Somewhere on the Volta River, 12 May 1972
I’m writing this to while away the time as we sail down the Volta Lake from Tamale to Akasombo on a ferry. The journey is supposed to take around 36 hours. As nobody in Tamale knew what time the ferry left, we had to get up at 5.00 a.m. and drive out along an awful road to Tamale Port, thirty miles away, in case it left very early in the morning. As it turned out, it didn’t leave till 10.00 a.m. so we arrived with plenty of time to spare. Since I last wrote, we moved on from the luxury of being waited on hand and foot in Elmina to roughing it somewhat in Dixcove, a beautiful little village, nestling as the name suggests in a cove and surrounded by sandy beaches lined with coconut trees. In Dixcove we again stayed in a old castle, Fort St Cross, sharing the accommodation with a motley assortment of grass-smoking hippies and dropouts, seasoned travellers, and several other VSOs and Peace Corps volunteers making the most of their holidays. Just before we left Elmina, imagine our surprise when who should turn up but three girls from Yola who had also travelled to Ghana – so we clubbed together and carried on to Dixcove as a group. Just before we left, two girls from Bauchi also arrived – it seems like the entire VSO population of NE State has descended on Ghana!
Conditions in Fort St Cross were much more spartan than in Elmina, with a privy down the garden, no electricity, water from a well rather than a tap, and one miserable little kerosene cooker shared by about 20 people. However, we managed to survive on a diet of tinned meat, bread, pineapples and coconuts.
Then
Fort Metal Cross
In the 1680’s, the Ahantaland around Inhuman settlement was a bone of contention between the English and Brandenburg.
The English were determined to acquire land there to build a fort because many English interloper captains were accustomed to trading at Fort Gross Fredericksburg to the detriment of English commerce.
The chief of Upper/Greater Dixcove leased to the English a promontory site near Inhuman village, located on the shore of a large and sheltered bay, later designated as Dick’s Cove (Dixcove).
The Cove’s calm waters and sandy beach made it an ideal “harbour” for canoes and small boats while ships could anchor about 3 kilometres offshore.
The Royal African Company commenced construction of the fort in 1692 but was unable to complete it until 1698 because of spasmodic attacks by the Ahanta people which continued well into the 18th century on account of the presence of the Dutch fort Babenstein at Butre.
The original fort, as seen and described by writers like Jean Barbot, was square with a pointed bastion at each corner except for the southwest corner which had a round tower.Curtain walls linked the bastions and tower. The inner structure comprised apartments, storage rooms and kitchen arranged round a small courtyard.
Subsequently there were several alterations to the original structure: a spur ending with a bastion, which was constructed in the 1St century, consisted of garrison apartments storage rooms and a workshop. One of the hollow bastions in the main section of the fort was employed as a slave prison. By 1750, the fort was equipped to carry up to 25 canons.
Downloaded from www.ghanatravelblog.com/castles-and-forts-in-ghana/fort-metal-cross-dixcove/ on 21.02.2009
The beach was superb for surfing – you could hire a surfboard for 1 shilling a day – and the breakers were enormous. So big in fact that I nearly smashed my hipbone when the front of the board dug into a wave, then into the beach, and then into me! However, I was only bruised and have now recovered.
Then there were coconuts. The whole two mile long beach was lined with coconut palms. All you had to do was knock one down and open it – delicious! But no grass-skirted dancing girls otherwise it would have been just like paradise! Occasionally a small boy from the village would appear and sit with legs crossed and arms folded in front of you, waiting to be sent off an an errand to the village to fetch a Coca Cola or a pineapple, just like the genie of the lamp – your wish is his command.
One evening several of us went for a walk to the beach a couple of miles away. It was already dark, and when we got there we decided to go for a swim, though we hadn’t thought on to bring our swimming things. We left our clothes on a rock next to a bushlamp and splashed around in the water for a couple of hours. When we got out, the lamp was still perched on the rock but all our clothes had disappeared! So we had to wait two or three more hours until it was quite late, everything had gone quiet and most people had gone to bed, before streaking the two miles back to the castle without a stitch of clothing to wear.
After three days of blissfully total idleness we decided it was time to head on for Kumasi, where we stayed with a couple of VSOs at the University of Science and Technology. While there we took a trip out to a nearby village which makes Ashanti stools and fertility dolls, and another village where they make really beautiful hand-woven Kente cloth. But it was so expensive – about 12 cedis (£5) for a strip 6 feet long by a foot wide that we just took some photos of the weavers and didn’t actually buy anything, much to their disgust. There were some really nice carved stools for around the same price, but as I couldn’t think how to get one home I settled for a smaller, lighter one which didn’t weigh so much and posted it to myself – but the postage came to more than the cost of the stool!
From Kumasi we set off at 6.30 a.m. to get to the Volta River at Jeji in time to catch the eleven o’clock ferry. We’d been told they went at 8.00 a.m. 11.00 a.m. and 3.00 p.m. We arrived at Jeji at 10.45 just in time to see the ferry setting off - it had already got about 150 yards from the bank. So we adjourned to a café in the village for a drink of lemonade - and were given seats outside by the proprietor, who also insisted on presenting us with a loaf of bread. We decided at about 1230 we’d better go and see if the ferry had arrived back, so jumped on our motorbikes, only to discover that mine had a puncture. So we had to take the back wheel off and go down to the landing stage to look for a mechanic to mend the puncture. By the time we’d got the puncture repaired and the wheel reassembled, the next ferry had left, so we had to wait for the last one of the day at 3.30. So by the time we reached Tamale it was 7.30 at night and we were completely shattered. They had dug up large parts of the road into Tamale from about 30 miles out, and driving along laterite roads with trenches dug across them in the dark is a fairly terrifying experience. Our worst experience so far was the road to Dixcove. It had just rained and for a three-mile stretch the road was between one and three feet deep in mud. We arrived completely covered in mud from head to toe after taking about an hour and a half to go the three miles, assisted by a vast army of locals who pushed, pulled and dragged our motorbikes though the quagmire. The ferry should reach Akasombo tomorrow afternoon, but it is quite well equipped, with loos, a shower, and even a fridge with cold drinks. We brought plenty of food and there are several large bales of cotton on the deck which should provide a comfortable bed for the night.
G S S Kaltungo 2nd June 1972
I arrived back in Kaltungo a few days ago after what must have been nearly eight weeks on the road. On the way back through western Nigeria we visited Ife, a famous Yoruba town and the site of the archaeological discoveries known as the Ife bronzes. They also dug up a lot of terra cotta heads which are now in the Ife museum, which also houses some terra cotta pavements and the chief’s palace. Ife has great historical signficance as the centre of the cult of Oduduwa. He was supposed to be the world’s first blacksmith, and they show you a great lump of iron shaped like a pyramid and weighing several hundred pounds which he is supposed to have used for beating metal. I went off in search of Oduduwa’s shrine and was shown a mud hut, rather like any other mud hut in appearance, but the locals got out the priest of Oduduwa, who posed to have his photo taken. He wanted £1 but was persuaded to accept 1/- and the locals assured me this was the “real place”. I’m still not quite sure whether or not they were having me on.
In Oshogbo there was a very interesting juju shrine, kept up by a mad Australian woman who got interested in juju and married the juju priest. It was a bit pseudo, however, rather like the Nigerian equivalent of a Victorian gothic fake medieval castle. In Oyo, which specialises in leather goods and carved calabashes we bought some very nice calabashes and a couple of leather pouffes.
Bida, the capital of Nupeland, is a very quaint old city. One of the traditional industries is glass-blowing, and they make an incredible assortment of beads and glass ornaments from melted down recycled bottles. So you can buy Guinness bottle beads (brown with white circles), Milk of Magnesia bottle beads (dark blue), Star beer bottle beads ( dark green), Sprite bottle beads (lighter green), Fanta bottle beads (clear glass) and so on. Quite amazing really, someone must have consumed an awful lot of Milk of Magnesia tablets for there to be so many empty bottles to re-cycle! They also make brass trays decorated with different elaborately ornate patterns. The industry is organised along the same lines as the pre-industrial domestic system used to be in England, with different huts each making different items.
From Bida we continued on to Kanduna, and thence to Jos, via Zaria, and ancient walled city and one of the capitals of the Hausa emirates. Unfortunately the road from Zaria to Jos, famous for its notoriously awful laterite with huge potholes, finished off one of my shock absorbers. My brand new bike was guaranteed for the first six thousand miles, and I’d just done 6200 when it happened! I tried to get a new one in Jos but they were out of stock.
On arriving back here in Kaltungo I set off again the next day with the school van to Maiduguri to get some books for the library. You can borrow up to 200 titles for six months at a time from the State Library there. Actually the title “State Library” is something of a misnomer – its about one-tenth of the size of Hoylake library. I didn’t manage to get a shock absorber there either, so I will have to try in Kano. One of the teachers, Mr Alexander, is planning to buy a new car and needs someone to drive his old car back when he goes to Kano to collect it, so I will probably angle to go with him. The last thing I heard about the drums of books you sent was from Walford Wingate, the forwarding agents, who wrote to say that the ship they were on, the Hoegh Gunvor, had broken down irrepairably in Abidjan and that all the cargo was being forwarded to Port Harcourt via the SS Egori. I received four bills of lading from the Nigerian agents, Umarco, but as these had been posted before the letter from Walford Wingate, I assume they still won’t have received the books. Anyway, with the Principal’s assent I wrote to Umarco saying that when they arrived they should forward them to Gombe station for collection from there. There was slightly worrying paragraph in the letter from Walford Wingate saying that “the company have declared a general average on all cargo” and that I should inform my insurers to avoid delay when the cargo arrived in Lagos. I’m not quite sure what the implications of a general average might be – could you let the insurers know?
Some bad news on the housing front. The Senns informed me that they are expecting several new teachers at the Teachers College this term and I would have to move off the compound. When I told the Principal all he said was “Don’t worry – and don’t bother doing anything until they throw you out!” He is building a new house at the school for the Alexanders, but its not ready yet and still needs painting. When they move, I will probably move into their present house, halfway up a hill in the centre of the village, with a splendid view but no mosquito netting on the windows, no electricity, and all the water has to be carried up the hill from a well at the bottom. However, it has a commanding view over the entire village so makes up in aesthetic value for what it lacks in convenience. However, I’m not too worried as, this being Nigeria, it may never happen!
I tried to call on Peter Heaps while in Maiduguri, after getting his contact details in your letter, but according to his cook he hadn’t arrived back from England yet. The girl I stayed with had, it turned out, been down to Kaltungo at the beginning of the long holiday for a Christian Leadership course held at the Teachers’ College here. Guardian Weeklies have started arriving four at a time, once a month, but they’re excellent as a way of keeping up to date with the news – and when you’ve read them, being printed on tissue paper, they also make good toilet paper when torn up into small pieces! My salary for this month still hasn’t arrived but when it does hopefully I’ll be able to reduce my mounting debts! Could you collect old comics and magazines and send them out in bundles if possible – other volunteers reckon they go down very well as supplementary reading material – Bunty, Princess et for the girls, Lion, Dandy, Beano, Superman etc for the boys.
G S S Kaltungo June 13th 1972
The school is in a great turmoil because the Principal has just arrived back from Maiduguri and announced there is going to be an inspection during the fifth week of term to see if the school is up to standard to enable the 5th form to take their GCE exams here next year. Various officials from Maiduguri will be turning up. As a result, he announced that we will have to work six days a week this term – no Saturdays off –until the inspection has taken place. A great deal of window dressing and covering up of past omissions is now in progress. He handed out a pile of exercise books and instructed all the teachers to concoct lesson plans and records of work going back to the beginning of last term.
The insurance papers for the books haven’t arrived yet, but I keep getting frequent letters which I have so far ignored from a firm call Scanship saying if you don’t have the insurance papers then you can pay 5% of the value of the good and let them get on with it. None of the textbooks we need for this term have arrived yet – though they were ordered in Fabruary, so we’re having to make do in Literature with the Pride and Prejudice, which we have already read to death, and various duplicated poems which are taken from a book called West African Verse.
Yesterday I went to visit Pastor Ibrahim, who helps with the Sunday School. He was complaining about the rising cost of living and that the £5 per month which he gets from the local church council isn’t enough to make ends meet. I suspect he hopes I might contribute! He gave me some eggs and took me to a birthday party. I even got a letter the other day from some boy in Ghana I don’t even remember meeting, asking me to help with paying his school fees!
I was hoping to go to Kano with Mr Alexander when he went to collect his new car yesterday, but the Principal wouldn’t let me go because of the need to prepare for the forthcoming inspection, so I asked him to get me a new shock absorber while he is there. Meanwhile the bike is going well and is actually a lot less bumpy now that all the oil has leaked out of the old shock absorbers. I’m just about to have supper – steak, chips and cabbage, followed by mango and bananas. Just at the moment there seems to be a great surplus of food – I’ve got so much stashed away in the fridge its in danger of going off, which makes a change from last week when there were no tomatoes, oranges or bananas in the market, the hens stopped laying eggs and I forgot to tell the cook to buy some meat, so I had to survive out of tins. On Saturday night I had the Current Affairs Society round and showed them slides of the 6-day war in Israel and also some of Italy.
I’m still expecting to have to move fairly soon, but there’s no sign of them painting the Alexanders’ new house, so at the moment I’m lying low and saying nothing. It’s possible that the person thyey have lined up for my house won’t actually arrived in Kcaltungo until September. Apparently its some American missionary bod who is going to be teaching Maths at the Teachers’ College.
P.S When you send letters, can you underline GSS Kaltungo, as although the last few were addressed to GSS Kaltungo, via Gombe, NE State, they all got delivered to GSS Gombe – they only read the last line of the address!
G S S Kaltungo June 18th 1972
There doesn’t seem to be much news to report this week – for the first time in my stay here I may even have trouble filling up an airletter. The main event of the week was a continuation of the long-standing antagonism between Kaltungo and the nearby village of Billiri, about 8 miles away. We had a football match arranged at the school yesterday afternoon between our school and Billiri Secondary School. Various local celebrities had been invited including the Mai Kaltungo (Chief of Kaltungo) who was officially visiting the school for the first time, and the princely sum of £6/10/= had been spent on refreshments – orange squash, cola nuts and cigarettes – for the honoured guests.
After about 15 minutes Billiri were winning 2:1 They had a couple of free kicks awarded to them, and one of the Kaltungo team tripped one of the Billiri lot up. The referee awarded them a free kick, but they all upped and walked off the pitch in protest at the rough tactics of Kaltungo. They then spent about half an hour debating what to do, and finally decided to refuse to play any more. A near riot broke out when some of our students tried to stop the Billiri team climbing into the Kaltungo school van, which had brought them from Billiri and was to take them back, saying that if they wouldn’t play, they should be made to walk back to Billiri. Eventually the game continued with the Kaltungo team playing another team of Kaltungo students, but this proved to be a bit of an anticlimax. So the saga of Billiri vs Kaltungo continues. Sixty years ago, I suppose they would have gone on the warpath for less and taken a few heads!
Then
Rev Hall describes an account of how the Eastern Tangale and Western Tangale became enemies:
“In olden times, after our people settled in this southern part, our people and they of Western Tangale lived west of here, nearer the present Western Tangale. Intermarriage prevailed. It came to pass that one Western Tangale man named Lakarai and a man of our town were in competition for the one woman as wife. When the time of cutting roof grass came round, both cut at the same place, but with a line dividing them. The grass that was being cut was still green; and they stacked their stocks of cut grass until they should dry, each stack in its own place.
After some days the man of our town went back to his stack and began to strip it clean. The Western Tangale man came upon him thus employed and charged him with appropriating some of his grass. Our man denied guilt. The Western Tangale man continued charging him and making threats. It was simple jealousy over the woman. They came to blows, beating each other furiously; and Laharai killed our man. The people of our section then made a combined attack on the Western Tangale people, and, fighting to kill, the combatants went on, until after a time our people withdrew to this present location, and the people of Western Tangale to the hills in which they now live. They lived in warring enmity. Seven years would be counted for war, and then peace would be made. Seven years of peace would be counted, and then war would break out again, continuing like that, with seven years of alternating peace and war until the white man came, who set them at one and put an end to war”.
He goes on to describe the head hunt:
“At day break the war chief announces the intended attack. Baked cakes of millet are prepared that forenoon; these to be the food of the men off at the fight. Their food is prepared in that form because it will keep fresher than the ordinary mush. In the evening, armed with spears, axes, knives and shields, the fighting group leave home for the distant bush, to the spot planned for the attack. They hide themselves in the thick growth of the ground. In the early morning a man of the Western Tangale group – the object of the attack – passes on the road nearby to get to his farm. He does not know an ambush lies in the way. The men fall upon him, kill him, and cut off his head. They dismember him completely and tear his flesh into fragments and carry it off. The man whose spear entered or first entered the man, the head is his. The three next to touch or spear the man are included with him, and these four are called “the men of the head”.
Various ceremonies and celebrations arise from the capture of a head:
“The slayers gather together. They emit yells and sing to the man to whom has fallen the head. They run home, declaring they’ve done it, they’ve done it. On the way they come to water, and dropping the head into it, they wash it. Washed, it is put into a string bag and the mouth of the bag tied up, the men singing all the time the praises of the slayer. …. The priest of the sacred grove appears. The bag with the head is handed to him. He takes the head out of the bag. All are gathered at the sacred tree of the hamlet. The priest is seated at the stone set apart for the reception of heads. He presents it twice towards the stone and withdraws. With a third presentation he sets it right side up on the stone, the eyes looking towards the bush, and says , “You ugly mouth, you! Did I ever think your head would come into my hands?” Dancing and feasting then takes place for the next night and day.
The head, placed by the priest of the grove on the stone for the reception of heads, stays there until the late afternoon, when it is lifted, put into an earthen basin and placed on a limb of a baobab tree close to the hamlet. After three days the head is removed from the tree. The hair is shaven clean. Pieces of corn-stalk are set into the bottom of a cooking pot, to form a rest for the head in cooking. The head is placed thereon, water is poured on, and the pot placed on a fire. The head cooks. The hairs (i.e. the roots) come out with boiling and drop to the bottom of the pot below the corn-stalk rest. When it is boiled, the meat is clean, free of hairs. The pot is removed from the fire. Elders bring an earthen basin, and, pulling off all the flesh, eyes also and all soft substance, gather all into the basin. There just remains the skull. The elders divide the meat amongst themselves and eat.
The business of burying the skull is then proceeded with. The place is either behind the slayer’s house, or under the sacred tree of the hamlet, according to the choice made. The ground is opened up. The skull is placed in an earthen basin and set into the hole. Another basin is brought and inverted over the lower basin. The earth is brought back, and covers the whole. Then a moderately long stone is placed on the spot, partly buried. It is known as a stone of a buried head.
Hall, ibid, pp 199-204
This morning we started off the Sunday School again. It went very well, although the numbers seem to have dropped off a bit. One of the teachers seems to be rather losing interest, but I gave him a lift to make sure he got there!
