Not Forgotten: Southern Nigerian

by Elaine Neil Orr

I have always thought my origin is Ogbomosho, the dusty Yoruba town where I was born in 1954. What I most recall is the sun slamming down, ricocheting off tin roofs of mud and plaster houses that duplicated one another endlessly down a thousand bicycle paths, splashes of puddles during the rains, and a hundred women on their way to market. The laterite road was elevated so that perching on the seat of our sierra-gold 1957 Chevrolet station wagon, my face was level with the faces of people in front of their shops. Everything looked brown except for the cloth. The cloth was blue, blue, and more blue, enough blue to have left the sky in debt. The women and the men wore the cloth. Many of the children wore only bracelets or low-slung shorts or a wrap.

At the Mobil station where my father fills the tank with petrol, I ponder the lifting wings of Pegasus the horse on the side of the building. I have never seen a horse, rather goats and Brahman cattle and chickens in the road and black mambas and red-headed lizards and all manner of birds, including hawks, and once, before a missionary nurse shot it, a monitor lizard in my front yard. My reverie is interrupted when a boy my sister’s age thrusts a tray of Trebor Mints and chewing gum in little rectangular packets through the window. “Buy chewing gum,” he instructs loudly, emphasizing the word gum, as if I might not understand English. “Buy chewing gum.” He does not step back or retreat. When my father reenters our vehicle, he digs for ages in his shorts pocket before producing the three pence for the purchase. He stages this elongated transaction as a kind of improvisational comedy and it works. The boy and I both laugh, though perhaps for different reasons.

Three major ethnic groups and hundreds of other “minor” ones inhabit modern Nigeria. The big three are the Yoruba, the Igbo, and the Hausa-Fulani. In my earliest years, I imagined that Yoruba land encompassed most of the country. The
arid territory of the huge northern region was diminished in my mind by its absence from my experience. I knew of it primarily through Fulani herders on the
road with their great horned cattle, headed south to market, and Hausa traders, tall elegant men who brought beautiful works of art to sell to the missionaries, laying out their wares on mats on the veranda and praying to Allah as regularly as
the hibiscus that opened in the morning and closed in the late afternoon. As far as I was concerned, they were all foreigners. When I was older I tried without success to convert some Hausa traders to Christianity, hoping to pull them into the green pastures of our southern world, but they refused “twelve steps to salvation.”

Southern Cultures

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Last Updated:  05/18/07