Up-Country Girl: A Personal Journey and Truthful Portrayal of African Culture

By Phebean Ajib? la Ogundip?

Up-Country Girl is the story of an African girl from a rural farming community, and the notable achievements and developments in her life, which coincided with many national events. Nigeria moved from being a British colony to independence, and the new democracy was disrupted by a series of coups detat bringing decades of military rule, before a return to civilian rule in 1999.

Interwoven into her story are the authors personal views from experience, on old and new polygamy, corruption, sex education, the upbringing of children, business partnerships, the problems of a pluralistic society, work ethics, and other issues.

Up-Country Girl also affords the reader a truthful and accurate portrayal of African culture. As a creative writer, the author wrote Nothing So Sweet which won First Prize in a British Council competition; several short stories which were broadcast by the B.B.C; Folktales and Fables published by Penguin Books, and short stories included in two recent anthologies.

As an educationist, she is best known as the co-author of secondary school textbooks: New Practical English by Ogundipe and Tregidgo, and Brighter Grammar.

She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468584714

Phebean Ajib? la Ogundip?

Born Phebean Ajibola Itayemi in Esa Oke, Nigeria. Her elementary education in Esa Oke, secondary education in Queens College Lagos, University education (M.A. Hons.) in St. Andrews, Scotland, rounded up with a London University Post-graduate Certificate in Education. She worked as an educationist in Nigerian Government service, first as a teacher of English, then as administrator in various schedules including educational broadcasting, Principal of institutions, National Secretary for UNESCO, Deputy Chief Federal Adviser on Education, and Acting Director in the Federal Ministry at time of retirement.

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Up-Country Girl

A personal journey and truthful

portrayal of African culture

Phebean Ajibọla Ogundipẹ

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© 2013 Phebean Ajibọla Ogundipẹ. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 4/2/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8473-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8472-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8471-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012907055

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Table Of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 Olden days

Chapter 2 Home-training of the African child

Chapter 3 Influences from elsewhere

Chapter 4 Keeping old, accepting new

Chapter 5 Old practices and old beliefs

Chapter 6 New horizons

Chapter 7 Up-country girl goes to town

Chapter 8 Queen’s in the forties

Chapter 9 New life, new shoes

Chapter 10 Benefactor teachers

Chapter 11 Surprises

Chapter 12 Growing up time

Chapter 13 The new world of Europe

Chapter 14 City life and London

Chapter 15 Return of a ‘been-to’

Chapter 16 ‘Tisha’ at last

Chapter 17 African culture and relationships

Chapter 18 Moving up the ladder

Chapter 19 Career progress

Chapter 20 Partnerships and priorities

Chapter 21 Hard times, hard politics

Chapter 22 Coups d’etat and the military

Chapter 23 A federal civil servant

Chapter 24 Nearly 25 years of service

Chapter 25 Post-retirement assignments

Chapter 26 Retired – not tired?

Chapter 27 House-help, good and bad

Chapter 28 Life goes on

Preface

This book can bring useful and interesting knowledge to a wide range of people.

In today’s globalized world, one does not need to step on a plane, or even travel at all, before one comes across people from elsewhere, from ‘far-away places, with strange-sounding names’. Our natural curiosity to know more about these ‘strangers’, that curiosity which every child, white, black, brown, or yellow is born with, is one good reason for reading a book like UP-COUNTRY GIRL.

The social interaction we need for getting on well with our neighbors, which is based on our knowledge of the social background we both have in common, and the known details of their personal life and circumstances, is not so easy to obtain when we come across these unknown strangers. We can move nearer to such interaction by reading books like UP-COUNTRY GIRL, which, while not giving us as much background knowledge as we have of the neighbor across the road, can give us enough awareness of the differences between us to save us from gaffes that might seriously offend someone we have no intention of offending, or quarrelling with.

In addition, on the positive side, reading such a book as this will bring us some of the pleasure we get from reading books of fiction, especially when we know that what we have read, strange though it might sound, is fact, not fiction.

Also, to our surprise, we will re-discover the universality of mankind when we find, in the strange country we are reading about, items similar, or even identical, to items in our own lives, or sometimes, if the passing years have brought changes, to items in the lives of our parents, or grandparents in the days of their youth.

