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Nanka, NIGERIA -The plantain plant may wear rags,
Clarius Ugwuoha
But that does not mean that it is madI shake my head in nostalgia. A lot of discomfort is visited upon Lagos and the environs by the fuel price hike. The chorus of children who hawk unguents, a feature of Lagos streets in the harmattan, dies gradually out. The greatest victims -- of course, the greatest victims -- are always the children, who like to hang around street corners treated to the tantalizing smell of delicacies, to a world taken for granted, a childhood world interpolated with illusions and an airy eye view of life.
Even iya ibeji's corner, a very busy eatery where we flock on good days, for local brews and delicacies and where the children have to be prised off the steaming dishes of iyan, amala and ewedu and what else, no longer is crowded. It too has emaciated like a sickly creature. I am stung out of my reverie by the jolt of the bus.
This morning, I take part in a protest over the fuel price hike. At Yaba Square are bonfires and, in the bonfires, the knotted wrath of a dispossessed folk. The ever-thickening crowd that whips from place to place, tears in its trail, finally berths here in Yaba Square. I think this recast lacks theatricality.
From my own socio-economic matrix, I know that more destruction, even in protest of an injustice -- and knowing all too well that this destruction only strikes at the wrong chord -- is counterproductive.
But here, at last, is that version of the protest that every despot must dread. A scruffy figure sidles his way to the dais. His sheer virulence of speech whips the crowd into and out of frenzy. He still reverberates in my full consciousness even as I am on my way out of Lagos in a danfo bus. He is the common man in the street whose oily sweat oils the wheels of state and whose silence is louder than the thundering of the great skies. His echo lives within me. I marvel at that force in words that can whip men into tears or laughter.
I am neatly sliced from the danfo bus that with each jolt rains on us with a pall of dust. It is truly harmattan, and the air is so dry you can hear it crackle. The leaves of the trees are thickly powdered with dust, heavy cakes of which ride mercilessly in the noonday haze. I am reddened all over.
Yes, she is there, my wife, cradling the children to spare them this rain. Ironically, a worse-than-dust rains within them. But she is unable to shield them from this. I blink. How time flies.
The answer to every situation is always there, but you have to search for it. I am leaving Lagos ...
Dusk and it is Nanka.Once is Lagos, now a new world of bitter rediscovery. I feel completely dispossessed -- like a fish out of water.
The first day in my father's deserted homestead of termites and rats is uneventful. The holes in the walls pierce my heart. After dusk is another, and after another, the next -- the ritualistic height of the igwaji, the new yam festival in Nanka.
I can still feel the spastic rattling of the danfo bus, days after I have digested its survival feast. I console myself with blissful thoughts of the igwaji festival that is to come. It will be a blaze of colour. I will wash my tears and confusion in its exuberance.
I am in Nanka not in Lagos. There is a fresh and lucid mentality about everything, so that if I am blindfolded and sent to the same old environment among a different people, I will at once wise up. This is something inexplicable. Whenever Nanka calls to my mind, I have the idea of a bright yellow colour and a goat.
Akoko, in the neighbourhood, for no obvious reason, comes across as a lucid red tree, upon it a thorn.
Lagos is reddish brown.
In Nanka, I am among my people, at last. But quite unsavoury is that Nanka has been as stagnant as I who criticize it. It baffles me: Nanka -- rich in oil -- two decades later is without change. There's only the primary health care centre, the only presence of the outside world, submerged in thick spans of bushes. The trees in the forest behind are lush and bend so that their arms embrace the roof of the building. You will have to see them yourself.
The sight of the village is at first unprepossessing. But beyond the huts and bungalows is the natural ambience of the riversides, the stretch of the marshy terrain, pierced through like an arrow by swampy footpaths; the acrid tang of the lime and neame trees, their twigs rustling lazily in the light breeze. All these captivate me. It is like the discovery of a new and strange world pregnant with possibilities.
In the morning, the sun rises from the other end of the sky. At dusk, darkness descends with a heavy thud. This is because of the lofty trees and the dense tangled growth. The trees cast shades far and wide even when the sun is in the centre of the sky, so that when it is down in the horizon, the darkness is thicker than the back of the earthen pot. The homesteads are marked out by the pale rubicund glow of the fibre lamps. There are measured cadences even in the blowing of the breeze. If you put your ears to the chest of the encroaching hills, you will hear the village tick. I look at it and smell, the tangy, orange smell.
There is a wet ferment of drums, flutes and folksongs. The dancers swarm like of bees and wake the earth in clods.The eldest man in Nanka is the Nwadiali or traditional chief priest and his ritualistic duty it is to usher in the new yam. He arrives, behind him a youth, with the youth a large roast of tuber yam.
I am at last in Nanka, the cultural hub of Nise clan. Words fail me to describe the ensuing scene. I can only marvel at the dazzling blaze of life and warmth, as the excitement fevers, buoyed through the sand and dust, the shouts and handclaps. A young man weaves his way through into the centre of the sweaty crowd, shut in by eyes, by dust and voices. He is decked in traditional war garb, omu leaves clenched in his teeth; in his hands is the age-old ipo matchet which is never sharpened and which he must use to cut the sacred omu tied between two trees in a shrine in the far forests -- with only a stroke.
