The Onitsha market called Otu, one of West Africa’s big meeting places, was situated on the bank of the River Niger and served not only the people of Onitsha but those from the surrounding Ibo towns and villages as well. They regarded this place as the centre of their world. A market day was an occasion to dress up and meet with friends, as well as to buy and sell. The market was where people who wanted to display their dances went, be it an age-group or a family showing the end of their mourning for a departed relative. And there were many superstitions attached to the market place. For example, if a person was insane then so long as the madness was not shown in the market there was hope of a cure. The big markets were places where the visible living met and among them moved the dead and the invisible.
So Otu Onitsha was like a nerve-centre sending messages to all the surrounding areas. The latest agbada cloth was to be bought at Onitsha. The newest fashion was sure to be seen worn by somebody at Onitsha. The most recent gossip could be heard at Onitsha.
Okolie and his charge Ojebeta did not regret leaving the flat-bottomed canoe that had ferried them across the river from Asaba. At first Ojebeta had liked the enthusiastic rowing of the canoe men, so much so that she had allowed her fingers to run through the water as they sped. But after a while, when she had begun to feel dizzy, and a market woman carrying a pot of red palm oil to sell had warned her to take care lest she was thrown into the river, Ojebeta had become scared. Her fear was not lessened by the strange loud songs of the canoe men in tune with their stylish rowing. When they stopped singing, their talking was so voluble that their voices seemed to be drawing the gentle waves of the blue waters against the brown sides of the wooden boat. As they rowed near the waterside, the clamour coming from Otu Onitsha drowned all thoughts.
The Eke market was the biggest market Ojebeta had previously ever seen before, but this one looked to her like a whole city. It was a complete market landscape that seemed to stretch for miles. People swarmed and buzzed like insects. Most were dressed up fashionably but some, like the canoe men and the people selling fresh fish, wore only very meagre cloths wrapped kite-like round their loins. Apart from the Ibo traders, there were Yoruba stalls where you could buy different kinds of root medicine and the black dyed cloth called iyaji (in fact it was more a navy blue but to the Ibos, who loved things colourful, bright and flowery, anything darkish and plain was black). Even the Northerners—the Hausas, and the tall, graceful Fulani shepherds with their leather knapsacks, leather slippers, long whitish robes and dark brown turbans—had stalls. Some of their families had settled permanently in the houses along Otu market and sold delicious Hausa dishes, such as corn and bean dumplings laced with roasted meat in honey, and the beef known as efi Awusa. Their women had large holes in their ears through which they wedged bright coral beads bought with the money they made buying and selling in Ibo towns.
People pushed and jostled, hawkers added to the din, and in general everyone seemed to have a great deal to say. Ojebeta, though frightened and clutching Okolie, found it fascinating. So many people and so many different kinds of Ibo dialect! Her hold on her brother became tighter as she began to notice that people were staring at her. She felt humiliated when she saw a group of women with trays of cassava pulp on their heads laughing and pointing in her direction; one of them, trying to be modest, was looking away to hide her laughter.
Ojebeta glanced at her brother, then down at herself, and asked, “Why are they staring at me so, and laughing?”
Okolie was finding it hard to control his nagging guilt, and as he guided her through the noisy crowds—through the stalls of the fish sellers and the yam sellers, towards a more open space in the market—he did not at first hear her question. He heard eventually, after she had tugged him and shouted louder; he knew, however, that to give her a full explanation would take long minutes, so he patted her shoulder as if to say she should not worry about those silly people who had nothing better to do than stand there laughing like people with broken heads.
He knew why they were laughing. It was not just because of Ojebeta’s safety charms, the bells and cowrie shells that jingled and clanged when she made the slightest movement. It was because his sister also had a very interesting face. All over her features were traced intricate tattoos, the pattern of spinach leaves, with delicate branches running down the bridge of her nose, spreading out on her forehead and ending up at the top of her ears. On each cheek was drawn the outline of a large spinach leaf looking ready to be picked. It was not that many Ibos did not have facial tribal marks of different kinds, rather that a few would have put so many on the face of one little girl. But Ojebeta’s mother Umeadi, when she realised that her daughter was going to live, had had a reason for going to the expense of engaging the services of the most costly face-marker in Ibuza. For, with such a riot of tribal spinach marks on her only daughter’s face, no kidnapper would dream of selling her into slavery. What was more, if she got lost her people would always know her, for although the patterns on her face might seem madness here to these Ibos from the East who frequented Otu Onitsha market, among the Western Ibos called the Aniochas it was a distinctive and meaningful design.
The thought of cutting off Ojebeta’s charms occurred to her brother Okolie. Among her own people they were not such a strange affair, but they were out of place in the middle of one of the largest markets in West Africa. They were supposed to be for domestic purposes. Usually it was thought safe to remove such charms from a child when that child could talk coherently enough for any living adult to understand, so that if her persecutors from the other world should ask her to come with them, she could shout, “Go away, I don’t want you. I am happy here.” Then the adult could take a broom or whatever and start to beat all the corners of the room saying, “Asha, asha,” until the child stopped calling for help. For most children this age for removing their safety charms was when they were about four or five years old; they were then regarded as having walked out of childhood and become members of the living world.
