O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL

Wednesday December 23

Nigeria is said to have one of the highest populations of fervent faithful. Even the crows wear priest collars, a band of white at their throat.

As I write this carollers stroll just beyond the compound wall. Their voices rise in delicious harmony: “We wish you…a merry Christmas.” I love the subtle pause, a slight but noticeable difference from back home renditions.

The festive season here is not the same as the accepted norm in Canada. A couple of market stalls carry tacky plastic trinkets for kids, castoff toys that never made it under North American or European xmas trees and will probably break after a few hours of play. But I don’t see shoppers clambering for these things. Preferred gifts, if any are given, are the likes of yams and groundnuts and new cloth to dress women and children fineO.

At this time of year families gather in huge numbers. Most of the Nigerians I’ve come to know are one of five or seven or ten plus siblings. Add in extended families and you’ve got a major brood. Christmas day is all about going to church for three or more hours of halleluiahs and hymns, then for some hosting guests or for most carrying on with the daily grind. I’m surprised to learn vendors in my neighbourhood expect to be open by mid-afternoon the 25^th though I’m told items will be four-fold the regular price.

The real festivities come towards the New Year when masses board public buses or pile into beat up Audis and Peugots or sparkling new Mercedes and Prado SUVs to head to their homestead villages. It’s here that storytelling revives around outdoor kitchen fires. Traditions and memories regale children, songs are sung, praises are given to the Lord Jesus Amen! and thanks offered up for whole roasted goats and bowls of egasi soup. Gallons of palm wine and cases of Malta wash it all down.

As a voyeur, it’s refreshing.  Crude commercialism has long worn away any enamour of Christmas getting, giving way instead to relishing the season the way it’s celebrated Nigerian style: surrounded by family, close friends and delicious foods. Though I’m far away from my daja’s Leah and Kaleigh, my parents, my brothers and their families, and my kinship sisters Elaine, Leah (with a soft e) and Pat their spirits transcend oceans and time zones to buoy my own.

In a handful of days five guests will arrive from Illorin, Lagos and Abuja. Plastic cones of fresh roasted cashews bought roadside in Benue state are wrapped as gifts for each. I’ve decorated with cuttings from plants I can’t name. The house sparkles after spending much of the weekend mopping concrete floors with bleach and leftover laundry water, wiping grime and dust from shelves, kitchen counters, toilet and sinks, and scrubbing away bits of this and that from the fridge.

Tomorrow it’s to the hairdresser for braiding. I’m going blue. Not old lady blue but Carnival-colourful blue. “When in Rome….”

Signing off and not be back until Internet resumes or on return from adventures in Uganda and Rwanda.  Christmas loving xxxooo

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Saturday, December 1, 2013

Umbrellas are a rain or shine accessory. Today the sun is strong and it’s just the other side of dawn. Women walk the shoulder of the highway with babies slung across backs, carrying umbrellas to shield heat and beating rays. Driver Patrick is taking me as far as Ogoja, four and some hours north of Calabar, much of it on those ugly roads. Then it’s a transfer to driver Eja for another three to four hours into Benue’s capital, Makurdi. Tomorrow we take another three hour journey north west from there to Agatu. This destination is the sketchiest place yet. It’s a centre of violent clashes between nomadic Fulani cattle herders and the Idomah  people. Anger surges when the Fulani let their herds graze onto farmland, trampling everything under hoof.  At one point the violence and bloodshed spun so out of control we debated yanking the GSF project from this area and awarding it to an alternate local government.  But peace settled in, albeit through the force of armed patrolmen.  Now the area is just coming out of a recent cholera outbreak, so I’ve packed my own food and a case of water.

Armatan season has arrived in Makurdi, its haze visible in the far distance.  Ega tells me “it came yesterday. It brings cool air. When it clears, the heat comes. Mangoes grow.”

Ega loves music. He skats to Fela Kuti, grins and nods to high music, sighs when a voice or lyric or rift sounds just right. He reminds me of a kid in a big body. A naïve gentle giant.  New tunes have been uploaded onto my phone so that we can enjoy and chillax together. And to be candid, I’ve sat through his gospel music CD so many times I can’t bear to hear it once more.  Unfortunately my phone powers out and we listen to that tape run through three full times before I ask if we can please turn it off and just enjoy some silence.

Sunday December 15

Agatu is as remote as it gets. We turn onto a washed out dirt road better travelled by motorbike than Hillux.  We pass a stagnant pond where women and girls have come to collect water. Brush fires burn where men and boys have come to flush out and trap rats for good eating. Some 40 minutes later we arrive in town and are directed to the home of the Council Chairman. As we step through the threshold, women scatter and disappear. Our host through his man servants offers beverages. We sit staring at a mounted flat screen TV, eyes glued as if glancing away disrespects his Honour’s personal space.  There’s no exchange. It feels uncomfortable to me. It feels like typical Nigerian hospitality to everyone else.

