This is a piece I have to do or else my humanity would be questioned. To receive such unbelievable show of solidarity and not to put one’s appreciation on record is to be less than a human being. And so, one would take his mind away briefly from the social commotion raging in Nigeria to attempt to design and wrap a ‘thank you’ distinguished not in size but in the intention to all those who have made this paradox possible.
It is a paradox in the sense that I am compelled to appreciate the power of the outcomes of what goes against my idea of burying a parent. I cannot remember from whence I came by the consciousness that the best way of doing any of those things is to have comrades, friends, brothers and sisters share drinks, jokes and memories under an oak tree, play and perhaps dance to some Fela tunes and everyone goes away. It must have come from the story of what a comrade did at the burial of his own father several decades ago and which I might have internalised even though, I have always been over ruled in putting such into practice. I was over ruled during my wedding a decade and a half ago and during my father’s burial recently.
As far as I was concerned, my father had passed away much earlier than my departure from Nigeria late 2013. Each time one spoke with him on the phone, one got the impression of someone already looking at somewhere else. So, I thought he should be buried immediately he died and instructed accordingly. That way, I would be in a position to give him a burial which would be a convocation of political, social, professional and other associates and, therefore, a critique of the routine. I was probably not jerked to re-assert the immediate burial option because he didn’t speak in parables when I spoke with him an hour before he died on March 29th, 2014. Then he only complained against the doctor but, given his legendary animus against doctors except the only one he was comfortable with and whose prescriptions he readily accepted. Once he was taken to the mortuary, it meant his burial must follow immediately. To insist otherwise would be to give the impression that one was bidding for time to look for money to stage an ‘owambe’ sort of thing. Not when those like Comrade John Odah who might have been expected to understand what I was getting at conspired with the ‘conservatives’ to get on with the burial now instead of allowing for time to put my kind of plan in place against sometimes in October this year.
One strategic error with over turning my agenda is that we ended up holding the burial during the rainy season. That is the first reason for this piece, to thank God again and again that, throughout the three days that the fiesta lasted, there was no even a sign of rainfall. What a total tragedy it would have been had it rained. The 15-20 minutes from the Utonkon-Okpoga highway to my village is simply and automatically impassable once there has been a drop of rain. This is without exception to both the pedestrian and the person on the wheel because of the loamy nature of the soil. All the visitors who came to the burial would never have dreamt doing so if any rain fell. God, I thank you beyond words.
But the most humbling was to come from the experience of popular solidarity. How could people in the existential quagmire in my community afford that level of solidarity is what I can neither explain nor understood, especially the primary school teachers who have not been paid for half a year but who went to the extent they went. It was so moving that, at some point, you didn’t know whether to be happy or to cry. In fact, at the end of the funeral, I could comfortably open a yam factory with what was left of the yam tubers. There is a particular case of a farmer who brought us 176 tubers of yam, free of charge.
Comrade John Odah and I have ruminated over the fact that we have carried out human rights, gender, labour education, youth conscientisation works, etc in our activist life but never inside our own local communities. Even as a journalist, I have never worked in Benue State up to a year, not to talk of Odah. This is nothing to regret about because, for comrades, ‘home’ can be anywhere. Additionally, there is no way we could do what we have done outside our state without it being interpreted as positioning for political office. Our elite are so mercenary in orientation that they think everyone loves to be a legislator, a governor and so on.
Not having done so and be known for it, I carry the feeling of deficiency in communal responsibility in my mental diskette, to borrow this expression from the original owner. That was until this funeral provided an opportunity for the folks to say very nice things about me and my junior brother. Although they were talking about things I could never have remembered ever doing, each testimony was very true and they were, therefore, not telling lies. And it gave me incredible happiness and eternal fulfilment that my record in communal responsiveness is not as dismal as I thought.
Our people are very genuine, very sincere and too generous. They don’t give their best only to those they see as deceivers, politicians in particular. To this stock I must put my appreciation on record even as many or most of them would not read it but because appreciating them is the correct way to appreciate my father as a member of that collective.
Beside their solidarity is the joy in watching their energy, resilience, creativity and vitality in spite of the poverty of their existence. In Nigeria, everyone complains of marginalisation. So, no one really knows who is suffering real marginalisation. I still maintain that Edemoga District has been most marginalised. Until the Suswam regime tarred the Utonkon-Okpoga road early in the life of the regime, (and it is high time Mister governor passes through this road again with a view to arresting the contractor and the engineers who worked on the project) the whole place was locked up. The foot paths we trekked to primary schools in those days, the ponds from which we drank water and the wretched primary schools we attended are still what you get. Majority of the women are classic cases of permanently poor, pregnant and powerless.
