THERE IS SOMETHING THAT OGBU-OJAH DIDN’T TELL US
Sometimes I wish my grandmother had had the time to tell us Ojahdili the great wrestler’s tragic story from the point of view of Ogbu-Ojah, his legendary flautist. For this praise singer it was who, once he wet his pursed lips and hunched his shoulders in a crouch (as flautists were wont to do), would unleash an intoxicating melody that buoyed his master’s spirit, waking in massive convulsive ripples the most tired, injured or atrophied muscle and sinews. It was said that even birds paused in mid-flight upon hearing this tune, several dropping right out of the sky to their utter astonishment. It was also said that it tended to rain birds (not cats and dogs), whenever Ogbu-Ojah let loose his:
Ojahdili!
Ngolo di golo di gongongo!
So it was little wonder that Ojahdili soon ran out of men who could defeat him in a wrestling bout, and stumbled upon the idea of travelling to the spirit world. For was it not common knowledge that no man had been known to defeat the spirits? Was this even Ojahdili’s idea in the first place? I must have been too awestruck or frightened at the prospect of wrestling with a spirit to broach this important question to Grandma.
So we were told that it was Ogbu-Ojah’s magic sweet melody that, despite the reservations and admonishment of Ojahdili’s parents and friends, ferried his master through mmiri na asaa, agu na asaa, forded seven great rivers, across seven dangerous forests, to Iton-Kom. That mythical land, situated smack between the land of living and the land of the dead, was where the dead freely interacted with the living, and animals were known to mingle and talk with both man and spirits.
It was still this same Ogbu-Ojah’s sweet melody that saw Ojahdili through the first victory with the one-headed spirit, and through to his legendary defeat of the spirit world’s wrestling champion, the much-dreaded ten-headed spirit.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would have loved to ask my grandmother why Ogbu-Ojah and Ojahdili did not stop after the legendary defeat of the ten-headed wrestling champion of the spirit world. Didn’t they notice the conspiratorial look between the spirit lords? Didn’t they hear the lull, and feel the chill when the spirits demanded one last fight? Were they not puzzled when the new challenger produced by the spirit lords was a puny-looking, emaciated spirit that stumbled into the wrestling arena with a drunken gait?
Though Ojahdili must have been inebriated by his recent victories, for some reason I have always believed that Ogbu-Ojah knew that this was it, that this was that moment when a man would be finally and irredeemably broken. So why didn’t he stop his master? Why did he have to unleash his melody once again? For he must have known that even this would be of no use.
He had barely gotten to the second stanza when, in a blur, his master was whizzed through the air, and landed spread-eagled on his back in a deafening thud. When the dust settled, Ogbu-Ojah’s eyes were tortured with the strangest of sights—the uncanny image of the puny-looking spirit straddling his master’s muscular chest, pinning both his massive arms with what looked like thin air. In the ultimate humiliation, he had stuffed the once-great Ojahdili’s mouth with clods of dirt, dry leaves and what appeared to be maggot-filled faeces…
I remember the expression on my grandmother’s face when I asked who the puny-looking spirit was, mouth agape and in awe, the whispered question barely escaping my lips. The look she gave me was as if to say, was it not evident? It was his chi, she responded with a sigh, his personal god. For no man, however great or strong, can defeat his personal god… no man.
Somehow I was left with an inkling, this feeling that Ogbu-Ojah knew, as soon as he set eyes on the puny spirit, that it was Ojahdili’s personal god. So why didn’t he stop him? Why did he have to play the flute that one last time? Had he become tired of Ojahdili’s belligerence, his quest to conquer? I doubt this, because without his rousing melody, Ojahdili would never go into battle—never. Or was this pure and simple envy, anya ufu? Did he want to see Ojahdili fail, his master humiliated. Did he? Hmmnnn… there was something that Ogbu-Ojah wasn’t telling us.
Things only became clearer when grandmother told us the story about Udene the vulture and his affair.
I never really understood how a vulture could have an affair with a human being. How? That is, assuming that ili enyi meant having such an affair.
