If new words which are foreign to a language are acquired, and added to a language, making them part of the vocabulary, Kainji needs to be added to the Igbo dictionary as a one word meaning "Ogbu orimili (ohimiri/oshimiri), killer of a great river. Orimili is reserved for large bodies of water, powerful, not for streams and small rivers.
I must admit that I was a nosy child, a much better word would be, inquisitive and I listened and picked up details. During discussions and conversations between visitors to the house and the adults, small details probably taken as unimportant in casual discussions, as part of the evening chatter, after a long day's work, and chairs are pulled under the "fruit" tree or on the veranda, to enjoy the evening breeze with colleagues, were carefully picked up and pondered on.
Visitors were always around in the evenings and on Sunday afternoons after church. We played records on gramophones with the needles, on Sunday afternoons and lounged around. No real work on Sundays. The gramophone sets with the dog and the logo-- " his master's voice."
When important visitors come from out of town, usually in their own vehicles, a rare occurrence in those days when very few people owned cars, relatives or friends would visit with their families, all the way from Lagos, Enugu or Onitsha, the big cities, or other towns, and turn the house into a recreation spot for us children. Around the dinner table for dinner,served with "efele owuwa" special breakable dishes reserved for visitors, happy chatter and laughter would fly back and forth, the latest in politics in the region, around the country,even around the world for the adults. Different topics, sometimes involving the children and their schoolwork and church would came up. Gifts and present came too.
I would "put my ear to the ground" togbo nti n'ani" and pick up everything. Some of the subjects, I did not even understand. To top it off, some of the stories about politics and world events would then appear in the Daily times and the Nigerian outlook, the two newspapers delivered daily to the house in those days. They would have those stories and even augment them with pictures. It was great fun reading those newspapers, but most of the fun came from connecting the stories to pictures and actual faces. I remember when Sir Winston Churchill passed away and my father picked up the newspaper and exclaimed--"Churchill anwuo"--- Churchill is dead, and then it was in the news, in English on the BBC, and VOA I believe, on the transistor radio, and in the vernacular news in Igbo. I kept wondering who Churchill was and why he was so important as to draw such a reaction. Later when I got a chance at the newspaper and was able to connect the name to a face, an impressive face of a big man, old, round cheeks, big nose, a big hat on his head and a cane ( walking stick), I concluded that he must have been an important man. The story about his part in World War11, to me read like a tale from ancient history. The family part of his life story I soaked in, his wife Clementine, whose name made me wonder if she had anything to do with the song "oh my darling Clementine, but then again, that Clementine in the song was dead and must have inspired Mrs Churchill's mother to name her in memory of the real Clementine. Churchill was in his early nineties when he passed and I wished my grandfather who had died earlier, in his early eighties was blessed to live another ten years into his nineties.
Another face on the newspapers all the time in those days was Nikita Krusechev. His name was always in the news and I wondered why his mother gave him such a first name and I actually asked, and after a good laughter, my father told me that his name was not really what I thought I heard. I thought they were calling him --nkita. I wondered why he was always in the news, morning and night and learned that there was some kind of argument between him and the leaders of other countries. When I got older and understood about the cold war, it all made sense.
In those early days, most of the words on the radio were mumbles to me, being British accent on BBC and American accent on VOA. People's names stood out in the newscasts and then a clear word here and there and the rest were mumble and lost. In the newspapers, the words were there, clear for one to read and pronounce anyway they pleased in the local accent. Even the obituaries and "in memoriam" sections were read and the pictures studied. Up to this day, I see stories in pictures and facial expressions and my children tease me for studying pictures rather than looking at them.
Around that period, I remember travelling to Lagos with my older sister for a holiday with relatives during one Christmas holidays. It was my first time going to Lagos and it was a big deal. I had been to Onitsha, Enugu, which I remembered very well. Port Harcourt and Aba, I had visited, but did not remember anything about them. Visiting big cities was a real adventure since we lived in rural communities, rural towns with their villages which did not have electricity or running water. Rural life was great and I will not trade the memories for anything, but going to the big city for a few days or weeks was like going to another world. The city lights, the cars and buses, the trains, yes trains, trains actually ran on tracks in Enugu and other cities, clean trains on clean tracks, no debris. I loved to hear the hoot of the trains when they approached.