I succeeded on Friday in getting some money out of the bank in Gombe as I managed to get there only half an hour after they had officially closed, not an hour and a half after as happened the week before, when they wouldn’t let me have any! Now that they are making us work on Saturdays its very difficult buying anything – you have to go straight into Gombe as soon as you finish on a weekday.
On Friday I got a letter from the Teachers’ College Principal, “for my interest and cooperation” asking me to vacate the house by the 21st (Wednesday of this week!) . I told our Principal, who said he would write and ask if I could stay for another month, as they have still not wired or painted the Alexanders’ house. He said if he asked for a month they might let me stay at least for another week!
Today an unexpected visitor arrived in the person of Anne, a VSO from Gombe, who was to go into the local hospital here in Kaltungo for a minor .operation, but on arriving at the hospital discovered that the doctor had gone off somewhere and noone knew when he would be back. So she’s staying here until he puts in an appearance! He usually turns up for work by mid-morning on a Monday after a weekend away. They were opening a new mosque in Bauchi on Saturday and anyone who is anybody in the North East state was invited, presumably the doctor included.
The Principal said it would be ok to take the Boys Brigade camping to Tula sometime this term, so its merely a matter of picking a suitable weekend when its not raining heavily. I promised him I would go and have a look at what the road was like ; I think he was a bit afraid we might get there and then it would rain, and the drifts would be too deep to cross in the school van and we might have to stay there for a week, living on a diet of fruit and dog.
Later
Newswatch Magazine reports:
For the people of Tula, the administration of Mohammed Danjuma Goje is the best thing that has happened to them in a long time. Tula, located on top of a hill overlooking Gombe town, once played a prominent political role as the headquarters of the Native Authority for the area. But it lost that pre-eminent status after independence on account of its unfavourable terrain.
Rather than open up the area and make it accessible, Tula was abandoned to its fate. The political capital of the local government administration was moved to Billiri instead. Billiri is closer to the main access road to Gombe. Tula, therefore, remained a victim of official neglect until Goje became the governor of Gombe State.
Goje re-built the only access road into Tula. Today, the 15 kilometre road which usually took one whole hour has been reduced to less than 20 minutes and the people are happy.
One of those who cannot hide his joy over the changes that have taken place in Tula since the coming of Goje is Andrew Aliyu, 64-year-old Biology graduate of the University of Jos and district head of the area.
Today, Tula may not have regained its pre-independent political role as the seat of local administration, but it has benefited from the generous disposition of the Goje administration towards the spread of modern amenities. Its road has not only been reconstructed, it has been asphalted. It also boasts of electricity, potable water, a hospital with modern facilities and qualified medical personnel and a science school.
Tula is only one of the many positive stories of change that has taken place in many communities in Gombe State with the spread of modern amenities.
Newswatch reported Goje as saying:
“When I took over as the governor, I knew what was to be done. Our rural areas were so remote, neglected, and inaccessible. There were no rural roads linking them up. I don’t know if you have been to Tula. It used to be the headquarters of Tangale Waja Native authority. Because the place is located on top of a hill, the Europeans loved the place and settled there and made it their base and administrative headquarters”. Goje explained that, “After independence, the seat of local administration was moved down the valley to Billiri due to lack of access road to Tula. In fact a military governor once told the people of Tula to relocate down the valley because there was no way a road could be constructed to link them at their present location to the rest of the state. When I came, I knew a road could be constructed to link up Tula and the rest of the state. And by God’s grace a road has been constructed”.
Downloaded from www.newswatchngr.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=207&Itemid=1
on 21.02.2009
We should be getting some new teachers in the next few weeks, students from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria who are filling in before starting there in October, and also some student teachers on teaching practice, so the workload should go down a bit, although the Principal instructed us that we had to sit in on their lessons and generally supervise them, not just leave them to get on with it.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Chapter 6 Breaking Out West
Lagos, 25 April 1972
As you can see from the postmark, we’ve now reached Lagos. We spent the whole of the past two days trying to get visas for Togo and Dahomey, travellers’ cheques, motor registration and extended insurance to cover other countries in West Africa, not to mention cholera and yellow fever jabs. Mostly its gone fairly smoothly, though it took three and a half hours to persuade the Central Bank of Nigeria to part with £25 worth of travellers’ cheques. The only real fly in the ointment has been the insurance for my motorbike. Guess who its insured with - your old firm, Guardian Royal Exchange, but the Nigeria branch. So far they have issued two cover notes but they haven’t got round to producing an actual policy. When I called in on their agents in Jos on the way here to enquire about it, they said, “No problem, you can fix everything up at the head office in Lagos.” But of course when I went into their office here they claimed it was nothing at all to do with them, they couldn’t extend the cover without the original policy, so I would have to go to their office in Kaduna and ask for the original policy documents. I don’t usually lose my cool, but after a pretty stormy interview with the manager in which I completely lost my temper, they finally agreed they would issue an entirely new temporary policy valid for a month for a mere £5.00. This is despite the fact that I’ve already paid them £12 for insurance for the entire year, but as you need an extension to this to cross the border into other countries there wasn’t a lot to argue about and I had to pay up. We were rushing to get all the paperwork sorted out as tomorrow id a national holiday, then it’s the weekend, and the last thing we wanted to do was to have to stay three more days in Lagos.
Traffic here is absolutely chaotic! There are only two bridges from the mainland to Lagos Island where most of the shops, offices and embassies are located, and these are absolutely chock-a-bloc with traffic all day long. It can take anything up to one and a half hours to go the 8 miles from Yaba, where we are staying with a VSO at the College of Technology, to the city centre. The drivers have no road sense whatsoever, have never heard of signals or indicators, overtake on all sides and cut in and pull out with absolutely no consideration or regard for other road users. But so far we have managed to avoid any mishaps!.
After leaving Port Harcourt we carried on to Onitsha, passing the famous Uli airstrip on the way. At the height of the civil war this was the only way planes could land or take off with supplies for the shrinking enclave of Biafra. It’s actually just a section of road which is wider than normal, with lines painted down the centre to guide the planes in. You can still the wreckage of around ten or more planes littered about in the bush at either side of the main road, and the whole extraordinary sight is completed by the huts of the locals who have moved in and built grass-roofed extensions around the shattered remains of the planes.
Then
Biafra’s Last Stand
Ojukwu was betting that the centrifugal forces of tribal, religious and economic rivalry would tear Nigeria apart in time to save Biafra. But his men ran out of food before that debatable historical process could run its course. Thousands of them faded into the bush, shed their uniforms and, clad only in shorts, melted into streams of refugees. The Nigerians overran Owerri, the last remaining city of any size (250,-000) in Biafra. Then they pressed on toward Uli with their 122-mm. Soviet cannon, shelling the strip from a range of 13 miles.
Shortly before Owerri fell, Ojukwu held an all-night Cabinet meeting at which it was decided that he should leave Biafra, ostensibly to seek help elsewhere, actually to facilitate the surrender. …At Uli airstrip by that time, half the runway lights and some of the runway itself had been knocked out by Nigerian guns. The control tower began to wave off flights; they dropped from 17 a day to three, and soon were discontinued. The last pilots to get in with dried fish and other food had to unload their own planes because workers had fled. Often food moved from Uli was brought back because distribution centers had been overrun. The last telex message from Biafra to Markpress, a Geneva public relations firm that has handled the Biafra account with skill, said tersely: "Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the airstrip at Uli is functioning normally." Next day it fell and with it the nation that it had kept barely alive for so long.
Downloaded from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878714-8,00.html on 5.2.09
Onitsha appeared to have been very badly smashed up during the war. We visited the remains of the famous covered market, once the greatest market in Nigeria and now a twisted tortured mass of steel girders, and also the shanty-town market which has now replaced it. The European quarter of Onitsha, with its grand two-storey houses, has been almost entirely obliterated. We left Onitsha across the famous Asaba Bridge over the Niger, which was blown up by the retreating Biafran army and now has a makeshift Bailey bridge to connect its missing spans with the main part of the bridge, which is still standing.
Later
Perhaps the greatest chaos we experienced in Nigeria was trying to cross the bridge over the Niger River at Onitsha. The Niger River roughly bisects Nigeria, entering from the northwest to about the country's center and then flowing directly south to the Bight of Biafra, as the corner of the Atlantic south of Nigeria is named. The region where the Niger flows into the Bight is a huge swampy area that accounts most of Nigeria's massive oil reserves and significant production is usually simply called "The Delta".
The Delta is now well known for its civil unrest, gangs, private armies, kidnappings, and general mayhem, so it was a definite no-go zone on the checkerboard of areas in southern Nigeria the British Foreign Service has warnings against traveling to. Although we had no reason to go to the Delta, these warnings were in effect in several other areas of southwestern Nigeria, requiring us (for insurance coverage purposes as well as safety) to take a circuitous route instead of the main expressway which passed through some areas of conflict.
All roads in south-central Nigeria, however, seem to converge into one serious bottleneck - the bridge across the Niger at Onitsha, one of the greatest scenes of anarchy I've ever experienced. Nigerians must be the world's most aggressive drivers to begin with, but here thousands of cars were all jostling for space and numerous roads converged to cross the only bridge for at least a hundred miles in each direction that linking the eastern and western halves of the country, a bridge with only one lane of traffic in each direction and numerous stalled vehicles the traffic had to squeeze around. All told, it took us about three hours from when we hit the traffic jam until we got over the bridge, all spent in stifling humid heat. Onitsha was a crowded and chaotic as any other Nigerian city we passed through, but my main recollection of its unpleasantness was the choking soot and vehicle exhaust fumes hanging low over the city that literally left a bad taste in my mouth.
Downloaded from http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/modernnomad67/3/1198108860/tpod.html
From Onitsha we carried on to Benin, an ancient city famous for its medieval bronzes, wood carving and weaving. We had a look round the chief’s house but couldn’r wait the 48 hours it takes to get permission to go round the Oba’s palace. It was fascinating watching craftsmen making bonze statues and wooden carving using the same techniques thay have used for centuries. Our visit to Benin coincided with a cocktail party in honour of the Queen’s birthday. The VSO we were staying with was well in with the Assistant High Commissioner and got use invited, along with him , to act as waiters at this event. It seems they didn’t entirely trust the local staff not to purloin bottles of gin and whisky and squirrel them away over the wall. They had signed up the local police brass band to play rousing tunes and the two national anthems, then the Military Governor of the state made a rather boring speech. All the male guests, apart from us VSO waiters, were dressed in tails and bow ties and the female guests in smart cocktail dresses. The next morning we drove on towards Lagos, stopping the night in Ondo because a bridge on the road to Shagamu had fallen down. The next morning we got some locals to carry our motorbikes across the river for 5/= each. Tomorrow we plan to spend the day on Bar Beach – famous as the site of public executions in Lagos state, before setting off for Dahomey the following day. The rainy season has now begun and each night there are torrential downpours with violent thunderstorms. In spite of all the rain we’re having to eat out tonight because the water supply has failed again. The food in Lagos is very peppery and slightly lacking in variety, but a meal in a café rarely costs more than 3/= for rice, stew and peppers, or yams and soup.
May 2nd 1972
Elmina
Elmina is so incredibly delightful that’s its difficult to describe on paper. We’re sitting on a beautiful silver beach with not another person in sight and not a single footprint in the sand but our own. Round the bay, the coast, fringed with coconut palms swaying gently in the breeze stretches away as far as the eye can see. There’s no need to but coconuts, you just wait till one drops from the nearest tree! Every now and then a dugout fishing boat with a square sail, looking rather like a Chinese junk, floats out from behind the breakwater, battered by the waves as they crash onto the rocks. The other side of the bay, hidden from sight at the moment, the fishermen are mending their nets and distentangling crabs and lobsters ready for their next fishing expedition tonight. This morning we went shopping in the market and bought some juicy tangerines (5 for 1/=) and provisions for lunch. Then we wandered about taking photos of the fishermen mending their nets and finally collapsed on the beach and just floated around in the water.
The most impressive sight in Elmina is the castle, or rather two castles. One was built by the Dutch around 1666, the other by the Portuguese as early as 1482. The larger castle, which we plan to look round this afternoon, is not used as a Police Training School. The beach where we’re sitting at the moment lies just under the battlements, separated from the castle wall by a fringe of coconut palms. A double moat, now dry, guards the entrance to the vast, rectangular, 97,000-square-foot castle, built over the course of four centuries. Perched on the end of a rocky peninsula, its four great watchtowers command a view of the surrounding sea; above, on the landside, six 12-foot-long Dutch cannons are aimed at the town. Inside, an eerie stillness hangs over a large stone courtyard, illuminated by the sun's unrelenting glare. The castle's inner facade, made of lime, stone and bricks imported from Europe, is stark and austere. Darkened windows gape above its great double stone stairs; a black iron balustrade, marked "W" for William, King of Orange (1672-1702), is the only touch of decoration.
Then
Today, Elmina Castle is a tourist attraction and World Heritage Monument in Cape Coast, Ghana. This hasn’t always been the case. Looking at the castle from the outside, nothing can ever prepare the unsuspecting visitor or tourist emotionally to hear about the tales of horror and atrocities that went on beyond those walls.
The Portuguese built the castle in 1482, originally established as a trading post for goods bartered for local gold and valuable gem. However, as the demand for slaves increased in the Americas and Caribbean, the castle became strategic in the perpetuation of this abhorrent human cargo trade. The storerooms of the castle were converted into dungeons, and the ownership of the castle changed hands several times, eventually ending up being seized by the British in 1872. By this time, slavery had been abolished. The British didn't use Elmina to house slaves; they used Cape Coast Castle for that. During World War II the castle was the training ground for the West African Frontier Force, which fought with distinction in Burma. Today, on the former site of the Dutch Reformed Church on the second floor, it houses one of Ghana's District Assemblies, a relatively new experiment with democratic forms for the one-party Government.
Elmina Castle, known then as the slave castle, is one of over twenty castles built along the shoreline of the Gold Coast (now known as Ghana). The Gold Coast was one of the richest markets for slave traders during the peak of the slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of captives passed through the dungeons of Elmina Castle, and were shipped off, like commodities into the Americas and Caribbean against their wishes. This illicit human trade carried on for close to 300 years. …
Not knowing what awaited them on the slave ships, those who made it to the coast were held captives in the castle’s dungeons. They were subjected to all sorts of indignities, intimidation and torture. They were shackled in the damp and dark dungeons. It is said that up to three hundred captives were packed into each dungeon, without room to even lift an arm or move around. Food was scarce and disease was rampant.
The unsanitary conditions under which the captives lived were unbelievable. Without room to breathe properly in those dungeons, the captives had to defecate there. The sick were often not attended to, and many of them died while held captives there. Air quality wasn’t a priority. The stench in those dungeons must have been nauseating. Even today, the dungeons still reek. Inside the castle is a smaller, older stone courtyard flanked by four dungeons. Each held as many as 200 women for up to three months. Food was handed through the iron gates on a long paddle; there was no toilet, no room to lie down and sleep. The only air or light came through the doorways or a few small holes at either end of the ceiling. When the governor wanted a bedmate, he stood on a balcony above and picked one of the women herded into the courtyard, our guide said. The fate of those who rebelled -- those who tried to escape, for instance, or cause unrest -- was harsh. Men were sent to the condemned cell, a small black room with one hole in the wall, where they were starved to death, our guide said. Women were beaten and chained to cannon balls in the courtyard.
A visit to Elmina leaves one with an eerie feeling of ghostly hallucinations. As the tour guide is talking, it is easy to visualize hundreds of captives in the dungeons, screaming out their agonies, just pleading to be returned home. But alas, we know that didn’t happen. Countless number of them died under these atrocious conditions. Those who survived the dungeons had to endure further indignities of being shackled together, tightly packed like cattle, on those slave ships. As we all know, when they died, they were simply tossed over-board into the sea, and their names were forgotten.
Throughout the slave trade period, at different times, thousands of captured slaves were chained to cannonballs at the castle, and made to stand in the blazing sun. Women, when their capturers were not raping them, could be made to lift heavy cannonballs in the blistering sun as punishment. Other so-called rebellious captives were either murdered outright, or placed in solitary confinement in an airtight, dark holding ‘facility’ in the courtyard, and could be left there to starve to death. Yet, while all these atrocities were going on, the castle also served as a missionary sanctuary and housed a church. The slave traders held church services there.
Perhaps the most significant memory from Elmina Castle is ‘The Door of No Return’.
This was where hundreds of thousands of our ancestors passed during the slave trade era to awaiting slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic to the so-called New World. An underground tunnel, through which slaves passed when they left Elmina, sweats with dampness. The peeling walls are covered with a green mold. At the end is a narrow opening, which once led to the beach where canoes took the captives to ships at anchor. It frames the sun's brilliant light; inside the tunnel all is dark.There is a plaque next to the condemned dungeon door at Elmina. It reads:
“In Everlasting Memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to uphold this.”
Downloaded from http://www.blackhistorysociety.ca/Elmina.htm on 5.2.09
The other fort, much smaller and cosier, is our temporary home in Elmina! Owned by the Antiquities Department, you can stay here for 5/- a night for a bed with sheets and a mosquito net. We seem to be the only people here at the moment, with a bedroom each and a dining room perched on the battlements just under the watchtower. You buy whatever you want to eat in the village then give it to the caretaker, who cooks for you, lays the table, then washes up afterwards. I’m sure anywhere else but in West Africa the place would be absolutely swarming with tourists, but we haven’t seen another white face so far here. The only concession to the more upmarket tourist trade is a motel a couple of miles down the road. We went there last night and found we and three other people were the only customers. Ite fort were staying in is called Fort St Jago and is on top of a hill overlooking the harbour with its fishing boats and Elmina castle down below. This morning we were woken at 0600 a.m. by the reveille trumpet and staggered out of bed at sunrise and watched the police trainees on the castle parade ground below doing their drill. It looked a bit like a scene from a film in the middle ages with the peasants pushing their carts along the street below and staggering up the steep hill to the castle gate with bundles, boxes and buckets of water. Ten minutes ride away there is another pretty little coastal town, Cape Coast, which also has a picturesque castle, with great heaps of cannon balls piled up to act as a breakwater.
Later
As you wander round St George's Castle, one of the more delightful aspects is the way its twin, Fort St Jago, keeps flitting into view through the windows and turrets. Perched on top of a small hill across the fishing harbour from St George's Castle, Fort St Jago is small and perfectly formed. In keeping with its pleasant aspect, it doesn't share the dark secrets of its bigger brother, for while the Portuguese and the Dutch herded slaves through St George's as quickly as they could, Fort St Jago simply sat there, looking down on the travesty below without comment.
When the Dutch captured St George's Castle by bombarding it from St Jago Hill, they realised that they would have to retain possession of the hill if they weren't to lose their new acquisition to the same trick. With this in mind, in 1666 they built Fort Coenraadsburg on the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, to act as a military barracks for protection of the town, which was booming with the burgeoning trade in locally mined gold and locally captured slaves.