Growing up in the village, there were so many euphemisms to mask what adults got up to behind closed doors. One of the things I noted quite early in life was that these dysphemism helped to differentiate between what sex meant to adults and to children. So, while for the older ones, sex or an affair was referred to as ili enyi, as different from ime enyi (enjoying friendship as opposed to being friends), for us children it was represented by just one sufficiently ominous dark phrase, ife alulu ani, implying a bad, dark, terrible and dirty activity. Thus if during the monthly egwu onwa moonlight games a boy was caught wriggling on top of a girl, it would earn the erring child a visit from the neighbourhood disciplinarian, Nne Godi.
Godwin’s septuagenarian mother had racked up quite a reputation for herself due to her legendary leg-lock or ipa. Long before Americans invented water boarding, Nne Godi would imprison an erring child between her legs and smear hot chilli pepper on or into their privates, depending on the sex. Suffice to say that Nne Godi’s visitations were enough to deter all but the lion-hearted neighbourhood child from exploring ife alulu ani.
So how could I, under these Guantanamo Bay-like, life-threatening circumstances seek clarification for the meaning of ili enyi from any of the adults without incurring the wrath of Nne Godi? How? Unless I asked the slightly older children during the next ’egwu onwa session. Unfortunately, the next session coincided with my preparations for the annual Federal Government College Common Entrance examination into the country’s unity schools.
So, that moonlight-bathed night, when a horde of neighbourhood children came calling at my heavily fortified home’s, padlocked and chained wrought iron gate, it was my stern-voiced father who bellowed, “Rapu nu ya. O na agu akwukwu.” Leave him alone. He is studying.
Of course that didn’t deter the bellicose children from composing a spur-of-the-moment derisive song for me:
Jekwu puta egwu onwa!
Kpom kpom!
Okuku aka anabara ina alaru ula!
Kpom kpom!
“Jekwu come out and play! How come you have gone to bed long before the chickens have come home to roost?”
All I could do was to bury my head in shame (and my Larcombs mathematics textbook) as I struggled to figure out the square root of five and six. I couldn’t recall which one was more devastating, the shame of the mockery from my friends or the fear of not having a clue to the required square root.
Grandma came to my rescue the very next day, as providence forced my father off to Lagos for an emergency business meeting—a trip that at the minimum, would typically last one week. However a concession had to be made in order not to incur his wrath. I studied up until the time for the egwu onwa games, but rather than release me to go play with the neighbourhood children (and possibly earn me an opportunity to sneak into Nne Onyewe’s cocoyam farm and get up to no good under the canopy of swaying broad luxuriant cocoyam leafs), she brought out and spread her ute raffia mat on the cemented courtyard and invited us all to come join her for another session of akuko iro.
For those who don’t know, Grandma was a repository of, what appeared to me at the time to be, thousands of folklores, oral tradition akuko iros that had been handed down from generation to generation. It was acknowledged that if she ever invited you to listen to an iro, you had better put your butt down on that raffia mat and listen attentively, for you were most likely never again going to have the opportunity to hear that story from a storyteller as gifted as her.
It was said that Ogbu-Ojah slunk back home from Iton-kom, that mythical land situated smack between the land of living and the land of the dead. It was known that Ogbu-Ojah’s magical sweet melody had ferried the town’s champion wrestler Ojahdili to the land of the spirits, to challenge the spirit champions to a wrestling match. It was also known that Ogbu-Ojah’s sweet melody had seen Ojahdili through the first victory with the one-headed spirit and through to his ultimate demise at the hand of his personal god, his chi. Defeat in the land of spirits meant death in the land of the living, so it was only Ogbu-Ojah who was allowed home through the portal that separated the land of the living and that of the dead.
No one of age, inclusive of the pubescent, would ever forget the day that Ogbu-Ojah returned from Iton-Kom. For the first time in living memory, the town crier beat his wooden gong in broad daylight, summoning all village elders and Ozo titleholders to an emergency meeting at the home of the oldest living citizen in the village. The outcome of their deliberations was a tightly held secret.