There were usually people everywhere, and vehicles advertising different products, with their music blasting. The streets were very clean, quite unlike what we have today and people were safe. The police did their work and would direct traffic in their crisp uniforms and hats, standing in the traffic booth at round-abouts. I would stare and take in everything, the advertisements on the billboards, the mothers walking with their children on the sidewalks, their hair neatly braided. We were not allowed to come to school with breaded hair, so we wore our hair cropped very low, just like the boys. At night, the electricity came on and the street lights actually worked. People would sit outside and chat with neighbors and I could read with very clear light. Back home we read with kerosine lamps and once in a while, when my father had a lot of work to do, he would light his gas lamp which we called " aladin" because that was the brand name on it. It gave clear light like electricity.
Visits to the city were usually very brief. Sometimes I would travel to Onitsha with my mother to buy food in bulk, the produce like sacks of beans, onions, which we could not grow ourselves, bags of dried fish, mangala and stockfish and canned tomatoes when tomatoes were not in season. I went with her to carry the baby while she shopped. Sometimes she would strap the baby to my back with a wrapper and oja while we shopped. Those trips to the Onitsha market were very interesting, but very tiresome. We would walk through the market and there were so many people to greet, people from our village who lived and worked at Onitsha, some of them traders at the market. Then we would go to Ose Okwadu and to the river bank for fresh fish. I would stare at the boats and ferries all over the river and people moving in different directions, doing their work or shopping. The river bank was clean despite the crowd and the business transactions.
The River Niger was the lifeline to many families. They fished in it for livelihood, some worked on the ferries which ferried cars back and forth from Onitsha to Asaba, that was before the bridge was built and opened. There was life on the River Niger and there were stories, legends about the Niger. There were stories of people who had actually seen mamiwata "mermaid" bathing in the river. When people drowned in the river, it was always assigned to mamiwta and her annual quota of humans. When the Niger bridge was going up, it was rumored that mamiwata demanded a number of human heads before the construction started. Such stories made children afraid to go too close to any body of water for fear of being one of mamiwata's victims.
Stories and discussions on bringing electricity to all the towns started popping up. The government was going to put a dam across the Niger River, very far away and use the force of the restrained water to generate electricity and every family would have electricity, just like the big cities. What a day it would be when that happened, people thought. Everywhere would be like obodo oyibo. Then reality set in, when people who understood what was about to happen started opposing it. People in Agriculture who understood what such a blocking would do to the fishing industry and to the market gardens which depended on the river, started opposing the building of the dam. There was a lot of talk about the Kainji dam, the pros and cons. It was in the newspapers and on the radio. I remember my father going to meetings and the protest letters. Being in Agriculture, people would come to him to explain to them what the problem was all about and he would draw a diagram illustrating the blockage in the river's path and how the flow would be reduced and eventually affect the river downstream and the river will no longer flood during rainy seasons and deposit nutrients for farmlands and there would be no fish to catch.
The opponents to the dam lost out and the construction of the dam started. Halfway into it, the effects were crystal clear. Although the ferries were not needed anymore because of the bridge, the fishermen lost out totally as the river shrunk back. Businesses on the riverfront almost died. Market gardens suffered and then the war started. After the war, people were too traumatized to realize that the River Niger was very sick, was only a shadow of her majestic self, with sand islands and bare receding banks.
Very sad story indeed. To learn recently that the Kainji dam and the eighty- two mile or is kilometer, lake around it was, and is not generating any electricity for the people is criminal, to say the least. The Kainji dam, in my opinion, has by itself destroyed the River Niger and should be given the title---- Ogbu -orimili 1 of Nigeria.
Next : Crossing the River Niger on a ferry on the way to Lagos. Quite an adventure from a child's view.
Chinwe Enemchukwu
Orlando, Florida
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