The people of Ibuza, living off the land, were poor. But when it came to claiming lost relatives few nations of the earth could be more generous with their welcome than Ibuza people.
The fact that Ojebeta had left home when she was only seven did not dim the warmth she knew she would receive from her people. She was right. After crossing to the other side of the river, she asked for the Ibuza stalls; these were not hard to find, for they sold mainly akpu, a pulp made from cassava, and palm oil. The markings on her face did the rest. Right there in the market she acquired tens of relatives. Women from her very own homestead in Umuisagba came and hugged her. The everyday clothes she was wearing were like velvet compared with the rags and faded outfits these women wore to market. Another great difference was in the way they talked which seemed brusque and loud to Ojebeta now. Also their skin, even that of young girls, seemed burnt, dark and rough, or dry and lacking in moisture. However, their open hearts compensated for these small defects.
They bought and gave her all kinds of food, and even though she assured them several times that she did not want any she was pressed to eat some yam, roasted and soaked in its skin and then soaked in palm oil till it dripped. But at least for the sake of the old woman who had bought it for her Ojebeta soon learned to like it. The woman had introduced herself as the senior wife of Ukabegwu; she was very wrinkled, with tobacco-dark teeth and a neck in which so many nerves and sinews stood out in relief. She reminded Ojebeta of what she had used to do for her when she was little, and, with a rather unpleasantly harsh laugh, told her many things about her mother Umeadi.
“She would have been glad to see her daughter back from olu oyibo, from working with the white people. You would have been her pride and joy, with such smooth skin and such modest and polished manners. Oh, your aunt will be insane with happiness. Oh, they will be glad to know that felenza did its worst but did not kill off all our people….” On and on she went. Then she joked, “Ogbanje Ojebeta, where did you leave your ogbanje charms?”
“I have them with me. They guided me. They reminded me of home.”
And the senior wife of Ukabegwu said, in great joy: “You have outgrown those your friends from the other world. They will never worry you any more. But you should keep your charms. Your father faced death to get them for you.”
They would not call Ojebeta’s stay with Ma Palagada anything other than a good thing. For had she not returned with such fine manners and clothes, just like the older men who went to seek their fortune in the white man’s jobs, in olu oyibo. No, it was to olu oyibo that she too had gone, not just to Otu Onitsha. That was an understatement.
In Ibuza, though there were at the time nothing like newspapers or bush radio, people had ways of spreading rumours fast. So it was no surprise to the little group that made their way from Asaba to see five young men and four women on their way to meet them. They all met in front of a big hut which was a mission station, newly built by some people who called themselves the Church Missionary Society and who talked about a new God called Jesu Christi.
Uteh, the senior daughter of Obi Okwuekwu, let go her tongue. She sang the praises of all their ancestors right down to Ogbanje Ojebeta, the daughter of Okwuekwu Oda. She had a pieec of nzu—sacrificial chalk—in her hand, and she sprinkled some on each homestead god or goddess as they passed; she also left them pieces of kolanut. When they came to Umuodafe, a village at the extreme edge of Ibuza, she said to their god:
“Afo, have this chalk, and eat this piece of kolanut, for my daughter who I thought had died is back. Afo, eat kolanut….”
She went on thus until they reached Ojebeta’s people. It was then that Ojebeta found out that she had really not forgotten the lay of her homeland. She could see the market now, though it was smaller than it had been in her imagination. She saw other huts where she remembered her father’s used to be, and knew that other relatives had taken the position. To her people land was a communal holding. You came during your lifetime and built your own hut, and when you died your hut was pulled down and burned and all your wealth buried with you. So the land would be cleared ready for another generation. In Ibuza, people came and people went, but the communal land remained. It was a foolish person, therefore, who did not take care of his father’s ancestral holding, for it was to there he would eventually return. Nobody owned land, for how could anyone own land, when you could not even own the air you breathed and the water you drank?
It was then that she asked, “Okolie, my brother—where is he?”
“Okolie has gone to olu oyibo, a long time ago, and so has your brother Owezim before him. They are in a place called Lagos. Your elder brother works in a big ship—as big as a village—and now he has four sons and a girl. Okolie…Okolie—we don’t know much about Okolie…. But,” added Uteh more brightly, “Okolie is still living. Life is more important than anything.”
“I cannot stay here in Umuisagba, then, since Okolie is away, and my eldest brother has gone to a white man’s job.”
“Come and live with us. Don’t you know that the great-grandfather of your father and my great-grandfather were of the same mother and father?” said old Ukabegwu, whose wrinkled wife had announced the arrival of their new relative. “So how can you think you have no father, when I am here? I hold your family ofo, the symbol of worship for your family; if your brother Owezim should die, your bride price will come to me.”