The Dutch would occupy Elmina town and the two forts for 235 years, until the British, keen to control the whole Gold Coast so they could add it to their growing empire, attacked first in 1871, and then again in 1872. It's surprising that this hadn't happened before – on a clear day you can see Cape Coast Castle from Elmina, which must have been really irritating for the empire-mad Victorians – but it turned out that the Dutch weren't remotely interested in defending this distant outpost, especially as the trade in slaves and gold had long since dried up. So, to avoid a long, hard struggle to a foregone conclusion, the Dutch wisely sold Elmina to the British for a small sum and sailed off to concentrate on their more profitable colonies in In-donesia.
Under the British St George's Castle became a colonial police academy, and it remained an academy after Ghana's independence until it was finally declared a national monument in 1972. However, after the departure of the Dutch, Fort St Jago passed through a number of strange incarnations over the years. It started its new life as a guesthouse and then morphed into a leprosy hospital (until a permanent hospital could be built in town) and then a prison (again, until a prison could be built elsewhere) before returning to life as a guesthouse. In 1986 the government closed the guesthouse and started promoting the fort as a piece of Ghana's heritage, but surprisingly the guide on the fort door told me that plans are still afoot to convert it back into a guesthouse; it's just money that's the problem. Given that Fort St Jago is a World Heritage site it seems a little odd that it might end up being a guesthouse again, but for once I can see the logic. The fort would make a perfect place to stay.
For a start, the rooms are huge and airy, and given a reasonable amount of work they'd be wonderfully atmospheric. The old chapel would make a great suite and the officers' rooms would be perfect for a dormitory, while the tower would be the ideal spot for a candlelight dinner as the sun sinks into the shoreline. Meanwhile the courtyard would be a great spot for sitting and reading, sheltered from the hot afternoon sun by the shadow of the entrance hall and lit at night by the lovely Victorian-era streetlight in the middle of the yard.
Downloaded from http://www.moxon.net/ghana/elmina.html on 5.2.09
We spent last weekend in Accra, mainly to insure our motorbikes for Ghana. The Guardian Royal Exchange here was a ,ot more helpful than in lagos and charged £2/10- to extend the cover for two weeks, saying we could reclaim this back in Nigeria – though I have my doubts! So at the moment my motorbike is covered by three separate and concurrent insurance policies (except that the endorsements don’t appear on the first two). Accra is a pretty, clean, green and open city nothing like Lagos which was just the opposite. Most things in Ghana seem to be better organised and generally more developed than in Nigeria. But the piece de resistance was Lome, the capital of Togo, where we stayed two nights at Edith’s Inn, a hotel run by a black ex-Peace Corps nurse, quite reasonably priced and fantastic value for money, with air-conditioned rooms for only £1 a night. I had the first hot shower I’ve had for four months, and we fed like lords. There was a splendid little German restaurant just round the corner where you could get the most succulent steaks for under £1. There’s nowhere like it in Nigeria – even the top hotels don’t produce such good food but charge ten times the price
We agreed we ‘d have to go through Lome on our return to Nigeria and gorge ourselves again! The beach, however, in Lome was not so good - miles of beautiful sand but it shelved very steeply. This, combined with breakers about 20 feet high and an extremely strong undertow meant it appeared to be too dangerous to do anything more than paddle on the edge of the water, but even then you kept getting swept over and seawards. In Accra we stayed with a couple of VSO electricians. I went with one of them on Sunday morning to the Presbyterian Church and imagine my surprise when the minister, a Rev Forrester-Paton, turned out to be the father of a student who lived a couple of doors down the corridor in New College back in Oxford. Small world! They say almost everyone in the world knows somebody who knows someone six degrees of relationship removed from themselves. The Forrester-Patons were in the middle of packing up to return to England after 25 years in Ghana but gave us a very nice lunch and told us all about Elmina and advised us to get the Museums Department in Accra to phone up the castle and let then know we were on our way – sound advice because it meant we got VIP treatment on our arrival.
Colin Forrester-Paton, Church of Scotland missionary in Ghana, was born on 5 April 1918 at Alloa, Scotland. His family had missionary connections, his uncle Ernest was a missionary in India and his great-aunt Catherine had trained women missionaries in Glasgow. Forrester-Paton was educated in Moffatt and Norfolk then at New College, Oxford University where he graduated 1st class BA Hons in 1940. He attended the United Free Theological College in Edinburgh and then graduated with a B.D. from London University in 1943. In the same year he was married to Jean Lorimer Crichton Miller (1917-1998) who had been working for the air force. Between 1943 and 1946 he was secretary of the Student Christian Movement and his contacts with Gold Coast students in Edinburgh at this time led to his interest in missionary work. He was ordained by the United Free Presbytery in 1944 and in 1946 left for Ghana with the Church of Scotland. His wife followed in 1947 and they were stationed in Akropong where at first Forrester-Paton taught at the Presbyterian Training College and studied Twi then concentrated on literature work. He did various work for the Presbyterian Church and Christian Council of Ghana involving literature and translation and was especially involved in ecumenical work. The Forrester-Patons also spent periods at Amedzofe and at Sandema in Northern Ghana. From 1960 Forrester-Paton acted as mission secretary and gave an increasing amount of time to the Accra Ridge Church. Jean Forrester-Paton raised three children and also often took services in schools and colleges and spoke at women's meetings and conferences. Her main work was with the Christian Marriage and Family Life programme of the Christian Council of Ghana. The committee (CCMFL) was set up in 1961 and instigated programmes and provided advice and training on family planning, marriage guidance, sex education and family relationships in general. Jean Forrester-Paton was its secretary from 1961 to 1972 and played a large part in securing the co-operation of the Roman Catholic Church in 1967. The Forrester-Patons left Ghana in 1972 and the following year Forrester-Paton became an associate minister in Hawick. He retired in 1983 but had been appointed Chaplain to HM the Queen in 1981 and was Extra Chaplain in 1988.
Downloaded from http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/3/21.htm on 5.2.2009
As you can see from the postmark, we’ve now reached Lagos. We spent the whole of the past two days trying to get visas for Togo and Dahomey, travellers’ cheques, motor registration and extended insurance to cover other countries in West Africa, not to mention cholera and yellow fever jabs. Mostly its gone fairly smoothly, though it took three and a half hours to persuade the Central Bank of Nigeria to part with £25 worth of travellers’ cheques. The only real fly in the ointment has been the insurance for my motorbike. Guess who its insured with - your old firm, Guardian Royal Exchange, but the Nigeria branch. So far they have issued two cover notes but they haven’t got round to producing an actual policy. When I called in on their agents in Jos on the way here to enquire about it, they said, “No problem, you can fix everything up at the head office in Lagos.” But of course when I went into their office here they claimed it was nothing at all to do with them, they couldn’t extend the cover without the original policy, so I would have to go to their office in Kaduna and ask for the original policy documents. I don’t usually lose my cool, but after a pretty stormy interview with the manager in which I completely lost my temper, they finally agreed they would issue an entirely new temporary policy valid for a month for a mere £5.00. This is despite the fact that I’ve already paid them £12 for insurance for the entire year, but as you need an extension to this to cross the border into other countries there wasn’t a lot to argue about and I had to pay up. We were rushing to get all the paperwork sorted out as tomorrow id a national holiday, then it’s the weekend, and the last thing we wanted to do was to have to stay three more days in Lagos.
Traffic here is absolutely chaotic! There are only two bridges from the mainland to Lagos Island where most of the shops, offices and embassies are located, and these are absolutely chock-a-bloc with traffic all day long. It can take anything up to one and a half hours to go the 8 miles from Yaba, where we are staying with a VSO at the College of Technology, to the city centre. The drivers have no road sense whatsoever, have never heard of signals or indicators, overtake on all sides and cut in and pull out with absolutely no consideration or regard for other road users. But so far we have managed to avoid any mishaps!.
After leaving Port Harcourt we carried on to Onitsha, passing the famous Uli airstrip on the way. At the height of the civil war this was the only way planes could land or take off with supplies for the shrinking enclave of Biafra. It’s actually just a section of road which is wider than normal, with lines painted down the centre to guide the planes in. You can still the wreckage of around ten or more planes littered about in the bush at either side of the main road, and the whole extraordinary sight is completed by the huts of the locals who have moved in and built grass-roofed extensions around the shattered remains of the planes.
Then
Biafra’s Last Stand
Ojukwu was betting that the centrifugal forces of tribal, religious and economic rivalry would tear Nigeria apart in time to save Biafra. But his men ran out of food before that debatable historical process could run its course. Thousands of them faded into the bush, shed their uniforms and, clad only in shorts, melted into streams of refugees. The Nigerians overran Owerri, the last remaining city of any size (250,-000) in Biafra. Then they pressed on toward Uli with their 122-mm. Soviet cannon, shelling the strip from a range of 13 miles.
Shortly before Owerri fell, Ojukwu held an all-night Cabinet meeting at which it was decided that he should leave Biafra, ostensibly to seek help elsewhere, actually to facilitate the surrender. …At Uli airstrip by that time, half the runway lights and some of the runway itself had been knocked out by Nigerian guns. The control tower began to wave off flights; they dropped from 17 a day to three, and soon were discontinued. The last pilots to get in with dried fish and other food had to unload their own planes because workers had fled. Often food moved from Uli was brought back because distribution centers had been overrun. The last telex message from Biafra to Markpress, a Geneva public relations firm that has handled the Biafra account with skill, said tersely: "Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the airstrip at Uli is functioning normally." Next day it fell and with it the nation that it had kept barely alive for so long.
Downloaded from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878714-8,00.html on 5.2.09
Onitsha appeared to have been very badly smashed up during the war. We visited the remains of the famous covered market, once the greatest market in Nigeria and now a twisted tortured mass of steel girders, and also the shanty-town market which has now replaced it. The European quarter of Onitsha, with its grand two-storey houses, has been almost entirely obliterated. We left Onitsha across the famous Asaba Bridge over the Niger, which was blown up by the retreating Biafran army and now has a makeshift Bailey bridge to connect its missing spans with the main part of the bridge, which is still standing.
Later
Perhaps the greatest chaos we experienced in Nigeria was trying to cross the bridge over the Niger River at Onitsha. The Niger River roughly bisects Nigeria, entering from the northwest to about the country's center and then flowing directly south to the Bight of Biafra, as the corner of the Atlantic south of Nigeria is named. The region where the Niger flows into the Bight is a huge swampy area that accounts most of Nigeria's massive oil reserves and significant production is usually simply called "The Delta".
The Delta is now well known for its civil unrest, gangs, private armies, kidnappings, and general mayhem, so it was a definite no-go zone on the checkerboard of areas in southern Nigeria the British Foreign Service has warnings against traveling to. Although we had no reason to go to the Delta, these warnings were in effect in several other areas of southwestern Nigeria, requiring us (for insurance coverage purposes as well as safety) to take a circuitous route instead of the main expressway which passed through some areas of conflict.
All roads in south-central Nigeria, however, seem to converge into one serious bottleneck - the bridge across the Niger at Onitsha, one of the greatest scenes of anarchy I've ever experienced. Nigerians must be the world's most aggressive drivers to begin with, but here thousands of cars were all jostling for space and numerous roads converged to cross the only bridge for at least a hundred miles in each direction that linking the eastern and western halves of the country, a bridge with only one lane of traffic in each direction and numerous stalled vehicles the traffic had to squeeze around. All told, it took us about three hours from when we hit the traffic jam until we got over the bridge, all spent in stifling humid heat. Onitsha was a crowded and chaotic as any other Nigerian city we passed through, but my main recollection of its unpleasantness was the choking soot and vehicle exhaust fumes hanging low over the city that literally left a bad taste in my mouth.
Downloaded from http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/modernnomad67/3/1198108860/tpod.html
From Onitsha we carried on to Benin, an ancient city famous for its medieval bronzes, wood carving and weaving. We had a look round the chief’s house but couldn’r wait the 48 hours it takes to get permission to go round the Oba’s palace. It was fascinating watching craftsmen making bonze statues and wooden carving using the same techniques thay have used for centuries. Our visit to Benin coincided with a cocktail party in honour of the Queen’s birthday. The VSO we were staying with was well in with the Assistant High Commissioner and got use invited, along with him , to act as waiters at this event. It seems they didn’t entirely trust the local staff not to purloin bottles of gin and whisky and squirrel them away over the wall. They had signed up the local police brass band to play rousing tunes and the two national anthems, then the Military Governor of the state made a rather boring speech. All the male guests, apart from us VSO waiters, were dressed in tails and bow ties and the female guests in smart cocktail dresses. The next morning we drove on towards Lagos, stopping the night in Ondo because a bridge on the road to Shagamu had fallen down. The next morning we got some locals to carry our motorbikes across the river for 5/= each. Tomorrow we plan to spend the day on Bar Beach – famous as the site of public executions in Lagos state, before setting off for Dahomey the following day. The rainy season has now begun and each night there are torrential downpours with violent thunderstorms. In spite of all the rain we’re having to eat out tonight because the water supply has failed again. The food in Lagos is very peppery and slightly lacking in variety, but a meal in a café rarely costs more than 3/= for rice, stew and peppers, or yams and soup.
May 2nd 1972
Elmina
Elmina is so incredibly delightful that’s its difficult to describe on paper. We’re sitting on a beautiful silver beach with not another person in sight and not a single footprint in the sand but our own. Round the bay, the coast, fringed with coconut palms swaying gently in the breeze stretches away as far as the eye can see. There’s no need to but coconuts, you just wait till one drops from the nearest tree! Every now and then a dugout fishing boat with a square sail, looking rather like a Chinese junk, floats out from behind the breakwater, battered by the waves as they crash onto the rocks. The other side of the bay, hidden from sight at the moment, the fishermen are mending their nets and distentangling crabs and lobsters ready for their next fishing expedition tonight. This morning we went shopping in the market and bought some juicy tangerines (5 for 1/=) and provisions for lunch. Then we wandered about taking photos of the fishermen mending their nets and finally collapsed on the beach and just floated around in the water.
The most impressive sight in Elmina is the castle, or rather two castles. One was built by the Dutch around 1666, the other by the Portuguese as early as 1482. The larger castle, which we plan to look round this afternoon, is not used as a Police Training School. The beach where we’re sitting at the moment lies just under the battlements, separated from the castle wall by a fringe of coconut palms. A double moat, now dry, guards the entrance to the vast, rectangular, 97,000-square-foot castle, built over the course of four centuries. Perched on the end of a rocky peninsula, its four great watchtowers command a view of the surrounding sea; above, on the landside, six 12-foot-long Dutch cannons are aimed at the town. Inside, an eerie stillness hangs over a large stone courtyard, illuminated by the sun's unrelenting glare. The castle's inner facade, made of lime, stone and bricks imported from Europe, is stark and austere. Darkened windows gape above its great double stone stairs; a black iron balustrade, marked "W" for William, King of Orange (1672-1702), is the only touch of decoration.
Then
Today, Elmina Castle is a tourist attraction and World Heritage Monument in Cape Coast, Ghana. This hasn’t always been the case. Looking at the castle from the outside, nothing can ever prepare the unsuspecting visitor or tourist emotionally to hear about the tales of horror and atrocities that went on beyond those walls.
The Portuguese built the castle in 1482, originally established as a trading post for goods bartered for local gold and valuable gem. However, as the demand for slaves increased in the Americas and Caribbean, the castle became strategic in the perpetuation of this abhorrent human cargo trade. The storerooms of the castle were converted into dungeons, and the ownership of the castle changed hands several times, eventually ending up being seized by the British in 1872. By this time, slavery had been abolished. The British didn't use Elmina to house slaves; they used Cape Coast Castle for that. During World War II the castle was the training ground for the West African Frontier Force, which fought with distinction in Burma. Today, on the former site of the Dutch Reformed Church on the second floor, it houses one of Ghana's District Assemblies, a relatively new experiment with democratic forms for the one-party Government.
Elmina Castle, known then as the slave castle, is one of over twenty castles built along the shoreline of the Gold Coast (now known as Ghana). The Gold Coast was one of the richest markets for slave traders during the peak of the slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of captives passed through the dungeons of Elmina Castle, and were shipped off, like commodities into the Americas and Caribbean against their wishes. This illicit human trade carried on for close to 300 years. …
Not knowing what awaited them on the slave ships, those who made it to the coast were held captives in the castle’s dungeons. They were subjected to all sorts of indignities, intimidation and torture. They were shackled in the damp and dark dungeons. It is said that up to three hundred captives were packed into each dungeon, without room to even lift an arm or move around. Food was scarce and disease was rampant.
The unsanitary conditions under which the captives lived were unbelievable. Without room to breathe properly in those dungeons, the captives had to defecate there. The sick were often not attended to, and many of them died while held captives there. Air quality wasn’t a priority. The stench in those dungeons must have been nauseating. Even today, the dungeons still reek. Inside the castle is a smaller, older stone courtyard flanked by four dungeons. Each held as many as 200 women for up to three months. Food was handed through the iron gates on a long paddle; there was no toilet, no room to lie down and sleep. The only air or light came through the doorways or a few small holes at either end of the ceiling. When the governor wanted a bedmate, he stood on a balcony above and picked one of the women herded into the courtyard, our guide said. The fate of those who rebelled -- those who tried to escape, for instance, or cause unrest -- was harsh. Men were sent to the condemned cell, a small black room with one hole in the wall, where they were starved to death, our guide said. Women were beaten and chained to cannon balls in the courtyard.
A visit to Elmina leaves one with an eerie feeling of ghostly hallucinations. As the tour guide is talking, it is easy to visualize hundreds of captives in the dungeons, screaming out their agonies, just pleading to be returned home. But alas, we know that didn’t happen. Countless number of them died under these atrocious conditions. Those who survived the dungeons had to endure further indignities of being shackled together, tightly packed like cattle, on those slave ships. As we all know, when they died, they were simply tossed over-board into the sea, and their names were forgotten.
Throughout the slave trade period, at different times, thousands of captured slaves were chained to cannonballs at the castle, and made to stand in the blazing sun. Women, when their capturers were not raping them, could be made to lift heavy cannonballs in the blistering sun as punishment. Other so-called rebellious captives were either murdered outright, or placed in solitary confinement in an airtight, dark holding ‘facility’ in the courtyard, and could be left there to starve to death. Yet, while all these atrocities were going on, the castle also served as a missionary sanctuary and housed a church. The slave traders held church services there.
Perhaps the most significant memory from Elmina Castle is ‘The Door of No Return’.
This was where hundreds of thousands of our ancestors passed during the slave trade era to awaiting slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic to the so-called New World. An underground tunnel, through which slaves passed when they left Elmina, sweats with dampness. The peeling walls are covered with a green mold. At the end is a narrow opening, which once led to the beach where canoes took the captives to ships at anchor. It frames the sun's brilliant light; inside the tunnel all is dark.There is a plaque next to the condemned dungeon door at Elmina. It reads:
“In Everlasting Memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to uphold this.”
