HARRIET AS IGBO

By Biko Agozino

This is not a spoiler. Harriet is a film without spoilers because the audience already can tell how the movie was going to end. What I would like to comment on are the symbolic representations that the Director, Kasi Lemmons, brought into the narrative that will not make sense to viewers who are not familiar with the background Igbo world views of both Harriet Tubman and the actress who played that role, Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo.

Some critics reportedly protested against the casting of the award-winning ‘British’ actress and singer to play the role of the iconic African American hero but if only the protesters knew that it is a case of an Igbo woman being portrayed by another Igbo woman... Besides African Americans have played the roles of Africans in Hollywood without protests from Africans who simply admire good acting by our black brothers and sisters.

There was a carving that the father of Minty, short for Araminta, gave her when she went to tell him that she was fleeing to freedom from slavery. She kept it with her always just as Frederick Douglas kept a piece of wood that an elderly enslaved man gave him after he was beaten by an overseer. According to Douglas, no one ever beat him again in his life for he kept that piece of wood with him, just as the old man told him. The Igbo call such a piece of wood or carving, Ofo na Ogu, the symbol of innocence and blessings. The Director, Kasi Lemmons, was probably reminding us throughout the movie that Harriet Tubman held Ofo and Ogu as a blessed innocent person and that that, in addition to her strong faith in God, was part of the reasons why she was bold in fighting for freedom from slavery for all, unlike Django who only went back to unchain his boo.

Harriet repeatedly claimed that she heard the voice of God but that was attributed, even by black abolitionists, to ‘possible brain damage’ from her head injury as a child when she was found in a barn with the white boy. The Igbo will agree with her claim that she heard the voice of God because the Igbo also believe that God is present in everyone as Chi, or God, a part of the Great God or Chiukwu, also known as Chineke, God the creator. Such a God or Chi would never subscribe to the pro-slavery gospel that the black preacher was paid to preach to the congregation of the enslaved who were called upon to obey their masters and work hard for them as an honor to a white God. Harriet did not say amen to that prayer.

It is a shame that the leading actress, Cynthia Erivo, chose to go by her English first name when her Igbo name would have been more appropriate to the role. Chinasaokwu, the name that her Igbo parents gave her in England when she was born, means God answers accusations. Just as Minty dropped her slave name and chose a free name, perhaps to evade slave catchers who continued to search for runaway enslaved people especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Cynthia should be challenged by her fans to drop the slave name and adopt her Igbo name, Chinasa, as her first name in honor of Harriet if not in honor of her own family. Her real last name, Erivo, literally translates as the unfed or the starving, a strange name that echoes memories of the mass starvation of the Igbo in Biafra during which 3.1 million died. The actress owes it to herself to recover her Igbo name as her first name.

Incidentally, the name Harriet and her original slave name, Araminta, may have onomatopeic meanings in Igbo as Ha aya eti – they will never beat us and Ala mu nta - my little land, or Aninta, a common Igbo name. Hayeti is, by coincidence, similar to the name that the Haitian Igbo revolutionaries gave to their new republic – Ayeti – and that is the way they still spell it in creole today, like the way that Harriet said that people pronounced Rit, her mother's name that she took. It means in Igbo, they will never beat us. Even the name of the Director of this movie, Kasi, also transliterates in Igbo as to console, suggesting the consolation for those who have suffered great injustice without being offered reparative justice.

Moreover, the name Moses that was attributed to Harriet by almost everyone, may also have an Igbo-sounding meaning – Moshishi, or the spirit said to say. The enslavers could not believe that an African woman was capable of leading such daring raids to free the enslaved and lead them to freedom in their hundreds. They claimed that she was a white abolitionist in ‘black face’ which must have been a popular pastime of influential white men then and even now. 

The Harriet model of womanist activism can be found in Ogu Umunwanyi during which Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929, only sixteen years after Harriet passed away; the Abeokuta women’s rebellion against taxation in 1945, the Kikuyu women’s uprising against forced labor in the 1950s, the South African women’s defiance against the pass laws of apartheid in the 1950s, and the Liberian women’s praying of the devil back to hell to end the bloody civil war in the 1990s.