There are usually prayers -- that he cuts the omu with only a stroke -- since if he fails, he dies and doom and perdition take over the land. He has been in the ibari of the chief priest, cooked in a big medicine pot, now cast abroad with the destiny of the clan on his head .The crowd goes agog as he matches pace with the rhythm of the drums, songs and shouts of acclaim.
The chief priest motions for silence.
"Today, the spirits of our forefathers are here with us for the festival of the new yam ends and we must bid them farewell. The omu bearer will go into the forest to cut the sacred omu, and in so doing cast the spirits adrift to their various homes ... "
He pauses to a gong stroke.
" Omeife" He calls the young man as he sings his praises: " Strongest of all men, toast of women, eagle in the sky ... The pinch a child gives itself does no harm, let nothing harm you. Because the snake tried to harm you, he is now without legs, the bat pointed at you and today is without eyes. The snail that climbs with the tongue knows the bitterest tree ... " He continues in a maze of proverb and incantations. At the end Omeife leaves for the forests and comes back triumphant!
In the cool evening as I amble around the village, I am overwhelmed by memories. I cast back and forth, until that perfect rhythm that reorientates life comes in sight. This is a village in dire need of redirection. Everything is in order. You need a skillful architect to put these raw materials into a formidable structure.Here is the old mission school and those who are supposed to be there fast on Indian hemp in the creeks instead. They feel marginalized but, most important is that they marginalize themselves too as they mask out of the sane society, shut in a world of stretched perseverance. The values here are as confused as in the city, a village in its first stage of sophistication.
Every drama in the city is rehearsed here, perhaps with a genuine touch of originality, this infantile exuberance that kindles the air with raucous wrath directed against fellow brother -- I remember Yaba bonfires. The mission school conjures memories that look like when-we-are-there. I remember teacher Okoro as he solves the board frantically in a chimney of cigarettes.
The school premises is set back, neatly sliced from the heart of the village. The school ... its delicate cocoon. The classroom blocks, now overrun with moss. The fields, which use to be cropped low, the lawn shinning in the noonday haze.
The idea of trees is essentially colonial. They grow sparsely, are maintained, with thick foliage that catch the sun and throw back a dense shade. Here the teachers sit out at free and break periods. The classrooms ... They seem to hold an indefinable appeal, swept and dusted with wall chats hung on the wall. The blackboard has lost its stature and terror, shrunk to just another contraption that holds knowledge momentarily and throws an entire class into a chanting session. Nor will it ever lose its peevishness and that vexatious flair for ceremony. Now and then it conspires with the teachers, mystifies an entire class and calls up the cane at will. That is its most salient shortcoming. So much for our childhood world ...
I wake up alive to my surroundings, realizing with a jolt that I am still in Nanka, that I am not in Lagos or something.This is a place where life is strangely cosmetic and you have to fashion yourself after some better civilizations to conform. The Nanka girl sadly has LOST HER INNOCENCE, the same way the natural environment is daily degraded by pollutants. That natural beauty of hers is hidden in a thick cosmetic mask. The skirt rides high, that is when she wears one, and most times it is trousers. The tag "prostitute" is inappropriate by village standards. A case in point, of course, where the name sounds louder than the very act. Like "armed robbery". Everyone will agree.
What happe ns in the creeks is not "armed robbery". There has to be a better name, deals -- for want of appropriate terms.
The young boy there, his high voltage activism bothers me. Destruction trails his anger. It is well known that the synthesis of thought and action can make or mar, bring into form or wipe out, a synergy of miraculous proportion. This enormous youthful agility in him can be harnessed to the benefit of self and society. He has a genuine cause but there are better ways of articulating them to the understanding of civilized powers. The mentality is unbearably and overwhelmingly military, the fallout of years of military predation in the polity, looting and much insensitivity. He is a victim, as much of self as the powers that be. I look at him with pity, he is in the wrong place, he should be in the mission school.
Here, the most frequent entertainment is not a shot of ogogoro at iya ibeji's, or how the economic situation has reduced or affected earning powers.We sit to endless stories of the world out there. How the cities are a safe haven and one could almost pluck a living off the trees. I stretch myself, of course, to explain that it is not so, that the greatest failings start the very day we begin to look at possibilities only when they are outside our immediate environment. That there are so many things within us that can be developed to the envy of the outsider.
I sound foolish in their eyes, the untutored wretch who left life in the smart cities for one of endless drudgery and dreams in the village.
And so parents continued to pawn their children out into slavery and prostitution under the illusion of greener pastures -- to Gabon, Cameroon, Guinea Bissau -- and sometimes countries in Europe.
I am sad. My caution is not heeded. Another source of worry too, is my suspicion, gleaned from stories I am regaled with, that the HIV pandemic might also have crept into the village reaping the ignorance to its hearts content. An entire family is wiped out, for instance, by Nwogwugwu the deity, by witches in their alcove ...
CLARIUS UGWUOHA says of himself: Born as Clarius Iheanacho Ugwuoha, on July 29th 1974,I studied at the Holy Ghost College Owerri and the University of Lagos. My poems have been published in various international anthologies and have won international prizes. I am author of the books: MONARCHS OF THE FOREST, a satirical revue and BEYOND RIVER URASHI, a biography.This is Mr. Ugwuoha's first article for your World's Magazine. It continues next edition.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
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