I’m now sitting under a full moon. Armatan haze clouds its shine. The air is lovely and cool. And it’s silent. So quiet, so tranquil.

 Accommodations are primitive: bed in one corner, plastic chair in another. Stained and chipped walls. Stained concrete floor. No closet or hooks, not even a door handle to hang clothes. Toilet sans seat. No mirror. No sink… just a large bucket filled with murky white water drawn from a nearby well. Cholera or not it’s a no brainer: some of that bottled water is gonna be used for sponge bathing.  No mosquito nets, no window screens.  Looks like eau de insect spray time.  Light flickers and dims. Flickers and disappears.

Dogs are lean, goats are scrawny. Children run around barefoot and dirty. Lots of little boys are shirtless, many shortless - wearing tight fitting gotch. Grounds are littered with plastic refuse. The scrub is dry and brittle. There’s not much work here: men sit or lie beneath mango trees for the better part of the day.  An open defecation site is mere metres from our guest house lodgings.  Children come and go, with a few sheets of toilet tissue in hand. For some reason, like Logo, this place calls out to me. Maybe it’s the raw poverty. Maybe it’s the way people get on with life.

While training is underway I’m called out to meet someone who says he’s head of security. It’s the first time I’m asked to present my passport to authorities. He writes down details, tells me he’ll be sending this information to Abuja. “You’re a VIP and I want to make sure you have a good visit. It is my job to keep you safe. When you leave, I will call ahead to Otukpo. When you arrive there, they will call ahead to Makurdi.”  His concern for VIP me is both reassuring and unsettling.

Ega and I drive into the village centre to pick up fried yam and eggs. As we wait for our food a masquerade terrorizes the villagers. Children run to hide. Born-again Ega urges me to come away from the main road, to take a seat out of sight.  But it’s too late. I’m spotted. The masquerade heads my way. Children and adults follow, watching from a safe distance to see what this costumed spirit will do and to get a closer look at my white skin.  Before the masquerade can make a scene, locals call him off and away.

The tin overhang above our bench is supported by thick tree limbs like the power wires blatantly siphoning energy from the main lines to falling down homes. The charming round huts of the Tiv people are replaced here by basic four-wall block structures, some with windows boarded by sheets of corrugated metal.  A large brown bats sweeps from a tree, then another, and more still.  Fires burn, ground nut oil boils, yams fry. 

More expressions:

“so and so no be there”

“kai”

“wahda”

“so I came quiet”

“how you be now?’

“no problem for that one”

“we’ll follow go now”

“alright, later now”

KEEPER OF SECRETS

December 2, 2013

“Water ebbs and flows. 

We must remember our body is mostly water. 

We ebb and flow too.

Our emotions are in constant movement,

We feel.

As creative souls, when we reach a lull, I think of it as seeds,

the dormant period before new growth.”

So begins a series of perfect moments with Dr. Karen M Wilson-Ama Echefu, Fulbright Research alumni, Professor at Calabar University’s Faculty of Arts, and extraordinary jazz vocalist.

She sings in the parlour of her modest home, scaling heights and depths, evoking my tears; giving voice to poet Gloria Anzaldua.

El camino de la mestiza I The Mestiza Way

“Caught between the sudden contraction, the breath

sucked in and the endless space, the brown woman stands

still, looks at the sky. She decides to go down, digging her

way along the roots of trees. Sifting through the bones, she

shakes them to see if there is any marrow in them. Then,

touching the dirt to her forehead, to her tongue, she takes a

few bones, leaves the rest in their burial place.”

…and Karen’s addition:

“Tell her she’s beautiful”

To be one in an audience of two is such a privilege and joy.

It’s by happenstance that this rare opportunity presents. I stop in on Ivor to wish him well on his three-month sojourn back to heart and home (and to collect pics from our visit with Hindu). He has a parcel for his neighbour, Karen, and thinks we should meet.

Gonna miss that guy, keeper of secrets, living life in a way few will ever know; mining the mysticism of a dimming African culture that thrives in the back alleys of present day Havana. Just as the legacy of French-Canadian foremothers and fathers instils tradition of tongue on generations of Quebecois, Havana’s Efik descendants retain lives and styles ebbing and flowing, transforming with time in the motherland. Havana’s Ekpe High Priest dons white; symbolic perhaps of the purity of unblemished belief. http://www.afrocubaweb.com/ivormiller/ivormiller.htm

Juju magic