Somtochukwu
The day Zimuzo was arrested, everyone in Amankalu sobbed. It was like the Eze had died. Zimuzo was picked up from his father's compound by four policemen from Umuhia who had come in a roaring truck, as if to announce to the village that they were around. The villagers were all quiet in their small homes, and nobody went to the farms. For policemen to have come to this small village to arrest a man—that was a big shame. There was no way to explain this sadness they shared, except to say what a big shame they had just seen. Despite this, not one person said Zimuzo was wrong to steal an old man’s yams. Zimuzo said that the gods had sent him to carry the yams. In Amankalu, and elsewhere, as far as the people were concerned, the gods did no wrong. Despite the shame and the crying, soon after Zimuzo was arrested, the men from Amankalu organized a whip-round and sent a representative to Umuahia to bail him out.
The day Golibe rode a motorcycle past the big Welcome to Amankalu sign, the villagers hurried out of their homes and into the streets. Golibe was chanting, “Nne, come and see your son o!” as he rode down the clay roads. Some of his neighbors held branches in their hands, swinging them right and left, dancing, and chanting Golibe’s name like he was the Messiah on Palm Sunday. He was a true son of the land, they said. His name would go down in their very important history as the first person in Amankalu to procure a motorcycle. That day, Eze’s compound prepared palm wine and abacha enough to feed the village two rounds, just because Golibe purchased a motorcycle.
The day I came home in a forest-green taxi as one of the first University graduates from Amankalu, Mama did not bat an eye. It was a Sunday. On Sundays, people here do not go to the farms. They stay home to massage their swollen joints and to gear up for the week ahead. Only Mazi Maduka’s family visited the old dilapidated Anglican Church on Sundays, or at all, in fact. Mazi Maduka was the village representative who had volunteered to bail Zimuzo out of prison in Umuahia.
As the taxi drove past Akoliufu, the neighbouring village, and into Amankalu, I asked the driver to turn off the air contitioning. It was a new car and the driver wanted me to know it was new, but it had become too cold.
My Papa used to say “that village breeze is different from any other breeze,” and he was not wrong. I wound down the car window, and the warm air, which smelled of fermented cassava and burnt wood rushed through the car. I had somehow missed this smell. I was now home again.
This was my first time in Amankalu in five years, and not one thing had changed. Men still wore crew neck shirts and loose threadbare trousers. Although the women paid more attention to fashion, they were still a long way behind the fashionable women of Enugu who wore weave-ons and painted their nails.
These women here in Amankalu moved around dressed like models in an Igbo village runway. I saw one slim lady wearing a shiny new head tie on her way to the farm. There was another with her two-wrapper-Hollandies pulled around her waist and knotted in the back with a thin, short rope, selling garri near the market. Fashion had become a competition of who would wear the latest style or who would tie the latest Hollandies. A woman would go to the tailor and even before sitting, would announce, “It’s that Nne Ifeoma’s style I want. Exactly the same thing but maybe you will add rose to my own here.” She would then point to wherever she wanted her embellishment to be, likely above her left breast or on her right sleeve. These women hustled for new clothes the way girls from my university did for spaghetti tops and abortion belts.
Just like the fashion, the roads in Amankalu were still the same: well-trodden and dusty, yet somehow smooth and broad. I did not expect that the roads would be tarred. Even the roads in the city were only fixed during campaigns for state government positions; politicians would give away multiple bags of rice and bottles of groundnut oil, reassuring voters of the paradise that would come if they were elected. The newly fixed roads would be, in the words of the politicians, just the tip of the iceberg.
We soon drove past Azubuike’s store. Azubuike, unlike the other men, did not work on a farm. He was smart. He hired young boys who we called “job” to do all the farm work for him. He did not go to the monthly meeting at Eze’s palace with the other men. Azubuike dressed up in Isiagu to his store everyday. He wore his best one to church in Umuahia every Sunday. Azubuike had the most beautiful woman in the village as his wife. However, they had no children.
Years ago, Azubuike gave me a whole fifteen thousand Naira. “Use this for transport,” he said. He knew I was due to leave Amankalu that afternoon. I held out my right hand, and wiped my teary eyes with the other. I shoved the money into my stuffed Ghana-must-go between my yellow dress and an old textbook. Now, whenever I went to church, I prayed for my brother Chimalume, I prayed for Azubuike, then, I prayed that my parents would live to watch me succeed in my new career.
Want to come back and finish this later?