“Nothing of the sort is happening,” said Uteh. “I know that I am a woman and a daughter in this town, but I am the only living daughter of Obi Okwuekwu. Ojebeta’s father and I had the same mother and father.”
“But you are a woman!” shouted Ukabegwu’s senior wife. “How is it that you want to inherit the girl? It is not your right!” In Ibuza women were usually more conservative than men.
Uteh knew that if she pursued the argument with force, she would lose Ojebeta for the second time. So she lowered her voice.
“I don’t want her bride price. I only want her to come and rest with me for a while. But if during that time you were to need her to help you with something you wished to do, of course she would come here and help. For who is her father if not Ukabegwu?”
“Our people say that argument is like an old rag: if you dump it here it stays here, and if you dump it there it stays there. That is good talk. Uteh the daughter of Obi Okwuekwu. Let the girl stay with you. If there is anything that her duty calls her to come and help us out with, then she should come quickly.’”
This minor argument which had its origins in good faith might have marred Ojebeta’s arrival; but it was tactfully quenched, and the dispute in Ukabegwu’s senior wife’s mind was suppressed, though not completely successfully. For there was a saying in Ibuza, that those who have people are wealthier than those with money; a young girl of sixteen, in her prime, attractive and strong, would have been a boon to a family such as the Ukabegwus. She could help to fetch water from the stream which was about three miles from the village, she could clay the house, fetch the family akpu, and she could even do some trading before she was married away to a husband. And when she married the chief woman who had looked after her would have a little share of a pound for her troubles. Food was not all that plentiful, but if one could work hard one would not starve in the dry season. As for the harvest season, there were more yams thrown away then and plantains given to the goats than people could possibly consume. The trouble was that people had no means of keeping the perishable food so that it would last them through the whole year.
Eze, Uteh’s husband, was thrilled with their luck. Apart from the work she could do, they actually loved Ojebeta, and she was to spend the most enjoyable part of her adolescence with them. There were so many things she had to re-learn.
On the very next day after her arrival, her aunt was glad to see that she had already been to the stream and returned, just as she used to do at the Palagada house in Otu. Uteh called to her fondly.
“Ma’am,” Ojebeta responded from the other side of their hut.
“What is this?” Uteh exclaimed in shocked tones. “We may not have been to olu oyibo, but here we are still people, not goats. Why is it that you answer like that when I call you? What does it mean? And when my husband called you last night you told him, ‘Sah!’ as if you were driving away a snake. What do you mean by it?”
Ojebeta patiently explained to her that it was a custom among the people with whom she had been living for the past nine years. Uteh understood though she still did not like it. She told Ojebeta to stop it and answer “Eh!” in the usual way when people called her. But Ojebeta found it difficult to eradicate such a long-standing habit, particularly one which had been formed so young; and she became jokingly known as the daughter of Uteh who answered “Mah” and “Sah”.
By Ibuza standards, and by the yardstick of her age, Ojebeta was a rich girl. She gave ten shillings of her money to her big mother Uteh to keep for her, and spent three shillings and sixpence to buy gallons of palm oil. On market days a group of them would take their oil across the Niger to the Otu waterside and sell it there for five shillings. They would pay two pennies for the ferry fare, with a shilling they would do esusu, a kind of saving, and then they would spend the rest buying soap, fish for their parents, and a head of tobacco for the old people. On Eke days, it was Ojebeta’s duty to take all the dirty clothing to the stream to wash it by beating it against the wooden blocks that were there for the purpose.
All in all she was growing into quite a sophisticated young woman of Ibuza who did not have to carry the soul-killing akpu for a living. Sometimes she went to the stream to fetch some akpu as food, but she did not have to sell it to make ends meet. Palm oil selling was not at all a bad occupation. Many people could not afford to take it up since you needed to have a little deposit to buy the oil from the local housewife, to buy your “galawa” which was the empty kerosene tin you put the oil in, and to buy some clean clothes. So palm-oil sellers were a class apart: the very young and the independent, who did not need to make much profit to survive.
Akpu was different. Every farmer practised shifting cultivation; and when a farmer shifted from one farm to a new one, he invariably allowed cassava to grow in the old farm. Cassava thrived in almost any soil, and it did not need tending. The housewife had to go to the farm to dig out the cassava roots, carry the tubers for a mile or so, then soak them in the stream in that part of the water specially divided into squares for women to soak their cassava. It would be left there for three or four days until it was fully fermented and beginning to turn into pulp. Then the housewife would put the pulp into a bag and carry it home, heavy and wet and dripping its milky water. At home, on the night before market day, she would then tie this cassava pulp, still very damp, onto a special akpu basket, piling the basket high with the pulp, securing it with banana strings, and covering the top with smoked banana leaves. Women from Ibuza carrying their akpu to Asaba looked dwarfed under the load of their baskets; some women would even carry two or three of these heavy baskets. After a while the women smelled so much of akpu that you could easily tell a habitual akpu carrier from the more privileged women who traded in palm oil, kernels or lighter commodities like ogili matches and cigarettes. The attraction of akpu was that one needed no deposit; any fool with plenty of energy could do it. There was money in it, too, for you could sell a basket for as much as a shilling in Asaba; so if you carried three or four baskets you had four shillings’ gain, just like that.