Unlike Western feminist activists who seek gender-separatism, the Africana womanists are exemplary in the sense that their demands always included the interests of suffering men and women in articulation or intersectionally instead of seeking divisive gender essentialism. This is part of the reasons why Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi theorized that womanism was more appropriate than feminism as a description of the interests of African women within cultures that also inevitably include men as allies who can also be opponents in some ways but cannot be pigeon-holed essentially as all the enemies of ‘womandom’. The film, Harriet, showed that not even all white men were enemies during slavery given the important role played by white abolitionists, though some white women were among the worst enslavers and some black men worked for the slave catchers to earn some money.

Harriet was fond of singing the freedom song, ‘Go down Moses, go down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go’, as a rallying signal for the enslaved to join the underground railroad to freedom. The biblical Moses was called an Egyptian and so, Harriet was not a black Moses – the biblical Moses was obviously not white. The fact that Harriet was suspected to be a man goes to challenge the western invention of women as gendered in submissive relations under patriarchy whereas gender is not a central feature of the conception of people in African cultures where generation, not gender, is more deferential and hegemonic, according to Oyeronke Oyemumi in The Invention of Women.

Harriet carried a gun with her for protection and used it to threaten some of her own family members who were too scared to go with her to freedom. But when she had the opportunity to shoot and kill her enslavers, she chose not to kill. This may seem strange to many fans of Hollywood who have come to expect the hero to be a blood-thirsty maniac in Tarantino movies. However, to the Igbo who suffered genocide, pogroms and mass killings in Nigeria without resorting to retaliatory killings, it is normal to leave the gravest wrongs in the hands of our Chi and instead invest our energies into rebuilding our beloved communities in accordance with the African philosophy of nonviolence that Gandhi admitted that he was taught in Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. followed to lead the Civil Rights Movement.

A puzzle that the film tried to solve was why many poor whites who did not enslave Africans continued to fight in support of what the film called the ‘lost cause’ of slavery even after the Africans had asserted their right to freedom as fellow human beings. W.E.B. Du Bois explained this with the theory of the psychological wages of whiteness. However, the film differed slightly from the conventional interpretation of this theory by explaining that, according to Du Bois, it was not just psychological wages because there were huge structural privileges to even poor whites that they would like to defend; not to mention the hefty rewards placed on the heads of ‘Moses’ and the runaway enslaved people to motivate poor whites to join the posse to try and recapture them. Also, the young white men were motivated by their lust for the bodies of young black girls who were gang raped even ‘before their first blood’ perhaps because they were brought up to think of black girls as ‘pigs to be sold or eaten’ but never to be loved by white men who fathered children that looked exactly like them and still enslaved their own flesh and blood or sold them for money.

The film represented Harriet leading a unit of African American soldiers in battle during the Civil War at the historic Combahee River point of the Black Womanist Rebellion statement. This was the only time that a woman commanded men in battle during the civil war. It came to pass in fulfillment of the vision that Harriet shared with the young white man who was trying to recapture her as his property even though she prayed for him to survive typhoid as a child. She had disarmed him and made him climb down from his white horse, knelt him down and aimed his own rifle at him, and told him to listen to the coming sounds of the civil war even before the war started. She prophesied that he was going to die with thousands of other young white men fighting for a lost cause. Then she rode off on his white horse which did not discriminate between a white male rider and a black female rider. That war soon took an estimated 750,000 lives but it could have been avoided if white people simply accepted the fact that black people were equally human and not property. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

Achebe Critiqued Okonkwo

By Biko Agozino

The interview of Achebe by Soyinka and Nkosi in 1964 goes to show why written reviews and the sort of interviews that James Eze did for The Sun should be accompanied with video documentaries for the archives. I work with video a little and I have won an award in this genre to my credit but we should do more. In this interview, Achebe critiqued the 'aggressive' masculinity of Okonkwo as representing the 'weakness' of an 'unbending' society.

