As I began to learn my first English words at school, I would naturally test my ability on various wall hangings in our home. I remember the difficulty I had figuring out “Right wrong.” I kept wondering which it was—right or wrong! I am certain that even the earnest Miss Warner would have smiled at the problem I was having with English nouns and verbs.
My father filled our walls with a variety of educational material. There were Church Missionary Society yearly almanacs, with pictures of bishops and other dignitaries. But the most interesting hangings were the large paste-ups which my father created himself. He had one of the village carpenters make him large but light frames of soft white wood onto which he then gummed brown or black paper backing. On this paper he pasted colored and glossy pictures and illustrations of all kinds from old magazines. I remember a most impressive picture of King George V in red and gold, wearing a sword. There was also a funny-looking little man with an enormous stride. He was called Johnnie Walker. He was born in 1820, according to the picture, and was still going strong. When I learnt many years later that this extraordinary fellow was only an advertisement for Scottish whiskey, I felt a great sense of personal loss. There was an advertisement from the Nigerian Railways in which the big “N” and “R” served also for “National Route.” That also gave me some trouble, as I recall reading it as “Nigerian National Railway Route,” which made some kind of sense too!
So my education went from the walls of our home in a haphazard fashion through the village to St. Philip’s C.M.S. Central School and back again.
It was sheer effrontery, hinting at any kind of comparison between my puny story and the story of Moses at the beginning of this account. It was like the glowworm comparing itself to the full moon. I do apologize. I was carried away. But the village of Ogidi did keep surreptitious watch over me through the exile of Christianity. My river, though, was not the Nile but the Niger. Indeed, our official title was the Diocese on the Niger. Not of the Niger but on. Our bishop was Bishop on the Niger.
The village of Ogidi was only part Christianized when I was growing up and still provided its traditional sights and sounds from which I—a Christian child—was technically excluded, an exclusion making them all the more compelling. Like all children I looked forward to the Nwafor Festival, the major holiday of the traditional year, during which ancestral masquerades of all kinds left their underground homes through antholes to visit the living. For eight whole days we saw them, from a reasonable distance, because they and their attendants carried bundles of whips with which they occasionally punished themselves to prove their toughness and certainly punished you if you were available. We would keep count of the masquerades we saw every day and tally the figures at the end of the eight days and then compare our grand total with the previous year’s. In a good year, the number could be well over a hundred. And the rule was that even if you saw the same masquerade ten times (as might happen with the livelier ones), you only counted it once.
And then the sounds of the village.
There was language, in song and speech, all around you. True, Christianity divided the village into two—the people of the church and the people of the world—but the boundary between them had very many crossings. The average Christian enjoyed the sights and sounds of traditional festivities. Non-Christians, for their part, observed us closely and treated some of our practices with indulgent amusement. In the most celebrated song of those days—“Egwu obi,” “Song of the Heart”—they mimicked our singing in tonic sol-fa:
Ukwe ndi uka
Sss ddd m rd mr-e-e
In spoken language there was sometimes a difference in matter but none in manner between church and village. There were great orators in both. Christians of my father’s generation who preached on Sundays at St. Philip’s Church were not all orators, but a good number of them were. Although the Anglican Church, in a misguided effort at unification, had dealt a severe blow to the Igbo language by imposing a mechanical “union” dialect on it, the hybrid language it created remained between the covers of the Bible and was not allowed to cramp the style of sensible preachers once they had read out their obligatory text and closed the Bible. One such preacher was well known for taking to the pulpit at the time of the village feast to warn true believers against the great evil of accepting gifts of food surreptitiously over their compound wall from heathen neighbors. Obviously the traffic was heavy on the crossings. Christians had their own festivals, of course: the big one, Christmas, and the small one, Easter, although preachers kept telling you it was the other way around.
There were also two secular festivals which livened up our Christian year—Empire Day on May 24, and Anniversary on July 27.
May 24, as every schoolchild knew, was the birthday of Queen Victoria. It was a major school event and schoolchildren from all over the district would march in contingents past the British resident, who stood on a dais wearing a white ceremonial uniform with white gloves, plumed helmet, and sword.