What the rest of the village recalled was that early the next morning, long before the first cock’s crow, roughly at the time the first guinea fowl awakens, a scuffle was heard in Ogbu-Ojah’s compound. Ogbu-Ojah’s proclamations of “kedu ife me?” (What did I do?) rang through the early dawn air, followed by grunts and moans of what appeared to be a struggle between Ogbu-Ojah and several men.
It was later known that Ndi Ichie, the village elders and Ozo titleholders, had decreed that Ogbu-Ojah be ostracised for oso-ochu, manslaughter-related exile, for actions capable of or leading to the death of a brother… a ten-year sojourn in a foreign land or ajo-ofia, the evil forest. His mystical flute was to be hurled into the Ori Ngene, the local river deity, never to be played or touched again by man, for it was believed to be from the spirit world. His name was to be proscribed, and his very existence was to be represented by the name of the foulest of beasts.
It is said that when one of the emissaries sent to carry out Ogbu-Ojah’s sentence threw the flute into Ori Ngene, a hand was thrust forth from the depths of the river just before it could hit the river’s surface. With what sounded like a sonic boom, the flute was caught, and the Ojah was slowly and delicately lowered into the river’s depths. As the flute sank, it let loose one of the most beautiful melodies ever heard by man. The young men stood transfixed by the bank of the river and until today have refused to talk about other eerie activities they observed that night. Two of them were known to have become mad a short while after this mission.
All assumed it was to be the last to be heard of Ogbu-Ojah.
Prior to his death, Ojahdili had four male children, named after the four market days in the igbo commercial calendar: Eke, Afo, Orie, and Nkwo. It was no surprise that none of his children took up wrestling. In fact, the town council proscribed wrestling after Ojahdili’s death, for what other profession could intoxicate a man to the point of challenging his chi? His beautiful wife, Oso-di-eme, was inconsolable. After the death of her husband, she began to take long trips into the forest, abandoning her four children to their fate. Sometimes she spent months on end before returning to her matrimonial home. It was rumoured that she had gone stark raving mad. Others speculated that she constantly journeyed to the borders of Iton-Kom, out of grief and hoping against hope that she would be allowed through to the land of the spirits to bring back her husband.
So, when she became pregnant two years after the death of Ojahdili, the village gossip ecosystem exploded in a flurry of hypothesis. However, nobody was willing to incur the wrath of the spirits, for was it not common knowledge that Oso-di-eme constantly visited the land of the spirits? And, by extension, was it not logical that she had been impregnated by a spirit, or by her dead husband who, by the very fact that he was dead was a spirit as well? So, though the gossips and speculations boiled and bubbled over, no one ever dared challenge Oso-di-eme to her face.
Oso-di-eme had a baby girl and named her Ifesinachi, a child bestowed by a personal god. The villagers were not that accommodating, and preferred the more mundane and vindictive Nwa ajilija, a child born of gravel and dust, of unknown parentage, and in essence a bastard.
It was said that Nwa ajilija grew to be a beautiful young girl with the most melodious voice known to anyone, living or dead. By the time she was three, her voice would be heard by the horde of women doing their laundry at the banks of Ori Ngene, her tunes hummed to by the sweating men working in Oma-agwu (the fertile farms situated far within the forest), and skipped to by her fellow children as they played in the dirt in the village obodo-ezi playground.
All this while, Oso-di-eme continued her regular forays into the forest. This time she was forced to always strap Nwa ajilija to her back, as there was no one with whom to leave her, since her industrious elder children spent the whole day at the farm.
Perhaps Oso-di-eme should have listened to the villagers, who all believed that Nwa ajilija was a child from the spirit world. One day, upon their return from one of the regular forays into the forest, Nwa ajilija asked her mother, “Mama, who is this man that you go to visit in the forest?”
Oso-di-eme stopped dead in her tracks, her hand frozen in mid-air. The raffia fan she was using to whip up the flames in the hearth for the evening meal was suspended like the wing of a bird transfixed by Ogbu-Ojah’s enchanting melody. Oso-di-eme swept the kitchen with her gaze, looking for the source of the adult voice, the source of her query.