I have always suspected that Achebe identified with Unoka, his fellow artist, more than with Okonkwo, the brute. Very reassuring to hear it from his mouth and see him dressed as a Hausa talakawa or onye nkiti, commoner, for the role. Okey Ndibe once wondered why Achebe presented his fellow poet, Unoka, in such poor lights but it is not the fault of Achebe that we live in a capitalist world where money talks and some talented artists tend to starve to death:

"I visited Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, the one who is responsible for introducing the word “agbala” in Cameroon. Due to him many secondary school children who were not macho enough ended up with the nickname “agbala” which means woman, and, it was a derogatory word for a man in Umuofia who had not taken any titles which was the case with Unoka. If some students did not get “agbala”, they got another name “efulefu” meaning worthless person, another word introduced in the Cameroon language arena from Things fall Apart", reflected Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang, while waiting to interview Achebe on the 50th anniversary of the novel.

This is not a diss against Unoka but a critique of Okonkwo who boasted of his many farms but allowed his single-parent father that raised him to be a strong champion wrestler to die of kwashiokor or malnutrition. It is an indictment against the society for which Unoka performed without charging a fee but they still had the bold face to go and hassle him for little loans whereas he had written on the wall, the bigger debts that his society owed him for his performances. 

When Okonkwo went to the Oracle of the Hill to divine why he was having a hard luck in life, he was told that it was the spirit of his father that was angry because he was yet to sacrifice a goat to him. The Efulefu that he was, Okonkwo did not chew on the proverb carefully but disdainfully asked the Oracle if his father left him a chicken when he was alive, how come he was demanding a goat? Okonkwo ended up dying like an ojugo chicken and was buried like the carcass of a dog because the fly without advisers follows the corpse into the grave.

Here Achebe said that despite the cruelty in colonized Igboland, there were also beauty and arts to be appreciated. Jimanze Ego-Alowes recently announced that Okonkwo was Achebe's alter ego but the honor goes to Unoka, the intellectual. He also tried to revive the allegation that Achebe got the story of Arrow Of God from Mr Nnolim just because the characters in the novel are similar to the characters in Nnolim's pamphlet. That is understandable because the story of Arrow of God is a historical event and Achebe admitted that Mr Nnolim was one of those he interviewed while researching the novel.

In the Arrow of God published the year of the interview, the year of the Civil Rights Act in the US, Achebe again chose to resolve colonialist conflict non-violently through the dialogues led by Ezulu against the historicism of Obierika who warned against confrontation with the white men. Instead of rushing into war with a machete in hand to chop off the head of the African messengers of the invading white men the way Okonkwo did, Ezulu went on a hunger strike as a decolonization strategy. Instead of overthrowing him in a bloody coup and installing a new priest who was ready to eat the sacred yam and declare the new yam festival to enable them to start harvesting their yam, the people of Umuaro simply converted to Christianity and started harvesting their yam in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Yet, Achebe called Okonkwo 'my hero' in the interview for he remained a tragic hero who had lost touch with his people following his alienation in exile in Mbanta, according to Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe. 

Today, African rulers idealize the genocidal masculinity of those that Ali Mazrui lionized as carrying on the 'warrior tradition'. Rather than admire the philosophical Igbo who prefer eating words with the palm oil of proverbs and instead of honoring hero-poets like Chris Okigbo, Mazrui tried the spirit of Okigbo and convicted him in the land of the ancestors after death for the crime of abandoning poetry to take up arms in defense of his people who were threatened with genocide. Unknown to Mazrui was the fact that Okigbo actually saw his participation in the resistance to genocide as a participant-observation methodology through which to gather new materials for his writing being the scholar-activist that he was (recounted by the literary theorist, Ben Obumselu, in an interview with James Eze; though Okigbo may have used that camouflage to avoid being dissuaded from going to the war front by his fellow intellectuals). 

The neocolonial genocidal states imposed on Africa by European colonizers are still in the business of killing Africans en-masse but that should not be called the warrior tradition of Mazrui, it is the genocidist tradition that started with the genocide against 3.1 million Igbo, the foundational genocide of postcolonial Africa orchestrated by the colonizers, as identified by Achebe in There was a Country and in Biafra Revisited by Ekwe-Ekwe and against which the Igbo mounted a heroic resistance just as they did to colonial conquest (Ekumeku War), indirect colonial rule (Ogu Umunwayi), resistance against wage theft (Enugu Colliery massacre), and the ongoing non-violent demand for a referendum on the restoration of Biafra by Igbo youth. Prior to colonization, the neighbors of the Igbo never committed genocide against the Igbo with the aid of such African 'tribes' as Shell BP, The British government led by the left-wing Labour Party, and by the Soviet Union, Walter Rodney observed.

