Meanwhile, he showed us some fascinating pictures of a recent trip to Calabar (to witness the filming of Half of a Yellow Sun), including these images of Obong Eyo Honesty IX's house in Duke Town. The descendants of the old King still live in the house, which features beautiful wood panelling and stained glass windows. To think that former governor Donald Duke wasted all that money on Tinapa, which no one visits except to stay in the hotel, when he could have spent a relatively tiny amount of government money renovating the magnificent old buildings of Calabar and turning them into museums. Calabar's tourist potential is yet to be untapped.
I wonder if this is the house of Duke IX of Old Calabar (an earlier post). Umoh Bassey-Duke/Nkoyo Toyo - can you help? I'm not sure that it is, but he would surely have lived in a house similar to this (and its probably another still-standing place of faded grandeur). To think of all the things that old mirror has seen! Surely its not too much for the Government of Cross River to realise what enormous cultural wealth it has on its doorstep and do something about it...
Images by Jide Bello.
Hear, See, and Say it
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