Downloaded from http://www.blackhistorysociety.ca/Elmina.htm on 5.2.09
The other fort, much smaller and cosier, is our temporary home in Elmina! Owned by the Antiquities Department, you can stay here for 5/- a night for a bed with sheets and a mosquito net. We seem to be the only people here at the moment, with a bedroom each and a dining room perched on the battlements just under the watchtower. You buy whatever you want to eat in the village then give it to the caretaker, who cooks for you, lays the table, then washes up afterwards. I’m sure anywhere else but in West Africa the place would be absolutely swarming with tourists, but we haven’t seen another white face so far here. The only concession to the more upmarket tourist trade is a motel a couple of miles down the road. We went there last night and found we and three other people were the only customers. Ite fort were staying in is called Fort St Jago and is on top of a hill overlooking the harbour with its fishing boats and Elmina castle down below. This morning we were woken at 0600 a.m. by the reveille trumpet and staggered out of bed at sunrise and watched the police trainees on the castle parade ground below doing their drill. It looked a bit like a scene from a film in the middle ages with the peasants pushing their carts along the street below and staggering up the steep hill to the castle gate with bundles, boxes and buckets of water. Ten minutes ride away there is another pretty little coastal town, Cape Coast, which also has a picturesque castle, with great heaps of cannon balls piled up to act as a breakwater.
Later
As you wander round St George's Castle, one of the more delightful aspects is the way its twin, Fort St Jago, keeps flitting into view through the windows and turrets. Perched on top of a small hill across the fishing harbour from St George's Castle, Fort St Jago is small and perfectly formed. In keeping with its pleasant aspect, it doesn't share the dark secrets of its bigger brother, for while the Portuguese and the Dutch herded slaves through St George's as quickly as they could, Fort St Jago simply sat there, looking down on the travesty below without comment.
When the Dutch captured St George's Castle by bombarding it from St Jago Hill, they realised that they would have to retain possession of the hill if they weren't to lose their new acquisition to the same trick. With this in mind, in 1666 they built Fort Coenraadsburg on the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, to act as a military barracks for protection of the town, which was booming with the burgeoning trade in locally mined gold and locally captured slaves.
The Dutch would occupy Elmina town and the two forts for 235 years, until the British, keen to control the whole Gold Coast so they could add it to their growing empire, attacked first in 1871, and then again in 1872. It's surprising that this hadn't happened before – on a clear day you can see Cape Coast Castle from Elmina, which must have been really irritating for the empire-mad Victorians – but it turned out that the Dutch weren't remotely interested in defending this distant outpost, especially as the trade in slaves and gold had long since dried up. So, to avoid a long, hard struggle to a foregone conclusion, the Dutch wisely sold Elmina to the British for a small sum and sailed off to concentrate on their more profitable colonies in In-donesia.
Under the British St George's Castle became a colonial police academy, and it remained an academy after Ghana's independence until it was finally declared a national monument in 1972. However, after the departure of the Dutch, Fort St Jago passed through a number of strange incarnations over the years. It started its new life as a guesthouse and then morphed into a leprosy hospital (until a permanent hospital could be built in town) and then a prison (again, until a prison could be built elsewhere) before returning to life as a guesthouse. In 1986 the government closed the guesthouse and started promoting the fort as a piece of Ghana's heritage, but surprisingly the guide on the fort door told me that plans are still afoot to convert it back into a guesthouse; it's just money that's the problem. Given that Fort St Jago is a World Heritage site it seems a little odd that it might end up being a guesthouse again, but for once I can see the logic. The fort would make a perfect place to stay.
For a start, the rooms are huge and airy, and given a reasonable amount of work they'd be wonderfully atmospheric. The old chapel would make a great suite and the officers' rooms would be perfect for a dormitory, while the tower would be the ideal spot for a candlelight dinner as the sun sinks into the shoreline. Meanwhile the courtyard would be a great spot for sitting and reading, sheltered from the hot afternoon sun by the shadow of the entrance hall and lit at night by the lovely Victorian-era streetlight in the middle of the yard.
Downloaded from http://www.moxon.net/ghana/elmina.html on 5.2.09
We spent last weekend in Accra, mainly to insure our motorbikes for Ghana. The Guardian Royal Exchange here was a ,ot more helpful than in lagos and charged £2/10- to extend the cover for two weeks, saying we could reclaim this back in Nigeria – though I have my doubts! So at the moment my motorbike is covered by three separate and concurrent insurance policies (except that the endorsements don’t appear on the first two). Accra is a pretty, clean, green and open city nothing like Lagos which was just the opposite. Most things in Ghana seem to be better organised and generally more developed than in Nigeria. But the piece de resistance was Lome, the capital of Togo, where we stayed two nights at Edith’s Inn, a hotel run by a black ex-Peace Corps nurse, quite reasonably priced and fantastic value for money, with air-conditioned rooms for only £1 a night. I had the first hot shower I’ve had for four months, and we fed like lords. There was a splendid little German restaurant just round the corner where you could get the most succulent steaks for under £1. There’s nowhere like it in Nigeria – even the top hotels don’t produce such good food but charge ten times the price
We agreed we ‘d have to go through Lome on our return to Nigeria and gorge ourselves again! The beach, however, in Lome was not so good - miles of beautiful sand but it shelved very steeply. This, combined with breakers about 20 feet high and an extremely strong undertow meant it appeared to be too dangerous to do anything more than paddle on the edge of the water, but even then you kept getting swept over and seawards. In Accra we stayed with a couple of VSO electricians. I went with one of them on Sunday morning to the Presbyterian Church and imagine my surprise when the minister, a Rev Forrester-Paton, turned out to be the father of a student who lived a couple of doors down the corridor in New College back in Oxford. Small world! They say almost everyone in the world knows somebody who knows someone six degrees of relationship removed from themselves. The Forrester-Patons were in the middle of packing up to return to England after 25 years in Ghana but gave us a very nice lunch and told us all about Elmina and advised us to get the Museums Department in Accra to phone up the castle and let then know we were on our way – sound advice because it meant we got VIP treatment on our arrival.
Colin Forrester-Paton, Church of Scotland missionary in Ghana, was born on 5 April 1918 at Alloa, Scotland. His family had missionary connections, his uncle Ernest was a missionary in India and his great-aunt Catherine had trained women missionaries in Glasgow. Forrester-Paton was educated in Moffatt and Norfolk then at New College, Oxford University where he graduated 1st class BA Hons in 1940. He attended the United Free Theological College in Edinburgh and then graduated with a B.D. from London University in 1943. In the same year he was married to Jean Lorimer Crichton Miller (1917-1998) who had been working for the air force. Between 1943 and 1946 he was secretary of the Student Christian Movement and his contacts with Gold Coast students in Edinburgh at this time led to his interest in missionary work. He was ordained by the United Free Presbytery in 1944 and in 1946 left for Ghana with the Church of Scotland. His wife followed in 1947 and they were stationed in Akropong where at first Forrester-Paton taught at the Presbyterian Training College and studied Twi then concentrated on literature work. He did various work for the Presbyterian Church and Christian Council of Ghana involving literature and translation and was especially involved in ecumenical work. The Forrester-Patons also spent periods at Amedzofe and at Sandema in Northern Ghana. From 1960 Forrester-Paton acted as mission secretary and gave an increasing amount of time to the Accra Ridge Church. Jean Forrester-Paton raised three children and also often took services in schools and colleges and spoke at women's meetings and conferences. Her main work was with the Christian Marriage and Family Life programme of the Christian Council of Ghana. The committee (CCMFL) was set up in 1961 and instigated programmes and provided advice and training on family planning, marriage guidance, sex education and family relationships in general. Jean Forrester-Paton was its secretary from 1961 to 1972 and played a large part in securing the co-operation of the Roman Catholic Church in 1967. The Forrester-Patons left Ghana in 1972 and the following year Forrester-Paton became an associate minister in Hawick. He retired in 1983 but had been appointed Chaplain to HM the Queen in 1981 and was Extra Chaplain in 1988.
Downloaded from http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/3/21.htm on 5.2.2009
Chapter 5 The rand Tour - 5000 km Round Est Afric on a Motorbike
Enugu April 11th 1972
Yesterday we arrived in Enugu, capital of the newly created East Central State of Nigeria, after travelling for about ten days since leaving Kaltungo on April 1st. We stayed for several days with the chief Game Warden at Yankari Game reserve, a VSO named Dave Ball. At Yankari there is a beautiful warm spring, - the Wikki Spring – where the water temperature is about 90 degrees F, just cool enough to keep cool, but not so cold you can’t stay in the water for most of the day! The record was 13 hours, till 3.00 a.m. in the morning. One morning we went for a game drive – or rather I did, as Clive, the VSO from Yola who I’m travelling with - was suffering from a headache. We saw just about everything apart from lions and elephants - hartebeest, deer, roan antelopes, crocodiles, buffaloes, cougars and so on. By mid afternoon Clive had recovered and we went again, this time seeing a herd of over 50 elephants. We stayed here for four days, feasting on Hartebeest for dinner each night – it was and soft and tender as fresh breadcrumbs, a welcome change from the leather-like goat and dog meat you get in Kaltungo market.
From Yankari we drove on to Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State. We stayed here longer than anticipated as a vital screw on Clive’s Suzuki had lost its thread and he had to get it re-threaded. Jos was much cooler than Kaltungo – we even had a rainstorm on the way, the first rain I’ve seen since in four months since arriving in Nigeria, apart from a freak five-minute downpour last January. The climate in Jos is cooler all the year round and you can actually get fresh strawberries and cream, though at the somewhat extortionate (by Nigerian standards) price of 8 shillings a pound. We had a look round Jos museum and went to the cinema two nights in a row. Then we set off for to the south heading towards the former short-lived breakaway state of Biafra. The road south from Jos to Makurdi is unbelievably awful, even by Nigerian standards, for around 100 miles. It’s a dirt road with huge corrugations and enormous potholes, not to mention great rocks sticking up in the middle of the road all over the place. On one section the surface was so bad it took 3 hours to go 40 miles. Fortunately we had met a couple of volunteers from Lafia while we were in Jos and they had invited us to stay the night. I had a slight touch of fever – the mosquitoes in Jos really bite you to death – so I took a massive dose of Nivaquine and went to bed at six in the evening. This seemed to do the trick, as when I woke up at 6.00 am the following morning I felt as right as rain again, so we carried on that day to Oturkpo. We had the address of a VSO at Jesus College in Oturkpo, but he and the other volunteers at the college had locked up and gone off to Calabar for the week, so we stayed the night in a Methodist Rest House – quite spartan, but with a fridge and a cooker, and all for 3/9d each for the night. We cooked our own supper then got invited over for breakfast by teaching couple from Yorkshire, John and Betty Taylor, who had only been out here for a few weeks. By the time you reach Oturkpo there is a noticeable change in the landscape – the trees get taller, the grass lusher, and as we carried on yesterday to Enugu we really felt that at last we had reached the tropics, with palm trees and dense forest lining the road on either side. We’ve now passed through Tur country (round Lafia) and the Idoma tribe around Oturkpo and reached Iboland. In Enugu itself there are hardly any signs of the civil war – everything has been repaired at an unbelievable rate, and although there wasn’t a lot of damage here anyway (it was captured by the Federal forces fairly early on in the civil war) they certainly seem to have made a rapid recovery. There are still a few shell holes in the walls of shops and houses, and along the road we saw the battered remains of army lorries and tanks. When we got to Enugu we weren’t quite sure where we could stay, so we called on some CUSO (Canadian) volunteers who directed us to the house of a retired doctor from Canada who is now working as a volunteer at the University of Enugu. He has a massive house on the university campus and seems to keep “open house” for visiting VSO’s, CUSO’s and Peace Corps volunteers. You’d think on meeting him for the first time that he was the classic “absent-minded professor” – but apparently he is a world expert on brain surgery! We had dinner last night with another CUSO, Theodore Kay from Taiwan who teaches Pathology at the university. He told us that prior to the civil war the university was a breeding ground for the Biafran intelligentsia and had only been re-opened just over a year earlier, in 1970.
So far on our travels we seem to have avoided any serious mishaps. It wasn’t as terrifying changing to driving on the right as everyone had anticipated – in fact they have had police and soldiers on almost every corner directing the traffic. We had a spot of bother yesterday in a remote village when Clive went the wrong side of a bollard in the middle of the road and got threatened with being carried off to stew in a police cell in Oturkpo for a few hours. However after much pleading and grovelling apologies from Clive they finally let us go on our way. Usually when they stop you they are after the ubiquitous “dash”, but VSO’s advice is to stand your ground and not give in – although a few shillings might save endless delays and cost less in the long run!
18th April 1972 Port Harcourt
Since I last wrote we have done the south east and have now reached Port Harcourt, where we’re squatting in the house of a VSO who is, like us, away on holiday! We left Enugu just over a week ago and drove through the East Central (Ibo) State to Calabar all in one day. There was a superb new road, just like a motorway, all the way from Ugep to Calabar. We realised afterwards that we had hurtled past some interesting-looking rubber and palm oil plantations without stopping to take any photos, and we haven’t seen any more since then! The country in EC State is very different to the north, with dense tropical rain-forest and tall trees which have a canopy of leaves a couple of hundred feet up which blocks out the light and creates a closed-in, slightly oppressive, atmosphere. The villages are very diffuse – each house is surrounded by a little compound and has its own plot of land, so you feel you never actually leave a village and one village shades into the next imperceptibly. We spent a day looking round Calabar, an old slave port on the Cross River and a centre for early Christian missionary activity in the nineteenth century. The Hope Waddell Training Academy dates back nearly a century.
Then
The Reverend Waddell arrived in Calabar in 1846, accompanied by a teacher and a carpenter, and set up a Presbyterian mission station there. Several years after he retired and returned home to Dublin, the Board of the Mission in Scotland decided to commemorate his work in Calabar by setting up a school and naming it after him. Waddell, however, was unaware of the decision to name the school after him and never set eyes on this monument to his work, dying on April 18 1895, two days after the decision to establish the school had been taken. The Hope Waddell Institute was a prototype for a modern-day polytechnic, and offered courses such as printing and bookbinding, building and electrical technology, secretarial studies, and motor mechanics, with four units, a primary school and three specialist secondary departments an industrial department, agricultural department and a teacher training college. This was highly innovative at the time, when other schools in Nigeria offered only a very academic curriculum. Sadly today, the founders’ dreams are all but dead and the school operates like other secondary schools in Nigeria, offering a basically grammar school type of curriculum.
Downloaded/adapted from www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/travels/2005/feb/17/travels—17-02-2005-001.htm on 31.1.09
We took a trip up the river to a traditional village called Creek Town which had the most magnificent Portuguese-style decayed colonial mansions you could ever imagine. Creek Town, Duke Town and other settlements north of Calabar were founded by the Efik tribe who migrated south during the first half of the 17th century. One house with splendid Doric columns supporting the upper storey balcony had a tailor’s shop on the ground floor with a remarkable set of tailor’s dummies – a strange mixture of the humdrum and the extraordinary. The thing which struck us most about Calabar was how remarkably clean it was, no piles of rubbish burning at the sides of the roads, unlike most towns in Nigeria which are smelly, dirty and rubbish-strewn. We discovered later we should have go to see the grave of Mary Slessor – but by then we had arrived in Port Harcourt!
We stopped the night on the way here in Uyo, staying with a volunteer who’s been working at an Advanced Teachers College but is going home at the end of the month because they are overstaffed and don’t need him any longer. He took us for a swim in the river at a very pleasant spot called Abak, then next day we drove on to Port Harcourt. The town was quite badly affected by the civil war – you can still see the burnt out shells of various buildings, but otherwise you wouldn’t really know there had been major battles here. There is a midnight curfew. The first night we only left the house of a couple of VSO girls at 1.30 a.m. and got stopped by armed police every few hundred yards wanting to know where we had come from, where we were going and why we were driving during the curfew. Port Harcourt is absolutely swarming with soldiers – in fact virtually the entire Nigerian army seems to be quartered in the three south-eastern states. But its quite remarkable how quickly everything seems to have returned to normal, and how few physical signs of conflict are still to be seen.
We decided to go and visit a Canadian volunteer who lives right out in the Niger delta on a tiny island, only about a mile long, called Buguma, about 20 miles west of Port Harcourt. I took us two hours by boat to get there. The boat was supposed to leave at 11.00 a.m. but by the time they had loaded it up with wood and provisions it was getting on for 2.00 p.m. One boy had four large wicker baskets of bread, which he emptied onto the quayside in a large heap then proceeded to bang two loaves at a time together - we surmised to remove the ants and mildew - before putting them back into the baskets, now covered in dirt from the quayside as well! The Buguma islanders were a very friendly lot and the CUSO girl, Francis, seemed to be surviving remarkably well in extremely basic living conditions: she lives on a diet of garri, rice, yams, fish, oysters, prawns and snails! We had been asked by the British Council to grill the Principal of the school, the Kalabari National College, about what their facilities were like, because VSO is also thinking of sending a volunteer there. Apparently Francis was sent there in the first place as company for another Canadian volunteer who couldn’t stand being in such an isolated posting but finally cracked and had to be sent back to Canada. We would have really liked to visit Bonny or Opobo right at the mouth of the delta, but they told us it takes three days by boat from Port Harcourt and the boat ride is pretty gruelling. One bit of mangrove swamp looks pretty much the same as another, and even after only a couple of hours travelling to Buguma it was starting to get a bit boring, so I can’t think what three days through the mangroves would be like!
Now
Buguma today is a local government headquarters with 52 family compounds and a population of around 150,000. Each compound has a paramount ruler who oversees the affairs of the compound. The people belong to the Kalabari tribe. Buguma is one of the few riverine settlements in the region which is accessible by road. Traditionally the village depended on fishing and collecting periwinkles, oysters and shellfish from the mangrove swamps. Mangroves were used as building materials. But the coming of the oil industry to the Niger delta has destroyed the ecosystem and the habitats of marine animals and fish. The oil companies clear the mangrove swamps and forests leading to changes in the tidal currents, erosion and the destruction of the natural habitats, leading to a decline in the fishing catch, poverty, unemployment and environmental degradation. Since the Shell Petroleum Development Company began exploiting the oil reserves in the Delta, they paid compensation only for 5 years.
Downloaded from cas.umkc.edu/geo/LCAM/NIGER_DELTA/Pages/N_Buguma.htm on 31.1.09
Our next major objectives are Onitsha, where they used to be a famous covered market, the largest in West Africa. Onitsha was famous for its market literature, locally published pamphlets and books with titles like “How to Talk to Girls and Win Their Love” which were produced in the 50s and 60s, often in creole or pidgin, or using colourful non-standard English and racy plotlines. From there we plan to head for Benin, where they make the most beautiful carved wooden heads from ebony and other hardwoods, and also exquisite metal statues in bronze and silver.
Yesterday we arrived in Enugu, capital of the newly created East Central State of Nigeria, after travelling for about ten days since leaving Kaltungo on April 1st. We stayed for several days with the chief Game Warden at Yankari Game reserve, a VSO named Dave Ball. At Yankari there is a beautiful warm spring, - the Wikki Spring – where the water temperature is about 90 degrees F, just cool enough to keep cool, but not so cold you can’t stay in the water for most of the day! The record was 13 hours, till 3.00 a.m. in the morning. One morning we went for a game drive – or rather I did, as Clive, the VSO from Yola who I’m travelling with - was suffering from a headache. We saw just about everything apart from lions and elephants - hartebeest, deer, roan antelopes, crocodiles, buffaloes, cougars and so on. By mid afternoon Clive had recovered and we went again, this time seeing a herd of over 50 elephants. We stayed here for four days, feasting on Hartebeest for dinner each night – it was and soft and tender as fresh breadcrumbs, a welcome change from the leather-like goat and dog meat you get in Kaltungo market.
