In 1979 Elizabeth Blunt was sent to Nigeria by the BBC to cover the country's elections, as the then military head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, prepared to hand over to an elected civilian government. She recently returned to the country to revisit some of the people and places she had known all those years ago.

I was back in Nigeria recently, and trying to find a woman called Dada who I had met on my first visit to the country, 27 years ago.

I peered at my faded notebook. "She used to live in Lamido Crescent. Off Korauo Road, it says, near Hadeija Jamahare..."

My colleague was getting impatient. "Don't you have her cell phone number?"

Cell phone number. How quickly people forget.

Of course she did not have a cell phone number. There were no cell phones in 1979, not even those great big things the size of a house brick that we used to carry around.

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