By the way, the interpretation of Ikenga, by Achebe in the interview with Soyinka and Nkosi, as representing male virility is a mistaken patriarchal attempt to monopolize power. Every Igbo person is born with both aka Ikenga, right hand, or aka nri (food hand) and aka ekpe, left hand, or aka nshi (shit hand). The fact that both males and females hold the hoe with aka ikenga leading and aka ekpe following suggests that Ikenga is not exclusively male but that men fashioned an art object, Ikenga, to represent the essence of male dominance. It is only a simulacrum, signifier or sign signifying the referent or signified male authority. 

It does not follow that women lacked authority since Things Fall Apart emphasized the enormous influence of Mbanta, the mother's kindred, where Okonkwo, the child-killer and wife-beater, was schooled by the mother's brother that mother is supreme, Nneka. Moreover, the power of the female deities, Ani or earth mother and Agbala the Oracle of the Hills signifies that there could never be male power and authority without female power and authority among the radically democratic Igbo who say that when one thing stands, another thing stands beside it. 

In other words, the Igbo take it for granted that both men and woman are equally blessed with aka Ikenga even though some Ikenga pass others for strength just as the male hoe (for tilling) tended to be bigger than the female hoe (for weeding). The fact that Africans were forced into colonialism with machetes and hoes as farming implements and have continued to rely on these ancient tools for farming 60 years after the restoration of lumpen independence is part of the evidence indicating How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, according to Walter Rodney.

Brotherphobia is not Xenophobia

By Biko Agozino

Brotherphobia or sisterphobia is an ancient problem that should not be confused with xenophobia. Europeans attacked and killed fellow Europeans for centuries over who should get the lion's share of the colonization of Africa. The Semitic people are still at each other's throats even though they all claim to be the children of Abraham. Nigerians have been slaughtering fellow Nigerians like rams since the genocidal war orchestrated by the British against the Igbo for no other reason than that they speak what South Africans would call an incomprehensible kwerekwere language, probably a corruption of 'Igbo Kwenu!' For such excuses as they steal our jobs and take our women or they sell drugs and commit crimes, black South Africans loot the poor shops of fellow Africans and lynch their fellow Africans, inciting revenge attacks against multinational South African businesses in other African states. 

South Africans have been massacring one another in the struggle over crumbs from the table of apartheid colonizers since the reign of Shaka Zulu and especially during the confrontations between Inkhatha and ANC supporters. White farmers are fleeing in large numbers as they are targeted by those from whom they stole the land. Tanzanians and Swazis have been butchering each other to make money medicine or 'muti' just as Nigerians have been doing juju for get rich quick and some try to intimidate others especially when cattle is used as a modern 'colonization' scheme backed with weapons and charms of all sorts by people who claim to worship the same God. Somalis and Rwandans are still at it just like Sudanese, Egyptians, Libyans and Algerians as a result of the imposition of the genocidal state on neocolonial Africa by Europe. Africans trying to escape the quagmire are allowed to drown in their thousands in the Aegean sea.

The solution is Pan Africanism and the erasure of the borders that colonialism imposed on Africans. South Africa and Nigeria could follow the lead of Ghana and Ethiopia and invite the African Diaspora to return and be given dual Africana citizenship. With the coming of the African passport and the policy of free trade and open borders, Africans can travel where they choose and settle, marry, study, work, trade or run for office in any part of Africa just as the Americans do in the US. The African states recalling their ambassadors from South Africa should realize that US states do not have ambassadors in other states but are all represented outside the US by the Department of State. The US should extend this democratic experiment to the whole of the Americas who want to join the United States of the Americas instead of kidding around about buying Greenland.

