TRAVELS w/P: Tales of Adventure Here & There

30/04/2013 Tuesday Tales

Driver Umoh’s story comes out in bursts and pauses of anger and silence like one might imagine the staccato sound of an AK47 firing off rounds, a sound eerily familiar to the storyteller. He can’t tell me his age when the story opens saying instead, “it was in nineteen hundred and sixty seven.” He was three years from meeting and marrying his wife. It was a time when he had two choices. He could join the Nigerian army and war against armed extremists or arm himself alongside extremists and kill anyone and everyone standing in the way of an independent Biafra. He chose the army.  Violent random killing in the name of Biafra was too much for Umoh to understand much less support. “They went into a village near my own and killed everyone – elders and men, women and babies and children…everyone. Bodies were everywhere. For a month I buried those people.” Horror carries in the hollow of his voice and the steely hard of his eyes. This is the petite gentle man I watched playing and cooing with a baby last week in delighted abandon. A proud father of many and grandfather of many more. A man still haunted by memories that would send most of us over the edge.

 Let’s talk about something happier I suggest, feeling guilty for having asked him about Biafra in the first place.

He tells me about the out-of-Calabar village weekend wedding for his nephew and how he showered the newlyweds with heaps of gifts including a kitchen tray, hair dryer and sewing machine.

Somehow we get talking about his own village. He’s the clan chief, complete with hat and walking stick and shoes. “I will bring my shoes to show you,” he offers, “they are very beautiful.”  No doubt.

He also tells of a jealous younger brother, a wicked wicked man identified by “the Church” as a deal maker with the devil. A man who sold Umoh’s land out from under him while he was away at work. A man who regularly threatens death on Umoh and those around if Umoh refuses to pay up the N10,000 or whatever wicked brother decides he needs to keep himself in beer. A man Umoh believes will one day successfully poison him just as his father and uncles were poisoned to death.

Iye. Nigeria is one weird weird world.

Sidebar: I have these itsy bitsy teeny weeny incredibly itchy bites showing up around my belly around to my back. Don’t know what they are or where they’re coming from. They seem especially aggravating at night. Bed bugs?