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 a 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 shefail, both in promptitude and quality. There were some I was sure she would just say it was impossible butit 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 “onyanotobunulotuchakwuna”. 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.