Intellectuals and activists can help by thinking beyond their national consciousness as Fanon urged and realize that the people have voted with their feet in utter disregard for the artificial lines that colonizers drew on the sand to divide and weaken Africans as Azikiwe observed in his London 1962 speech on Pan Africanism.

The government has a role to play here by going beyond job creation towards the funding of cooperatives that would train Africans from wherever and grant them funding to start enterprises in partnership with fellow Africans. The Igbo have perfected this though their individual efforts in apprenticeship but with huge grants from the governments across Africa, there would be annual enterpreneurship grants to support emerging apprentices to set up their own shops in partnership with others to create wealth across Africa as Biko Agozino and Ike Anyanike argued in their influential paper, 'Imu Ahia: Traditional Igbo Business School'.

Achille Mbembe has a proposal on a borderless world but sees it as a utopia to be recovered. It was actually the indigenous map of the world and not a utopia. The world existed without borders when Africans discovered all other continents and populated them millions of years ago without passports and visas and with asylum for all who ask for one. One Peoples Republic of Africa or United Republic of African States for all Africans at home and abroad! Forward Ever! Organize, Do Not Agonize!

Tribute to My Beloved Guardian Angel

By Biko Agostino

Before I was born, the ancestors sent a beautiful angel to be my guardian and to love every spot that my feet would touch on earth. She was probably four or five years old when I was born and she was already baby-sitting our nephew who was born six months earlier. She ran back home when she heard the news of my birth (our mother had suffered several still births and infant mortality before). Big sister wanted to be my baby sitter. But one look at me and she said, what an ugly baby, and fled back to babysit our nephew who was more plump at six months than scrawny little caterpillar-like me. She later told me that our favorite uncle bought me powdered baby milk and started calling me Nwa Bekee or child of the white man even though I was as dark as coal. He told mother to take special care of me and never to leave me alone with big sister all day while she was at the farm or he would beat her to make her cry like the baby me (we lost him in the war and so he did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled).

Later she returned to be my babysitter and to be my guardian angel. She agreed to quit elementary school to be in charge of me as a baby. She taught me how to write the number 1 on the dirt floor of our mother’s bedroom. She laughed when I wrote a big number 1 that almost covered the whole floor and she taught me to make the stroke smaller to fit into a wooden slate or exercise book line. She taught me my catechism and made sure that I did not accept sacrificial chicken meat from Papa’s shrine because it was the food of sinners, nri ndi ome njo. But when I refused injections for malaria because I believed that God would cure me, she told me that the medicine was given to us by God to make us well. When I questioned whether the herbs that Papa used to cure dysentery were fetish, she said that they were herbs created by God for our use. She was the only child that Papa showed all his healing herbs and she became a healer.

When the Biafra war broke out and we became refugees, she would insist that she could carry all the loads that mother could not carry and she allowed me to carry only the lantern and the hen that I was given to raise. The hen made too much noise and one adult took it and wrung its neck to avoid exposing us to the enemies. That night, we had chicken soup. When the enemy troops approached, we fled again with our little belongings and I carried only the lantern. We were suddenly separated and I ran ahead only to realize that I was alone among the crowd of refugees. I stopped and waited in the hope that mother and sister were coming behind and shortly, they caught up with me.

Mother was too proud to stand in line for relief to be given to refugees, she preferred to go hunting for crabs and vegetables. Big sister was the one to go and get rice uka nwajata, garri Gabon, salt fish, stock fish, and powdered milk for us. She could not get powdered eggs because she had no kwashiorkor but our younger step brother was a bit swollen and so his mother got those yellow egg powder that made his elder brother to taunt me and say that I could have gotten some egg powder if only I had kwashiorkor too. My sister said not to mind such foolish talk.

