What in Awka Deserves to Be Preserved?

When people talk about preserving a city, they often reach for its oldest things like buildings, monuments and streets. But ask what people would hate to lose about Awka, and the answers are less obvious.

The peace and quiet, the nightlife, the entrepreneurial spirit, the responsiveness of its people, blacksmithing. Some of these things are centuries old. Others are being created right now.

And that may be the point.

Awka’s character is not held in one place. It lives in the neighbourhood shop opened to solve an everyday need, in the relationships people maintain with family, friends and neighbours. In the churches and communities that bring people together. In the ease of moving through a city that, for some residents, still feels peaceful compared to larger cities.

Even the contrast matters. Awka can be quiet during the day and come alive at night. Both have become part of the city people know. But some parts of that identity are becoming harder to find. Awka is still known as the blacksmith city, yet blacksmithing, one of the crafts historically associated with the city, is becoming less visible. That raises a difficult question, “what happens when a city keeps the name but gradually loses the practice behind it?”

Culture presents a similar tension. Imo Ọka remains visible in the city, but what happens when an old tradition survives while some of its practices become dangerous?

Then there are the things people barely think about until they are gone. Access to water, trees, local language, food, a functional traffic system, even UNIZIK. They may not look like heritage. But perhaps heritage was never only about old things. Sometimes it is the ordinary systems, habits and spaces that quietly make a place feel like itself.

Awka will change. It already is. But what is important is what should remain when it does.