“You will find your
knicker inside the portmanteau in the bedroom. Drink the rest of the
ovaltine in that tumbler in the pantry, and don’t forget your nib in
the parlour before you rush off to school.” This model sentence
portrays what could have been said by any mother in Nigeria to a
schoolchild on a morning in 1953.
Knicker,
portmanteau, tumbler, pantry, nib and parlour – whatever happened to
these words which were in common usage half a century ago, but are now
almost extinct, perhaps with the exception of the rural areas in the
East? I must leave the assignment to the many philologists in Nigeria.
Does anybody still
recall what a “nib” is, or a pen-holder, or an ink pot and blotting
paper to clear the mess we made as scholars learning how to write? I
look at my laptop now and remember what Dad’s type-writer looked like!
The noise it made, almost like a giant insect! It was that time of the
year again in 1952, when Mr English’s Morris Oxford car gathered dust
in an open garage and the whydahs fought and fussed around seeds and
blades of grass growing rapidly in the rainy season. Whenever Mr
English was away in the northern summer on annual vacation, some other
Englishman came to “act” for him. My father always warned me that not
all white men came from England as I believed, and that there were
people called Scots, Welsh and Irish who spoke English too and shared
the British Isles. It was all confusing to me anyway. I only recall his
supplementing comment that the English didn’t think much of the Irish.
The principal of
Owerri Government Secondary School (OGSS) at the time was indeed a Mr
English – a tall, hefty man who paced about the compound like a
regimental sergeant-major. His deputy in the summer of 1952, one Mr
Amiss fabricated an act of colonial arrogance and brutality, which I
remember very well to this day. We had a short break at the primary
school, an annex to the secondary section. Jideofor and I were as
always rough-handling each other, shadow boxing and wrestling on the
school lawn. As Mr Amiss drove past in his small Austin, my friend
posed in a deliberate, threatening boxing stance, threw a few punches
in the air in the direction of the white man’s car, even though he was
a good 20 yards from it.
The vengeful colonialist
It was not a good
idea! To our horror Mr Amiss jammed a foot on the brakes, flung the car
door wide open and chased after Jideofor while I watched, petrified at
the possible outcome. Eventually, in a matter of seconds he caught up
with him and dragged the poor little fellow to our headmaster’s office.
Jideofor could not have been more than seven years old at the time. I’m
not sure what transpired there, but the school alarm bells were rung at
once, and all of about 200 pupils rushed to the assembly hall. Mr Amiss
requested that Jideofor be stripped naked, which happened; then that
the headmaster flog him in the presence of the entire school.
Mr Akpuaka, our
headmaster, a man from Abagana unequivocally refused to do this. There
was a slight stalemate; Amiss and Akpuaka glaring at each other, blue
eyeballs against brown eyes. As the two men squared up to each other,
the hall was drowned in a cryptic silence in which the drop of a pin
could have been detected! In the meantime the culprit, my friend
Jideofor lay prostrate on a table, twitching like a living organism in
the final throes of death, pleading, crying, “Please, Sir, I beg Sir, I
won’t do it again!” It was like the minutes before an execution. Mr
Amiss was unforgiving.
Finally, a
compromise was reached: another teacher was to administer the corporal
punishment, not the headmaster. Up came Mr Amaechi who walloped eight
strokes of the cane over Jideofor’s bare buttocks! A satisfied Mr Amiss
walked to his car like a robot, an indignant Mr Akpuaka made for his
office, and the rest of school and staff disappeared into the
classrooms.
A remarkable
advantage of childhood is the total absence of consciousness of who you
are and a complete innocence of where the world wants you to belong. My
parents sometimes chatted about what they called “settler colonies,”
meaning Kenya, Rhodesia and South Africa, and what was known as “colour
bar” in them. It was all Greek to me! I had no idea what racial bias
was at the time. I simply saw the white people in Nigeria as foreigners
who would go home one day, and admired them a lot. Because we lived for
the most part in government reserved areas, and had Europeans as
neighbours, I often went to their houses to play with their children
and wondered why in some cases their parents chased us away. When my
father came back from the United Kingdom in 1953, his white friends in
Nigeria became less than before he left.
He held us back
from playing with white children, with the simple philosophy, “Don’t go
to the houses of people who don’t come to yours.” I tried to protest
then, but now I understand what my father implied, and the wisdom in it.
Aloysius Akpuaka,
son of our brave headmaster who stood up to Mr Amiss in the Jideofor
saga, later joined the Nigerian Army and was in fact Ibrahim
Babangida’s course mate. He fought bravely in the Biafran War, and was
demobilized afterwards in the lowly rank of a major.
Aloy, with his
Pakistani wife, went into growing strawberries, grapes and other fruits
for a living in Jos, when he was fed up with the miserly contracts he
got from former military colleagues who had risen to become generals of
the Nigerian Army.
The last time I met
him, we talked a lot about all the wild fruits we simply grabbed off
the branches and ate in the compounds and forests around Owerri, not
minding whether they could have been poisonous or not. I now realize
that a great many of these plants may not be biologically extinct, but
definitely lost forever in Nigeria, as a result of senseless
infrastructure development and deforestation.
The British had
fruit orchards, palm plantations and ornamental trees in every one of
the government schools they established in their colonies. Growing up
in these environments was not far from living in Eden Gardens! On a
single day, I could eat guavas, an avocado or mango, pitanga cherries
or a ripe pine apple, straight from the orchard. I kept a pen-knife
constantly in my pocket for the purpose.
Male resistance to female advancement
In the 1940s, my
father was what they called an ATT, African Travelling Teacher, and
travel he did on an Enfield motor-cycle that roared through the dirt
road like an angry dragon. Later in the 1950s, the family practically
led a nomadic life, being moved around from one school or college to
the other – in Owerri, Ogoja, Uyo, Onitsha, Aba and Opobo.
It was during this
period that I experienced at first hand some problems of gender
equality, as manifested by the rights of women. My mother was a teacher
in the employment of the government, just like my father, but only a
grade level lower. The family worried about my father’s promotions, but
not over my mother’s. My parents were always going to Enugu, the
capital, to plead with the director of education for Eastern Nigeria,
C.T. Quinn-Young and his successor, J.E.H. White to ensure that their
postings were to identical destinations. They did not always get a
sympathetic hearing, but it was the Nigerians unfortunately who
complained, even aloud that it was “unfair” for both man and wife to be
earning salaries.
Clearly my mother
was hated by the men in the education department of Eastern Nigeria,
most of whom had illiterate wives that remained at home all day. Worse
still for such males, these unfortunate women admired my mother
immensely and came round to ask for her advice and intervention on the
education of their daughters. I recall how often my mother went to
remonstrate with men who refused to send their daughters to school.
There are quite a number of educated women from the East today, and I
know who was in the vanguard of the long processes that got them to
their present status.
