On
the 25th of March; three
days after the surviving Lorries left after the war had failed to come through my
village, I rode on a bicycle with Chima sweating ahead of me with our weights
towards Onitsha to board any of the persuaded Lorries to the north.
“Makurdi
is the farthest we will get,” a driver advised some north-bound passenger.
“Is
there no bus for Kano?” a woman asked.
“Madam,
please! What I know is what I have just told you,” the driver raised a hand to
prevent any further argument from the woman.
“ONAGA!
ONAGA!!” a lorry boy cried with his last breathe, announcing the entrance of
the North-bound lorry.
Our
eyes peered towards the direction the skinny boy had come from, and the honking
of a lorry hissing fumes from its opened bonnet.
“Onaga ugwuhaousa!” the boy said to
passengers who inquired.
The
lorry came to a halt in front of us, and we all knew we were all in for one
hell of a ride to the hills of the North.
“Banye nu!” the lorry boy cried again,
urging us to pay our fares as he chewed into a huge loaf of bread.
At
the chimes of the midday bells of the cathedral calling for the Angelus, our
lorry jogtrotted through heavy human-traffic of hawkers. Men and women selling
wares from everywhere they have brought them from, mostly stolen from foreign
aids or smuggled into black markets the western states were enjoying at the
time.
We
had maintained supposedly convenient positions before we set out for the long
journey, spots we were sure soon to loose from our jam-packed state when we
struggle for space like the theory posited by Darwin. It might have been a blessing or perhaps a
dream come true that I was travelling northward again for the second time in
fourteen years after my first experience that didn’t end well.
I sat in a corner packed high with our
different luggage ranging from really expensive suitcases to hand woven
jute-bags, sucked in behind the men, the women sat across us relatively comfy,
and we traded conversation both ways in camaraderie . A man kept casting
hateful stares to a woman, everything she and her little baby did appeared to
upset him, his patience was in check until the teething girl passed foul
smelling fluids on the floor of the vehicle and had to cause us to stop, so she
could be cleaned. He lamented that he had told the woman to stay back while he
went to look at the business he left, but she insisted and wound up with him in
the same lorry against his knowledge. She was his wife. “It is the hardship
here” I heard an elderly woman said to
the man, she too had a small shop in Kaduna before the war broke out, she said her entire family were wiped out in the war,
her only surviving son who was an engineer in Europe returned during the war
and joined the cabinet of the republic only to disappear at the brink of the
war, I was upset at her story and hate filled my heart for her son: his mother
was alive and appears to be faring well, mine had suffered terribly, and most
painfully to me was that she had a challenge: she was hunchbacked. I never
permitted myself to ruminate what had played out on her during those times, but
blamed absence, when she sure needed all her children to support her. I was not there and I was not sure if I had
thought about her during the time I learnt the war was at the hardest. Although
I couldn’t venture into the country because the western border of Cameroon was
sealed, only refugees were admitted into Yaoundé, the gendarmes would never let anyone out, without approved government
official pass and high protection.
“If
I were your son, I would never leave you!” emotion betrayed the promise I made
to myself not to say a word to anyone on the journey.
“He
had a strong position in ‘our government’,
he saved his head. he fled with Onyisi”,
I was never part of that government that had caused the death of my mother and
sister, and made this woman, my old
friends and so many others to lose their
family members, I would never have sought war nor support one. It downed on me
that I was wrong, it was a collective agreement by our legislatures from the
central and south eastern states, and they lured us to war. All of us: they
were the ones that elevated the Governor to a General and asked him to lead
them to war, now that the war was over; their faces still graced most of the
local and international tabloids trading blames or dissociating themselves from
their deed. The ones worth exempting were those that were put in jails notably
were the mathematics professor, Chike Obi in the famous University town of
Nsukka, and to an extent the high ranking Colonels and some soldiers executed
when they developed cold feet during the war. The harm was already done; we had
all gone on a journey with the whirlpool and came out not too well. Those of us
in the bus retracing our path northward, and many others who came behind were
the ones taking the real gamble on peace, and not them that have either left
the country or returned to the shambles of their homestead.
“I
still wouldn’t have left my mother,” I stuttered, this time tears stood in my
eyes, without more ado the handkerchief in my hand dabbed my eyes as I feigned
something were in those eyes. I couldn’t fool the old woman.
“Everybody
knew how the war was fought…there was nothing anyone could do. Mothers would
never have done better for their children, neither could children for their
parents…there was nothing anyone could do,” she said to me, her eyes querying
the redness in mine.
If
only the eyes gave out all that was in the heart. I bowed to conceal the
embarrassment my eyes were causing on their own; the other passengers became
interested in me. Something I intend to avoid, but their eyes on mine were
quizzing. They have forgiven themselves, picked up their shattered lives
together looking forward to create a better future for their children than the
one they had had. Why couldn’t I?
It
was the bitter truth: no one had the right to carry any form of blame. I
convinced myself. I was simply fleeing from my mother all these times without knowing
it. It wasn’t just a while. Eleven years; she sent me letters and I had none
for her, It was usually from those letters that I learnt she knew my location
each time I was more miles away from her: I presume she usually made the long
journey to the mission house in Onitsha to ask about her son, who was a
beneficiary of the mission’s scholarship in Cameroun.
“It
must have been hard on you” the old woman smiled at me on one of our stops,
when she found me lurking around the lorry while other passengers were either
eating in close bunkers, buying things with their squeezed money or maybe stretching their soon to be tired feet. I
smiled and offered her an orange I had just bought from a little bare-chested
boy hawker, she took it with a smile that reminded me of Felicia, the old
secretary of the Logistics Department of the ‘Cam-Herald’, this time the lean frame before me with an overflowing
gown popularly called ‘ Mary Amaka’ around
here had none of those exaggerated makeup the secretary habitually adorned on
her small face.
Minutes
later we crept back into our spaces; hardly a time any one of us adjusted from
the hard bench on our behind during the journey, that the other didn’t feel a
thing. We were all inconvenienced from everything. Unless there was a stopover;
times when our driver had to put petrol from a jerry can which maintained an
enviable position among us. There were also times on that journey that I
regretted why I hadn’t taken Abdulkadir’s offer and would have been by now
basking in a spacious of his peugeout.
The
breaks in our journey translated into putting water into the steaming radiator
after kilometers, a change a flat tire or to ease ourselves and eat. There was
an occasion when the front wheel busted with a loud bang, and ran into a ditch
close to a village, and we had to come down with our bare lives intact so it
could be fixed. On three stops; the
driver and his boy repaired something in the engine compartment, maybe
electrical or mechanical. The total stopover had rare numbers for the
passengers’ refreshment: to eat lunch in crowded stations of hawkers and canteens,
or for the driver to stretch his legs- we seized such stops too to stretch like
him, and to take leaks or emptied our bowels, warning ourselves not to wander
too far from the pack. Husbands followed their women to reasonable distances
into the bush. One of those stops offered us the opportunity to avert an
impending danger, had I not noticed the defunct republic coat of arm on both
sides of the front bumper of our lorry.
...to be continued!
Ezenwa Obumneme Ugochukwu is a Writer and Author of The Land is an Orphan. He tweets @EzenwaUgochukwu
Ezenwa Obumneme Ugochukwu is a Writer and Author of The Land is an Orphan. He tweets @EzenwaUgochukwu
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