Tour of Duty

4 ideas

1. Eighteen states, eight months, one backpack

   Nigerian travel journalist Pelu Awofeso spent eight months backpacking through eighteen of Nigeria's thirty-six states, traveling by ordinary road transport and staying among locals rather than on an official or tourist circuit. The book presents the country through the everyday Nigerians he met along the route instead of through officials or statistics. It is a sustained domestic case of a citizen traveling his own country as a traveler would travel a foreign one.

2. Let the people explain the place

   Instead of describing a country through its institutions, headlines or official narratives, the traveler lets the ordinary people met on the road supply the explanation. This shifts authority from the outside observer to local voices. It surfaces everyday texture, such as hospitality, livelihoods, grievances and pride, that aggregate portrayals flatten.

3. Nigerians can be tourists in Nigeria

   The journey is built on the premise that a Nigerian can travel his own country for discovery rather than only for work, family or necessity. Moving state by state shows that a single nation holds enough regional, cultural and landscape difference to reward the same curiosity usually reserved for foreign travel. Treating home as a destination is itself an argument against the idea that the interesting world lies abroad.

4. Slow overland travel as a research method

   Eight months on the road with minimal gear forces dependence on public transport, local lodging and strangers' help. Those dependencies create the encounters from which the account is built. Covering fewer places over a longer time trades breadth of sightseeing for depth of contact, and the constraint of backpacking becomes the reporting method.

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