ktravula – a travelogue!

reflections on the world

Village Boy

Evenings come with breeze, silence and dust. Across the sky are slivers of brown rustiness finally settling on the town after a long day’s work. A road passes in front of the wooden shack where men young and old sit down to banter in merriment, often with their shirts off. The women sit in groups petting children. When darkness falls and all that lights the day is the moon up in the sky, voices move up and down in modulations that carry the weight of their vain deliberations.

The village is a study of contrasts. On the one side of it is a sprawling mass of huts covered with brown rusted roofs. In the middle of this side of town, also called Aba, was the Christ Apostolic Church – perhaps the only modern building there. Aba burns the eyes with the brown of its thatched huts and of its children’s feet. In a bustling afternoon, the sound of goats and chicken compete with the trail of their smell from one street to another up until the foot of the agbalumo tree…

One hour of traipsing around these edges of the village eventually finds a seven year old boy back at home – a different part of the town. The house overlooks a long equally dusty street that runs from a clinic down to the right hand of the observer to the other part of the village where the barber lives. There is a certain magic in living around here. Grown folks played practical jokes on little children and on each other. A day earlier, on his way back from wandering around the village, he was stopped on the pavement of a certain house where another young boy was being shaven. His head was already bald.

“It’s your lucky day, young man.” A man volunteers. “Stay right where you are. What are you doing around here all by yourself?”

“I was coming from around there. I am going home over there.”

“Why were you staring?”

It is always hard to know where adult conversations were leaning.

“I wasn’t staring. I was on my way home.”

“Like I said, it is your lucky day. All young men your age are being circumcised today.”

What?

“You look frightened. Come closer and sit down here. We’ve been told to go around circumcising all young men like you around town.”

It took a whole minute, then he took off as fast as he could. He never looked back until he got home, panting like a dog. For a long time that evening, he would wonder how grown people managed to make such brutal jokes that seemed at the expense of poor helpless kids scared half to death. And for a longer time after that, he would begin to take a different route home while wandering around the village, but always with a lingering fear that he was not totally out of the grip of mentally bullying elders.

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Village Boy was published on February 5th, 2012, with the tags , , , under the adventures, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Fading Landscapes

Spoke to mother hours ago. Two men from the landscape of my childhood just passed away. One was Pastor, the leader of one of the first churches that shaped my most vulnerable childhood times. He is around sixty years old. The other was Bro Kenny, younger, the director of the youth arm of the other church I belonged to as a teenager. Together with a select group of agile young people who all lived around that area of our youth, Bro Kenny as we called him then, led us through that period of our young restlessness.

Childhood and youth seems to fade away fast enough, and suddenly becomes a lifetime away. Faces from times past come flashing back, with strong energy currents of a familiar place… worshipers in church about three evenings a week, loving life with purest of enthusiasm, young innocent teenagers developing a crush for the very first time for fellow members of the youth group, trial music composers, dancers, proselytizers, picnickers, thespians, and general happy-go-lucky innocent boys and girls growing up within a bible-based yet liberal upbringing. Childhood was a little stricter, with religious instructions that extended beyond the church walls looming around as a constant threat and bulwark against our otherwise footloose rascally tendencies.

Where did all that go, dusty feet all around Akobo where all of this began? The naivete of youth, and the delightful profundity of biblical directions that sought to explain everything away? The simplicity of the day, the sweetness of the rain, the long pleasant smell of the harmattan at Christmas, the noise of little children during church services, the laughter of grown women and the intensity of their prayers up to heaven, the offering baskets and the coins we put in them, the general fervent intensity of youthfulness and mischief – all just floats around the plate of memory. Maybe this is what one death – or two – does: remind of how much was lost. And more importantly, how much more once was.

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Fading Landscapes was published on October 23rd, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Pen for Chickens

The smell is familiar. Almost every family at one time or the other in South-Western Nigeria has kept a chicken farm. And a farm is usually too serious a name for it. Free range chicken running around the house cackling and providing needed amusement for little children with idle hands. There is a rooster that crows unfailingly at five in the morning, and then there is the hen which lays cute little white eggs and then sits on them for about twenty-one days before little chicks come out looking like tiny little dolls. Get close to them while they waddle around their feisty mother around the large compound of the house and see the wrath of a woman (bird) scorned. An angry mother bird is not a pleasant sight to see.

