Date Published: 04/14/10

Letter to a war victim - My Grand Father. - Uka K. O. Ugwa

Old One, it’s me Uka, son of your vintage son, Kalu. How has life been in the great beyond? Everyone who knew you say you are the best example of a good man. Can’t tell on what parameters they measured your goodness. A few others have had a good laugh at the reminiscence of your craftiness and great command of humour. They speak of your creativity that mesmerized those toeless white men who laboured vainly to siphon your skull which brimmed with wisdom. I hear maidens of your time preferred you and husbands wore blue envy whenever wives appraised your unparalleled wit.

Great One, please forgive us. The children of your children yielded to the tongues of those white creatures for which you stopped your ears deaf when they drummed their creed: If you are a Christian, you will go to heaven because heaven is such a wonderful place. We accepted hook, line and sinker and can’t tell what belief triumphed over the other: theirs or yours. Yours they preach is synonymous with darkness and theirs light.

As the good man you were, I can’t imagine a place for you in the dark, (Or do they call it hell?) beyond the realm to where all mortals go from here.

Grand Pa, the sights and trend here will sure shock you back to your abode in the last 40years if you ever revisit. Tell me, were you able to find some food to rest those worms that tormented your intestines before you breathed your last? The other day, I saw him on television - not sure if you ever saw a TV in your lifetime. I saw General Yakubu Gowon. He has been preaching obeisance to God’s laws and forgiveness of sins. Guess you’d not forget in a hurry that son of a nomad who placed a blockade on food routes in Biafra until your entire life was surrounded by children with bloated stomachs, swollen limbs and skulls big and heavy from kwashiorkor.  I hear you rationed what you had in your barn and treasury till you had no firewood to boil water to soothe your strained nerves after a hectic day. My father made jokes of how you lost hope and said you’d find a lot to eat in the land of the spirits. I imagine the agony of having to die in the midst of plenty. You, famed to lead your contemporaries in number of rows in the yam barn.

Were there really much to eat when you arrived at the land of the spirits? You won’t believe Odumegwu Ojukwu could not resolve his dispute with that Gowon boy long after you were gone. A million more heads were sacrificed before that heady Nnewi gunner vanished. The other day a boy from his homestead swore the bearded one is a god. Like a powerful god, he vanished into the air and reappeared in a place they call Ivory Coast to buy food to sustain his wearied army. You haven\t heard Gowon rubbished the Biafran ingenuity with that food thing and Biafran engineers worked their brains to shreds in a bid to invent food alternatives for the population at the brink of extermination. You won’t believe Ikemba never returned with any food till my sister, Ijeoma, turned thirteen. I was five and we made a song at school that asked the returnee warrior for the heads of those he led to war. You saw Ijeoma? Mother said she bore her through that annihilating hunger – a month or two before you left. It’s a long story what happened in Emeka Ojukwu’s absence.

He is in your mould, Grand Pa – so ingenious. His flattery prowess swayed the most beautiful maiden of our time and his old age could not sap his fluid of life. She bore him handsome princes and beautiful princesses. They say her father fried with jealousy when her beauty found the heart of that old veteran.

Did anyone that arrived there recently tell you how those khaki wearing boys that trampled your yam farm practised relay with the leadership of this land? Six of them in succession but for a short break when they stumped a kinsman from a session with his pupils in a rural Sokoto school and made him to keep watch over the treasury while they sought more spaces to stockpile their loot. Safe spaces secured, they sacked the watchman and his meekness.

Grand Pa, I’ll save you the energy but would have loved to know the exact number of Nigerians who have arrived there from the Biafra war and religious and political upheavals that have since bedevilled us. I know spirits don’t lie but not sure if you have demographic data there. You won’t believe Ojukwu really saw tomorrow.

Lest I forget, how was it to reunite with Grand Ma and my father after those long years of waiting for a company? Or did you recreate a family when you arrived earlier? If you did, how did Grand Ma take your new wife – now the first? Did my father talk of the developments here? He’d possibly talk of the electricity in your thatch house and the black stream that just meandered into our village from Umuahia to ease our transportation. Are you surprised the hut still stands? It’s still there but the thatches paved way for corrugated iron sheets to modernize Grand Ma’s kitchen just before she departed this part.

Did he mention anything GSM? Jackson Ogbonna Ude only returned with one the day my father laid in his glass casket. He never lived to see it. With this handy box, you would have kept Grand Ma informed of the progress in your farm at Iyi Achi while she was away at Ekpiri Ibibio.