African-Americans will also find UP-COUNTRY GIRL of special interest. As people of African descent whose ancestors were brutally removed from their native land and rich cultural traditions and brought to work as slaves for a society that constantly told them they were inferior, UP-COUNTRY GIRL provides a reminder of their true heritage. This knowledge is of vital importance as they will find more valid and empowering ways to express their rejection of the idea of black inferiority, and assert pride in their origins, than by more superficial actions like growing dreadlocks or sporting hair corn-rowed like the feminine hairstyles of women in Africa, or by rejection of what is seen as a white educational system (which sadly leads to dropping out of school, resulting in their inability to secure any but the lowest-paying, least respected, jobs). Knowledge of the richness of their roots, along with the happy fact of an efficient, highly educated and widely respected African-American as the President of the United States, can only work to increase their self confidence while reminding them that they come from a people with strong morals, and a sense of community and familial responsibility.

Another group of readers who will benefit from this book is the group of present-generation Africans in the United States, away from home, known as Africans in the Diaspora, and their children, often born not in Africa, but in the new, American, home of their parents. The parents themselves, even when born in Africa, are often of an age when the events and facts of rural African culture are not as well-known as they are to the author of this book, because the world is changing everywhere, and even grandparents in the ‘Western world’ are finding that the virtues they grew up with, and the standards expected from them when they were children, are somehow beginning to vanish in the 21st century. The book should be of benefit to Diaspora Africans, and their children, for the discovery and preservation of old virtues.

Finally, for us travelers, it would be nice if there was a book where the friends and other well-meaning Americans with whom we have social interaction could find a truthful picture of real African culture. Thus we would not feel embarrassed by the type of odd views brought by lack of knowledge, or by the misjudging without really understanding Africa, under which we suffered as colonials.

The colonists really believed they were bringing us ‘superior’ Western standards whereas, in cases such as ‘democracy’, the ‘Western’ version they left with us is in fact inferior to the truly democratic African culture I grew up with. In our original home-grown democracy the Obas and Chiefs, who were much honored and respected, were far more democratic, in the basic sense of concern for the people ruled, and honest accountability which made them far closer to their people, than the present ‘Western’ model which has led to the growth of politicians and leaders who metamorphose into despots and sit-tight ‘rule till I die regardless of the consequences to the people’ dictators and politicians found in too many African countries these days, and which the recent Arab Spring was meant to change in the Middle East.

In a milder case, the friends of us travelers, when better informed, from the reading of books like UP-COUNTRY GIRL, would not interpret the fact of African children walking barefoot as a sign of poverty. By pure coincidence, this point about shoes is made four times in this book, starting from page 1, and mentioned three times later. The last was the time when I was principal of Government Teacher Training College (GTTC) in Ilesha and my two boys went to the elementary school that was part of GTTC. They came home, after their first day in school, to beg me to allow them to go barefoot to school, as they were the only two children in the whole school who wore sandals, unlike their classmates, and other schoolmates, who came happily to school barefooted!

To sum up, I hope all book-lovers will enjoy this personal account of my interesting journey, from the beginning of my rural African life, going on to the many developments in my career, and my views about issues such as the new type of polygamy, far different from, and inferior to, the old polygamy of my childhood; about education; the up-bringing of children, and other issues, just as I, a book-lover, love reading a wide range of good books by writers from other places and different cultures.

Phebean Ajibọla Ogundipẹ

Charlotte, April 2012

Chapter 1

Olden days

I did not own a pair of shoes until I was a secondary school pupil and nearly thirteen years old.

This was not the result of poverty. Although I was a farmer’s daughter, my father was a prosperous farmer in my little hometown of Esa Oke. Also, even though they were living in a rural community, my parents could not have been described as rural in any derogatory sense of that word.

By the standards of their time, my parents were enlightened folk. Far from being illiterates, or people who had never stepped outside the confines of their hometown, both John Folami Itayemi and his wife Rachel Ilori were educated and literate. They were well versed in the reading of Yoruba, especially the Bible and Hymnbooks, and in addition had a smattering of English.