The day’s events ended with a sports competition among the schools. My first Empire Day was indeed memorable. My school, which had some very big boys and was supposed to do well in the tug-of-war, managed quite unaccountably to collapse in seconds to their opponents. Rumor had it that this was no ordinary rout but an Anglican plot whereby our headmaster had instructed our boys to give in to a fellow Anglican side to prevent a Roman Catholic victory. Empire Day celebrations took place at the provincial headquarters at Onitsha, seven miles from my village. I think it was in 1940, when I was in Standard Three and ten years old, that I was judged old enough to walk to Onitsha and back. I did it all right but could hardly get up for one week afterwards. And yet it was a journey I had looked forward to so eagerly and which I cherished for years. Onitsha was a magical place and did live up to its reputation. First of all, to look down from a high point on the road at dawn and see, four miles away, the River Niger glimmering in the sky took a child’s breath away. So the river was really there! After a journey of two thousand six hundred miles from the Futa Jalon Mountains, as every schoolboy would tell you. Well, perhaps not every schoolboy. I was particularly fortunate in having parents who believed passionately in education, in having old schoolbooks that three older brothers and an older sister had read. I was good enough in my schoolwork to be nicknamed Dictionary by admirers. Although not so good in games; but no one in our culture would seriously hold that against anybody.
Two other things stand out in my mind about that first Empire Day visit to Onitsha. Cut free from my village moorings and let loose in a big city with money in my pocket, I let myself go; go so far, in fact, as to consume a half-penny worth of groundnuts. For many years afterwards the very mention of groundnuts would turn my stomach.
My other memory is much happier. I saw with my own eyes a man who was as legendary as Onitsha itself, an eccentric Englishman, Dr. J. M. Stuart Young, who had been living and trading in Onitsha since the beginning of the twentieth century. I saw him walking down New Market Road bareheaded in the sun, just as legend said he would be. The other thing legend said about Stuart Young was that he had been befriended by the mermaid of the River Niger, with whom he made a pact to remain single in return for great riches.
Later I was to learn that J. M. Stuart Young’s story contained a few doubtful details, such as whether or not he did have a doctoral degree. But it was probably true that he had first come to Nigeria as a colonial civil servant and then turned against the colonial system and become a merchant intent on challenging, with African support, the monopoly of European commercial cartels. He also wrote and published poetry and fiction. Years later I was to invoke his memory and name in my short story “Uncle Ben’s Choice.”
The other secular event, which we called simply Anniversary, was the annual commemoration of the coming of the Gospel to Igboland, on July 27, 1857. It is reported that Bishop Adjai Crowther and his missionary team, who arrived in Onitsha on that day, were heavily beaten by rain, and as a result every Anniversary celebration since has been ruined by bad weather. Perhaps those first Anglicans did not know where the rain began to beat them! The good news is that schoolchildren were always fed new yams and stew at the Anniversary celebration. For most people it was their first taste of juicy new yam for the year.
British colonization of Nigeria was never a labor-intensive affair.
White people were a rare sight, whether in the administration or the church or in commerce. This rareness did not, however, diminish their authority. The name of the British resident for Onitsha Province, Captain O’Connor, was so generally invoked that there is an age-grade named after him in Ogidi.* But I only saw him twice, from a distance. The bishop on the Niger, the Right Reverend Bishop Bertram Lasbrey, came to our church perhaps once in two or three years. His sermon left me disappointed. I don’t know what I expected; perhaps I thought that if mere teachers and pastors could do as well as some that I knew, a bishop must set a congregation ablaze. But perhaps again it was the problem of having to preach through an interpreter.
Elementary education began with two years in infant school and six years in primary school. For some children there was a preschool year in what was called religious school, where they spent a year chanting and dancing the catechism.
Who is Caesar?
Siza bu eze Rom
Onye n’achi enu-uwa dum.
(Caesar is the King of Rome
Who rules the entire world.)
Who is Josiah?
Josaya nwata exe
Onye obi ya di nlo
Onatukwa egwu Chineke.
(Josiah the infant king