The Villager: The Story of a Boy

By Bennett Obi

In a community where everybody was caught up in the vicious web of poverty, ignorance and disease, a woman of foresight decided to extricate her family from the claws of that endless cycle of doom. She fought against all odds to educate her children and somehow she succeeded. All her children made it above the community average and some made it to the top.

What some people take for granted to others it is a matter of life and death. Follow the trials and tribulations of people to acquire basic education. The story of Okonta chronicled the precarious village and secondary school life in those days in the Eastern Nigeria.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jul 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499087635

Bennett Obi

Dr. Bennett Onyebuchukwu Obi is a Nigerian born at Oraifite in Anambra state. He attended Oraifite Grammar school for his secondary education. He is an alumnus of the University of Nigeria Nsukka Nigeria and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is a specialist in HIV/AIDS management. He has practiced his art at various locations in Nigeria, the Comoros Islands, Nairobi Kenya (very briefly) and Lesotho. He is married with three sons. He has published four other books; The Villager, Before the Dawn, Tales of our time and Gem in a Rubbish Heap.

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CHAPTER ONE

TYPICAL EASTERN NIGERIAN

VILLAGE IN THE 1960S AND 70S

L ive in the villages in the 1960s and 70s in the Eastern part of Nigeria was a bitter battle for survival. The obstacles on the way to survival included but not limited to childhood diseases, abject poverty, poor environmental sanitation, poor housing and overcrowding lack of amenities like portable drinking water, good roads and healthcare facilities, not to talk about the almighty electricity supply; nobody was dreaming about that.

In the villages quality healthcare was non-existent; there was not even a health centre in the entire town. Every sick person was treated by a few patent medicine dealers, who also doubled as ‘doctors’. The entire population was in the dark; they had no idea what healthcare services were like so whatever they got from those quack doctors they were satisfied. Those quacks took advantage of the people’s ignorance and the absence of government presence in the villages to do what they did and got away with them; some people died of wrong medications, some were maimed by injection traumas and so many other malpractices went unreported and unpunished. Those so called doctors used one syringe and needle for the whole people for months or even years. They only boiled the instrument and used them over and over again even when the needle became very blunt and difficult to penetrate human skin, they would make people believe that any injection that was not painful was not an injection. So people grew up believing that injection must be very painful for it to work and also that any treatment without injection was fake. A lot of people could not afford that treatment from the quacks and such people when they fell sick would only rub palm oil on their body and lie by the fire. Another method of treatment was the use of herbs and roots and bark of trees. Those were boiled together and the sick person would drink some and use some to bath.

Children were not immunized against the infectious childhood diseases like tetanus, polio, diphtheria tuberculosis etc since there was no health centre or even a health post. The only form of outreach services people got was the visit of the health inspector from the district headquarters. He was only concerned about people having pit latrines in their homes as a way of promoting hygiene and invariably good health. He would go to the chief and announce his visit and the chief would use the village town crier to inform the people of the visit of the ‘sanitary’ because that was what the people called him. Any household that didn’t have a pit latrine the head of that family would be taken to the district commissioner at the district headquarters where they were tortured and released or even fined.

Another area where the authority of the district commissioner (DC) was felt was in the tax collection. The villagers were meant to pay tax as determined probably by the DC and the chiefs the information was not clear. Any adult male that failed to pay his tax was arrested and imprisoned for months or even years. On return from prison that tax was waived but the adult would pay his tax in the coming year and if he failed he was imprisoned again. That taxation did not consider what the adult male was doing for a living; every adult male must pay tax. Many people continued to go to jail for non-payment of tax for many years on end. Despite the tax government did nothing for the villages.

Education was at its infancy; there were only a few schools in the town, in fact there were only three schools serving a population of over twenty thousand people. Some children travelled up to ten kilometers to get to the nearest school and that discouraged some parents from sending their children to school. Consequently a lot of children never attended school; in fact only stubborn children were sent to school as a form of punishment, ‘good’ children stayed close to their parents and farmed, hunted and fished, thus taking over from their parents when they grew old and unable to do those things. Some parents however didn’t see schooling that way; they had the foresight that education was going to be useful in the future and so struggled to send their children to school. One such parent was Okonta’s mother who did everything within her powers to see that her children acquired education; even though she did not succeed because all her children were not educated, she tried her best.

Distance from school was not the only thing that kept children out of school, poverty and ignorance contributed a lot to it. Many parents could not afford the school fees charged at school. Some could not understand why they should pay huge sums of money according to their own standard for something that had no benefit. Some however that understood the importance of education gave their children to their relatives or more affluent members of the community as servants provided they paid their school fees. That was the option that Okonta’s mother adopted to send two of her children to school. That showed that she was only an illiterate but not stupid in fact she was far ahead of all her peers at that time; she understood the importance of education when a lot of people thought education was a waste of time and money. She had foresight that propelled her to do what she did when others were wallowing in their ignorance. It could rightly be said that she lived well ahead of her time.

Housing didn’t fare any better; people lived in thatch houses with mud walls and very poorly ventilated. Although there were a few solid brick houses, they were few and far between. Some of those thatch houses leaked terribly during the rainy season and some people used all sorts of utensils to collect the water to prevent their floors from being soaked as the floors were made of mud also. That situation was very embarrassing if there was a visitor in the house. The owner of the house could literally used her back to collect the water because she would sit at the point where the water was dropping and she would be drenched in her effort to hide the leaking point from her visitor.

Roads like their counterparts were at the rudimentary stages. There were no properly constructed roads; practically all the roads were winding tracks that linked neighbours together. However there were a few roads constructed by the Native Authority to link the district headquarters and the nearby towns. Those were not tarred roads rather they were gravel dirt roads and the Public Works Department (PWD) staff spent all their time maintaining them. One would find them sleeping under the tree shades most of the day instead of doing the work for which they were hired. The people used to make a mockery of them by nicknaming a lazy villager a PWD worker.

There was no portable water supply. The only sources of water for household use were the rivers or streams and the rain water. Some people travelled long distances to get to the streams and with such prevalence of water shortage personal hygiene and good health was compromised. People wore very dirty clothes and because everybody was involved, wearing dirty clothes was the norm rather than the exception; somebody could wear clothe without washing it for once until it torn to shreds. Poverty also contributed a lot to people being very dirty because many could not afford the home-made soap for bathing and washing of their clothes. Some people also did not have a spare clothe to change into while the other one was being washed; some resorted to washing their clothes at night so that they could dry by the following morning. Those that had another pair of clothes to wear while another was being washed were regarded as being well to do. Some people wore clothes that were patched in so many places with different colours of materials and threads that they look like walking scarecrows. School children removed their school uniform when they came back from school and go about naked all in the effort to preserve and protect their uniforms. A growing school child could wear his uniform for up to three year and by then the uniform became