* * *
When I was younger, Mama loathed my wine-coloured school pinafore the same way she loathed seeing me strolling back home from school in the evenings with the other “lazy girls.” She yearned for me to be like the daughters of her friends, who would follow their mothers around like newly-hatched chicks. Education was for lazy women, she would say. It was for those who couldn’t fry garri and split firewood: “because they cannot stay at home doing nothing, they go to school.”
The women often maligned the “lazy girls” in the market, and although she clearly wanted to, Mama never joined her friends for my sake.
“If to say I get another daughter,” she would say afterwards, “I for no dey disturb you like this. I for just leave you to this your nonsense school. When I was your age ehn, I dey do everytin wey my Mama ask me to do. But children of these days ehn, I no even understand. Or na wetin dem dey teach una for that school be that?” Like the other women of Amankalu, Mama switched between Igbo, English and Pidgin English.
Chimalume, my older brother, stood up for me when Mama began with her complaints. Once, when Mama had raised her right hand up to slap me, Chimalume snuck behind her and hugged her so tightly that her stomach fat slumped over his arms and covered them. Mama chuckled and used her raised hand to rub his head. Then she looked at his face. “My boy,” she smiled, “Hmm, okay. If it is for your sake, I will leave this your stubborn sister.” She sent me to my room.
After that day, Mama constantly nagged me for wanting to go to school:
“I know there is one boy in that your school that is deceiving you and making you to disobey your mother. I know.”
“There is no boy. I am going to school because I want to.” I responded.
She scowled at me. “Don’t worry, I go go that school go find out.”
I shook my head, “Was Papa not in Secondary School when he got you pregnant? And you are telling me about—”
She jumped out of her seat and in a second was standing in front of me, right hand raised, ready to smack my “stupidity” out of me. Chimalume appeared out of nowhere. He held Mama’s hand and gently put it back down. Even Papa, sitting on a stool, sharpening his cutlass, was holding his breath. I deserved that slap. Mama and Papa would not think this far, but Chimalume deserved a slap too.
Mama eyed Chimalume and shook her head, all the way into her room. That was that.
I used to wonder who Mama loved and respected more—Chimalume or Papa. Maybe she respected Papa out of necessity. He was her husband, he had paid her bride price, he provided food for the family, and was the father of her children. He was worthy of her respect. On the other hand, Chimalume was just a child. She respected him out of her own desire to. He was her pride, her son, the one to take on the family name, the one to fill his father’s shoes.
Chimalume was three years older than me. He had inherited Papa’s smooth dark skin and his towering height, and had also taken Mama’s curly, thick hair. If Mama prepared ofe achara and fufu and Chimalume refused to eat, she would go back into the kitchen to prepare a special meal, because what is a mother’s work if not to feed her hungry children? Mama would boil half a tuber of yam for Chimalume, even when yams were scarce and expensive. It was a small cost for the happiness of her golden boy, who would always eat as Kings eat.
I once asked Papa why Mama gave Chimalume so much attention. He shook his head and chuckled:
“You are wiser than your age, Somtochukwu,” he said. “Chimalume is your mother’s pride, as she says, because, if she had no son, she would not be able to lift up her shoulders in the presence of other women. My dear, in Amankalu, it is better to have no child than to have no son. Your mother is grateful that she has him.”
I grew up knowing I was less important. I was as irrelevant as groundnut oil in a pot of banga soup. The extent of my relevance was in marriage and the birth of more boys for the land. Boys would mature into men, work on the farms, do “men’s work”, rule their homes and go to school if they wished to.
I couldn’t tell if it was the anger I felt towards Amankalu’s imprudence that turned me into a rebel, as Mama would have called me. Or maybe I was tired of being overlooked. In the times when no one paid attention to me, I borrowed and read books from the Headteacher at my school. Nobody noticed, but I was topping my class. Nobody noticed while I was applying for the scholarships our Headteacher brought to my notice. Nobody noticed as I planned a future for myself, one that was not in line with the narrative of Amankalu.
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in April, I announced to my parents that I would be going to University. I stood in the middle of our parlour trembling as I waited for their reaction.
“Somto has written WAEC and JAMB and she passed, and next session, she will follow me to school,” Chimalume came to my rescue. “When I graduate she will be in two hundred level so she will be used to the environment. You people have nothing to worry about.”
Papa stared at the both of us like he was waiting for the part where we would laugh and say it was a joke. Mama threw her hands onto her head and began screaming, “Ewoo!” She fell to the ground in comic agony. Rolling on the ground was common among the women of Amankalu.
“Ewoo!” Mama shouted, “Somtochukwu has finally killed me o!”
“Shut up, woman,” Papa snapped. “Do you want the whole village to hear you and come and start asking us what happened?”