Papa got seriously sick with diarrhea and used his last savings to buy buckets of garri and share to his two co-wives the way he rationed yam daily before the war. Once our mother cooked soup with some strange mushrooms but said that we would not eat it until the next day to see what it would look like. It foamed all over the pot the next morning, so she threw it away as poisoned. Sometimes she seasoned the soup with roots that tasted like chicken. There was a goat that was dedicated to Ani, the earth goddess, but the priest who took it into exile reminded everyone that we could not even beat it even if it ate our yam. The enemies approached again and we fled back to our farmland where we could harvest yam, cassava and vegetables while fish and mollusk from the river kept us well-nourished until the enemies swept past us and we returned to our home. Big sister carried me on her back to queue up for medical attention at the Town Hall when I had a big lump on my neck. A passing Red Cross official saw me as I was sweating and almost fainting while waiting in the hot sun and carried me in her arms to get me urgent attention with so many injections that I lost count. Thank you Red Cross. Thank you Nwa Nne m, child of my mother, for saving my life.

Once, Ndi Red Cross saw me hawking vegetables from mother’s farm. They spoke through their nose with an interpreter to say that they would buy all the vegetables that mother could supply. When I told mother, she said that her farm was not capable of yielding daily supplies of vegetables for the hospital. Papa laughed and said that they were not asking her to grow it. She could buy it in bulk from the market and supply to the hospital for a small profit. 

It was big sister that took over the purchase of the vegetables and the supply to the hospital to earn the extra income that helped us to recover quickly from the losses of all our ante-bellum savings that the government only exchanged for twenty pounds per family at the end of the war. She also collected water and firewood for cooking and sometimes had to abandon her heap of firewood to escape rapist enemy soldiers who tried to catch her. One such enemy soldier got drunk and came to harass the child as she was mashing palm nuts with her feet for palm oil and as she pushed him off from the tree log ikwe akwu, the hand grenade on the waist of the soldier fell into the palm oil without exploding. It was after boiling the oil that the bitter taste told us that something was amiss. We fished out the unexploded but spent grenade from among the rocks added to the pot. The soldier came crying to say that he would be punished if he did not account for the grenade. We gave him the empty shell and threw away the spoilt palm oil.

Strangely, two uncles who returned from the war as ex-Biafran soldiers took it into their heads that supplying vegetables to the hospital meant that we were collaborating with the enemies as saboteurs. They came to beat us up and one of them tried to demonstrate with the neck of our mother how they were experienced at killing someone without firing a shot. Luckily, big sister was just pounding foofoo and she let the pestle fly at the head of the uncle who stumbled and nearly fainted before freeing mother from the stranglehold. I challenged one of the uncles to send for one of his brothers who was the same age with me so that I can fight it out with him. He did and I pounced on the poor cousin and threw him about like a doll in our harmless wrestling match. Big sister was a fearsome wrestling champion and she had taught me how to lock the arm of my opponent under my armpit and how to throw the person down easily. When I fought with my sister, she let me win and ran away from me because I was a cry baby. Once a bully tried to make me cry and my sister wanted to fight the bully after school but she swung like a girl and the bully landed a punch on her mouth to make her gums bleed. I was embarrassed and decided that I would never let her fight for me again.

When a teacher came to live with us as a tenant, she said that big sister was very smart and offered to pay her tuition fees if mother agreed. Papa said that he would pay the fees if mother would buy the books as usual. But mother said that she needed the extra hands on the farms to stop us from starving and told Papa that the fees were the easy part that she would happily swap with him so that he would buy the books and the clothes and medicine and pocket money and Papa said that the fees were what fathers paid. Big sister obeyed mother and tried to arrange some evening classes that did not go far. When she got married to a trader, the seventy naira bride wealth paid to Papa was not enough to give me hope of taking up my admission into high school, just four years after the war. Papa sold one piece of choice land for 400 naira and told me that it was to help pay my high school fees but he also bought a bicycle for my brother from his other wife who was said not to have the book head. I got the message, I could not go to the books house, uno akwukwo, or school, to fool around instead of excelling at being a good book child or nwata akwukwo, a student, who possesses isi akwukwo or book brains.

Earlier when my brother and I were expelled for school fees two years after the war, Papa said that he would give us the fees if we went to the farm with him for two school days to earn it and we did, thereby learning that books are sweet-sweet but they are expensive to learn and those with patience will learn books if their father and mother had money. Luckily, a year into our high school, the government abolished school fees and supplied spring bunk beds with mattresses so that Papa only paid 40 naira as boarding fees to spare me from having to attend as a day student in a distant town. Once I was suspended for participating in a protest and my mother and big sister came to pledge that I was going to be of good behavior before I was allowed back.