The truth though is that this is basically but, very unfortunately, the case throughout Nigeria. I met a woman who told me she has given birth to 13 children, 11 of whom are alive and kicking although only two of them have managed to go up to secondary school. And to think that this woman is an extended family member of mine is to imagine my agony. It is such that even if I am Dangote, I would still have problems with my bank managers if I were to give my people the benefit of modernity. But this is only a manner of speaking. My experience of anti-poverty politics in Jigawa State shows to me that it is not difficult to deal with poverty. It is the ideological orientation, not the amount of money, that matters.
Let me, at this point, begin to draw this to a close by narrowing on a few of the more impossible architects of this paradox, beginning with the Catholic Church in charge of my area. Three things are involved here. The first is to express appreciation for the concession they graciously granted the family to celebrate the burial mass on the compound. That so solved the logistics problem that would have arisen in moving up and down to the Church. The second is the inevitability of the partnership of the Catholic Church for any government that wants to take adult literacy seriously around our area. I came to this conclusion from listening to my mother. I must say that my mother’s interpretation of the Bible is rather too literary but the ease with which she illustrates her argument nowadays with apt segments of the Bible suggests to me that the Church is the natural partner of any serious government programme around there just as the Mosque might serve that purpose better in certain other areas in the country. The third point is to recognise the Christian choir. They never get tired and they are all incredible dancers, stretching it to rustic miming that you don’t get even in some good Departments of Drama in our universities. Certainly, those talents can be developed. A money bag, a vote seeking politician, an INGO or just someone can take up this challenge and discuss terms with the Church. I thank the Catholic Church immensely. They were just wonderful throughout.
Next is Chief Abel Adulugba, the former Acting District Head of Edemoga and Benue Polytechnic academic. Without any prejudice to Chief S.S Aba, the incumbent who is a man of peace, Adulugba would have been on the throne today if the District Headship were hereditary in our clime. But the four or five years he acted on the throne, he showed his genius in these matters. His wisdom, reasonableness and sense of balance, his wizardry in conflict handling and cultural protocols are certainly beyond his age. In him, his late father reproduced himself for the District before leaving this world. As usual, the Chief-academic was on hand throughout this period to play the role of the veritable resource person that only he could play.
I must quickly note the Edemoga elite for the completeness of their presence, pouring in from a different assignment in an unspeakable solidarity. With Barrister David Adulugba at the helm, it was both symbolic and practical. It was comforting learning that they are thinking collectively beyond the politicians and politics about the District. May God bless their efforts.
Then Mrs Phelli Ogbuja, the lady at the head of the cooking team, obviously the most impossible part of the entire thing. I never knew we had such a resourceful sister. I must have asked her to pass particular cuisine for particular category of visitors more than twenty times each day and none of it did she fail, both in promptitude and quality. There were some I was sure she would just say it was impossible but it never happened. And I am talking of real home cooking, not commercial cooking. Methinks we should ask her husband to come and add money to her initial dowry. Abi? She is fantastic.
The last but not the least must still be the pair of Comrades Iduh Onah and John Odah. As I said at the opening, 1 had an idea of how this should have gone. But Onah and Odah would not hear of it. And before I knew, the death of my father became a facebook posting and a media story. Earliest callers all said they read of it in the facebook and I knew whose facebook immediately since I never posted anything on facebook.
Comrade Odah, on the other hand, insisted there were some people who should know. It is entirely his handwork that even before I got back to Nigeria, help had come from many of such people, mainly my former working roots such as Jigawa, media associates, comrades, politicians, academics, some diplomats, civil servants and, surprisingly, not a few business men.
All in all, the joke on us is how the burial of a self-effacing Christopher Ogbu Onoja would bring so much crowd as well as bring back almost all the old cultural dances that CNN modernity has nearly wiped away: the stilt walker masquerade, the most adventurous I ever saw. He was a dancer as well. His displays were more than just putting up a dry show. I heard again one of the tunes that sent the village wild when we were growing up by the flutist. It is called “onya notobunu lotu chakwuna”. In the advent of the Church and CNN, it was forgotten. I don’t know where my mother’s people got an elder who could play it. It is a chauvinistic statement aimed at ridiculing quitting a marriage by a woman, saying that such a woman has only prostitution to turn to. Of course, in those days, I never understood the import but even now that I do, I would still, involuntarily, be moved to cloud 9 by the tune anywhere. And I heard the ‘ulaga’ again, after so many years. And there were the wonderful masquerades, 8 of them in all from Akpa and whose inimitable boy dancer was the cynosure of eyes no end. Of course, the leading Idoma lyricist was there, with John Odah dancing Alime like hell that night.
Samuel Huntington must be right when he argued in his Clash of Civilisation that the more modern the world turns, the more culture asserts itself. Just that, unlike in Achebe’s Arrow of God, the Church and culture are in a co-existence in Idomaland that can be made even more productive. It must be in the nature of burials nowadays that one comes out of it totally broke but it is otherwise fascinating and even transformative.
Follow Us On WhatsApp