From Yankari we drove on to Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State. We stayed here longer than anticipated as a vital screw on Clive’s Suzuki had lost its thread and he had to get it re-threaded. Jos was much cooler than Kaltungo – we even had a rainstorm on the way, the first rain I’ve seen since in four months since arriving in Nigeria, apart from a freak five-minute downpour last January. The climate in Jos is cooler all the year round and you can actually get fresh strawberries and cream, though at the somewhat extortionate (by Nigerian standards) price of 8 shillings a pound. We had a look round Jos museum and went to the cinema two nights in a row. Then we set off for to the south heading towards the former short-lived breakaway state of Biafra. The road south from Jos to Makurdi is unbelievably awful, even by Nigerian standards, for around 100 miles. It’s a dirt road with huge corrugations and enormous potholes, not to mention great rocks sticking up in the middle of the road all over the place. On one section the surface was so bad it took 3 hours to go 40 miles. Fortunately we had met a couple of volunteers from Lafia while we were in Jos and they had invited us to stay the night. I had a slight touch of fever – the mosquitoes in Jos really bite you to death – so I took a massive dose of Nivaquine and went to bed at six in the evening. This seemed to do the trick, as when I woke up at 6.00 am the following morning I felt as right as rain again, so we carried on that day to Oturkpo. We had the address of a VSO at Jesus College in Oturkpo, but he and the other volunteers at the college had locked up and gone off to Calabar for the week, so we stayed the night in a Methodist Rest House – quite spartan, but with a fridge and a cooker, and all for 3/9d each for the night. We cooked our own supper then got invited over for breakfast by teaching couple from Yorkshire, John and Betty Taylor, who had only been out here for a few weeks. By the time you reach Oturkpo there is a noticeable change in the landscape – the trees get taller, the grass lusher, and as we carried on yesterday to Enugu we really felt that at last we had reached the tropics, with palm trees and dense forest lining the road on either side. We’ve now passed through Tur country (round Lafia) and the Idoma tribe around Oturkpo and reached Iboland. In Enugu itself there are hardly any signs of the civil war – everything has been repaired at an unbelievable rate, and although there wasn’t a lot of damage here anyway (it was captured by the Federal forces fairly early on in the civil war) they certainly seem to have made a rapid recovery. There are still a few shell holes in the walls of shops and houses, and along the road we saw the battered remains of army lorries and tanks. When we got to Enugu we weren’t quite sure where we could stay, so we called on some CUSO (Canadian) volunteers who directed us to the house of a retired doctor from Canada who is now working as a volunteer at the University of Enugu. He has a massive house on the university campus and seems to keep “open house” for visiting VSO’s, CUSO’s and Peace Corps volunteers. You’d think on meeting him for the first time that he was the classic “absent-minded professor” – but apparently he is a world expert on brain surgery! We had dinner last night with another CUSO, Theodore Kay from Taiwan who teaches Pathology at the university. He told us that prior to the civil war the university was a breeding ground for the Biafran intelligentsia and had only been re-opened just over a year earlier, in 1970.
So far on our travels we seem to have avoided any serious mishaps. It wasn’t as terrifying changing to driving on the right as everyone had anticipated – in fact they have had police and soldiers on almost every corner directing the traffic. We had a spot of bother yesterday in a remote village when Clive went the wrong side of a bollard in the middle of the road and got threatened with being carried off to stew in a police cell in Oturkpo for a few hours. However after much pleading and grovelling apologies from Clive they finally let us go on our way. Usually when they stop you they are after the ubiquitous “dash”, but VSO’s advice is to stand your ground and not give in – although a few shillings might save endless delays and cost less in the long run!
18th April 1972 Port Harcourt
Since I last wrote we have done the south east and have now reached Port Harcourt, where we’re squatting in the house of a VSO who is, like us, away on holiday! We left Enugu just over a week ago and drove through the East Central (Ibo) State to Calabar all in one day. There was a superb new road, just like a motorway, all the way from Ugep to Calabar. We realised afterwards that we had hurtled past some interesting-looking rubber and palm oil plantations without stopping to take any photos, and we haven’t seen any more since then! The country in EC State is very different to the north, with dense tropical rain-forest and tall trees which have a canopy of leaves a couple of hundred feet up which blocks out the light and creates a closed-in, slightly oppressive, atmosphere. The villages are very diffuse – each house is surrounded by a little compound and has its own plot of land, so you feel you never actually leave a village and one village shades into the next imperceptibly. We spent a day looking round Calabar, an old slave port on the Cross River and a centre for early Christian missionary activity in the nineteenth century. The Hope Waddell Training Academy dates back nearly a century.
Then
The Reverend Waddell arrived in Calabar in 1846, accompanied by a teacher and a carpenter, and set up a Presbyterian mission station there. Several years after he retired and returned home to Dublin, the Board of the Mission in Scotland decided to commemorate his work in Calabar by setting up a school and naming it after him. Waddell, however, was unaware of the decision to name the school after him and never set eyes on this monument to his work, dying on April 18 1895, two days after the decision to establish the school had been taken. The Hope Waddell Institute was a prototype for a modern-day polytechnic, and offered courses such as printing and bookbinding, building and electrical technology, secretarial studies, and motor mechanics, with four units, a primary school and three specialist secondary departments an industrial department, agricultural department and a teacher training college. This was highly innovative at the time, when other schools in Nigeria offered only a very academic curriculum. Sadly today, the founders’ dreams are all but dead and the school operates like other secondary schools in Nigeria, offering a basically grammar school type of curriculum.
Downloaded/adapted from www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/travels/2005/feb/17/travels—17-02-2005-001.htm on 31.1.09
We took a trip up the river to a traditional village called Creek Town which had the most magnificent Portuguese-style decayed colonial mansions you could ever imagine. Creek Town, Duke Town and other settlements north of Calabar were founded by the Efik tribe who migrated south during the first half of the 17th century. One house with splendid Doric columns supporting the upper storey balcony had a tailor’s shop on the ground floor with a remarkable set of tailor’s dummies – a strange mixture of the humdrum and the extraordinary. The thing which struck us most about Calabar was how remarkably clean it was, no piles of rubbish burning at the sides of the roads, unlike most towns in Nigeria which are smelly, dirty and rubbish-strewn. We discovered later we should have go to see the grave of Mary Slessor – but by then we had arrived in Port Harcourt!
We stopped the night on the way here in Uyo, staying with a volunteer who’s been working at an Advanced Teachers College but is going home at the end of the month because they are overstaffed and don’t need him any longer. He took us for a swim in the river at a very pleasant spot called Abak, then next day we drove on to Port Harcourt. The town was quite badly affected by the civil war – you can still see the burnt out shells of various buildings, but otherwise you wouldn’t really know there had been major battles here. There is a midnight curfew. The first night we only left the house of a couple of VSO girls at 1.30 a.m. and got stopped by armed police every few hundred yards wanting to know where we had come from, where we were going and why we were driving during the curfew. Port Harcourt is absolutely swarming with soldiers – in fact virtually the entire Nigerian army seems to be quartered in the three south-eastern states. But its quite remarkable how quickly everything seems to have returned to normal, and how few physical signs of conflict are still to be seen.
We decided to go and visit a Canadian volunteer who lives right out in the Niger delta on a tiny island, only about a mile long, called Buguma, about 20 miles west of Port Harcourt. I took us two hours by boat to get there. The boat was supposed to leave at 11.00 a.m. but by the time they had loaded it up with wood and provisions it was getting on for 2.00 p.m. One boy had four large wicker baskets of bread, which he emptied onto the quayside in a large heap then proceeded to bang two loaves at a time together - we surmised to remove the ants and mildew - before putting them back into the baskets, now covered in dirt from the quayside as well! The Buguma islanders were a very friendly lot and the CUSO girl, Francis, seemed to be surviving remarkably well in extremely basic living conditions: she lives on a diet of garri, rice, yams, fish, oysters, prawns and snails! We had been asked by the British Council to grill the Principal of the school, the Kalabari National College, about what their facilities were like, because VSO is also thinking of sending a volunteer there. Apparently Francis was sent there in the first place as company for another Canadian volunteer who couldn’t stand being in such an isolated posting but finally cracked and had to be sent back to Canada. We would have really liked to visit Bonny or Opobo right at the mouth of the delta, but they told us it takes three days by boat from Port Harcourt and the boat ride is pretty gruelling. One bit of mangrove swamp looks pretty much the same as another, and even after only a couple of hours travelling to Buguma it was starting to get a bit boring, so I can’t think what three days through the mangroves would be like!
Now
Buguma today is a local government headquarters with 52 family compounds and a population of around 150,000. Each compound has a paramount ruler who oversees the affairs of the compound. The people belong to the Kalabari tribe. Buguma is one of the few riverine settlements in the region which is accessible by road. Traditionally the village depended on fishing and collecting periwinkles, oysters and shellfish from the mangrove swamps. Mangroves were used as building materials. But the coming of the oil industry to the Niger delta has destroyed the ecosystem and the habitats of marine animals and fish. The oil companies clear the mangrove swamps and forests leading to changes in the tidal currents, erosion and the destruction of the natural habitats, leading to a decline in the fishing catch, poverty, unemployment and environmental degradation. Since the Shell Petroleum Development Company began exploiting the oil reserves in the Delta, they paid compensation only for 5 years.
Downloaded from cas.umkc.edu/geo/LCAM/NIGER_DELTA/Pages/N_Buguma.htm on 31.1.09
Our next major objectives are Onitsha, where they used to be a famous covered market, the largest in West Africa. Onitsha was famous for its market literature, locally published pamphlets and books with titles like “How to Talk to Girls and Win Their Love” which were produced in the 50s and 60s, often in creole or pidgin, or using colourful non-standard English and racy plotlines. From there we plan to head for Benin, where they make the most beautiful carved wooden heads from ebony and other hardwoods, and also exquisite metal statues in bronze and silver.
Chapter 4 Bureaucracy and Bribery
GSSK Kaltungo 27 February 1971
Last weekend I went to Gombe, 45 miles away and stayed over on Friday and Saturday nights, because there was supposed to be an Agricultural Show on the Saturday with traditional dancing and other cultural events. I had to borrow a motorbike from one of the teachers to get there, and by the time I had go going on the Friday, I arrived to find everything was over for the day. Then on the Saturday morning I had to visit the bank, post office, shops and vehilce licensing office. I’d promised the owner of the bike I’d loan him the money to buy a new tyre till the end of the month, and buy it for him while I was there. The result was that by the time I had done the rounds of the shops and other places I’d missed everything on the Saturday as well! You always have to allow ten times as long to do anything here as you would in England. I remembered to take the shopping list with me, but when I arrived back in Kaltungo I realised I’d left my precious packet of bacon (it costs 6 shillings a sixpence for a quarter of a pound!) and a packet of cheese (virtually my protein ration for the week) in my friend’s refrigerator. However it didn’t seem worth a ninety mile round trip to go back for them.
I’m still trying my best to get a Nigerian driving licence. The only time I can go to the vehicle licensing office in Gombe is on a Saturday, as we don’t finish school until 2 p.m. and everything in Gombe including the vehicle licensing office shuts by 3.30 to 4.00. But although the ,censing department is supposed to be open on Saturdays, I’ve been there three times so far and there’s never anyone there to issue licenses. I rather gather than most of my fellow VSOs give up trying to get one in the end and just drive without a licence.
Mr Olorunmonu diappeared in the middle of last week bound for Kano, apparently to have something done either to his spectacles or his eyes, and hasn’t been seen since – nor has the school van which is used to p[ick up tyeachers from the junction with the main road and take them the two miles down the road to the school.
The Sunday School I’m now involved with seems to be going well. About half the boys and girls at the school are nominally Christian and most of these come to the Sunday School which takes place every Sunday morning. From next week Mrs and Mrs Cox from Billiri, who usually run it, are going away to Jos and so I’ll be left holding the fort. Theer is another Sunday school teacher from the teachers’ College whose name is John, who has been coming along each week and taking the 3rd form ( which I take for RK during the week. Mrs Cox was teaching Form 1 and Mr Cox Form 4 , and previously I had been teaching Form 2. But now we will have only 3 of us, John, a third year boy who is a student at the Teachers’ College, also called John, and possibly a pastor who is supposed to start this week teaching RK at the school. This may mean re-shuffling the teachers. I’d also like to reorganise the Sunday School a bit, and have a time at the beginning with everyone together, rather than teaching them in separate groups the whole time. But I’m not sure whether this is a good plan or not, so pray for wisdom! Also the Cox’s had a benefactor in the US who used to send a year’s supply of leaflets to give out each week to the students, but the supply ran out last week. Apparently the anonymous donor was a supporter of some previous missionaries who have now moved and nobody knows their address to write and ask for more. The students however really enjoyed reading the leaflets and answering the questions and have been clamouring for more. Maybe you could ask around if to see if anyone would be interested in sponsoring Adventurers leaflets for Forms 1 and 2 and Pilot leaflets for the upper classes? No word yet from the British Council about the oan they are supposed to be giving to buy a motorbike. The sun’s hot and my arches are falling from too much walking around the village.
GSS Kaltungo March 13th
Quite a lot has happened since I last wrote. Last weekend I went off to Jos, 250 miles away, to buy my motorbike – a Honda 175cc, quite powerful and heavy. It cost £295 and I can’t leave till I’ve paid off the debt! The British Council gave me a loan of £245 and I managed to get a 10% discount, but then I had to pay £30 for tax and insurance. Its already overdue for its first service – at 200 miles – but just the ride back to Kaltungo from Jos was 250 miles! I’ve change the oil and done all the adjustments I could myself, but didn’t manage to check the tappets as the inspection cover is stuck on with a Phillips screw which refused to budge. So I plan to take it to a mechanic in Gombe tomorrow to get that checked. Only 250 more miles to go and I’ll have run it in.
Whilst in Jos I went to see an Indian film at the local open air cinema. Cinemas in northern Nigeria seem to show only Indian films and spaghetti westerns. The film itself was awful, but the experience was fascinating as the audience chattered none-stop at the tops of their voices throughout and more fights appeared to break out in the audience than appeared on the screen. Most of the audience was down below but you could pay extra to sit upstairs on a small balcony. On either side of the screen were the toilets which had no doors but that didn’t seem to deter people from using them. I managed to avoid the experience as I didn’t fancy peeing in full view of the entire audience! The following night eight other volunteers and I gate-crashed somebody’s party (only one had actually been invited) but by the time we arrived no-one seemed to care. All the big wigs from Jos society were there – the manager of Leventis where I had bought my motorbike, the manager of Holts, who I’d bumped into that morning while enquiring about boats down the Benue - they used to run a steamer service but apparently they’ve sold it recently, and the Deputy Minister for Education in North East State. He seemed to know all about me – he’d been studying the file on the school – although I’d never heard of him! On the Sunday night I stopped over in Bauchi, half way between Jos and Gombe as I was hoping to get the bike registered there on the Monday morning. When I tried to register it in Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State where I’d bought it, they were refusing to register anything, as they’d reached BP9999 and were still awaiting instructions from Lagos on which number ought to come next. In Bauchi they happily agreed to take the money and register it, but they had run out of registration books!
Back in Kaltungo the week’s work passed fairly quickly, though I had a great stack of books to mark as I’d left them plenty to be getting on with whilst I was in Jos. It’s not easy marking books by the light of a Tilly lamp – a pressurised lamp which runs on kerosene and has a very fragile element which gives out a lots more light than the light of an ordinary bush lamp but also gives out a lot of heat too! I had supper on Wednesday with some of the Nigerians in the town, a teacher named Alhasan, his brother and girlfriend and a girl named Beatrice who teaches at the school and seems to be very nice.
I seem to have got myself landed with helping to run the Boys Brigade, so I’m studying their drill book in my spare time. Next Saturday we are planning to take the Current Affairs and Geography societies on a combined trip to visit a mechanised farm near Biu where they grow tomatoes commercially, a waterfall and lake where you can swim, a cotton ginnery and then a historical site near Billiri on the way back.
This morning I went with Mallam Gideon, one of the Teacher’s College teachers and his wife to a remote church in the bush where a pastor was being ordained. About 700 people had turned up from 20 or so miles around and the tiny village church was packed to capacity. To get there you had to go down very precarious forest tracks which were extremely sandy in places – rather terrifying when you’re still a novice motorbike rider. After the service was over we went to Mallam;s Gideons’s friend’s house for a meal of millet soup, guinea corn porridge and bananas. We had just about reached saturation point when word arrived that we had been invited to go and eat at the Chief’s house, so we had to make room for a second meal of liver and rice, doused in sauce of groundnut oil tomatoes and hot peppers. Every time I eat Nigerian style I have visions of succumbing to some dire disease, as they don’t usually boil the drinking water or wash the pots, but so far I seem to have survived.
Dan Crawford in Thinking Black describes how “one cook I knew, having run out of wash-up-water for his dishes, calmly sent in to his master two courses, all the plates of which had been washed (dare I write it?) with his own African saliva.”
Yesterday I went to Yola with most of the teachers in the school van to spend the remainder of this year’s allocation for the school library. They are allowed about seven shillings per pupil per year for library books but until this year it hadn't been used, so was lost altogether. If you don'’ spend the budget before the end of the financial year on 31st March then it’s too late! One the way back I bought enough freshly caught fish to completely fill the freezer compartment of my kerosene fridge, just as they were being unloaded at the edge of the river by the ferry, for a mere 5 shillings.
The book you sent on the Soviet Educational system arrived safely, but now its looks as if I’ll be on holiday in Ghana during the Easter holidays when I was supposed to be doing the talk. I’m hoping to go to Yankari Game Reserve with another teacher from Yola who has a Suzuki 100 motorbike around 1st April, when they change from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right, keeping a low profile until the chaos which everyone is predicting this will cause has subsided. Then we plan to drive on down to the eastern Region to Calabar on the Cross River, then via the Niger Delta and Port Harcourt to Lagos, before visiting Benin, Togo and Ghana. That’s probably as far as we’ll get in a month! The National Geographic magazines you sent arrived safely – please send the drums of books to Port Harcourt and tell them to inform us when they arrive – and make sure they are insured for their full value, as they’re quite likely to go missing.
GSS Kaltungo March 23rd 1972
Thanks for the birthday card, which arrived safely along with a letter saying you were sending it! Most mail seems to arrive eventually, though there was one letter I sent to KR about a week after arriving here which had been “returned to sender” and took 3 months to arrive back. I thought it was a pity to waste it altogether, as I’d spent time and thought composing it, so re-addressed it correctly and sent it off again! Thanks for all your efforts to send books and magazines for the library. The students really seem to appreciate having a library and are making excellent use of it, though no doubt sooner or later the novelty value will wear off!