Soon after Ojebeta arrived in Ibuza she found her age-group; she was told she belonged to “Ogu Aya Okolo”—“Okolo’s war”. Selling akpu was looked down on as old-fashioned by that group born during Okolo’s war. But the older married women retorted, “You will soon be like us,” and they were probably right. There was an Ibuza saying that young people think that when they grow up they will reach the sky and touch the stars; but after a while they would realise how far away the sky is.
Ojebeta still maintained her enthusiastic involvement in Christianity. Many Ibuza girls went to the C.M.S. church then, attracted by the songs, especially the translated Ibo songs. Ojebeta was so devout that she was encouraged by the white vicar to attend baptism classes. This was one of the issues that caused minor clashes between her and Uteh and Eze.
Uteh, having watched her for a long time one day doing some kind of sewing with her hands, said: “Ojebeta, what type of man do you think you will marry? You do not know how to farm, and when people call you, you still answer as if you were a goat. Now you start going to this funny place you call church. What is wrong with the religion of your fathers? What is bad in making sacrifices to your dead mother and father and to your personal god?”
Eze stopped lapping up his soup noisily from the wooden bowl his wife had given him, and added. “Oh, she is young. When people are young they think it is something new to be young. Wait until she becomes a woman, that is when you will have to tell her a thing or two. Just be very careful about this new religion, otherwise an old farmer will cut a lock of your hair and you will have to marry him.”
“I think, in-law, that is a very bad thing to do to any girl. Suppose I did not wish to marry him? I would like to marry in church and wear a long white dress on the day of my marriage. And I’d like some brass band to play music for me to go to church on the day.”
Uteh burst out laughing. “I went to Onitsha some time ago,” she said, “and I saw a group of people playing and beating a funny kind of drum, and they were blowing some shiny things—is that what you call brass band? And the young girl in white I saw there, who looked like a ghost and walked like a sleep-walker—was she the new bride? What is wrong with our own music, and our own way of a girl going to her husband’s house?”
“It’s the work of the devil. The Bible and the Catechism books say so. I must be married in church.”
“This church thing does not bother me too much,” Eze said by way of compromise. “But if I wanted to go to church I would go to the ‘Father’ ones. They have more magic, and their outfits when they do their performance resemble those of our head juju priests. They really command respect. And at the end of the performance you are given some alcoholic drink—some people say it is the blood of someone, but those Fathers drink a lot of it. Eh, Ojebeta, why don’t you go to that one, instead of the poor one at Umuodafe, where people sing in the Ibo language? The Fathers speak a strange language of the gods. You may not understand it, but you can feel immediately that your chi is near when one of the Fathers starts his magical incantations.”
“Well, so you have been watching them, have you, Eze? You sound as though you have tasted the drink yourself, the way you talk,” Uteh admonished. Then, turning to Ojebeta she said, “It will be difficult for you to find a farmer who would go into all this church stuff with you. Few of our people go to olu oyibo, and those who have gone have always taken their wives with them. So you will have to start paying attention to those young farmers who come to meet you on your way from Asaba.”
So afraid was Ojebeta that all she had learned at Ma Palagada’s would be wasted that she prayed to God to send her an Ibuza man who had experience of the white man’s work and would know the value of what she had learned.
Meanwhile she and some of her friends still looked down on the other age-groups who carried akpu and who did not go to church; and even before they were baptised they all found it fashionable to take European names. So Ogbanje Ojebeta added the English name of Alice. Now if you called her just Ogbanje, or just Ojebeta, she would not answer; but if you said Ogbanje Alice, she would flash her snow-white teeth at you and greet you. It became a common type of occurrence in Ibuza at that time among those who wanted to show how modern they were. It was a little comical when even young people who did not go to church took on names so exotic to them that they could not even pronounce them. So you might hear a girl saying her names were “Kilisi, Ngbeke”—“Christy”, coupled uneasily with her original Ibo name which meant “born on Eke day”. The trend reached such a pass that people became shy of their native Ibuza names.
The irony was that the process would eventually come full circle and people would reject their English names; but that was to be in the days of Independence, after the end of colonialism. That was still in the future.