Both had spent some part of their lives outside the rural confines of Esa Oke. My father, in his youth, had embarked on the adventure of working for the oyinbo [White Man] when they were building the earliest railways on the West Coast of Africa. He had gone as far as the Gold Coast, now Ghana, perhaps attracted by what sounded like incredibly high wages to a farmer’s ears. I still remember the melodious tune, which had been brought home by him and his co-travelers, in their report of their far-away adventure. It was a verbal rendition of what must have been a drum-song.

Drum-song? In those days, communal labor was a regular feature of village life. It varied in scale, starting from a small group of friends banding together, having set aside an agreed day, to work on a project of one of them, such as building the walls of his new house, or roofing it. The largest scale was when it was decided that a big job, such as improving the roads of the village, or building a house for the chief, needed to be done by all the males of a section of the village, or even all the males of the entire village. Some members who were drummers would bring their drums along, and their drumming while others worked was regarded as their own contribution to the communal labor.

1.jpg

Yoruba Drummer

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Woman grinding condiment on grinding stone

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Woman spinning thread from cotton wool

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Farmer harvesting cocoa with cutlass

This was because the people believed that work would be more easily done if it could be made livelier by being accompanied by drumming. The drumming was used to get the workers to work to a rhythm which coordinated their physical movements, and also made everyone work as a team, with no one slacking behind the others, and with all of them working efficiently and without complaining of tiredness, until the time for a break, or the approach of sunset, signaled the end of the day’s work.

As late as the nineteen-fifties, I myself was witness to the fact that the use of this rhythmic assistance to communal labor had not yet disappeared from our culture. I was an Education Officer in Ibadan, and was driving past in Agodi when I saw a group of prisoners cutting grass near the governor’s mansion. The beautiful lawns in Agodi were maintained in those days by gangs of prisoners who did this work as part of their prison sentence, under the watchful eyes of their warders. It was easy to recognize the prisoners in their uniform attire of cotton shorts and short-sleeved bubas. As I passed, I heard them singing as they worked, led by two of them with simple drumming instruments. They all swung down at the same time to cut the grass, following the rhythm of the accompanying song, which went thus:

Sinsi morning [wham!] Ah never chopu [wham!]

Sinsi morning [wham!] Ah never drinki [wham!]

Bend down k’o s 40089.jpg anko O 40096.jpg ba!

Bend down k’o s 40363.jpg anko O 40098.jpg ba!

I understood this song, in Pidgin English and Yoruba, was saying, "Since morning, I have not eaten;

Since morning, I have not had a drink;

Bend down, cut government grass!

Bend down, cut government grass!"

The [wham!] in the first and second lines indicated the moments when they all bent down together and swung their grass cutters; on the third and fourth lines, the syncopated action was at the point where they sang the command Bend!

I was so fascinated by this spectacle that I made the mistake of stopping to watch. They noticed me watching, and called a stop to change their song to one they were sure would send me running:

"Ẹ wa wo ‘yawo ẹlẹwọn o,

Aya t’o duro o, aya wa ni;

Aya t’o duro o, aya wa

Aya t’o duro o, aya wa ni;

Ẹ wa wo ‘yawo ẹlẹwọn o,

Aya t’o duro o, aya wa ni"

This song, as they continued to swing their grass cutters, meant,

"Come and see a prisoner’s wife;

This woman stopping here is a wife of ours …."

If being a prisoner was considered a public disgrace, being called a prisoner’s wife was even more disgraceful for an innocent bystander. I fled.

It is surprising how well the drums, named talking drums by foreigners, actually mimic the speech rhythms and patterns and tones of Yoruba (and most likely of some other African languages). The mimicry is so good that those who know the drum rhythms and the particular language well can recognize the words the drums are saying, even if the workers are not accompanying the drums by singing the words of the song.

The drum-song to which my father must have swung his railway-building implements was composed to reflect the rhythmic sound of the railway engine:

"S 40119.jpg ile meji l’owo ojumọ ni Sekondi, Sekondi, Sekondi,

l’owo ojumọ ni Sekondi……"

"Two shillings is the daily wage in Sekondi,

Sekondi, Sekondi;

…. the daily wage in Sekondi…"

announcing that the daily wage for workers in Sekondi (a town in Ghana) was a whopping two shillings!

Two shillings was a lot of money at the time, when one realizes that, fifteen or more years later, when I started elementary school, the school fees for a whole term was only three pence, one-eighth of two shillings, as twelve pence made one shilling. And the same three pence was enough to pay for a small bag of ballam rice. This bag was six inches by six inches square, and enough for one special meal for a family of four or five.