Life is rather hectic here at present as the school breaks up next Thursday. I’ve been landed with the task of supervising the 11+ examination on Saturday in Billiri, with 11 invigilators to watch and around 400 candidates sitting the exam. There seems to be quite a lot involved, including briefing invigilators who may never have seen a computer answer sheet before.
Not a lot out of the ordinary happened in the past week. On Tuesday I went to Tula for the first time with Beatrice, one of the teachers from the school. This is a delightfully picturesque village perched on the edge of a mountain about 20 miles from Kaltungo. We got quite carried away in the gardens there and came back loaded with enough paw paws, grapefuit, lemons, lettuce, beans and cucumbers to last at least a month!
I keep mentally threatening to sack Benjamin, the cook because he is so incompetent, but actually it would be quite difficult to manage without him. The other day he threw out all my Paludrin anti-malaria tablets because he wanted the empty tin to keep his ludo counters in. Yesterday I arrived back at the house from school to find flood of water pouring out from under the front door. When he’d gone home the water had been off and he’d inadvertently left the bathroom tap turned on, so when the water came back on it flooded the entire building with six inches of water!
Last Saturday, along with another teacher, I took 40 boys on a school trip to Dadin Kowa and Kuraya Terra (near Biu) to visit a tomato canning factory and irrigated farm. Then we went on to a charming waterfall at Kuraya Terra. The water drops around 100 feet and at the bottom there’s a huge pool, about 100 yards across which because the water is fast flowing is ok for swimming in, and free of bilharzia and other nasty tropical diseases which you can catch if you swim in slow moving or stagnant water. On the way back we were just about to run out of petrol when we reached Gombe. The lorry driver decided his truck needed the attention of a mechanic, but forgot to tell him the tank was almost empty, so the mechanic drove off towards his garage then ran out of petrol about a mile down the road and had to send someone off with a jerry can to fill the tank. As a result the boys got the night out on the town in Gombe which they had been clamouring for, and we didn’t arrive back at the school till nearly midnight.
At the school they are building a new reservoir. Things are pretty desperate at present – the sole well is totally inadequate for 300 boarders and the students have to go and dig in the muddy stream bed and scoop up what little water they can collect with cups and buckets. For 300 students that’s no joke! Not surprisingly about 50% of the students have bilharzia and various other tummy problems because of the bad water. It seems rather doubtful whether even this new reservoir will provide sufficient water to meet the needs of the whole school and the servants etc as well. Fortunately in the Teachers College where I am living such problems don’t arise.
They’ve now officially made me the patron of the Boys Brigade. The boy in charge, James Kano, is in my form and is a very capable leader with his heart in the right place. At the moment they have no uniforms and very little in the way of equipment. But it’s amazing what they can do to play a marching tune with a single drum and assorted desk lids, tins, bottles and chairs. I recorded their efforts and will send a cassette. My portable tape recorder is regarded in the village as magic – most of the villagers have never seen a tape recorder or heard their own voices before, and it really freaked them out the other day when I recorded a group of village children dancing a planting dance then played it back to them.
GSS Kaltungo 28th March
I’ve just about survived my first term here, but this last week has been more hectic than most! Half way through last week I had a visit from the local Inspector of Education. After humming and harring a bit - no-one here ever gets to the point straight away, that would be seen as extremely impolite – he final revealed he would like me to supervise the “National Common Entrance Exam” – equivalent to the 11+ exam in the UK, along with one of the other teachers from the school. We were assigned to Billiri, about ten miles away, and it was an interesting if exhausting experience. The problems began on the day before the exam, when we were supposed to visit the school to make sure everything was in place , as well as meeting and briefing the invigilators. Our school turned out to be expecting 416 candidates from 10 other primary schools within a 10 mile radius, but could only muster 170 desks and chairs – and some of those were the three at a desk type you see in illustrations for Dickensian novels! We ransacked the two other nearest primary schools about three miles away and gotr the pupils to carry their desks and chairs on their heads to the exam centre, but we were still 50 chairs and desks short. As the nearest other school was six od seven miles away, we had to borrow pews from the church, which we were using anyway as a venue as the school had only 8 classrooms, and make the pupils sit on one pew and write on another. So much for the instructions from Lagos that pupils had to be seated in individuals desks at least five feet apart! Further problems arose when half of the invigilators failed to turn up for the briefing on how to conduct the exam – but these were resolved when we finally got tired of waiting for them and adjourned to the bar for a beer, only to find that they had been there all day and by that time we arrived were totally incapable of understanding the instructions anyway!
During the actual exam itself, we had to evict two candidates who were pretending to be somebody else. The rightful candidates had had their admission tickets confiscated by their headmaster for not paying their school fees on time , and he turned up and identified two other pupils, who had no doubt greased his palm well, as being the students named on the entrance tickets. The exam was just about to start when the two genuine candidates turned up, also claiming to be the same people. A prolonged investigation followed and finally the two offenders were forcibly ejected, much to the disgust of their headmaster!
During the actual exam I caught one of the invigilators in the act as he was showing one of the candidates which boxes to shade, so I dismissed the invigilator and reported the candidate had been helped with the answers. When I told them the following week in the Education Office that I’d caught one of the invigilators cheating they just told me, “Oh, that one, yes he was caught cheating last year as well!”
Talking of impersonating people, a girl was discovered to have been living at the school and attending lessons – actually it turns out she was one of the brightest students – although she hadn’t passed the entrance exam or been interviewed for a place. On the day the girls came to the school at the beginning of the term she got a list of all the things they were supposed to bring from another girl, and just joined the crowd. Nobody realised she wasn’t supposed to be at the school until last week, when the Vice Principal wanted wanted to know who had been present at the interviews for new admissions, for the school records, and when she was asked she couldn’t answer. Then the truth eventually came out!
I’ve been making plenty of use of my new Honda 175 motorbike during the past few weeks and have now run it in and don over 1000 miles. Next weekend Nigeria switches over from driving on the left to driving on the right and they are predicting it will be absolute carnage on the roads. We had a dry run in Kaltungo village last Friday and hours after the practice was supposed to be over most of the villagers still hadn’t go back to driving on the left!
We break up for the Easter holidays the day after tomorrow – so the school is now well into the end of term spirit. Most of the teachers, including the Principal, have already disappeared. I took the morning off today to climb to the top of Tangale peak, an incredible shaped volcanic plug which looks a bit like the Sugar Loaf mountain in Rio de Janeiro, or the nosecone of an Apollo spaceship. I reckoned I deserved the day off after conducting the end of term book check virtually single-handedly after the teacher assigned to do it had gone off on a grand tour of the north in search of a competent doctor for his wife who’d developed complications after having a baby.
Last weekend I went to Gombe, 45 miles away and stayed over on Friday and Saturday nights, because there was supposed to be an Agricultural Show on the Saturday with traditional dancing and other cultural events. I had to borrow a motorbike from one of the teachers to get there, and by the time I had go going on the Friday, I arrived to find everything was over for the day. Then on the Saturday morning I had to visit the bank, post office, shops and vehilce licensing office. I’d promised the owner of the bike I’d loan him the money to buy a new tyre till the end of the month, and buy it for him while I was there. The result was that by the time I had done the rounds of the shops and other places I’d missed everything on the Saturday as well! You always have to allow ten times as long to do anything here as you would in England. I remembered to take the shopping list with me, but when I arrived back in Kaltungo I realised I’d left my precious packet of bacon (it costs 6 shillings a sixpence for a quarter of a pound!) and a packet of cheese (virtually my protein ration for the week) in my friend’s refrigerator. However it didn’t seem worth a ninety mile round trip to go back for them.
I’m still trying my best to get a Nigerian driving licence. The only time I can go to the vehicle licensing office in Gombe is on a Saturday, as we don’t finish school until 2 p.m. and everything in Gombe including the vehicle licensing office shuts by 3.30 to 4.00. But although the ,censing department is supposed to be open on Saturdays, I’ve been there three times so far and there’s never anyone there to issue licenses. I rather gather than most of my fellow VSOs give up trying to get one in the end and just drive without a licence.
Mr Olorunmonu diappeared in the middle of last week bound for Kano, apparently to have something done either to his spectacles or his eyes, and hasn’t been seen since – nor has the school van which is used to p[ick up tyeachers from the junction with the main road and take them the two miles down the road to the school.
The Sunday School I’m now involved with seems to be going well. About half the boys and girls at the school are nominally Christian and most of these come to the Sunday School which takes place every Sunday morning. From next week Mrs and Mrs Cox from Billiri, who usually run it, are going away to Jos and so I’ll be left holding the fort. Theer is another Sunday school teacher from the teachers’ College whose name is John, who has been coming along each week and taking the 3rd form ( which I take for RK during the week. Mrs Cox was teaching Form 1 and Mr Cox Form 4 , and previously I had been teaching Form 2. But now we will have only 3 of us, John, a third year boy who is a student at the Teachers’ College, also called John, and possibly a pastor who is supposed to start this week teaching RK at the school. This may mean re-shuffling the teachers. I’d also like to reorganise the Sunday School a bit, and have a time at the beginning with everyone together, rather than teaching them in separate groups the whole time. But I’m not sure whether this is a good plan or not, so pray for wisdom! Also the Cox’s had a benefactor in the US who used to send a year’s supply of leaflets to give out each week to the students, but the supply ran out last week. Apparently the anonymous donor was a supporter of some previous missionaries who have now moved and nobody knows their address to write and ask for more. The students however really enjoyed reading the leaflets and answering the questions and have been clamouring for more. Maybe you could ask around if to see if anyone would be interested in sponsoring Adventurers leaflets for Forms 1 and 2 and Pilot leaflets for the upper classes? No word yet from the British Council about the oan they are supposed to be giving to buy a motorbike. The sun’s hot and my arches are falling from too much walking around the village.
GSS Kaltungo March 13th
Quite a lot has happened since I last wrote. Last weekend I went off to Jos, 250 miles away, to buy my motorbike – a Honda 175cc, quite powerful and heavy. It cost £295 and I can’t leave till I’ve paid off the debt! The British Council gave me a loan of £245 and I managed to get a 10% discount, but then I had to pay £30 for tax and insurance. Its already overdue for its first service – at 200 miles – but just the ride back to Kaltungo from Jos was 250 miles! I’ve change the oil and done all the adjustments I could myself, but didn’t manage to check the tappets as the inspection cover is stuck on with a Phillips screw which refused to budge. So I plan to take it to a mechanic in Gombe tomorrow to get that checked. Only 250 more miles to go and I’ll have run it in.
Whilst in Jos I went to see an Indian film at the local open air cinema. Cinemas in northern Nigeria seem to show only Indian films and spaghetti westerns. The film itself was awful, but the experience was fascinating as the audience chattered none-stop at the tops of their voices throughout and more fights appeared to break out in the audience than appeared on the screen. Most of the audience was down below but you could pay extra to sit upstairs on a small balcony. On either side of the screen were the toilets which had no doors but that didn’t seem to deter people from using them. I managed to avoid the experience as I didn’t fancy peeing in full view of the entire audience! The following night eight other volunteers and I gate-crashed somebody’s party (only one had actually been invited) but by the time we arrived no-one seemed to care. All the big wigs from Jos society were there – the manager of Leventis where I had bought my motorbike, the manager of Holts, who I’d bumped into that morning while enquiring about boats down the Benue - they used to run a steamer service but apparently they’ve sold it recently, and the Deputy Minister for Education in North East State. He seemed to know all about me – he’d been studying the file on the school – although I’d never heard of him! On the Sunday night I stopped over in Bauchi, half way between Jos and Gombe as I was hoping to get the bike registered there on the Monday morning. When I tried to register it in Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State where I’d bought it, they were refusing to register anything, as they’d reached BP9999 and were still awaiting instructions from Lagos on which number ought to come next. In Bauchi they happily agreed to take the money and register it, but they had run out of registration books!
Back in Kaltungo the week’s work passed fairly quickly, though I had a great stack of books to mark as I’d left them plenty to be getting on with whilst I was in Jos. It’s not easy marking books by the light of a Tilly lamp – a pressurised lamp which runs on kerosene and has a very fragile element which gives out a lots more light than the light of an ordinary bush lamp but also gives out a lot of heat too! I had supper on Wednesday with some of the Nigerians in the town, a teacher named Alhasan, his brother and girlfriend and a girl named Beatrice who teaches at the school and seems to be very nice.
I seem to have got myself landed with helping to run the Boys Brigade, so I’m studying their drill book in my spare time. Next Saturday we are planning to take the Current Affairs and Geography societies on a combined trip to visit a mechanised farm near Biu where they grow tomatoes commercially, a waterfall and lake where you can swim, a cotton ginnery and then a historical site near Billiri on the way back.
This morning I went with Mallam Gideon, one of the Teacher’s College teachers and his wife to a remote church in the bush where a pastor was being ordained. About 700 people had turned up from 20 or so miles around and the tiny village church was packed to capacity. To get there you had to go down very precarious forest tracks which were extremely sandy in places – rather terrifying when you’re still a novice motorbike rider. After the service was over we went to Mallam;s Gideons’s friend’s house for a meal of millet soup, guinea corn porridge and bananas. We had just about reached saturation point when word arrived that we had been invited to go and eat at the Chief’s house, so we had to make room for a second meal of liver and rice, doused in sauce of groundnut oil tomatoes and hot peppers. Every time I eat Nigerian style I have visions of succumbing to some dire disease, as they don’t usually boil the drinking water or wash the pots, but so far I seem to have survived.
Dan Crawford in Thinking Black describes how “one cook I knew, having run out of wash-up-water for his dishes, calmly sent in to his master two courses, all the plates of which had been washed (dare I write it?) with his own African saliva.”
Yesterday I went to Yola with most of the teachers in the school van to spend the remainder of this year’s allocation for the school library. They are allowed about seven shillings per pupil per year for library books but until this year it hadn't been used, so was lost altogether. If you don'’ spend the budget before the end of the financial year on 31st March then it’s too late! One the way back I bought enough freshly caught fish to completely fill the freezer compartment of my kerosene fridge, just as they were being unloaded at the edge of the river by the ferry, for a mere 5 shillings.
The book you sent on the Soviet Educational system arrived safely, but now its looks as if I’ll be on holiday in Ghana during the Easter holidays when I was supposed to be doing the talk. I’m hoping to go to Yankari Game Reserve with another teacher from Yola who has a Suzuki 100 motorbike around 1st April, when they change from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right, keeping a low profile until the chaos which everyone is predicting this will cause has subsided. Then we plan to drive on down to the eastern Region to Calabar on the Cross River, then via the Niger Delta and Port Harcourt to Lagos, before visiting Benin, Togo and Ghana. That’s probably as far as we’ll get in a month! The National Geographic magazines you sent arrived safely – please send the drums of books to Port Harcourt and tell them to inform us when they arrive – and make sure they are insured for their full value, as they’re quite likely to go missing.
GSS Kaltungo March 23rd 1972
Thanks for the birthday card, which arrived safely along with a letter saying you were sending it! Most mail seems to arrive eventually, though there was one letter I sent to KR about a week after arriving here which had been “returned to sender” and took 3 months to arrive back. I thought it was a pity to waste it altogether, as I’d spent time and thought composing it, so re-addressed it correctly and sent it off again! Thanks for all your efforts to send books and magazines for the library. The students really seem to appreciate having a library and are making excellent use of it, though no doubt sooner or later the novelty value will wear off!
Life is rather hectic here at present as the school breaks up next Thursday. I’ve been landed with the task of supervising the 11+ examination on Saturday in Billiri, with 11 invigilators to watch and around 400 candidates sitting the exam. There seems to be quite a lot involved, including briefing invigilators who may never have seen a computer answer sheet before.
Not a lot out of the ordinary happened in the past week. On Tuesday I went to Tula for the first time with Beatrice, one of the teachers from the school. This is a delightfully picturesque village perched on the edge of a mountain about 20 miles from Kaltungo. We got quite carried away in the gardens there and came back loaded with enough paw paws, grapefuit, lemons, lettuce, beans and cucumbers to last at least a month!
I keep mentally threatening to sack Benjamin, the cook because he is so incompetent, but actually it would be quite difficult to manage without him. The other day he threw out all my Paludrin anti-malaria tablets because he wanted the empty tin to keep his ludo counters in. Yesterday I arrived back at the house from school to find flood of water pouring out from under the front door. When he’d gone home the water had been off and he’d inadvertently left the bathroom tap turned on, so when the water came back on it flooded the entire building with six inches of water!
Last Saturday, along with another teacher, I took 40 boys on a school trip to Dadin Kowa and Kuraya Terra (near Biu) to visit a tomato canning factory and irrigated farm. Then we went on to a charming waterfall at Kuraya Terra. The water drops around 100 feet and at the bottom there’s a huge pool, about 100 yards across which because the water is fast flowing is ok for swimming in, and free of bilharzia and other nasty tropical diseases which you can catch if you swim in slow moving or stagnant water. On the way back we were just about to run out of petrol when we reached Gombe. The lorry driver decided his truck needed the attention of a mechanic, but forgot to tell him the tank was almost empty, so the mechanic drove off towards his garage then ran out of petrol about a mile down the road and had to send someone off with a jerry can to fill the tank. As a result the boys got the night out on the town in Gombe which they had been clamouring for, and we didn’t arrive back at the school till nearly midnight.
At the school they are building a new reservoir. Things are pretty desperate at present – the sole well is totally inadequate for 300 boarders and the students have to go and dig in the muddy stream bed and scoop up what little water they can collect with cups and buckets. For 300 students that’s no joke! Not surprisingly about 50% of the students have bilharzia and various other tummy problems because of the bad water. It seems rather doubtful whether even this new reservoir will provide sufficient water to meet the needs of the whole school and the servants etc as well. Fortunately in the Teachers College where I am living such problems don’t arise.
They’ve now officially made me the patron of the Boys Brigade. The boy in charge, James Kano, is in my form and is a very capable leader with his heart in the right place. At the moment they have no uniforms and very little in the way of equipment. But it’s amazing what they can do to play a marching tune with a single drum and assorted desk lids, tins, bottles and chairs. I recorded their efforts and will send a cassette. My portable tape recorder is regarded in the village as magic – most of the villagers have never seen a tape recorder or heard their own voices before, and it really freaked them out the other day when I recorded a group of village children dancing a planting dance then played it back to them.
GSS Kaltungo 28th March
I’ve just about survived my first term here, but this last week has been more hectic than most! Half way through last week I had a visit from the local Inspector of Education. After humming and harring a bit - no-one here ever gets to the point straight away, that would be seen as extremely impolite – he final revealed he would like me to supervise the “National Common Entrance Exam” – equivalent to the 11+ exam in the UK, along with one of the other teachers from the school. We were assigned to Billiri, about ten miles away, and it was an interesting if exhausting experience. The problems began on the day before the exam, when we were supposed to visit the school to make sure everything was in place , as well as meeting and briefing the invigilators. Our school turned out to be expecting 416 candidates from 10 other primary schools within a 10 mile radius, but could only muster 170 desks and chairs – and some of those were the three at a desk type you see in illustrations for Dickensian novels! We ransacked the two other nearest primary schools about three miles away and gotr the pupils to carry their desks and chairs on their heads to the exam centre, but we were still 50 chairs and desks short. As the nearest other school was six od seven miles away, we had to borrow pews from the church, which we were using anyway as a venue as the school had only 8 classrooms, and make the pupils sit on one pew and write on another. So much for the instructions from Lagos that pupils had to be seated in individuals desks at least five feet apart! Further problems arose when half of the invigilators failed to turn up for the briefing on how to conduct the exam – but these were resolved when we finally got tired of waiting for them and adjourned to the bar for a beer, only to find that they had been there all day and by that time we arrived were totally incapable of understanding the instructions anyway!
