The odds were
stacked against any child with an educated mother in those days, and it
took a few days of primary school in 1951 to come to terms with that
perspective. The teacher had inquired why I did not have a “Christian
name.” “My young idiot, don’t you have an English name?”
I was sent to get a parent, to explain. That was not difficult. My mother was on the teaching staff at the school.
“He has to be
called Elijah or Jeremiah or Gabriel to sit in class?” asked my mother
politely, and then proceeded to lecture the teacher that most of these
names were in fact Jewish and had existed before the advent of
Christianity. Finally, my teacher was reminded that the school was
non-confessional and secular.
Like a whipped
puppy, Teacher backed down. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory which
could not be celebrated. The class felt sorry for our teacher; I became
ostracized, and thereafter my actions elicited comments from teachers
and pupils alike, “Just because your mother went to school, we won’t
have any rest here.”
Armed robbers had
not been born in those days, and I remember that doors and windows of
homes were often open at daytime. Reptiles, rodents and insects
therefore came and went as they pleased. Owerri was notorious for
snakes! It was nothing more than an administrative village at the time.
My father killed 35 snakes around the house in 1949 alone! He gutted
and preserved the slithering monsters in formalin for the laboratory of
the Government Secondary School. That he didn’t become a herpetologist,
or that none of the family died from snake venom is still a surprise to
me. On the way to school, I sometimes picked up the slough of a snake
as a trophy, or watched a viper slowly devour a toad. On such
occasions, I arrived late to be flogged by one of the sadistic
teachers. A photo album was carefully sequestered on one of the stools
in most family living rooms. While waiting to be served biscuits, kola
nuts and some orange squash or palm wine, the visitor pawed through
pictorial history of the host family: grim-looking ancestors, radiant
wedding photographs, the babies, relations and friends.
I became
fascinated with a rather strange photograph in our album – a black and
white shot, clearly showing the total eclipse of the sun in 1948. I had
been too tender to recall the exact event which sent the eastern
provinces into pandemonium! People were convinced the world had come to
an end! Some false prophets had misled many into that line of thinking.
There was also a
sepia monochromatic class print from Umuahia Government College with my
father and school friends in 1930: Imoke, Erokwu, Jaja Nwachukwu and
Okekpe sitting humbly with other scholars around Rev. Fisher, the
legendary first principal of the school.
Dr. Okekpe died
quite young in a plane crash around the forests of Benin in the late
1940s. The entire Eastern Nigeria never stopped mourning the fatality.
My family lost a great friend, and Nigeria one of its finest medical
practitioners. The death of a doctor in poor nations is always
devastating in the wider context, and sometimes I wonder how many lives
the brilliant doctor from Aba could have saved.
The mythical doctor
Perhaps the most
remarkable surgeon in the East was Margaret Nolan, an Irish nun at Anua
Catholic Hospital, near Uyo. In the 1950s, the myth surrounding her was
unbelievable. It was rumoured that her surgical skills was the direct
result of divine intervention. God appeared to Dr. Nolan, it was
whispered, before each operation to advice on what had to be done. It
was great clinical psychology. Patients had total faith in her and
travelled from all over the region for surgery under Dr. Nolan. A
seminal figure and star tourist attraction, non-patients came to Anua
just to catch a glimpse of this small Irish woman from the distance.
Doctors and
hospitals were rarities in colonial times. There was only one at the
general hospital, often the sole clinic in each town of the Eastern
Region. Besides the serial killer, malaria, Nigerians died like fruit
flies of easily preventable ailments. A fresh laceration requiring
anti-bacterial injections against tetanus could turn into a killer.
Diseases needing the simplest surgery, such as appendicitis were fatal
now and then. The popular anaesthetic was chloroform, from which
patients often did not wake up after surgery, due to inexact dosage.