Grandmother had a theory about predating hawks who found these little chicks a delicious specimen and preyed on them regularly for lunch. Paint them in bright red colours and the hawks and kestrels thought they were dangerous aliens and stayed away. I don’t know how well the theory worked but it was usually funner to see the motherbird walking around with a set of red coloured little chicks hand painted with red ink obtained from a certain leaf… The sight of a hawk swooping to pick up its favourite dinner of little chicks from behind the nursing motherbird is usually a sight too, but it happens usually really fast. One moment you have a piece of boiled yam on the way to the mouth. The other, you are staring at a noisy little battle that lasts just a second. A bigger bird has swooped down and made away with its living lunch and the angry mother is out there in the sun wailing in loud chicken cackles. Some times, the other little chicks are still too frightened to come out of where they had gone to hide at the prompting of the mother.

My first other conscious memory of chicken pens comes from the brown, sometimes black, imported “agric” type ones in fancy cages, fancy feeds and fancy golden eggs. Those lay eggs without mating, get large in no time and usually get slaughtered for Christmas “because they taste good”. But they are never usually allowed to range around the house, staying confined to a specially made pen with saw dust all over its ground which is changed after a few days. Too much work, if only mother cared about that. She was always already too busy worrying about raising us to bother with how much time and effort it took to change dirty saw dust layers on the floor of a large poultry. That, of course, unless we had to do it ourselves. Thinking back to this specific time, it always made it necessary to hope that one didn’t grow old fast enough to be able to take up the responsibility of cleaning a whole room full of chicken dung. It was a hope that never manifested.

Back to the large smelly room of the county fair in Highland last week was that moment where all that sounded, smelled and surrounded the traveller was a sight from a very distant past. He wasn’t a graduate student travelling with an equally adventurous colleague to check out the “country” side of America in form of a hundred cackling roosters of different shapes and sizes in familiar cages, he was a little boy by his grandmother’s side smelling chicken poo all over the house, discovering the delight in a boiled white egg of a local breeding chicken, crying over the death of one run over by a careless driver, watching her paint little chicks with locally-made crimson dye, running scared of the little white covering around the chicken’s eye whenever it blinks, and wondering with a thousand unanswered questions how chickens always found their way home to roost after such long wanderings around the neighbourhood.

The smell in that room came with a little more than just memories.

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Pen for Chickens was published on August 6th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Secondary School Days

It was always cold and dry in November towards the end of the school year, and the season always came with a certain bubbling feeling and restless feet. School was at Agodi, a stone throw from the governor’s office, and the state prisons. It was bordered by a military housing project/barrack which had some of the best eating shacks we had ever encountered. It was also the only place where we could go have burukutu in the after hours with the little money we could save. Fufu at Barracks was the best, for some reason. It was rock solid, and filling. It was just as well since the majority of the customers of the eating joints were military people expected to be tough, filled, and healthy.

The broadcasting corporation was about two miles away. It had a very large fenced compound where at this time of the year an exhibition was held. It was called an exhibition because it was conceived as a carnival for the Christmas season. In time, it became a spot for gaming, alcohol and peppersoup and not much else. It was the ultimate taboo spot of escape from school, and we took the liberties many times daring the always looming risk of being apprehended by state law enforcements sent out to find school children loitering the streets during school hours. The best way to get to the broadcasting corporation from the school without getting caught was to walk through a winding short-cut road that went through the Officer’s Mess of the Second Mechanized Division located just across the road. I see it now, a quiet living estate with fancy houses and barking dogs. Three, and sometimes four, young school boys in blue checkered shirts trekking across the land under a sometimes scorching sun. In their pockets are a few coins each, and some roasted groundnuts tied in transparent nylons.