Papa scolded me. My going to University would be a thing of shame. Why couldn’t I stay at home and fry garri? Why couldn’t I walk around the village in Dunlop slippers and short skirts, trying to seduce young men? Why did I want different things and dream outrageous dreams? I was not like the other girls, but he did not care to hear that. I cried that afternoon.
“Young woman,” Papa said to me. “I don’t know what you two have been discussing and what rubbish your brother has put in that small head of yours. But let me just tell you, no girl from here goes to University. Is it because I allowed you to go to Secondary School with those lazy girls?”
“No Papa,”
“Are you a boy, Somtochukwu?”
“No, Papa.”
“So what are you going to do in university? Have you heard of any daughter of this land that went to university?” he turned to Chimalume, “What have you been telling your sister?”
Chimalume got up and shouted at our parents:
“I don’t want to hear any nonsense talk this hot afternoon,” he began. “On campus, when I see so many young girls, I wonder, ‘Are the girls from Amankalu not human beings?’ So Papa, it is either you give a valuable reason why Somto can’t go to school or you allow her to go. Simple.”
“When did Somtochukwu write JAMB?” Mama spoke over Chimalume. “Where did she go and write it? Who took my daughter there?”
Neither of us answered. I wasn’t going to tell my mother that I had followed the headmaster and six other boys in my class to Enugu to write JAMB. I wasn’t going to tell her that only four of us had gained admission into the university and that I had the second highest result. If she had been paying attention, she would have noticed that the day I went for the exam, I came back home later than the other girls who were in my class. If she had been paying me any attention at all, she would have seen the result sheets lying exposed on the plastic table in my room.
“Woman, forget that one.” Papa said. “Chimalume what is wrong with you? Have you forgotten that anyone who goes against the traditions of the land will be severely punished? See Azubuike who refused to work on his farm, his wife is barren. Golibe’s sister who tried to ride her brother’s motorcycle, did she not break her legs in an accident? Wasn’t it until the gods approved of women riding motorcycles that they started to do it? Now, your sister wants to go to university. Is she a man?”
“Papa, forget tradition!” My brother snapped, “You and your people are old school. Education is education o Papa. It is not by man or by woman. Somtochukwu has already gained admission, all this drama you and Mama are displaying is unnecessary. Somto is going to school, full stop.” He stormed into his room and made sure to slam the wooden door hard.
I wished Papa had left our conversation at that, as the shameful declaration that the village couldn’t know about. Instead, he had raised the subject at the men’s monthly meeting. The next Sunday evening, the elders, with their feathered red caps and walking sticks, visited our home to speak to me. I was nineteen years old, and I had never seen the whole council of elders in one place, except at the palace years ago when a palm tree fell. Now they were in my home sitting across from me in our parlour, staring sharply at me as if they had just caught me trying to jump into the Azumini River.
“Nwa m nwanyi, my daughter, why have you chosen to bring shame to your family?” One of the elders asked.
I shifted in my seat and scanned the room for a book I could use to fan myself. I bit my bottom lip, and then I bit harder.
If Chimalume had not walked into the parlour at the time that he did, I might not have gone to school.
“I know that you have come with good intentions, but this girl, Somto, is my sister and even more than that, she is a person of her own.” Chimalume began. “She can make her own decisions and do whatever she pleases. If the gods decide to punish her, it will not affect you or your families. So, thank you very much for your concern.”
Papa was ashamed. I had humiliated him and as if that was not enough, Chimalume had done the same thing. That evening, Mama prepared a meal for the family and brought it to the parlour. When I tried to join in, she said, “your own is not here.” After that night, Papa no longer told me about his day when he returned from the farm. Even when I greeted him, he replied with, “Mmm,” and nothing else. Silence grew into hostility, and their neglect grew into abandonment. My parents discarded me like I was a bag of rotten ogbono seeds. When I was leaving for University, a week before Chimalume would, my parents did not even greet me goodbye.
“Mama, I am already going.” I said to her that morning, when she was setting up firewood for breakfast.
She did not look up at me when she said, “Did you tell me when you decided to go to university or when you wrote JAMB?” She continued, “No, you didn’t. So, why are you telling me now? Whatever I say doesn’t matter to you.”
Mama’s words did not hurt me the way Papa’s did:
“Somtochukwu, so you have made up your mind to shame me,” he said as he put on his farm boots. “You don’t even care that everyone will say that my daughter has gone to university like a man. You don’t care about me and this family. It’s okay. Igbo people say that a stubborn chicken hears things when it is inside the stew pot. Why the gods didn’t give me two boys is what I don’t know.”