But Ogbanje Ojebeta was dearer to her mother than that. She had wanted to make assurance doubly sure, and had allowed her daughter to carry the charms for so long as insurance that she would survive. It was almost as if her mother, without meaning to, had wanted to keep Ojebeta a baby as long as possible, since no little brother or sister followed her. Now Okolie was too frightened of the possible consequences to risk removing the bells and cowries himself.
“Suppose anything should happen to her,” he thought. “They would say that I killed her. No, let her wear them until I get her into the house of a master.”
Moreover, who could tell what trick their dead parents might be contriving now they were both on the other side? They might be longing to have their only daughter with them and might frighten her to death in her sleep. Who could foretell the thoughts of the dead, even if they were our loved ones? He believed that the living should belong to the living. Ojebeta should be given every opportunity to live her own life, and die in peace when her time came. Not be pulled along by their parents who now belonged to the dead, before she was even able to tell what life looked like.
Their last push and jostle through the crowd round those selling fresh meat brought Okolie and Ojebeta to some stalls that looked very clean and elegant and less noisy. It was as if the women of these stalls were of a different breed, well dressed like people having a special outing. At many of the stalls there were very young girls sitting on low stools with heads bowed, doing some kind of sewing. Ojebeta watched avidly as they passed these colourful stalls of the cloth sellers. They halted rather abruptly in front of one of them, and she guessed that they had reached their destination.
It was a strange destination for a child of seven. She could not have imagined in her most wild dream that this was where they were going. They had walked for miles and for hours and through various kinds of forests, waded streams and been ferried in a canoe to come this far. And now they stood before this gaily coloured stall where thousands of cloths of different patterns hung in rows on wooden shelves. There were so many colours and designs that they all seemed to merge into each other. Some had patterns of leaves on them, some had birds, some fish, some had a design like the mortar used to pound yam—whatever object you could think of, there was bound to be an agbada material that had that design.
Sitting on a long bench on the floor were four young girls, aged between nine and fourteen. They were all dressed identically in material with a pattern of cowries on it: the background of the cloth was white and the cowries were deep blue shapes with their edges tinged in yellow. Ojebeta noticed these details only on a closer look, for at first the cloth just looked bluish. They had stopped in front of one of these girls.
“Where is your mother?” Okolie asked in a low, dry voice.
Two girls looked up, and one of the younger ones gave a conspiratorial nudge to the largest and apparently the eldest girl. The latter looked up from her sewing and covered her mouth to prevent the laugh that wanted to escape at the sight of this queer looking pair at their stall. She could tell from their clothes and from their tribal markings, particularly those on the little girl’s face, that they were not from the bush interior but from the Aniocha area. But they certainly were an odd pair, with this big healthy man, in his prime of youth, walking up to stalls in Otu and asking people, “Where is your mother?” without any form of greeting.
“Look,” whispered the smallest girl, loudly enough for Okolie and Ojebeta to hear, “look, she is wearing bells like market dancers.”
The big girl, who had by now composed herself again, told the small girl to keep quiet and keep her eyes on her work or she would take her to Pa Palagada when they got home. At the mention of that name there was such an unnatural hush that one would have thought that whoever this person or apparition called “Pa Palagada” was his powers must be immense. Peace suddenly descended; even the girl sniggering and pointing at nothing bent her neck and glued her eyes to her sewing.
The big girl seemed to think Okolie wished to buy some abada material for Ojebeta, for she took out the wooden measure and waited for him to tell her which he wanted of the innumerable cloths supplied to them mainly by the United Africa Company Europeans.
Okolie studied her with interest. She was an attractive grown girl of about fourteen with large breasts. She looked well fed and so fresh and plump that her skin reminded him of smooth, ripe mangoes, ready to burst open oozing out rich, creamy, sugary juice. He wondered why Ibuza girls were not like that; they were usually thin, with long legs and narrow faces. Well, he debated within himself, this girl probably sat here all day and maybe the most work she did was to fetch firewood for the family or pound yam for the evening meal. An Ibuza girl of her age would have to help her mother plant cassava, help her father peel corn from the cobs when they were ripe, and on her way back from the farm she would carry heads of ripe palm kernels ready to be pressed into oil which could be sold here in the Otu market, apart from that oil kept for the family’s cooking and oil lamps. But these girls in Otu did not have to lead such itinerant lives. Although some of them were in fact slaves—Ma Palagada would have paid a sum on their heads, just as he was expecting her to pay something for his sister Ojebeta —yet they appeared to be treated just like the children in any family.