The excitement at the exhibition grounds never always justified its anticipation, but it almost always compensated for gloom of confinement that the walls of our school represented. Dry harmattan Novembers on the streets of Bashorun as pesky loose cannon truants from a faraway place looking for a lost piece of their precocious childhoods… were good times. They also featured really dusty feet in rubber sandals.

 

 

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Secondary School Days was published on July 18th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy, Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Edwardsville by Heart

The picture that I had intended for this post remains in my head. It is a sheath of red and green Christmas flowers bound in a perfect circle and hanging by the side of the wooden bridge over the Tower lake at the entrance of Cougar Village. It has been there since winter began as a sign for the season. I don’t know who put it there but it always makes a good sight every time I drive by, and I have always been too preoccupied with driving to be able to take a perfect picture of it. And so, it remains in my head.

One more disadvantage of being able to drive is the laziness it induces. All my favourite haunts on campus once familiar to regular thread of my bicycle tyres have now become distant acquaintances. But for that battery run-out on the car a few weeks ago that forced me to walk home at night in the cold, I probably won’t even have recognized what the bike paths look like. It’s sad, I know. It is also fattening. Goodness knows how large I’m going to become by the end of this school year. We have not even mentioned the cost of gas made higher often, no less, by Nigerian agitators in the Niger Delta. It has warmed up for a while in the last few days and a bike ride is looking very likely now, if only I can muster the patience to walk again to campus in order to pick up my bike where I’d left it a few weeks ago.

But this post is not about the bike, the car or the Christmas sheath. It is the treasures of the little city. Not much a delight as it was last year through a stranger’s eyes, it is growing into an even more familiar friend. From new wineries being discovered in the most obscure corners to making friends in wine shops downtown with the hopes of getting my picture artworks displayed on their walls. If what this is is the subliminal instinct working towards replicating an already picturesque childhood, this will be more interesting than expected. All we need now is a dog. I already have many stories to tell.

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Edwardsville by Heart was published on December 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , , under the adventures, Art, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Roads Around The Child (Non-Fiction)

Our house lay at a junction of roads. The first one stretched from an unknown place beyond the mango trees and a public water well in front of the Oguns’ house. Ahead, it reaches out into the dry dusty parts of the village, past the albino barber’s house and farther down into places where now I can’t immediately conjure beyond the sight of leaves, dry wood and old men playing draught on wooden benches outside their unpainted houses. The other road goes past the Bello’s house to the church, then branches towards the main road where tar begins and heads into the town. When put side by side as they both inevitably lay approaching the wide spot in front of the house where we all usually play in the evening around the grown men of the area, they form a dusty wide line of an attempted “v” which ends at the Baale’s house. From there, they part, each again taking up a lonely path to my right into as far as the eyes can see.

A mental stepping now out of the big compound of my house into those streets, I stand now, facing the Baale’s house, turning my back to the dusty “v” of the coming road. On to the left, the road veers by the small thrush in front of the house where Lanko Lanko lives, then a little further down it reaches an electric transformer. After that, to the left, is my school, fenced around with a white concrete wall and spiked metal bars. Further down is nothing but gullies and leaves, and a beaten path to where moin moin is sold along with its corn paste companion, into the labyrinths of huts and a maze of households of mud and concrete of old women with intriguing dress patterns and ribald tongues. They knew me and knew that I ran away from them whenever I could, except when I had things to buy. And one of them called me “my husband”. Further down in the centre of the village woods where dirt competed with house animals and putrid smells from collective waste is a large agbalumo tree. It came along with it a myth that it housed spirits that tormented wandering children…

Back to my junction, on to the right are the better, sanctioned spaces of play: the opening towards Mama Lawyer’s clinic, just three houses away. Before that is the kolanut seller, then the farmer and professor’s awesome cottage where I saw a chess board for the first time and wondered why it didn’t look like the draughts boards I’d seen my brother play at home. In there are their three boy children one of whom was around my age, older by about a year or two. Then an orchard of sweet smelling flowers, a corn mill, trees of mango and cashew, and livestock.  The cottage opened itself always up as a paradise of treasures, menu, and learning.

