13 January 1972, Kaltungo
Arrived here in Kaltungo late last night after great chaos and confusion on the way. The British Council in Kano was supposed to have sent a telegram to the Principal of the school where I’ll be working, informing him that I was arriving on the 0830 plane from Kano to Yola, which is about 100 miles from Kaltungo towards the Cameroon border.
Unfortunately the Principal interpreted the rather cryptic message in the telegram – WOODS ARR YOLA 12 JAN DEP KANO 0830 FLTWT 430 as meaning that the plane arrived in Yola (a one and a half hour flight from Kano) at 4.30 p.m., when 430 was actually the flight number! The British Council man in Kano who took me to the airport had said as his parting shot, “They know you’re coming, but Yola airport is not exactly easy to get to or from, so if there’s no-one there to meet you, you’d better try and hitch a lift to the lorry park in Yola before everyone disappears and leaves you stranded”.
Yola airport turned out to be a bumpy grass strip with a small, square corrugated iron hut at one end of the airstrip, an orange windsock hanging limply in the fetid hot air, with a few goats at the side of the runway munching on a patch of dry brownish-coloured grass. Most of the other passengers had someone to meet them, leaving me and an Irish couple who said they were teachers at Villanova Secondary School in Numan. They said they didn’t have anyone meeting them, as they hadn’t told anyone they were coming, and advised me not to wait around once the man with the key locked the tin hut and drove off, as it was quite possible nobody with a vehicle would come anywhere near the airport till the next plane arrived in three days time.
The three of us managed to get a lift from an Indian Forestry Officer to a house in Yola where some Irish friends of the teachers lived, but it turned out they were both away in Jos on holiday. The Forestry Officer was really kind and offered to drive us to Numan, about 40 miles away, where the Irish couple gave me a hearty lunch then took me to the lorry park where I would be able to find a mammy wagon to take me on to Kaltungo.
We found a brightly painted mammy wagon with a cargo of timber and sacks of maize, with the somewhat enigmatic slogan “No Body Like God” painted on the front above the driver’s cab. I joined the other passengers plus a few goats and chickens perched precariously on top of the maize sacks. The driver was instructed to drop me off in Kaltungo, and eventually after waiting for a few more passengers, decided he had a quorum and off we went. The road from Numan to Kaltungo had just been upgraded by an Italian firm, Stirling Astaldi, and was now a two lane super-highway with no potholes to catch out the unwary. But it did still have only single track bridges, and lots of them. I discovered later that nasty accidents were quite common, as drivers approaching a narrow bridge from opposite directions would speed up to get there first, rather than slowing down or giving way, leading to frequent head-on collisions which often ended up with one or both vehicles crashing into the ravine below with fatal consequences.
It got to 6.30 p.m and the African night fell suddenly, with still no sign of reaching Kaltungo. Then we stopped in pitch darkness at the side of the road, not far from a bar set back from the road and dimly lit by the light of a solitary bush-lamp. The driver shouted up in the direction of the passengers huddled together on the back of the mammy wagon “Kaltungo” and I scrambled down with my luggage and headed off towards the bar. I’d picked up a few phrases of Hausa already, so here was my first chance to practice in a real situation!
Sannu! Sannu! Hello. Hello
Ina gajiya? Ba gajiya How’s the tiredness? There is no tiredness.
Ina aiki? Aiki da godiya. How’s work? Work’s fine.
My few phrases of Hausa greetings exhausted, I tried to explain that I was a new teacher and where was the government secondary school. I must have managed to make myself understood because an old woman who spoke a few words of English said “Wait here!” and sent a small boy off into the darkness in search of the School Principal.
Then after a few minutes a Volkswagen Combi with GSSK painted crudely on the driver’s door loomed up in the darkness from the direction of Yola and screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust outside the bar. The driver explained he was Mallam Kura, a teacher at the secondary school. He’d gone to meet me at Yola airport at 4.30 but found the corrugated hut locked and no sign of a plane, then on the way back he’d stopped off at Villanova where they’d told him they had put me on a mammy wagon heading for Kaltungo, but despite racing flat out he hadn’t managed to catch up.
Mallam Kura took me for a brief courtesy call on the Principal, then dropped me at the house the school had organised for me. This had been built by the Italian road engineers who were widening the road to Yola, and had six or seven bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms but hardly a stitch of furniture, except for a coffee table , two easy chairs (one with a broken leg), a stand for a Tilly lamp, and a very large and very comfortable double bed , which they had sent the school driver to buy specially in Jos 250 miles away, expecting me to arrive with the wife I had been instructed to negotiate for!