In addition to the attractive wages, or perhaps more important than the wages, my father was probably driven by the adventurous spirit of youth, to find more interesting employment away from the farming known to his fathers. At that time, it was the gbajumọs, dashing young men with the spirit of adventure, who traveled to the outside world for employment, and returned to the village with travelers’ tales of the wonders to be seen in the strange new world of the cities, with all the new facilities brought by the oyinbos (the white people).

I never knew for sure why he had returned to Esa Oke to settle down to the farming life of his people. I never thought to ask him, because our culture demands an awesome amount of respect for one’s parents, especially fathers, and especially when one is still a dependent youngster. To get any really concrete information I would have needed to ask direct questions. But such questions, from a child to an elder, for no purpose other than to satisfy the youngster’s curiosity, would have been considered impertinent.

I had to be extra careful because I was a most inquisitive child, and in a community where the well-bred child is expected to be seen, not heard, I got into enough trouble speaking out of turn. Jibola, shut your mouth! or Who put your mouth into that matter? or Why in the first place are you tagging after adults listening to their conversation? was what I was told often enough, usually with the addition of the scolding term "Ẹlẹnu bebe-le" [owner of a mouth which goes clap! clap! clap!].

I can’t have enjoyed the scolding I got for being so forward; but it was never serious enough to make me think I was a bad girl. A bit of a nuisance at times, maybe, but okay. Actually, more than just okay. I knew I had the love of my parents and other relatives, and the approval of neighbors. Although tiny in size, I was a willing runner of errands, who could be counted on not to lag by the wayside.

Also, I seemed to be a particular favorite with those neighbors who went round the neighborhood to hawk goods.

What did people hawk, in a farming community that was almost completely self-sufficient? Perhaps some fresh farm vegetables, surplus to what they needed for feeding their own family. Or maybe some cooked foodstuff, such as ẹkọ or moin-moin, which a woman had made and wanted to sell to raise some cash for family spending. Even in our small, relatively self-sufficient community, there was still a certain amount of job specialization. It was convenient for the average housewife, that things like breakfast foods in the form of ẹkọ and moin-moin should be prepared in bulk by one particular person, who sold in smaller quantities to housewives who had other jobs to do with their time.

This was the African village equivalent of the European or American fast food. Moin-moin, for instance, takes a lot of time to prepare. The maker must first soak and then skin the beans, grind them smooth, mix the ground beans with oil, salt, pepper and other condiments, make a special cup of wrapped leaves, put measures of the bean mixture in them, and then steam the wrapped mixture for nearly one hour.

Ẹkọ takes even more time and labor to make. The ingredient for ẹkọ is only dried maize, or corn, and, in the village in those days, the first item of the preparation would be to take the cobs of corn, and remove the individual grains of corn from the cob by hand, a process known as shelling. Nowadays, corn can be found, ready shelled, in the market, for sale, but in a farming community like Esa Oke, the corn would have been grown, and harvested, by each farmer, just as each farmer grew the yams, vegetables and other foodstuff, which would be cooked as food for his household.

The iya ẹlẹkọ [woman who makes and sells ẹkọ] takes the shelled corn, and, first, has to leave the grains soaking in water for two or three days, until it is soft enough to grind. The grinding is done by using a small stone (called daughter stone) to crush the corn grains in a back-and-forth movement on a larger – mother – stone. This grinding movement is repeated until the grains have been reduced to a smooth pulp. This pulp must be rid of the tough skin of the grains before a really smooth flour-like substance can be produced. The next job is therefore to mix the ground corn with plenty of water, and then use a fine sieve to separate the husk from the paste of the corn. The sieved mixture is then left for some time so that the paste will settle, and most of the water can be drained off to leave behind the wet paste.

It is the initial soaking period of three days which, in addition to making the corn soft enough to grind, serves as time for the corn to ferment, and to develop the sour taste that characterizes ẹkọ. Nothing short of this sourness is acceptable to the ẹkọ eaters of my generation. But, like all acquired tastes, not all strangers appreciate or like it! In fact, and this is a sign of the changing of the times, some of our own children, and most of our grandchildren, who have developed a liking for imported sugar and sweetened foods, insist on adding sugar to pap, as ẹkọ is called when cooked for eating in a liquid form like porridge.