I hear you were busy deep in the belly of the rainforest where you sought the best woods for your craftworks when the first boom of war drums sounded. Those rainforests have all gone, Old One. These children who know not who their mother’s are burnt down the vegetation - trees to shrubs, while they set traps to catch rats. Farming on these soils can no longer be considered for profit. Nature has badly been altered here.

Let me ask, Wise One. Of what use would have black gold (black I mean) been to you if I handed you a hundred drums? It would sure be of little or no use in your lifetime and without it you lived happily all the same till that Yakubu boy gunned his way to maroon and starve you to death. That discovery from deep down the soils of Oloibiri is our undoing. It’s worth a lifelong fortune, Old One, but it put our living in the reverse. Ask my father from where he made his first million naira when after 36years of chalky hands and repeated sessions with new pupils each academic year he couldn’t roof my mother’s kitchen. His fortune was a crumb of the cake baked from that black liquid. I hear he complained somebody munched a larger chunk of the crumb and they cautioned him to look the other way or shut his mouth but he screamed the more and threatened to alert the cake sharers about the tiny crumbs disappearing from underneath the banquet table. His mouth was eternally shut for him. Did he say why he arrived there before time? It’s the trend here, Grand Pa. Many more have had to untimely join you there while scrambling to go for a take on the enormous cake from Oloibiri’s treasure.

I’m not mailing a long letter to spite your weak eyes that almost got blinded from orgy sights of war or your inability to demystify this ink and paper magic. I hear of your patience and know you’d find time to get a reader. Please don’t tempt him with the reading - I mean my father. You’d only excite his agony. He was to live and see his son unlatch the sandals of literary giants.

How often do you see James Cromwell, that whisky consuming Scot who tormented you with his idea of the enormous powers in the blood of a Jewish carpenter who was slain by his own kinsmen? He capped his ‘ridicule’ (of his own grandfather albeit) when he yanked your son, my father, off the farm and dragged him to Ididep where he was taught the ways of the Cromwells. Grand Pa, I hear you threatened suicide when news came that Cromwell ferried your son to the Comoros. Seek him out and command him to read this letter for you. If there isn’t apartheid in the land whereupon you dwell, you’ll sure find James Cromwell. It’d gladden his heart to know the fire they lit is still raging and licking up everything on its path. He’d get to know that their alteration of our strength, geography, religion, culture and economy has achieved its goal of keeping us perpetually unease so we’d forever be at the mercy of their offspring.

We are in a quagmire here, Wise One. Did anyone arrive there recently to tell you the new watchman of the big cake absconded? Sorry I tried to find a more suitable verb to address his action. I mean another son of a nomad, meeker than his other kinsman, who got the baton after a certain khaki adorning Egba boy was dusted from the gaol and made to hold sway for eight gruelling years. You’d probably know this ranting General if you caught a glimpse of those uncultured soldiers who trampled your crops and stole your livestock. The other day a parrot from his farm in his Otta village quipped he overheard the Baba brag the major reason he led the war to your homestead was to have a taste of our voluptuous maidens since he could not woo any with his crudely tribal-marked face and apelike nostrils. You see our troubles?

Sorry I deviated, Old One. The absconded Mallam was again stumped from a session with his pupils in Katsina. He was sickly and emaciated like a child grudgingly fed by a wicked step mother the day they brought him. You’d not doubt he had kwashiorkor if you saw him. All the same, he grabbed the baton only for him to veer off the track to rest every now and then till he was stretchered to Idu na Oba, the land of the fairies. The man and his absence have made more fairies than the tortoise. Let me tell you some of Umoru’s (that’s the new watchman’s name) fairies when next I write.

Lest I forget, tell James Cromwell his cousins blacklisted and called over 150million of us a terrorist bunch. Don’t be shocked at this population? Just tell him to pass a message to that hare-eared half Kenyan son of his niece that it’d make no good if he keeps that tag on our file in the Capitol or at the Pentagon (Cromwell will explain to you where these places are). Does he need such adjective to describe this population of directionless beings? He will waste money, time, men and energy to pursue a military or diplomatic action in this terrain. He’d have simply tagged us a NUMERIC PROBLEM and devised an ALMIGHTY FORMULA to reduce us to SIX DECIMAL POINTS. Period!

Rest in Peace, Revered One.