Arriving in Kaltungo has never been straightforward. The first missionaries to reach Tangale-Waja district were Rowland Bingham and A P Stirrett of the Sudan Interior Mission, who made an exploratory journey in 1915
Back in the USA, Bingham recruited missionaries to go to the areas he had reached on his travels. One of these was the Rev John Stevenson Hall, who together with his fellow student C Gordon Beacham agreed to be sent to the Tangale area. Accompanied by George Sanderson, they trekked from the SIM outpost at Miango, near Jos, to the country south of Gombe in the year 1917, reaching Kaltungo and then further to Tula, where they arrived on 19th January 1917.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1883, Rev Hall enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois and graduated in 1908. With his wife and his two daughters he lived and worked in Kaltungo from 1917 until he moved to Garko in 1933. (1) In the preface to “Religion, Myth and Magic in Tangale”, an account of the religious beliefs of the Tangale tribe, Rev Hall describes his journey to Kaltungo:
“At the writer’s first going [to Kaltungo] in 1917, the overland journey from the railway at Jos occupied fourteen days exclusive of Sundays…. When at the end of 1916 we first disembarked from the train at Jos and on the station platform were asked our destination by one of the white railway officials, we answered, “Tangale”, and his astonished and warning reply was. “Tangale! They’ll chop (eat) you man! I hear there are no graves there!”. I contradicted, saying I had seen a photograph of an actual Tangale grave, shown by a white man who had made a two-day visit to the district. “But”, he asked, in stubborn insistence, “did he look inside the grave?” My official friend may not take his train there yet. But he could, if he would, any time mount a motor car and that very day exchange his railway station at Jos for the mission station at Kaltungo, two hundred and twenty miles distant. Next day, if he chose, he could be back at this train “unchopped”, and, I am sure, with another thought about those graves!” (2)
(1) From J S Hall Religion Myth and Magic in Tangale ed H Junghraithmayr and J Adelberger, R Koppe Verlag Koln 1994 Editors Preface page xi
(2) Ibid Authors Preface p xvii
Kaltungo is a really beautiful spot – not too hot, surrounded by the most incredible volcanic hills of all shapes and sizes, with scrubby bush and thorn trees. The most spectacular of the hills, Tangale Peak, which is about 5 miles from the school, looks exactly like the nose-cone of a missile! Most of the houses are round huts with sun-baked mud walls and sewn grass roofs set in a conical framework of corn stalks, many arranged in compounds with several huts clustered together inside a perimeter wall. Each hut is windowless and has a small aperture for the doorway, cut out while the mud is still wet during the process of building.
The village, for it is hardly more than that, probably has a population of around 10,000, with a canteen, post office, the compound of the Mai Kaltungo, or local chief, a Teachers College run by the SIM mission, a small hospital, more of a dispensary than a hospital, an airstrip and our school, which is still under construction. There are some existing buildings, originally a primary school, which were taken over and renamed as a secondary school four years ago. There are supposed to be staff houses on the school compound, but so far they haven’t even dug the foundations for these.
Apparently there was some miscommunication and they were expecting me to arrive last September. They had me down to teach 24 periods of English a week, but when I didn’t arrive the Principal had to teach these lessons himself. He seems to be quite a character, a Yoruba from the western region of Nigeria, and currently masterminding a scheme to pump water from a newly constructed reservoir up to the school to save the students having to carry it from the dried-up bed of a stream a couple of kilometres away.
They must have decided the house they had planned for me was too big, because the next day I was told they were moving me to a much smaller house in the grounds of the SIM teachers college, which was currently unoccupied and where I could stay for as long as the college didn’t need it for their own staff. This turns out to be much more comfortable, with all the advantages of SIM affluence, including electric light from a generator from 6 to11at night, running water, most of the time, and a flushing toilet which actually works when you turn the handle. They moved the chairs coffee table and double bed from the other place, and I also have a spare bed for visitors, and a table which seems to have been commandeered from the staff room – so it looks like there’s a choice between eating off the floor in the house or marking books on the floor in the staffroom! The school doesn’t yet have a library and textbooks seem to be in very short supply, so the fifth form have been sent off to another school to do their GCEs and our school only goes up to Form IV.