During the actual exam itself, we had to evict two candidates who were pretending to be somebody else. The rightful candidates had had their admission tickets confiscated by their headmaster for not paying their school fees on time , and he turned up and identified two other pupils, who had no doubt greased his palm well, as being the students named on the entrance tickets. The exam was just about to start when the two genuine candidates turned up, also claiming to be the same people. A prolonged investigation followed and finally the two offenders were forcibly ejected, much to the disgust of their headmaster!
During the actual exam I caught one of the invigilators in the act as he was showing one of the candidates which boxes to shade, so I dismissed the invigilator and reported the candidate had been helped with the answers. When I told them the following week in the Education Office that I’d caught one of the invigilators cheating they just told me, “Oh, that one, yes he was caught cheating last year as well!”
Talking of impersonating people, a girl was discovered to have been living at the school and attending lessons – actually it turns out she was one of the brightest students – although she hadn’t passed the entrance exam or been interviewed for a place. On the day the girls came to the school at the beginning of the term she got a list of all the things they were supposed to bring from another girl, and just joined the crowd. Nobody realised she wasn’t supposed to be at the school until last week, when the Vice Principal wanted wanted to know who had been present at the interviews for new admissions, for the school records, and when she was asked she couldn’t answer. Then the truth eventually came out!
I’ve been making plenty of use of my new Honda 175 motorbike during the past few weeks and have now run it in and don over 1000 miles. Next weekend Nigeria switches over from driving on the left to driving on the right and they are predicting it will be absolute carnage on the roads. We had a dry run in Kaltungo village last Friday and hours after the practice was supposed to be over most of the villagers still hadn’t go back to driving on the left!
We break up for the Easter holidays the day after tomorrow – so the school is now well into the end of term spirit. Most of the teachers, including the Principal, have already disappeared. I took the morning off today to climb to the top of Tangale peak, an incredible shaped volcanic plug which looks a bit like the Sugar Loaf mountain in Rio de Janeiro, or the nosecone of an Apollo spaceship. I reckoned I deserved the day off after conducting the end of term book check virtually single-handedly after the teacher assigned to do it had gone off on a grand tour of the north in search of a competent doctor for his wife who’d developed complications after having a baby.
Chapter 3 Getting Going
GSSK Kaltungo
21 January 1972
Officially the school has now been in session for a week, but there’s still no sign of normal lessons resuming. Half the students were sent home to collect their school fees and most haven’t arrived back yet. It’s certainly less stressful than teaching in an inner London comprehensive would be! This morning there was a staff meeting which was quite hilarious at times – it consisted mostly of a verbal battle between the Principal and one of the teachers who the previous year had been in charge of student health and welfare and kept casting all kinds of aspersions on the character of the Principal, because he kept the school bus for his own private use and wouldn’t allow it to be used to ferry sick boys to the hospital.
I got my final version of the timetable yesterday and found I will be teaching 20 periods of English and 4 periods of Christian Religious Knowledge each week, divided between 2 classes (3A and 3B) which means I only have to prepare half the number of lessons. I also find myself appointed as Librarian in charge of the as-yet-non-existent library. This is a former classroom with a sign on the door saying library, with 6 tables, 30 chairs (some broken) and 3 bookshelves, plus about 60 books we bought when we went last week to Jos to get me a fridge and a cooker, a few tattered textbooks they already had, and the 50 simplified readers for the lower classes which were given me by the British Council before I left Kano. It would be good if you could contact my old school and send out a crate of second-hand books covering a wide range of subjects, fiction, science, space, transport, biology, hobbies like photography and music as well as reference books like dictionaries and encyclopaedias. They have to be not too advanced, so the students can understand them, but not so simple or childish that they think they are beneath them. The Principal in an unguarded moment said he would pay the freight costs, but as he may change his mind when it comes to the crunch, could you find the cheapest possible way to send them?
I also find myself running the “Current Affairs Society”, but don’t really have much idea of what to do, especially as after only a couple of weeks I’m starting to feel rather isolated from what is going on in the big wide wonderful world outside Kaltungo!. Posters for the library walls and any materials which might be useful for Current Affairs would also come in very handy. Also I am helping with track events in athletics – which as you know, I’m rather clueless about myself! A book on coaching athletics might give me some ideas, at least them I will be able to get the boys to do as I say, if not do as I do!
Please pray for the Religious Knowledge lessons – in my experience it was always very difficult for even committed Christians to teach this subject well. Things are quite complex here as some of the boys are Christians, others Moslems and others nail their colours firmly to the fence. Also pray for the other lessons and activities that I may glorify God in them by doing them competently and efficiently. There is a Christian Society at the school, run by the English Master, Mr Wakiti, and an Indian who teaches Chemistry, Mr Alexander. The Principal, according to Mr Alexander, was at one time a pastor but lost interest and is now on his thirteenth wife and has numerous children. One of the other staff members, Mallam Kura is a Moslem but seems to be quite liberal-minded. He was the one deputed to buy the books for the library from the SIM bookshop in Jos and he bought several titles which I would never have thought of getting for a school library, including “Peace with God” by Billy Graham.
There are four Higher School Certificate Students who have just arrived and will stay till September , waiting for the results of the equivalent of A levels. They seem to be a friendly bunch but relations with them are threatened with being impaired, because there was another group of HSC students last year who got under the Principal’s skin and didn’t work very hard, so he won’t lift a finger to help this year’s students to settle in. I, on the other hand, now have a nice house with a cooker, fridge, coffee table and chairs supplied by the school so the difference in the way we are treated could be quite divisive, as they have been left to fend completely for themselves.
I’ve acquired a boy named Benjamin to help in the house with cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing clothes. He doesn’t know how to do anything at the moment but appears to be willing to learn. In some ways the idea of a personal cook is vaguely repugnant, as he gets paid the equivalent of about £2 per week, but you can’t pay more than that or other employers of cooks and dishwashers would get upset at someone paying over the odds. It rather smacks of slave labour – especially as the way I got him was to go with one of the other teachers to the neighbouring village of Billiri where the negotiations over the future of the boy were conducted with the village headman sitting under a tree outside his compound, whilst Benjamin just sat there in silence awaiting his fate. He looks about 12 but turns out to be 16 and finished primary school a year ago. Since then he has been helping his father on the farm , but otherwise not really doing anything much. This is a serious problem in Nigeria – you can educate people but when they finish school there are no jobs for them to do except farming, and the school curriculum is very academic and completely unrelated to anything that happens on a farm. What seems to be really needed is training in better techniques of subsistence farming, how to cultivate cash crops for sale, and so on, rather than Physics and Chemistry. We have a Science lab but it has no gas or water and half the chemicals which were ordered from a company which has a monopoly on educational supplies have failed to arrive.
At present there are only six classrooms at the school, and two more temporary ones are about to be erected. However, the contractor who won the bid tendered to do it for the equivalent of £80, but now the villagers he wants to employ - and there’s no-one else – want £100 for the 18 trips needed to the river to fetch mud for the walls, so the contractor has no hope of making a profit and seems to be dragging his heels about starting the work. The classrooms will have mud walls 3 feet high, and a tin roof on poles. They should survive several rainy seasons until the Ministry of Works gets round to erecting more permanent classrooms sometime in the future. But with Kaltungu being so far from Maiduguri, the state capital, these things take time….
A generator to supply the school with electricity at night has now been on order for four years. It has apparently reached Gombe, but no-one knows if or when electricians will turn up from the Ministry of Works to install wiring and so allow the generator to be used.
I’ve just heard that lessons will start on Monday morning, so I suppose I’d better prepare something over the weekend!.
GSS Kaltungo
5th February.
Lessons have now started in earnest. I was eating a particularly tough piece of meat the other day when a filling dropped out, in spite of the dentist’s assurances before I left Engiand that everything was in shape and would last for at least a year! When I asked about a dentist here they said there was one in Jos, about 250 miles away, or one in Yola but nobody knew whether the one in Yola was any good. So I decided to try the one in Yola as this is nearer. It was a pretty excruciating experience as the drill was operated by a treadle like you see on Victorian sewing machines and it took about 20 minutes to drill the hole. While in Yola I met a Russian doctor named Igor, the only Russian in NE State. He hadn’t spoken Russian to anyone for the previous six months, ever since his wife went back to Russia with kidney trouble the previous summer – in fact he hadn’t spoken Russian for so long that when I greeted him in Russian he instinctively replied in English!
Yesterday the HSC students invited me round to the compound of the school storekeeper after lessons to play “bridge”. It tuned out that Bridge Nigerian–style bears absolutely no relation to what we call Bridge – it was more like a cross between Snap and Whist – but nevertheless a good time was had by all. I somewhat rashly promised I’d teach them to play Bridge English-style sometime.
There are great ructions in the staff room at the moment. One of the teachers, Mallam Salehu has an ongoing running battle with the Principal and yesterday it nearly came to blows when he demanded the use of the school van, but the driver, under orders from the Principal, refused to give him the key. They had a verbal set-to outside one of the classrooms with half the school looking on and the Principal then suspended Mallam Salehu from teaching. As a result, today Mallam Salehu went off to Gombe to prepare his defence, and the Principal sent one of the other teachers of to the Ministry in Maiduguru (in the school van) to put his side of the story.
I’ve just arrived back from a trip to the Market with my “cook”. As there’s only a proper market once a week, on Fridays, you have to stock up with enough food to last for seven days. By the time I get there in mid afternoon when lessons are over there’s not a great deal left to buy! We got the last papaya for the princely sum of 1/6d. Although if probably costs me twice as much than it would if I just sent the cook, it’s the main social event of the week and so worth paying the extra just for the experience!
I still haven’t been paid yet, although this seems to be normal – some of the teachers haven’t been paid for three or four months. When I first arrived the British Council gave me an advance of £30 but that soon went on buying bedding and household items. Since then I’ve been living on money I borrowed from a volunteer in Gombe. Whilst in Yola I heard of a VSO Forestry Officer working on the Mambila Plateau who had given the chap I was staying with a letter to post to the British Council in Kano wanting to know why he hadn’t been paid since last October! It seems they get you out here then they tend to leave you to your own devices!
I doesn’t seem to be particularly taxing teaching 24 periods a week, although it takes me about as long to prepare 4 periods of RE as it does all the rest of the lessons as there’s no set textbook to follow. The post here seems to be pretty erratic. Apparently the previous postmaster in the village was locked up for opening parcels and swiping the contents.
GSS Kaltungo
12 February 1972
Another week gone by and no letters at all from home this week! I discovered looking in my diary that the day after tomorrow is Pancake Tuesday so had a trial run making some pancakes, which turned out reasonably edible. I decided I’d invite some Nigerian colleagues and friends to a pancake party. The only snag is I’m not exactly sure what you’re supposed to put in them as I was using a recipe for griddle cakes, bur decided these were not the same as pancakes, so left half the ingredients out. Now I can’t remember what I left out and what I put in to make a passable pancake!
I’ve just recovered from a brief attack of what I can only assume was malaria, although I have been taking my Paludrin tablets every day and even ticking them off on the wall-calendar to make sure I don’t miss any. I had a very high temperature on Wednesday morning but went to school as I thought it was probably just something I’d eaten which had disagreed with me. In the afternoon I dragged myself off to the hospital where the Egyptian doctor sounded my chest then prescribed aspirin and an injection of nivaquine. It seemed to do the trick as the next day my temperature returned to normal, though I still felt a bit weak at the knees and took the day off school. Apparently you can still get suppressed malaria, even in spite of taking the Paludrin, though the effects are less severe than they would be if you weren’t taking any prophylactics at all.
I’ve just been having a prolonged non-conversation at the front door with a Fulani milk-seller who is supposed to bring fresh milk every day, but had turned up empty-handed. I think she was probably trying to tell me that the cows had failed to produce any milk today. Let’s see if any turns up tomorrow!
The Fulani are a nomadic tribe who are found all across West Africa inland from the coast. Like the Masai in Kenya and the Batswana in Botswana, their culture revolves around cattle and they follow the herds to where the best pasture is to be found. The geographic boundaries tend to go be from north to south in West Africa, as the colonial powers who carved up the continent between them in the late 19th century moved inland from the coast, whilst the cultural and linguistic patterns and similarities tend to go in a belt running from west to east. So you get Fulanis all across West Africa, though they are know by slightly different names – Fullahs in Sierra Leone and Fula in Guinea and Senegal further to the west.
This morning, a Sunday, I went along with the Cox’s – the missionaries from Billiri – to take the Sunday School over at the school. There are usually two Nigerian teachers who help with this but both had fallen sick.
Yesterday I went to Gombe, the local town 45 miles away with the school bus and did some shopping, buying some carrots, pineapples, limes and envelopes (which they don’t appear to sell in Kaltungo) then had lunch with Carol, an English girl who is teaching at the secondary school in Gombe on a three-year contract with the State Government. She’s been here two years already and seems to be getting tired of life in Nigeria – she was talking about possibly breaking her contract and going back to England in September. She had taught for several years in England before coming here and I rather think she is missing some of the home comforts of civilisation. This afternoon I had planned an expedition up Kaltungo Hill with a couple of the student teachers. Unfortunately the major object of the exercise was to look at the view, but although yesterday was a beautiful clear day and you could see for miles, this morning you can’t even see the hill from here, its so dusty because of the Harmattan. This is a dry fog-like haze made up of tiny particles of sand which blows from the Sahara desert at certain times of the year, and makes your nose dry up and your lips crack.
I hear there are coal and electricity strikes in the UK. Here the temperature in the staff room the other day was 90F, in spite of the blinds on the windows to keep out the sun and heat!
GSSK February 16th
This letter comes to you as a kind of mid-week extra. There isn’t any news to speak of, but I do have an urgent cry for help. A tiny screw fell out of the frame of my glasses and I couldn’t find where it is had disappeared to. I’ve managed to effect a temporary repair using some Elastoplast, but its beginning to wear a hole in my nose, so could you go and see Stanley Holmes, the opticians where I got my new glasses and see if they can rush the the requisite screw. It’s the one holding the left-hand nose-piece in position. Unfortunately is so tiny that it could have dropped out anywhere, but I was lucky that the nosepiece itself slots into a tiny slot through which the screw passes sideways, so I didn’t lose that as well!.
Apparently there is an eye hospital in Kano, but that’s 500 miles away and its unlikely the Principal would let me take a week off school to go there just on the off-chance they might have the right kind of screw to fit this kind of spectacle frame – so don’t let the opticians convince you that they would – anyway it shouldn’t have dropped out after only two months!
Very little has happened out of the ordinary since I last wrote. We finally got the library set up and open to the students and began issuing books for the first time yesterday. But if all 600 students come and borrow a book each there’ll be absolutely nothing left on the shelves! The dispute over the use of the school vehicle which culminated in Mallam Salehu assaulting the school driver then driving off in the van led to the arrival of an investigating team from Maiduguri, the state capital, yesterday. They spent the morning interviewing different members of staff about each other. They seem to have a pretty shrew idea, judging by the questions they asked, about the root causes of the dispute. They grilled me and the two Indian teachers separately – presumably because we were foreigners. There was also a certain amount of aggro this morning when it was discovered that some of the more senior boys had beaten up one of the junior boys, ostensibly for telling one of the teachers that they were planning a raid on the girls’ dormitories, although in fact the boy claimed he hadn’t told anybody anything! I’m not sure what the final outcome was, as I was swept into the library by a horde of first years who needed a master to take charge of their “library period”.
Yesterday I had a long chat with Mallam Gideon, the History teacher at the Teacher Training College, who was born in a tiny village called Tal which is just seven or eight miles south of Kaltungo. He is a mine of information on local history and culture and has promised to take me to Tal to see the original arrows and shields which were used against the British. Apparently the British had a great deal of trouble “pacifying” this area, mostly because the different branches of the Tangale tribe couldn’t stand each other and were constantly at war. Villagers from the next village to Tal turned up at the District Officer’s with a spear they had stolen from a Tal villager, and claimed it had been used to kill one of their own tribe. So, without investigating any further, the District Officer, a Mr Carlyle, ordered the entire village to be set on fire. Tal was burned to the ground twice, Tula, Kaltungo and Billiri once. Most of the educated local people are highly critical of the early missionaries who had such an effective hold on this area that they completely obliterated all traces of the local culture. So local dancing and drumming just don’t exist in Tangale -Waja any longer, at least not in their traditional forms. You do however still find the occasional rock at the junction of two paths, where a chicken has been sacrificed to placate the evil spirits. Some of the teachers who had planned to go for a climb up a nearby hill the other Sunday afternoon didn’t actually go, ostensibly because the harmattan was so thick they wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but one of then added that it was a local tradition that you don’t go to the hills when the harmattan is at its height!
Rev Hall records a description of the Chameleon Dance given to him by a Tangale informant:
This is a woman’s dance. The time when it is performed is when the first wet season moon comes out. It is commenced then, and goes on until the moon is one the wane. If rain has not fallen, the dance goes right on: from sunset on (for an hour or two). Even after rain has come and the seed is planted in the bush farms, the dancing may continue in the town; for the ground in the town is not planted until many days after that in the bush. The performance is every seven years.
The performers are girls. They are given their cue by the leading men, who point out the place where the dance has always been performed, a certain open space in the village. At sunset some girls, three or four, go to the place. They take their stand at it and commence to clap their hands and sing.
At first the dancers perform in a series of pairs. All is very serious. Laughing will disqualify a performer at this point… In the performance of a given pair you have sustained and repeated groaning, their faces being tightened and their eyes made to bulge. One advances to her neighbour with the forefinger of her right hand uplifted and her body swaying. With this her neighbour assumes a bent posture and moves to meet her. They meet. They straighten and stand bracingly erect, forefingers up, eyes bulging and groans continuing. They commence to sway again, move forward to touch, knock each other with their shoulders, draw back quickly, crouch once again, and in retreat, rise once more with a bound and move forward to meet and repeat the series of movements already described. Then the dancers form a circle with joined hands and go round and round, slowly, the knees slackening and tightening in keeping time with the song. The song goes:
It swings first to one side then to another
It becomes erect and massive
It darts forward swiftly –
The kobo (penis) of the man of Bu
Koland, Kolang, Layildikirik
[ Kolang was a western Tangale man who killed many men with arrows. Layildikirik was an Eatern Tangale man who could beat a drum all the way from Ture to Shongwom (eight miles) without tiring.]
Then a singer starts the “stepping over” dance. A child is placed in the centre. She crouches on the ground, making her head bob gently up and down. The dancers are still in the form of a moving ring. The singers sing:
Jumble, jumble, jumble;
In the midst of the trees, jumble
The ting has found her, jumble.