This strengthened his belief that he was doing the right thing for Ojebeta. He was sure Ma Palagada would treat her like one of these girls under her care. He imagined his sister in one of the outfits the girls were wearing; in Ibuza she could only dress like that for big important days, whereas here the girls were well turned out for the Otu market. He also liked their way of speaking the Ibo language, with a tinge of foreign sophistication, not the brash, harsh and pointed accents of his own people who because they were people of the interior did not have to live and trade with as many foreigners as these Ibos of Otu Onitsha. Many Ibo traders came from whereever their homes were just to make money at the Otu market, so that they could buy lands, build fine modern Victorian houses and live very modern, clean and foreign lives.
The big girl went on to say, like someone chanting, that they had just had a brand new supply of abada from the coast.
“You see this one—we call it ‘Ejekom be loya’ (‘I have a date with a lawyer’),” she sang, pointing with the long wooden measure to a cloth with a plain white background and a border of yellow, pale blue and pink. “You can’t get this from any other stall here in Otu market. Our Ma Palagada has bought the sole right to it for the next four markets from those white U.A.C. people. So if you buy it now for yourself and a yard or two for your girl-wife, you will both be in the height of fashion. People will never stop looking at you and admiring you both because they will never have seen a cloth so smooth and beautiful as this. It looks very like the white otuogwu your people like to wear. Just feel its smoothness. It is a cloth in a million.” Then she paused, both for breath and to assure herself that she had been saying the right thing.
Okolie had to smile. His red lips parted uncontrollably, and he had to steel himself so as not to burst out into a roaring type of laughter. He wiped away the tears of amusement that had sprung into his eyes, and said:
“All right, now you listen to me for a while. Did I tell you that I have come here to buy cloth? I asked of your mother, but you have not answered me. The cloth is fine, well designed, but I did not come here to buy cloth. I have come to have a word with your mother. Where is she?”
Okolie’s voice had so much authority and impatience in it that all three girls sitting looked up at him, and the big girl who had been trying to make an impression simply gaped. People did not come to the market asking for Ma Palagada just like that, particularly not this type of person, even though his voice was commanding.
“She is not at the stall,” she said curtly. “Do you want me to leave a message? I shall give it to her when she returns.” She turned round as if to resume her needlework and forget everything about this insolent farmer who came to the Otu market from God-knows-where to be so audacious.
But Okolie’s voice cut her short. He stepped right into the shed that formed the stall. The other girls held their breath, ready to let out a scream just in case they were going to be attacked by a market thief in broad daylight. They had all heard stories from other stalls where there were usually crowds about thieves who would move in on the seller, shouting for her attendance while other members of the gang were making away with goods meant for sale; that was mostly at the stalls of the dry fish sellers, not in the section of those selling cloth. You might also be given counterfeit paper money or even coins minted by some clever persons; but few thieves would think of coming this way and dragging a little girl with cowrie charms and spinach face along. The girls were alarmed, and puzzled, though without losing their outward composure.
“Get out of the stall,” said the big girl menacingly, holding on fast to the wooden measure, “or I will call the market police.”
Okolie ignored her and sat down in a space at the edge of the bench. “I have a special message for your mother,” he announced. “I have come all the way from Ibuza to give her the message. I am a relative of hers. That is why I have come, not to steal cloth. Steal my relative’s cloth? Tah! I would never do a thing like that. And this is my sister, not my wife.”
This latest statement intensified the laughter which had been bubbling within the girls, who were not very keen on their sewing anyway. First, they found it difficult to see any kind of resemblance between Ma Palagada and this farmer; the fact too that the big girl could have imagined the man’s little sister was his wife made them laugh the more.
“Don’t blame me,” said the big girl, defending herself. “The Owerri people marry their wives like that, and then come to the market for her to be equipped.”
Okolie nodded. “Not just Owerri people. Many of our people do it.” To himself he said, Is it not almost the same as I am now about to do to my little sister, young as she is—marry her away to this woman relative? So why condemn the Owerri people or anyone else who does that kind of thing.
As a gesture of affection, and to help assuage his guilt, he pulled Ogbanje Ojebeta on to his lap and they sat there on the bench, watching the bustle and jostle of the market. He wondered why God had created so many people, and for what reason. And why some of the people created could be as rich as this Ma Palagada and her husband and others as poor as those in Ibuza where he came from, so many farmers all struggling for survival. Then the thought occurred to him that after his Uloko dance he could consider becoming a trader himself. After all, he was going to get some money from Ma Palagada today. His imaginings were not disappointed as he watched the number of customers who came to the stall to buy yards and yards of cloth. One or two even bought the handkerchiefs which the girls were making from scraps of material. The big girl mended some torn cloths for a few people; and all the time the customers paid money, all money. Yes, he was going to get so much money for his sister.
He drew the tired little girl Ojebeta closer to him, and she put her head on his broad shoulder, trusting him as any sister would trust her brother, her only visible relative.