I left the house right after, and I cried as I walked away. It was Papa’s last sentence that caused me to cry on a day which was supposed to be one of the happiest in my life. Papa, who I had asked why Mama preferred Chimalume over me, was the same person wishing I had been a boy. It was the indifference with which he had said it that caused the aching feeling of rejection in my heart as I walked down the road dragging my Ghana-must-go behind me. This was when Azubuike saw me—I was walking past his shop—and he gave me the money I used to start a life outside Amankalu.
* * *
I almost asked the taxi driver to wait outside the rusted blue gate. My parents would likely turn me back. I took my box out of the boot, and before I could thank the driver, he zoomed off.
I took in a deep breath before I gently opened the gate and walked inside. The compound looked the same. The mango tree in the middle was still arched to the side. Our house, a little bungalow, sat there, idle. It looked fragile. It had always looked that way, with the windows devoid of mosquito nettings and Mama’s old wrappers serving as curtains.
Mama was the first person to see me. I saw it, the shock on her face, but, as quickly as it came, it left. As if she slipped on a mask, her expression became inscrutable. She shut her eyes and squeezed her mouth, an act very peculiar to her; she would usually hiss at this point, but this time, Mama did not hiss. She only frowned and retied her wrapper around her waist. Then she walked inside. That was my welcome. Five years away from home and that was my welcome.
Tears came to Papa’s eyes when he saw me. He was in the parlour, holding his bottle of snuff, talking with Chimalume who was seated opposite him, eating okpa with his hands. Papa looked at Chimalume then he looked back at me as if to say to Chimalume, “Did you know she was coming?”
“Somtochukwu?” He was not sure it was me. I had really not changed. I was still the taut-skinned and lanky teenager that I was five years ago and, even then, he didn't recognize me.
“Papa,”
“Somtochukwu, my daughter?”
“Yes Papa.”
Chimalume winked at me. I saw him just a week ago when he came to Enugu. I had talked to him about wanting to come home. He predicted that Papa would welcome me with open arms; according to my brother, not one day went by without Papa mentioning my name. At least Papa still loves me, I thought.
Papa’s next words killed that thought and buried it six feet under the ground with the epitaph, ‘The daughter who dared to dream and defied traditions’ boldly written on the gravestone:
“You are back here because the gods have started punishing you, or no be so?”
When I made up my mind to come home, especially after what Chimalume told me the previous week about Papa talking about me every day, I had envisioned a grand welcome. I had hoped Mama would hug me and call the neighbors screaming, “Nwa m nwanyi, my daughter, is back o!” I had hoped Papa would send for jars of palm wine and invite the men to come and break kola and celebrate in his house. I had hoped they would have woken up from their naive slumber and that more girls around town would be attending the Secondary School now. I had hoped Mama would apologize to me and I would say, “There’s no problem Mama.” I had hoped people would celebrate me as the first girl from the town to have a university certificate the same way Golibe was celebrated when he bought his motorcycle. I was completely wrong.
Papa was looking at me, waiting for my response. I looked at my feet, then back up at him, “No Papa, the gods have not started punishing me and they never will.”
He squeezed his face like Mama did, and looked away from me. I should have asked the taxi driver to wait.
Chimalume stood to carry my bag. “Let me take this into the room.”
“No,” I said. My parents looked up then.
“You want to sleep in the parlour?” Mama asked.
“No, I’m going back to Enugu.” I picked up my bag and sent Chimalume a thank-you-very-much smile. “I can see I’m not welcome here.” Papa was fighting tears now. He made to stand up but Mama touched his arm and he settled back down. I wanted to challenge him, to ask him if he was now incapable of making his own decisions. Instead I sighed and moved on:
“The main reason I’m here is to inform you that I have graduated, of course, and I have a job in the Ministry of Agriculture in Enugu. I will be living there permanently.”
They held the silence until Mama got up, retied her wrapper, and said she was going to clean the kitchen. I could hear her washing plates. Papa was frowning. There was an even longer silence.
“Papa,” I started, “i nweghi ike izuta nwa n’ahia, you cannot buy a child in the market,” I clutched my bag, “Please tell Mama that I have gone. And I will not be coming back.” With that, I left.
Glossary
Eze – chief (local leader)
Nne – mother
Hollandies – brand of wax print fabric
Garri – cassava flakes
Isiagu – a cultural shirt worn traditionally by Igbo men on special occasions such as weddings
Ghana-must-go – large Chinatown tote bag
Fufu and ofe achara – traditional staple food made with flour, and eaten with a sauce
Banga soup – traditional soup made from palm fruits
WAEC, JAMB – Nigerian school-leaving standardized exams
Ogbono seeds – wild African mango seeds
Okpa – a traditional food made from Bambara flour