So far a rather eccentric lady missionary/teacher, Miss Taylor, in her 50s or 60s who rides an ancient Mobylette power-assisted moped has been providing me with meals, but tomorrow I hope to go with Mallam Kura to Jos ( the nearest large town) to buy a motorbike and stock up with cutlery, dishes and food. He’s going there to order the pipes for the water supply scheme, so it’s a good chance to get a lift. Here in Kaltungo there is a market where you can buy tomatoes, maize, bread, bananas, oranges, milk, goat meat and dog meat, but no tinned stuff. The meat is set out on tables all covered with flies, and its difficult to know from its appearance whether what you are buying is goat or dog! For the time being I’ll probably stick to European food as I haven’t yet found anyone to do the cooking and I’m not sure what to do with the local raw materials.
The Tangales say that the dog (bai) is of the same genus as man (mu). Dogs are eaten, in ordinary feasting with friends, and are feasted in offering to demons. They are liked as meat. The meat of dogs is of the same kind as of men, with the same taste. The smell of dog meat is not sweet like that of goat meat; it smells like human blood.
Very few of the women – none of the younger – of Kaltungo will eat dog meat. They say that dogs in their ghost-guise harass men; if they eat dog meat the slain dogs will affect them in that manner: the dog is man.
Hall J S Ibid p 17-18
My next door neighbours are an American couple named Senn with 3 children – the only other Europeans in the village apart from the missionary teacher, Miss Taylor. He is the Vice Principal of the Teachers College. I’m the only European at the secondary school at present, though they should be quite well off for staff later this term as they are expecting four pre-university secondary school leavers as teaching assistants for 9 months plus a new French teacher - an Arab from Egypt.
The anticipated arrival of the 24 girls in Form 1 coupled with the fact that the boys’ dormitory, begun about two years ago and only just completed last November, is now ready for occupation means that 8 or so of the round huts which the boys have lived in until now have been cordoned off with a 10 foot high barbed wire fence to provide living quarters for the girls. “They’re very precious”, explained the teacher who had been assigned to show me around.
This morning I had an introductory chat with the Principal. I looks as if I will be teaching English, Geography and History, helping with the Football and Hockey teams, organising the school newspaper and the Christian Society. The Principal seems to have a good sense of humour and claims his hobby is “conversation”.
One of the Italian road engineers called by this morning and said there are several VSO, CUSO and contract teachers from Britain, Canada and other countries working in Gombe, the nearest largish town about 50 miles away towards Jos and that he’d tell them I was here!
Apparently there is an English missionary and his wife living 10 miles down the road in Billiri, but I haven’t met them yet. There are lots of real characters around. The next door neighbour on the other side, Mallam Gideon, is an authority on local history and has promised to take me to see an old woman living in a village a few miles away who still wears the traditional dress of leaves, made from the shredded roots of a certain tree. This old woman is reputed to be 120 years old and even her grandchildren have grandchildren!
Hair and clothes are thought of by the Tangale as an essential part of one’s personality. One informant told Dr Hall,
“When one of our people shaves the hair of another, great care is taken with regard to the disposal of the clippings. They are secreted in holes in tree trunks, or under granaries, or are thrown on the house sweepings heap, if careless ones are caught burning such hair, elders will rebuke them saying “You must not burn the soul (shirum) of a man. In the old warring days, when a truce interval obtained and you went to the house of the one with whom yesterday you were at war, and you had your hair cut there, you always brought back the clippings; and when you returned home, you deposited them in the hole of a tree trunk; if you left them yonder, then the day when the fighting broke out again, the people at the place where you left your hair would succeed in killing you, and would carry off your head and eat it.”
The notion is extended to include the ornaments and dress of the man. The prohibition with regard to the disposal of hair clippings is applied, for instance, in the case of the disused leaf dress of a woman.
“It is thrown where men do not tread. If one is found burning the disused dress of a woman, he is rebuked on the ground that he will burn the original wearer’s parts”
Dr Hall describes how a lady missionary got a young woman to make her a brand new rear dress from the shredded roots of a tree. The girl finished the dress but did not wear it. She brought it to the missionary who intended to take it home to show people what Tangale women wore. But before she got round to wrapping it and putting it away, the missionary hung it on a nail on the wall. When the Tangale girl saw this a couple of days later, she was thrown into a great consternation, and implored the missionary to return the dress to her, for “her distress was as keen as though it had been she herself thus hung”.
Hall J S Ibid p 23-24
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