The Nigerian birdwatcher’s circles of hell, By Uddin Ifeanyi

A few months earlier, on a much larger birdwatching excursion outside urban Lagos, our group walked by a gathering of villagers. Pleasantries casually exchanged, we moved on to the faint whisper of a stray comment. One of the team we’d just passed by was overheard telling another that “àwọn ègbè ẹ l’ẹyẹ nìyẹn”. Loosely translated, it means “those are members of the bird group”. As we sashayed through the thickets, the import of this statement exercised members of the team. Absolutely nothing wrong on the face of it? Yes. But that’s before you remember that for a lot of Nigerians, birds (and bats) are, in reality, shape-shifting elementals (more often than not, witches on their way to meetings of their covens) – or at the very least, other even more unsavoury entities.