When I finished high school with a First Division result, I got a job as a clerk with a construction company. I used my first salary to buy new wrappers for mother and for big sister and a suit and sandals for Papa. Our father’s other wife saw the gifts and exclaimed that she did not know that book learning could yield profits. She had sent her two sons to learn trading and she quickly recalled the younger one and sent him back to school. Our big sister supported us and I also supported the younger brother (who became a newspaper editor with a degree in history and politics) and our younger sister (who achieved a Diploma in Accounting and a Master’s degree in Business Administration and is an entrepreneur).

When I gained admission to the university to read Sociology, I had only 200 naira saved from my job as an auxiliary teacher. Big sister told me that she could give me 200 naira every semester from her profits made from selling bananas and groundnuts by the roadside. She also made soda soap and chin-chin snacks for sale. With that, I was able to cover two years in the university but my own little savings ran out. An uncle stepped in and matched the 200 naira bursary from big sister with 200 naira of his own and that was how I came to complete my university education.

Once big sister quarreled with her husband because the man did not like farm work as much as my sister. As a result, the yam collection that he inherited from his father was depleted. Only the yam collection that my mother gave to my sister as part of the wedding presents remained and her husband wanted her to turn the remaining yam over to him because yam is a man’s crop. Sister complained that he would neglect them and they would disappear just like his own collection of yam. I told sister to let him take over the yam and instead concentrate on trading to support her family now that her husband’s provision store had also collapsed. She said that she did not have money for trading and I gave her 600 naira from my savings to get her started before I went abroad for further studies.

When I sent her small amounts of money to build a house for me, she stretched it so much that the house became the kind of mansion that I had promised Papa as a child when he asked who was going to make sure that his barn would always be filled with yam. I told him not to worry about the barn because the mansion we were going to build would eat up the barn. I never remembered this exchange but big sister told me that she got the chills when the foundation was laid and the barn was completely covered while the house rose to three floors, just as I had promised as a child. She reminded me that when Papa asked where I was going to get the money for such a mansion, I told him that I was going to get it from the land of the white man just as I did.

Every time she said that her trading capital was exhausted, I gave her more money so that she did not have to go outside the family to borrow. With her ability to order sacks of corn and beans, yam and groundnuts from the northern part of the country and pay through a bank transfer for the delivery by trucks, she stopped making the treacherous journey to the north. With her little profits and with help from me, she was able to educate all her children with one being a mechanical engineer, another a mathematics major, another a medical technologist, one nurse, and two teachers while one son followed her into trading. Her first son is married to a nurse and the three daughters are married to traders. She was transferring her trade in foodstuff to the son who learned trading as an apprentice with the nephew who was born before me (who is now a big investor with a Master of Business Administration to his name).

My sister tried for my family and for her own with the little blessings that she had. I had plans for her and just a week before her collapse and death possibly from heat stroke in the farms, I was pleading with her not to go to the farm alone again but she said that she usually went with her little house help. We were planning for her to go back to school but she was busy molding cement blocks to build a bigger house for her family, having paid for the construction of the mud house that they now live in to move them out from her father in-law’s one room accommodation when she was newlywed.

She had high blood pressure that she was managing but help did not reach her in time and she did not regain consciousness for days in the hospital. I want to say thank you to my beloved guardian angel who still watches over me from above. I am proud of all her achievements on earth and her love of fellow human beings. I wonder what I could have done in this wild world without the child who is more valuable than money, Nwakaego.

All our plans for her to retire from trading and farming and go back to school full time will now be shelved. She wanted a lady’s motorbike but I said that it was not safe and asked her to learn to drive a car. She laughed and said that a child asked her father for a bicycle but the father promised her an aero plane instead. I laughed and told her that her father had a car waiting for her. She was a powerful actress, dancer and singer who performed memorable plays like Okenufo at the church concert when we were children. I was going to record all those fairy tales she entertained us with as kids but never got around to it. Sister Maria will be sorely missed and will always be loved. Angels never die!