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!