In the case of wrapped ẹkọ, which, unlike pap, is eaten cold with an accompanying dish such as stew, for it to be well prepared, the corn paste has to be mixed with the right amount of water, and must be stirred constantly during the cooking process so as not to develop lumps. The mixture must be cooked long enough to ensure that when cool, it will solidify. This is then measured into special wraps of gbodogi leaves, and left to become completely cold, when it can be unwrapped for eating.

Obviously, it made sense to have a moin-moin or ẹkọ seller, who made enough for forty families, rather than have forty housewives each spending the same amount of time making the smaller amount needed for their individual families. The makers of such items usually made a regular round of a selected part of the village, hawking their food items. Once they were known as suppliers of these items, prospective buyers waited in their houses until the sellers came around.

So, some neighbors used to hawk various items, and, I don’t know how this originated, but they had got the impression that I was a kind of good-luck mascot. Therefore, it was customary for someone about to go round hawking to say, Call me Jibola. When I went to her, she would say something like, Jibola, I just want to see you before going on my selling round. I know it will bring me luck and my goods will sell fast. I was then free to go back to our own house. I therefore grew up with this idea of being an "alaje", someone who somehow attracts wealth to those around her.

Although I was this happy, well-loved child, the distance created between parent and child by the respect demanded by Yoruba culture made it impossible for me, even as an inquisitive child, to find out from my father why he had returned to the rural life of Esa Oke, after experiencing the wonders of the new life brought by the white men. These strangers were bringing to Africa, among many other things, new methods of transportation, the most marvelous of which was the railways which he had gone to the Gold Coast to help build.

If I had grown old enough to earn my father’s respect for an independent, educated adult, it would have been acceptable for me to ask what had taken him to the Gold Coast, and why he had returned home at the time he did. I would have got answers to my questions, and most likely also would have been regaled with the details of his life as a railway worker so far away from home. But he died before I could reach that age, and it never occurred to me to ask my mother, who lived thirty years after him, and with whom I achieved the loving, but still respectful, relationship of an adult, independent daughter.

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We children never for a moment doubted that we had the love of our parents - how could we, when we saw how hard they worked to give their children a comfortable life, which enabled us to hold our heads high among our peers.

In the case of my family, our prosperity was symbolized by our nice house, which was roofed with corrugated iron sheets, had a smooth cement floor, thin cement plastering over the clay walls, wooden doors with locks, and windows with wooden shutters. The kitchen was a separate building a few yards at the back, an airy building with low walls, and with a roof of thatched gbodogi leaves. It was a better kitchen than the so-called modern kitchen, which is built as a unit inside the main house. It was a more practical place in which to sweat at the fire, grind corn or condiments like pepper on the grinding stone, or pound yam in the wooden mortar. The smell of food, and any cooking smells, wafted away in this cool, airy, building. This, in my view, shows the superiority of its design to that of the modern house, where the smell of cooking is a torture to hungry stomachs when the food is not yet ready for eating; is an irritating assault on the nostrils of visitors, and an annoying give-away in the opinion of the housewife, who would rather keep the details of the meal to the family for whom it was cooked. In addition, water for drinking and household use also kept nice and cool in a big clay pot in a corner of the airy kitchen.

Our house was big enough for us to have a spacious parlor (as the sitting room was then called), and enough rooms for sleeping, plus one that was set aside as a store, and another, larger one, called iyara alejo [the strangers’ room]. We had a special room for strangers, because our house was the first house one reached as one entered Esa Oke when coming from Imesi-Odo (now called Okemesi).

Those were the days when traveling by lorry was a luxury. Not a luxury in the sense that it was comfortable; on the contrary, the typical lorry was a noisy, rickety vehicle, a cage-on-wheels with narrow planks placed inside for passengers to sit on. These planks, only about four inches wide, were placed across the inside of the lorry, supported on the lorry’s two sides. The passengers not only had to balance on these simple seats, but also often had to cling to them with both hands, to save themselves from being jolted off the plank when the vehicle hit a bump, or dipped into a pothole in the road. Sometimes, a really bad jolt would lift the plank off the wooden side of the lorry on which it rested, and if, on descending, it missed the side from which it had lifted, it would crash-land on the floor of the lorry, sometimes on the feet of a passenger. The force with which the plank, still carrying the weight of the people sitting on it, landed on a limb, would probably have the poor passenger limping for days after the journey.

