Heritage
I come from a town called Okene. My people are called “ebira”. Okene is a rocky place, the terrain. Someone once suggested that there are bound to be volcanoes; that the magma underneath the land is the swirling, temperamental type. He says it is a miracle we don’t have eruptions, that maybe there have been sacrifices made by our ancestors that have quietened the rocks and sent them to sleep.
The interesting thing about places like Okene is that you have to get creative with architecture. You’d go visit an aunt and her perfectly normal semi detached has a mushroom of granite burgeoning at the side of it, just there, an ad-hoc piece of modern art, provided by nature. And the roads are the winding kind you see in black and white movies, where there’s a car chase on the outskirts of a town in Italy. My grandmother’s house was perched on such a hill. Going to visit her, the car — a little matchbox thing filled with my loved ones and the smell of sardine and egg sandwiches with too much margarine — would inch up the curly road, getting higher and higher, with nothing to stop us falling to our deaths below. Once, when we came into town at night I had the courage to look down for a brief moment. Underneath us the town was lit up, bright sparks blinking among the dark hills and foliage. It was beautiful; the profound kind is always a little tinged with fear, or intimidation.
Ebira means behaviour. If you wanted to commend someone with a pleasant personality you would say they have good “ebira”. Yet, other tribes see my people as vicious and combative. Unlike the rumours of volcanoes, the temperament hype leans toward truth, something in the blood. The contradictions don’t end there. It seeps into the names, like a man can be called Okateun — the strong, and the woman, Ohunene — the gentle, or variations of the same. This used to seem like wishful thinking to me, some kind of romantic delusion, or even slightly misogynistic. But now I imagine that the men are like the proud rocks dotting the land, and the women the gentle breeze that blows over it.
When I left home I created a new tribe for myself, an abstract allegorical one that I have never truly left. My people read Haruki Murakami and drink too much coffee. They are liberal humanists who don’t ever feel like they fit in and are always nostalgic and sad missing something that doesn’t really exist. Museums and cafes and libraries are their hometowns and their anthems are rock songs that they often cry to in the middle of the night when things get too much. These little things became more me than that small rocky place called Okene. But then I came home.
Looking at this fractured country through the prism of all the lost things and broken relationships, all the boys who could not love me back or completely because I was the wrong religion or tribe I see a bigger, more universal contradiction. Love should conquer everything but it very often doesn’t. We stay apart. All my ideals, my heritage, my blood, would I give them up for a greater good, like marriage, like national unity — should I invest in hard reality or the world that can be created?
It is a myth that there are volcanoes in Nigeria or in Okene for that matter, the rocks, as perilous as they seem are purely aesthetic, what lies underneath isn’t fire but iron. But I like the idea that our ancestors would have made a sacrifice, so the future generation may amble unencumbered over the land, free.
