Dispatch
What a month of carnival is actually worth
Calabar stages the largest street festival in Africa every December. The rest of the year is the harder question.
South-South
Calabar
Cross River State
4.9757° N, 8.3417° E
An old river port that reinvented itself as the country's carnival city.
About this place
Calabar was the capital of the Oil Rivers Protectorate and, before that, one of the busiest slaving ports on the coast. It kept the architecture and the churches and, unusually for a Nigerian city, a reputation for being orderly and clean. Every December it stages a month-long carnival that is now the largest street festival in Africa.
Everything from Calabar
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People in Calabar
Dispatch
What a month of carnival is actually worth
Calabar stages the largest street festival in Africa every December. The rest of the year is the harder question.
Field notes from Calabar
Ini Etuk
Carnival bands rehearse in September in whatever open ground they can get, usually school compounds after hours. You hear them before you see them. By December the routines are drilled to a standard that reads on television as spontaneity.
Where to go next
Editorial adjacency rather than distance — somewhere it makes sense to go from here.