No, lorries were a luxury merely in the sense that an ordinary person could not afford to travel by lorry, unless the journey was going to earn him money that would justify the cost of his fare. Also, the arrival of lorries from the big town was far from a daily, or even a regular, occurrence. No serious traveler could afford to wait an indefinite time for a lorry to show up in the marketplace, because no one traveled for fun in those days. Going far away from home had only become somewhat less perilous as a result of the arrival of Pax Britannica [Latin for British Peace], and one only traveled away from one’s living, and one’s family, for some urgent or unforeseen reason.

This usually meant people could not hang around until the day a lorry to take them to the big town finally turned up. In the farming community, time is always an issue. This is something we sometimes forget, we whose day nowadays is not bound by the rising and the setting of the sun. In our parents’ days, it was sunrise and sunset which limited the time available for work and other important activities to just half of the day, from dawn to dusk.

So, we had a regular flow of perfect strangers calling at our house, people coming from Imesi or farther off, who did not think they could reach the next small town of ljebu-Jesha, in daylight. Naturally, nobody traveled by night - how could they? People nowadays often forget, or are unaware of, the fact that the arrival of night in the tropics brings pitch darkness, in which one would not even be able to find the path on which to set one’s feet, without a light. Travelers could not carry lamps - the local oil lamp could not be carried about. Apart from the inconvenience of balancing a lamp at waist level, the lightest breeze could blow out the light. The only other possibility, a lantern with a glass shade, and run on imported kerosene, was too precious, and too expensive, to be used on any but the most important occasions.

Therefore, travelers arriving about sundown asked to be put up for the night. They expected, and got, hospitality for free. There was no problem feeding them - farmers always had enough cooked food to spare some for an extra mouth, and if they were short of meat in the stew, the children had their share given to the stranger; natural Yoruba culture demanded that an adult, and a stranger at that, should get preferential treatment to the children of the house. After they had eaten, they would be shown to the strangers’ room, where there was a mat for them to sleep on. They would be off first thing next morning, trekking to the next point of their journey.

This simple hospitality was considered so normal at that time that my parents never expected any special thanks or credit for harboring traveling strangers. Surprisingly enough, when beds came to town as a symbol of the white man’s civilization, the first bed bought by my parents was placed in the strangers’ room. It was a wooden bed, on which a simple mat was spread. The owners of the house and their children continued sleeping comfortably on the mats spread on the floor of their rooms! The first time I started sleeping on a bed, instead of on a mat on the floor, was in my dormitory in the boarding house in Queen’s College, my secondary school.

As a child, and for many years after, it never occurred to me to wonder how our house happened to be where it was. It was only later, when I learnt more about the character of my paternal grandfather, Ajasu, that I knew that to build a house there had been a deliberate act of bravery. I was told that Ajasu had shown bravery and self-confidence by choosing to live at the isolated edge of the town, at a time when the safest place to be was in the middle of the town.

There was no doubt that it required real courage to choose to build at "ẹrun odi" [the town entry] at that time. This was the 19th century, and the times of inter-tribal wars, or even internecine wars within the same tribe, were not so far off. People could still remember tales of what happened in times of war, when invading enemies came to raid the town and kill, or carry away to slavery, the town’s inhabitants. Such attacks and raids started with the first people the enemy found on entering the town. Most towns had walls and ditches built round them, to make the entry of enemies so hard that the townspeople would not be taken unawares. In my childhood I still found part of the mound-wall, with a steep ditch on the outer side, at the actual point of entry into our town, near our house. No doubt it has since disappeared, as the town has grown since then, and buildings have spread beyond the old boundaries.

Grandfather Ajasu was an independent spirit, a man of prowess, somewhat irascible, and so easy to offend that people had to be careful of him. One of his sobriquets was "Ajasu gan’in agbo meaning Ajasu-who-is-as-bristly-as-an-angry-ram. Angry rams were known for their gan’in", the hair that rose stiff on their backs when they lowered their heads, about to charge an enemy. I heard this from my brother Damisi, who has something of the stubborn courage and independence of spirit of his grandfather.

