we entered the tourist centre was loud music and different factions of people having fun — some were dancing in groups, some watching a masquerade procession, others taking selfies, and there was those just standing. I tried to absorb the experience as much as I could while our facilitators led us to a shed where we first ate and had a short session on leadership with an emblematic message on how one has to be intentional with “climbing up” the career ladder. Hence, the theme: “Leadership on the Rocks.”
After this session came the actual tour, a tour guide, all too eager to deliver on her job, said “Welcome to Olumo” with a large smile on her face. At the foot of the rock, I looked up and marvelled at the sacredness and what stories hid behind this giant rock. The elevator was not working, the tour guide told us, so we’d have to climb. That, exactly, was why we were there. Was why I was there. As we climbed, the guide gave us a meticulous summary of the story behind the name “Abeokuta” and how this Olumo was what saved the Egba people from being enslaved by the Dahomeys. We glided through a narrow path one after the other to the other side, where she showed us the underbelly of the rock, which looked like a house with different rooms. Peeking inside, I saw cooking utensils scattered around, and thought, this is what freedom looked like for the people who hid here centuries ago.
And suddenly, I’m five again. Not alone. Running. Like the Egba people, then. We had run en masse into the mountains for safety, too. We had taken cooking items and gallons of water too. We had made small fires and cooked too. We had stayed for days, making the mountains our home, and thanking them for giving us freedom. We had left a mark on the mountains, too.
“Do you know what this statue is?” The tour guide’s voice brought me back to Olumo Rock.
She was pointing at the busty statue of a woman with deep incisions on her face, strategically placed close to the entrance of the ‘house’ under the rock. While the tour guide narrated the story of the statue (which I can’t remember right now because I was busy making up mine), I tried to figure out what the incisions on the statue’s face were. They definitely didn’t look like ilà, tribal marks drawn for beauty purposes, but more like ọgbẹ́, scars from an inflicted injury—the kind that is forcefully drawn while two people hold you down like a slave.
With freedom comes scars—signs that say I was there. I noted in my head.
When the tour guide left us to tour the remainder of the Rock by ourselves and have our moments, I almost slipped somewhere while posing to take a goofy picture. My heart leapt, and my hands shook. Perspiration covered me, but it didn’t stop me from taking more pictures and making funny faces that seemed to shout just one thing: freedom. After all, on the mountains in Another Life Village, I almost slipped too, many times in fact, but it didn’t stop me from going back up, the next day, and the day after that.
As we descended the Olumo Rock after the tour, I could only think of the many Abeokutas in Jos that served as temporary shelters for people, shielding them from the death throes that intermittently shook the entire city by surprise every other year. The only cue to run? When you hear people shouting “A n fara. A n fara.”
But those mountains were way more than that. For some, it was a haven that gave you a break from the world’s chaos.
For others, like me, it was a place you go to feel free.
Birnin-Kebbi, 2020.
For all the stories I had been keeping over the years, with badly-written drafts that I always forgot in an unidentified notebook or a document somewhere on my phone, this was the year I started writing seriously.
The world was at a standstill. Or almost.
A tiny microorganism had ravaged the globe and forcefully confined people to their homes. Some were mending walls of abandoned friendships. Others were building relationships with their families.
Me? I was building my writing skills.
I had opted to remain in Kebbi State for my youth service because I wanted to be far from home (read: free). To immerse myself in another culture, just to see what freedom tasted like here. To perfect my command of the Hausa language, which I couldn’t quite master in Jos. Through my service year, I kept searching for new experiences in new people and places. Then came the lockdown and the ample time it gave me to search deeper, most of which I used to discover well-read writers, get mentored by an A-list writer, experiment with creative writing myself, and start telling the story of my life, in bits and pieces.
Lagos, 2025.
I am an adult with no luxury of going mountain climbing all day, even if I wanted to.
I am living alone in a space large enough for one person, providing for myself and others when I can, reliving my childhood in written form because I now know how to. I also make up fictional worlds, blending my (learned) culture, language, and experiences into one big mix to “tell these stories properly”—like Jennifer Makumbi indirectly implored, and building a bigger web of memories, unfiltered; one day, month, year after the other.
I may not be physically climbing a range of mountains and sweating through the journey, but I’m climbing through many other things, unscathed—the daily tasks on my to-do list, bills in my monthly budget, achievements in my bucket list, and the most daunting of them: making big decisions all by myself.
This is the version of freedom I have now grown most accustomed to in adulthood.
This is what freedom looks like now.
About the Author:
Winifred Òdúnóku (she/her) is a writer from Nigeria who loves experimenting with different narrative styles. Her works have appeared in Agbowó, Ubwali, Isele Magazine, Revista Periferias, Kalahari Review, The Moveee, Punocracy, 101 Words, The Missing Slate, Ilford Review, African Writer Magazine, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net Nominee, she was long listed for the 2024 Eugenia Abu/SEVHAGE International Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, and is a 2025-26 finalist for the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize for Fiction.
Feature Image by Sean Foster on Unsplash