The thing has found her, jumble;
Death comes, jumble,
Jumble, jumble, jumble;
Out and in among the granaries, jumble;
Death comes, jumble.
Each performer, as she reaches a certain spot in the ring, still going round, raises one leg swiftly and passes it over the bobbing head of the child in the ring. If her leg clears the child’s head, there is no interruption. Next moment her neighbouyrs leg is passing over. It happens to touch the head of the child who cries out, “Her leg touched my head!” Al;l stop. One takes the girl into the ring who did not clear the child’s head, and addressing her, says, “Tell us the name of your sweetheart!” She names one of her young men suitors. He questioner calls out, “Ahah, So-and-so”, repeating the name. Then all with laughter, playful ridicule and shouts proclaim the lucky fellow’s name. And the dance resumes, one after another becoming the butt.
After some time, the crowd and performers scatter and go home, crying, “Night has come. We must disperse. Let us meet tomorrow”.
Hall J S Ibid pp 187-190
When they found out I had a degree in Russian, they asked me to give a lecture comparing the Soviet and British systems of education to a conference of headmasters taking place in April. I know all about the British system, but if you can find a cheap, light, paperback about the Soviet educational system, please send it post-haste.
P.S. Five of the students got publicly flogged today during the morning assembly for whipping another student, but three others refuse point-blank to be flogged, so it remains to be seen what will happen to them.
21 January 1972
Officially the school has now been in session for a week, but there’s still no sign of normal lessons resuming. Half the students were sent home to collect their school fees and most haven’t arrived back yet. It’s certainly less stressful than teaching in an inner London comprehensive would be! This morning there was a staff meeting which was quite hilarious at times – it consisted mostly of a verbal battle between the Principal and one of the teachers who the previous year had been in charge of student health and welfare and kept casting all kinds of aspersions on the character of the Principal, because he kept the school bus for his own private use and wouldn’t allow it to be used to ferry sick boys to the hospital.
I got my final version of the timetable yesterday and found I will be teaching 20 periods of English and 4 periods of Christian Religious Knowledge each week, divided between 2 classes (3A and 3B) which means I only have to prepare half the number of lessons. I also find myself appointed as Librarian in charge of the as-yet-non-existent library. This is a former classroom with a sign on the door saying library, with 6 tables, 30 chairs (some broken) and 3 bookshelves, plus about 60 books we bought when we went last week to Jos to get me a fridge and a cooker, a few tattered textbooks they already had, and the 50 simplified readers for the lower classes which were given me by the British Council before I left Kano. It would be good if you could contact my old school and send out a crate of second-hand books covering a wide range of subjects, fiction, science, space, transport, biology, hobbies like photography and music as well as reference books like dictionaries and encyclopaedias. They have to be not too advanced, so the students can understand them, but not so simple or childish that they think they are beneath them. The Principal in an unguarded moment said he would pay the freight costs, but as he may change his mind when it comes to the crunch, could you find the cheapest possible way to send them?
I also find myself running the “Current Affairs Society”, but don’t really have much idea of what to do, especially as after only a couple of weeks I’m starting to feel rather isolated from what is going on in the big wide wonderful world outside Kaltungo!. Posters for the library walls and any materials which might be useful for Current Affairs would also come in very handy. Also I am helping with track events in athletics – which as you know, I’m rather clueless about myself! A book on coaching athletics might give me some ideas, at least them I will be able to get the boys to do as I say, if not do as I do!
Please pray for the Religious Knowledge lessons – in my experience it was always very difficult for even committed Christians to teach this subject well. Things are quite complex here as some of the boys are Christians, others Moslems and others nail their colours firmly to the fence. Also pray for the other lessons and activities that I may glorify God in them by doing them competently and efficiently. There is a Christian Society at the school, run by the English Master, Mr Wakiti, and an Indian who teaches Chemistry, Mr Alexander. The Principal, according to Mr Alexander, was at one time a pastor but lost interest and is now on his thirteenth wife and has numerous children. One of the other staff members, Mallam Kura is a Moslem but seems to be quite liberal-minded. He was the one deputed to buy the books for the library from the SIM bookshop in Jos and he bought several titles which I would never have thought of getting for a school library, including “Peace with God” by Billy Graham.
There are four Higher School Certificate Students who have just arrived and will stay till September , waiting for the results of the equivalent of A levels. They seem to be a friendly bunch but relations with them are threatened with being impaired, because there was another group of HSC students last year who got under the Principal’s skin and didn’t work very hard, so he won’t lift a finger to help this year’s students to settle in. I, on the other hand, now have a nice house with a cooker, fridge, coffee table and chairs supplied by the school so the difference in the way we are treated could be quite divisive, as they have been left to fend completely for themselves.
I’ve acquired a boy named Benjamin to help in the house with cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing clothes. He doesn’t know how to do anything at the moment but appears to be willing to learn. In some ways the idea of a personal cook is vaguely repugnant, as he gets paid the equivalent of about £2 per week, but you can’t pay more than that or other employers of cooks and dishwashers would get upset at someone paying over the odds. It rather smacks of slave labour – especially as the way I got him was to go with one of the other teachers to the neighbouring village of Billiri where the negotiations over the future of the boy were conducted with the village headman sitting under a tree outside his compound, whilst Benjamin just sat there in silence awaiting his fate. He looks about 12 but turns out to be 16 and finished primary school a year ago. Since then he has been helping his father on the farm , but otherwise not really doing anything much. This is a serious problem in Nigeria – you can educate people but when they finish school there are no jobs for them to do except farming, and the school curriculum is very academic and completely unrelated to anything that happens on a farm. What seems to be really needed is training in better techniques of subsistence farming, how to cultivate cash crops for sale, and so on, rather than Physics and Chemistry. We have a Science lab but it has no gas or water and half the chemicals which were ordered from a company which has a monopoly on educational supplies have failed to arrive.
At present there are only six classrooms at the school, and two more temporary ones are about to be erected. However, the contractor who won the bid tendered to do it for the equivalent of £80, but now the villagers he wants to employ - and there’s no-one else – want £100 for the 18 trips needed to the river to fetch mud for the walls, so the contractor has no hope of making a profit and seems to be dragging his heels about starting the work. The classrooms will have mud walls 3 feet high, and a tin roof on poles. They should survive several rainy seasons until the Ministry of Works gets round to erecting more permanent classrooms sometime in the future. But with Kaltungu being so far from Maiduguri, the state capital, these things take time….
A generator to supply the school with electricity at night has now been on order for four years. It has apparently reached Gombe, but no-one knows if or when electricians will turn up from the Ministry of Works to install wiring and so allow the generator to be used.
I’ve just heard that lessons will start on Monday morning, so I suppose I’d better prepare something over the weekend!.
GSS Kaltungo
5th February.
Lessons have now started in earnest. I was eating a particularly tough piece of meat the other day when a filling dropped out, in spite of the dentist’s assurances before I left Engiand that everything was in shape and would last for at least a year! When I asked about a dentist here they said there was one in Jos, about 250 miles away, or one in Yola but nobody knew whether the one in Yola was any good. So I decided to try the one in Yola as this is nearer. It was a pretty excruciating experience as the drill was operated by a treadle like you see on Victorian sewing machines and it took about 20 minutes to drill the hole. While in Yola I met a Russian doctor named Igor, the only Russian in NE State. He hadn’t spoken Russian to anyone for the previous six months, ever since his wife went back to Russia with kidney trouble the previous summer – in fact he hadn’t spoken Russian for so long that when I greeted him in Russian he instinctively replied in English!
Yesterday the HSC students invited me round to the compound of the school storekeeper after lessons to play “bridge”. It tuned out that Bridge Nigerian–style bears absolutely no relation to what we call Bridge – it was more like a cross between Snap and Whist – but nevertheless a good time was had by all. I somewhat rashly promised I’d teach them to play Bridge English-style sometime.
There are great ructions in the staff room at the moment. One of the teachers, Mallam Salehu has an ongoing running battle with the Principal and yesterday it nearly came to blows when he demanded the use of the school van, but the driver, under orders from the Principal, refused to give him the key. They had a verbal set-to outside one of the classrooms with half the school looking on and the Principal then suspended Mallam Salehu from teaching. As a result, today Mallam Salehu went off to Gombe to prepare his defence, and the Principal sent one of the other teachers of to the Ministry in Maiduguru (in the school van) to put his side of the story.
I’ve just arrived back from a trip to the Market with my “cook”. As there’s only a proper market once a week, on Fridays, you have to stock up with enough food to last for seven days. By the time I get there in mid afternoon when lessons are over there’s not a great deal left to buy! We got the last papaya for the princely sum of 1/6d. Although if probably costs me twice as much than it would if I just sent the cook, it’s the main social event of the week and so worth paying the extra just for the experience!
I still haven’t been paid yet, although this seems to be normal – some of the teachers haven’t been paid for three or four months. When I first arrived the British Council gave me an advance of £30 but that soon went on buying bedding and household items. Since then I’ve been living on money I borrowed from a volunteer in Gombe. Whilst in Yola I heard of a VSO Forestry Officer working on the Mambila Plateau who had given the chap I was staying with a letter to post to the British Council in Kano wanting to know why he hadn’t been paid since last October! It seems they get you out here then they tend to leave you to your own devices!
I doesn’t seem to be particularly taxing teaching 24 periods a week, although it takes me about as long to prepare 4 periods of RE as it does all the rest of the lessons as there’s no set textbook to follow. The post here seems to be pretty erratic. Apparently the previous postmaster in the village was locked up for opening parcels and swiping the contents.
GSS Kaltungo
12 February 1972
Another week gone by and no letters at all from home this week! I discovered looking in my diary that the day after tomorrow is Pancake Tuesday so had a trial run making some pancakes, which turned out reasonably edible. I decided I’d invite some Nigerian colleagues and friends to a pancake party. The only snag is I’m not exactly sure what you’re supposed to put in them as I was using a recipe for griddle cakes, bur decided these were not the same as pancakes, so left half the ingredients out. Now I can’t remember what I left out and what I put in to make a passable pancake!
I’ve just recovered from a brief attack of what I can only assume was malaria, although I have been taking my Paludrin tablets every day and even ticking them off on the wall-calendar to make sure I don’t miss any. I had a very high temperature on Wednesday morning but went to school as I thought it was probably just something I’d eaten which had disagreed with me. In the afternoon I dragged myself off to the hospital where the Egyptian doctor sounded my chest then prescribed aspirin and an injection of nivaquine. It seemed to do the trick as the next day my temperature returned to normal, though I still felt a bit weak at the knees and took the day off school. Apparently you can still get suppressed malaria, even in spite of taking the Paludrin, though the effects are less severe than they would be if you weren’t taking any prophylactics at all.
I’ve just been having a prolonged non-conversation at the front door with a Fulani milk-seller who is supposed to bring fresh milk every day, but had turned up empty-handed. I think she was probably trying to tell me that the cows had failed to produce any milk today. Let’s see if any turns up tomorrow!
The Fulani are a nomadic tribe who are found all across West Africa inland from the coast. Like the Masai in Kenya and the Batswana in Botswana, their culture revolves around cattle and they follow the herds to where the best pasture is to be found. The geographic boundaries tend to go be from north to south in West Africa, as the colonial powers who carved up the continent between them in the late 19th century moved inland from the coast, whilst the cultural and linguistic patterns and similarities tend to go in a belt running from west to east. So you get Fulanis all across West Africa, though they are know by slightly different names – Fullahs in Sierra Leone and Fula in Guinea and Senegal further to the west.
This morning, a Sunday, I went along with the Cox’s – the missionaries from Billiri – to take the Sunday School over at the school. There are usually two Nigerian teachers who help with this but both had fallen sick.
Yesterday I went to Gombe, the local town 45 miles away with the school bus and did some shopping, buying some carrots, pineapples, limes and envelopes (which they don’t appear to sell in Kaltungo) then had lunch with Carol, an English girl who is teaching at the secondary school in Gombe on a three-year contract with the State Government. She’s been here two years already and seems to be getting tired of life in Nigeria – she was talking about possibly breaking her contract and going back to England in September. She had taught for several years in England before coming here and I rather think she is missing some of the home comforts of civilisation. This afternoon I had planned an expedition up Kaltungo Hill with a couple of the student teachers. Unfortunately the major object of the exercise was to look at the view, but although yesterday was a beautiful clear day and you could see for miles, this morning you can’t even see the hill from here, its so dusty because of the Harmattan. This is a dry fog-like haze made up of tiny particles of sand which blows from the Sahara desert at certain times of the year, and makes your nose dry up and your lips crack.
I hear there are coal and electricity strikes in the UK. Here the temperature in the staff room the other day was 90F, in spite of the blinds on the windows to keep out the sun and heat!
GSSK February 16th
This letter comes to you as a kind of mid-week extra. There isn’t any news to speak of, but I do have an urgent cry for help. A tiny screw fell out of the frame of my glasses and I couldn’t find where it is had disappeared to. I’ve managed to effect a temporary repair using some Elastoplast, but its beginning to wear a hole in my nose, so could you go and see Stanley Holmes, the opticians where I got my new glasses and see if they can rush the the requisite screw. It’s the one holding the left-hand nose-piece in position. Unfortunately is so tiny that it could have dropped out anywhere, but I was lucky that the nosepiece itself slots into a tiny slot through which the screw passes sideways, so I didn’t lose that as well!.
Apparently there is an eye hospital in Kano, but that’s 500 miles away and its unlikely the Principal would let me take a week off school to go there just on the off-chance they might have the right kind of screw to fit this kind of spectacle frame – so don’t let the opticians convince you that they would – anyway it shouldn’t have dropped out after only two months!
Very little has happened out of the ordinary since I last wrote. We finally got the library set up and open to the students and began issuing books for the first time yesterday. But if all 600 students come and borrow a book each there’ll be absolutely nothing left on the shelves! The dispute over the use of the school vehicle which culminated in Mallam Salehu assaulting the school driver then driving off in the van led to the arrival of an investigating team from Maiduguri, the state capital, yesterday. They spent the morning interviewing different members of staff about each other. They seem to have a pretty shrew idea, judging by the questions they asked, about the root causes of the dispute. They grilled me and the two Indian teachers separately – presumably because we were foreigners. There was also a certain amount of aggro this morning when it was discovered that some of the more senior boys had beaten up one of the junior boys, ostensibly for telling one of the teachers that they were planning a raid on the girls’ dormitories, although in fact the boy claimed he hadn’t told anybody anything! I’m not sure what the final outcome was, as I was swept into the library by a horde of first years who needed a master to take charge of their “library period”.
Yesterday I had a long chat with Mallam Gideon, the History teacher at the Teacher Training College, who was born in a tiny village called Tal which is just seven or eight miles south of Kaltungo. He is a mine of information on local history and culture and has promised to take me to Tal to see the original arrows and shields which were used against the British. Apparently the British had a great deal of trouble “pacifying” this area, mostly because the different branches of the Tangale tribe couldn’t stand each other and were constantly at war. Villagers from the next village to Tal turned up at the District Officer’s with a spear they had stolen from a Tal villager, and claimed it had been used to kill one of their own tribe. So, without investigating any further, the District Officer, a Mr Carlyle, ordered the entire village to be set on fire. Tal was burned to the ground twice, Tula, Kaltungo and Billiri once. Most of the educated local people are highly critical of the early missionaries who had such an effective hold on this area that they completely obliterated all traces of the local culture. So local dancing and drumming just don’t exist in Tangale -Waja any longer, at least not in their traditional forms. You do however still find the occasional rock at the junction of two paths, where a chicken has been sacrificed to placate the evil spirits. Some of the teachers who had planned to go for a climb up a nearby hill the other Sunday afternoon didn’t actually go, ostensibly because the harmattan was so thick they wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but one of then added that it was a local tradition that you don’t go to the hills when the harmattan is at its height!
Rev Hall records a description of the Chameleon Dance given to him by a Tangale informant:
This is a woman’s dance. The time when it is performed is when the first wet season moon comes out. It is commenced then, and goes on until the moon is one the wane. If rain has not fallen, the dance goes right on: from sunset on (for an hour or two). Even after rain has come and the seed is planted in the bush farms, the dancing may continue in the town; for the ground in the town is not planted until many days after that in the bush. The performance is every seven years.
The performers are girls. They are given their cue by the leading men, who point out the place where the dance has always been performed, a certain open space in the village. At sunset some girls, three or four, go to the place. They take their stand at it and commence to clap their hands and sing.
At first the dancers perform in a series of pairs. All is very serious. Laughing will disqualify a performer at this point… In the performance of a given pair you have sustained and repeated groaning, their faces being tightened and their eyes made to bulge. One advances to her neighbour with the forefinger of her right hand uplifted and her body swaying. With this her neighbour assumes a bent posture and moves to meet her. They meet. They straighten and stand bracingly erect, forefingers up, eyes bulging and groans continuing. They commence to sway again, move forward to touch, knock each other with their shoulders, draw back quickly, crouch once again, and in retreat, rise once more with a bound and move forward to meet and repeat the series of movements already described. Then the dancers form a circle with joined hands and go round and round, slowly, the knees slackening and tightening in keeping time with the song. The song goes:
It swings first to one side then to another
It becomes erect and massive
It darts forward swiftly –
The kobo (penis) of the man of Bu
Koland, Kolang, Layildikirik
[ Kolang was a western Tangale man who killed many men with arrows. Layildikirik was an Eatern Tangale man who could beat a drum all the way from Ture to Shongwom (eight miles) without tiring.]
Then a singer starts the “stepping over” dance. A child is placed in the centre. She crouches on the ground, making her head bob gently up and down. The dancers are still in the form of a moving ring. The singers sing:
Jumble, jumble, jumble;
In the midst of the trees, jumble
The ting has found her, jumble.
The thing has found her, jumble;
Death comes, jumble,
Jumble, jumble, jumble;
Out and in among the granaries, jumble;
Death comes, jumble.
Each performer, as she reaches a certain spot in the ring, still going round, raises one leg swiftly and passes it over the bobbing head of the child in the ring. If her leg clears the child’s head, there is no interruption. Next moment her neighbouyrs leg is passing over. It happens to touch the head of the child who cries out, “Her leg touched my head!” Al;l stop. One takes the girl into the ring who did not clear the child’s head, and addressing her, says, “Tell us the name of your sweetheart!” She names one of her young men suitors. He questioner calls out, “Ahah, So-and-so”, repeating the name. Then all with laughter, playful ridicule and shouts proclaim the lucky fellow’s name. And the dance resumes, one after another becoming the butt.
After some time, the crowd and performers scatter and go home, crying, “Night has come. We must disperse. Let us meet tomorrow”.
Hall J S Ibid pp 187-190
When they found out I had a degree in Russian, they asked me to give a lecture comparing the Soviet and British systems of education to a conference of headmasters taking place in April. I know all about the British system, but if you can find a cheap, light, paperback about the Soviet educational system, please send it post-haste.
P.S. Five of the students got publicly flogged today during the morning assembly for whipping another student, but three others refuse point-blank to be flogged, so it remains to be seen what will happen to them.
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