Mama Lawyer’s clinic, for then and now remains as old as memory. I never saw her husband who was the real lawyer. She has travelled to many countries, we were told, and she had come home to retire, operating the clinic as a way to stay active. Even then, tufts of grey hair already dotted her beautiful hair that kept her demeanour always so disarming. The smile, the warm hug of a mother of all little children, and the music in her voice when she asks “Young man, what have we got today? Aren’t we looking good.” It always made the enduring phobia of needles immediately disappear, if only for the second. So when I get the “fever” as all ailments are called to a six year old, Momma dresses me up in a thick sweater and the right pair of trousers, and we walk hand in hand towards Mama Lawyer’s house, stirring the dust paths of the village’s open roads into the evening sky.

(Photos taken in Jos, Plateau and Obi, Nassarawa. July 2010)

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Roads Around The Child (Non-Fiction) was published on November 11th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the adventures, Art, Travelling category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

The Text Part of Growing

The evolution from picture books to text-only materials was gradual, but memorable. There seemed to have been an unwritten disdain for picture books that manifested after each birthday, each disposed oversized pyjamas and each replaced tooth. It wasn’t self-wrought however, but acquired, either from older peers with fancier stories of intimate relations with the written word resulting in inspiring encounters, or jealousy of even fancier ones with fantastic tales of their reading prowess. Something gave, however, for sure, little by little, and the young reader emerged, ready to take on the reading world without accompanying images.

The most memorable of such recollection could be the singular, but eventually impossible task of reading the first chapter of The Tiger by the Tail during a bus ride from home to school. It didn’t matter to him in the least that he couldn’t make any sense of it yet, never having even applied himself to more than just a few words on each page he flipped. It matter though that people saw him with a book that was bigger than a storybook, had no pictures in it, and moved from page to page as if passing through the patient and critical eyes of an avid reader. “Hey, nice book. How’re you finding it?” Someone would ask sometimes during the day, and he would respond: “Oh, very nice. Chase is such an exquisite writer”, and move on before the probing went far beyond the familiar. Oh the days.

The blog, now splattered with colours and images, flesh and blood, of ordinary and extraordinary people of various places, beliefs and convictions, could only remind of such trivialties; of days when colour meant ordinariness, and a lack of sophistication needed for the rites of adulthood. Now only a smile remains, and a longing for such a not so distant past of innocence and silliness.

Welcome September, and the year of birth.

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The Text Part of Growing was published on September 2nd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , , under the Fun, Literature, Soliloquy category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

A Short History of My Face

I looked in the mirror this evening and found out that I am (now) good looking. This doesn’t happen all the time actually. It is either that I am in a too crappy mood to appreciate what the mirror reflects to me, or the mirror is not clear enough because of water vapour mist or imaginary dents and spots to give me anything substantial. Let’s just say that we had just never agreed in a long while. Today, everything changed. Heck, I even noticed that my moustache and beard are growing more and more. Is it because of the winter? A few months ago, in Nigeria, I could almost count everyone of them. Now, that has become an impossibility. Well, it wasn’t I who tried to do the counting back then… The point of this reference, in any case, is to tell you that sometime this evening, I found myself in front of my bathroom mirror and I noticed a few old and new things about my now good-looking winter-adapting still boyishly hirsute face.

A more memorable thing I noticed on my face today however was a lone horizontal mark on the right side of my face. It used to be a scar and it has been there since I was seven, or eight – I no longer remember, but I remember the incident that brought it up there. How could I forget it? It’s a long personal story, but it can be summarized in the following words: an otherwise crazy curious experiment in local science. Earlier in one lone week out of the now many blurry ones in my childhood memory, my father had unknowingly satisfied too much of my recurring curiosity by telling me how he got the tribal marks on his own face. He was born in the early forties when it was still acceptable and admirable for parents from his side of Yorubaland to scarify the faces of their children as markers of culture, tribe, social standing or just plain beauty. Well, beauty as decided by the eyes of the beholder! I had looked at his face that evening, perhaps even touched his hirsute cheeks too, and found the three pairs of horizontal marks there quite fascinating. How in the world, I wondered, could those scars made by a fiery knife of the professional traditional scarifier remain on the face of his victim for that length of time? I had not the slightest idea, and I asked him.