Her attention barely rested on Nwa ajilija until the child angrily barked, “What are you looking for? Can’t you see the person talking to you?”
There was an eternity of silence as Oso-di-eme stared at Nwa ajilija, a stare that was returned defiantly. In that moment, Oso-di-eme realised how old Nwa ajilija’s eyes were—far older than her three years, far older than her mother and even older than the oji tree in the village square, that was alleged to be older than the oldest man in the village.
No one knew at what point the idea occurred to Oso-di-eme but what everyone seemed to concur to was that she should have known that the little girl could see through her actions and read her innermost thoughts. Oso-di-eme flung Nwa ajilija on her back and took off in the direction of the Ori Ngene River. What happened next was never heard of or seen in the village, and it was confirmed that it never happened again. From the child strapped to Oso-di-eme’s back emerged the most melodious and sonorous of songs, a call for help to her brothers working in the faraway Oma-agwu farms. It was said that even birds paused in mid-flight upon hearing this tune, several dropping right out of the sky to their utter astonishment:
Oh Ori Ngene!
Eke, my dear brother!
Oh Ori Ngene!
She wants to drown me in Ori Ngene!
Oh Ori Ngene!
A despicable wild beast is dating our mother!
Oh Ori Ngene!
Nwa ajilija kept on singing, drawing on all her strength to call on her siblings. It was said that the birds of the forest took up this song. The trees gustily sang its refrain, the blades of grass, even the grasscutters and guinea fowl were not left out, until the song reached the ears of her brothers in their far away farm.
It was said that upon hearing Nwa ajilija’s plea ferried on the very wind itself, her able-bodied siblings, Eke, Afo, Orie and Nkwo, threw down their hoes and cutlasses, and immediately raced towards the banks of Ori Ngene. They barely made it in time to see a wild-eyed, clearly delirious Oso-di-eme on the verge of throwing Nwa ajilija into the turbulent depths of Ori Ngene.
“She is having an affair with Udene the vulture!” screamed Nwa ajilija. “Ya na Udene na elie enyi,” an allegation that Oso-di-eme did not bother denying, aside from an almost involuntary shaking of her head.
It was also said that given that Ori Ngene, was usually the final arbiter in matters such as this this, Nwa ajilija’s siblings took the unanimous decision to request the river deity to determine whether it was right for their mother to have an affair with the despicable wild beast Udene. As soon as this question was put to the river, Afo cast both Oso-di-eme and Nwa ajilija into the roaring currents of the river. Just before both of them could hit the river’s surface, a hand was thrust forth from Ori Ngene’s depths, pulling down a screaming Oso-di-eme into the bowels of the river and throwing Nwa ajilija back on shore. It was a jubilant Nwa ajilija who was carried home shoulder high by her siblings.
I remember the look on my grandmother’s face when I finally summoned the courage to ask her the question, “Mama, but how could Oso-di-eme have an affair with the despicable Udene the wild beast? How can a human and a vulture have an affair?”
I also remember the look she gave me as if to say, was it not evident? Ndi Ichie decreed that Ogbu-Ojah be ostracised for oso-ochu, his name to never to be mentioned again and his very existence to be represented by the name of the foulest and most despicable of beasts, the vulture. Oso-di-eme’s affair had been with the man who had led her husband to his death and as for Ojahdili, she mused, no man, however strong, can challenge his chi to a wrestling match.
Jekwu Ozoemene holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Lagos and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from the University of Leicester. He is currently studying for a Doctorate of Business Administration in Banking and Finance at the University of Zambia / Binary University College, Malaysia. He is the author of Shadows of Existence: An Anthology of Poetry (2009), and a collection of plays, The Anger of Unfulfillment: Three Plays Out of Nigeria (2011). One of his poems appeared in the recently released Poems for a Century: An Anthology on Nigeria, edited by Tope Omoniyi.