In these more
modern times, Nigerians visit a “chemist”. In my childhood, it was the
dreaded “dispensary.” A dispenser, often male, unsmiling and
ill-tempered, happened to be a cross between nurse and pharmacist, a
no-nonsense jack of all medical trades, but expert in none. At the
dispensary, sores were washed in potassium permanganate and treated
with stinging iodine! The dispenser then wound a tight bandage, tying a
reef knot around paddings of cotton wool and lint.
For the
constipated, a laxative, cascara sagrada, could be purchased. However,
more immediate treatment meant the mechanical deployment of a simple
apparatus called an “enema” – a warm, soapy mixture pumped into the
large intestine, via a tube pushed into the rectum. And Boy, did it
work! In a matter of some silent minutes of tube withdrawal, the
resulting eruption had everyone in the room diving for cover! This was
colon cleansing at its best!
Most medication
came in liquid form, including the awfully-tasting quinine that did not
seem to do much about malaria. Enamel cups filled with a nasty, milky
liquid called mist alba were handed to patients suffering intestinal
bites of the common amoebic dysentery.
Message to the colonials
The world did not
end with the solar eclipse of 1948, as predicted. A year later, in
1949, 21 miners were shot dead by colonial police at the Iva Valley
colliery in Enugu. What did they do? They had been on strike. Mass
punishment was common in colonial times. The flow of coal, a vital
energy source to immediate post-war United Kingdom, was not to be
disrupted by any of His Majesty’s colonial subjects, including the
miners of the product, no matter what their grievances were. King
George VI sat on the throne at Buckingham Palace, and the slim Scot,
John Macpherson was Governor of Nigeria, living at the Marina in Lagos.
It was because of
coal that Port Harcourt had been built. The British wanted to send a
strong message – to sound it loud and clear that such insubordination
could not be tolerated.
Nnamdi Azikiwe and
his growing followership across Nigeria got the message and turned the
massacre at Enugu into political capital and strategy. Tall and
handsome, in terms of oratory Zik was a match for anyone alive. As
premier of the East, his opponent was a small, stubborn, British
regional governor, Clement Pleass. Mr Azikiwe’s protracted stay in the
United States did not exactly endear him to the British. He was not the
kind of man you saw drinking beer and playing golf with white people at
the recreation club.
Their counterblast
was to promote gossip through stooges that American degrees were
inferior; that Nigeria was not ripe for self-rule. The British invented
a ghost named, “Ibo domination” which would soon spread all over
Nigeria if Azikiwe became Nigeria’s president. On a daily basis, my
parents who were civil servants, exchanged notes on the latest
derogatory remarks their British bosses had made about Zik. I sensed
their dilemma because we were friends with the families of the district
officers, Messrs. Wethereal and Mann and the biologist and Principal of
Umuahia College, A.B. Cozens. Repeated attempts on Azikiwe’s life were
blamed by the ever suspicious Ibo on the British, something that could
not be discounted.
Clement Pleass was
not done with Azikiwe yet. There were more subtle ways of dealing with
this charismatic man. The British Government had been quietly
chronicling financial malpractices around Zik’s relationship with the
institution he founded – the African Continental Bank. In 1956, the
scandal burst into the famous Foster-Sutton Tribunal. For his defence,
Zik assembled an awesome team of British lawyers, including Lord
Ogmore, Mr. Shawcross and B.J. Mackenna. They did not save him. Nnamdi
Azikiwe was found guilty, but picked the option of calling for general
elections in the East rather than the disgrace of resignation.
In the middle of
the muddle, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip arrived on
a royal visit to Nigeria. The country came to a complete standstill!
While Nigerians welcomed the royal couple, the announcement came
through that the Gold Coast (Ghana) would be independent from colonial
rule in 1957. It was great news for Africa, but a slight shock in
Nigeria. We had been pipped to the tape by the Gold Coast. They had
done a better homework.
Confirmation came
on March 6, 1957 with that memorable midnight photograph of Kwame
Nkrumah, Komla Gbedemah and Kojo Botsio at the Accra Race Course,
declaring the birth of Ghana.
This article continues next week.