In those days, he said, the men who made the marks had a secret black paste/potion which they applied to the wound on the baby’s face while it was still fresh, to make the wound heal, and to make the marks truly stand out when it eventually healed. It was the effect of the dark paste/potion, he said, that ensured that the wounds never returned to the same nice state as the other parts of the bearer’s face. Thus explained the deep permanent marks on the faces of the very many grown people of his generation that I had met until then. For days after I discovered this secret, I remained in utmost sleepless fascination, not just about the level of pain it must cause the newborn who must endure the ordeal, the cruelty of the adults who must hold them down at just a few months old to get them scarified for the rest of their lives in the hands of a trusted man with a knife, nor about the resentment the children must feel when they grow up and decide that they never liked those marks on their faces in the first place, but about the possibilities of putting to test the newly gained knowledge I had obtained. I believed my father, but I wanted to see it for myself how it worked. I expressed my thoughts aloud and he asked in a very mischievous and to me quite unsettling jest whether I would prefer him to call the local scarifier to come and mark my face – “for beauty”. I shouted NO, and quickly fled. I must have been around eight years old.

But the fascination remained, so one day while in my primary school – which was not too far from the house – something  led to another in class and I had a really rough fight with one of my classmates over something that could as well have been as trivial as speaking “vernacular” in the classroom or reporting same to the teacher. I insist now that he had cheated during the fight because I suddenly saw his hand in a flash towards my cheek. It was all he could grab so he scratched me as hard as he could, and I felt a deep searing pain. A few seconds later, I touched my face with my palm and I saw a map of the vertical stripe blood on my hands. Then a few drops began to trickle onto my shirt. It was painful and I let him go, but it was also a brief moment of epiphany. Instead of continuing with the fight which I could by now have won if only for the moral upperhand of rage, I bailed, and everyone stared at me, wondering what was happening. I ran homewards as fast as I could to the store where mother always kept her cooking coals, with blood still dripping from my face. What I did in those fleeting moments of pain and panic was grind the few charcoal chalks into soluble powder, and apply it to my bleeding face. Thinking about it now, I almost can’t believe the extent of my little daredevilry and stupidity, because if my grandmother had caught me there, she would definitely have panicked, and I would definitely have received some serious spanking from her long cane. Now satisfied with my experiment, I grimaced in pain and smiled in satisfaction. The line had been drawn, no pun intended, and the local science had been put to test.

Looking at that lone vertical stripe today in the mirror on the right side of my face, I could only smile. It used to be a really prominent one. Now it’s just an almost indistinguishable scar, but it’s there alright. While applying for the Fulbright programme early last year, I wrote an account of this experience in my application to illustrate one of my first personal intimations with some of Yoruba cultural practices, and only just hoped for some laughter when the board eventually got read it. It was to my surprise on the big day of the interview when the board begged that the light be switched on in the room so that they could properly see the scar on my face. Apparently I had made a memorable impression on them. I was giggling and grinning like an eight year old child as I showed it to them. It was an interesting moment. And while one of them huddled close almost hand-tracing the line on my face, I myself wondered within why and how I could have been such an enfant terrible willing to put his own self on the line for such a little discovery. My face now bears one lone mark that wasn’t there since birth birth like that of many Yoruba people now wishing that they could erase theirs, or at least that they had got a choice in the matter in the beginning as they really should have.

Maybe I was really that terrible as a child, now atoning for those sins through the huge torment of the writing spirit. The lone stripe on my face may be a fine reference point to some precocious point in my interesting history, but the real truth is that secretly, I really really just wanted to prove my father wrong.

 

Image Credits: http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/african-art/images/sothebys2008yoruba.JPG

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A Short History of My Face was published on January 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the adventures, Art, Fun category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

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