On the positive side, Ajasu earned praise for building at the edge of the town. The praise singers sang:

"Olule gb’ule,

Ẹlẹrẹkun gb’ẹrẹkun;

Ye sa a gb’ẹrun odi?’ meaning:

Each house-owner minded his house,

Each courtyard-owner minded his courtyard,

Who would agree to mind the town entry?

They followed with the answer:

"Olule gb’ule,

Ẹlẹrẹkun gb’ẹrẹkun;

Ajasu gb’ẹrun odi’ meaning:

Each house-owner minded his house;

Each courtyard-owner minded his courtyard;

Ajasu decided to mind the town entry.

However, by the time of my childhood, many decades later, Pax Britannica had been brought by our colonial masters, and this meant that, although our house was still the first house strangers came to, there was no longer any danger in living where we did. We accepted the duty of being the unpaid guesthouse of our town without any fuss.

But even at that time, in the nineteen twenties, traveling, alone and on foot, through strangers’ territory, was something no one would do except in the full light of day. No one could say exactly how effective the Pax Britannica was, or the new laws of the White Man against old practices such as sacrifices to the local deities. It would be useful for the traveler to know the times of the local rituals of the various villages he would be traveling through, so as not to make the mistake of traveling at the time when something untoward, something dangerous for a passing stranger, might happen. God forbid bad thing! (as the saying goes), but what if one should be passing through a village at the time of one of their most dreaded ceremonies, on an occasion when, for reasons unknown to a stranger, the priests of one of the local deities were carrying out rituals which it was taboo for even the local citizens to witness? The unfortunate stranger who arrived to break such a taboo would not live to report it, he would simply have to ‘disappear.’

Everyone was convinced that the people of their own village had left behind such barbaric practices, but how could one be sure about the neighboring village, or about people in far-off towns? If it was decided that, for the welfare of a town, to save the people from pestilence, or from famine, or from such dread scourges as that of the smallpox god, Shonponna, the appeasement of the local deity needed human life, the townspeople would not want to lose one of their own. If some unknown stranger turned up, and had to disappear, only the priests would know, and the feeling in such cases would be that the deity itself had been helpful in sending the ignorant stranger their way. It would be impossible to make a local person disappear under any circumstances, without the family suspecting what had happened, and becoming unhappy, bearing grudges, and harboring thoughts of revenge, long afterwards.

By the time of my childhood, rumors that such practices still existed were probably just mere rumors; there was no way of confirming them. Even in the olden days, when these old deities were more generally accepted, such dread practices were never openly talked about. Only the few initiates, the priests and the closest worshippers, would know the whys, wheres, and whens, and they were no blabbermouths; they invariably kept their counsel to themselves. With the arrival of the missionaries bringing the new religion of Christianity, and the new laws under Pax Britannica that banned what the White Man termed heathen practices, secrecy became even more total.

This hazardous situation made travelers very cautious. After all, if someone on the way to the coast, many, many miles and many days’ journey away, never got there, it would be impossible to find out what had happened to him, or at what point in the journey, or even exactly when, since it might be months before the people at home knew that their kinsman had failed to reach his destination. Even in the case of those who did safely reach their destination, it could be a long time before someone from that place came home, bringing the message that he had seen so and so, who had sent greetings to his people back home. The postal system at that time was rudimentary even in the bigger towns, and non-existent in small places like Esa Oke.

Therefore it was only common sense, that the traveler who looked at the setting sun and judged that he could not reach the next town in daylight, should seek the hospitality of the nearest house to pass the night. He knew he would get a free meal, and be given somewhere to sleep, before continuing his journey early the next morning. The first house on entry to the village would be the obvious choice, and, for many years, ours was that house.

We, the children of the house, never saw anything strange in this hospitality to complete strangers. We grew up believing that kindness to strangers in need, and hospitality to strangers and visitors who dropped in at mealtimes, was the norm of any civilized society. We believed that any other Esa Oke family would have done what our parents did, if their house had been in the place where ours was.

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Chapter 2

Home-training of the African child

Naturally, in a place where kindness to mere strangers was accepted as so normal, it was taken for granted that each member of the community owed an immeasurable amount of neighborly service to the others. This communal way of living appeared