10 Sep 2006 |
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| The Man from Calabar By Reuben Abati I was in Calabar most recently. This is the town where I spent the more critical moments of my adolescent years. Every encounter with Calabar unlocks old memories; touches hidden aspects of the sub-conscious, it evokes for me a certain familiarity, a sense of home and place. When we got to Calabar in those days, we met houses with thatched roofs in the middle of the city; the streets were narrow passages; the side streets were for the most part, dusty entrances. To move about you needed to jump on the back of a commercial motorcycle. Long before the okada became a national phenomenon, it was there in Calabar as a means of popular transportation known variously as "Aka uke", "ala lok", "going?". Its only rival was the bicycle. Every morning you could see the local women riding bicycles to the farm carrying their baskets and hoes. We always wondered what the men did, with the women of Calabar working so hard to keep the family together. My father who had taken me to school there, had remarked that the people were unusually friendly. He joked endlessly about old Calabar women who wore nice skirts, dabbed their faces with powder, with some even wearing make up. Old men dressed smartly too, and to show friendship, they saluted any man they thought was older, like my father for example. "Welcome to our country" , the people greeted us. My father wondered if they thought we foreigners. But the truth is that even at that time, the people, being minorities, felt marginalised in the Nigerian arrangement. I recall the Orons alleging Oronphobia, and the Annangs greeting each other so militantly: "Annang nma!". I remember the cultural festivals: the Ekpe, the Ekpo, the Akata and the various rites with Bacchanal flavour. But the cuisine was truly delightful. We ate afang, edikang ikon, afia efere, ekpang nkukwo or vegetable, all tasting as if they had been mixed with honey. Even the poorest persons in the community ate well; if you went to a restaurant and asked for more soup, you brought a smile to the lips , and got generous scoops, not a murderous bill asking you to pay for every drop of oil as was done in Lagos and elsewhere, not a scowl which you were sure to get if you tried that in Benin. But "Calabar man like enjoyment no be small". We imitated their linguistic variations, and tonal, syncopated manner of speaking. "Man mus enyoy" ; " Ete, abadie, my bodi e dey inside yaket." "Da, tomorrow I go Okoya to see my friends and drink yampion"... Living among the people, we soon found out that there was a lot more to them than the myths about beautiful women, the cuisine and the fact of the area having contributed a larger number of househelps and cooks to the Nigerian service industry. You could follow a Calabar man or woman home and feel safe. In those huts, you would find a neatly kept surrounding, and you could have a decent meal. In the more privileged homes, you would not necessarily eat tastier meal. It was if everybody in Cross River was trained to cook and entertain visitors. Life in Calabar was without stress; I remember some persons complaining that their homes were burgled. And what was stolen? Food items! These were very friendly people, at home with strangers, living a totally uncomplicated life. The only thing that they feared was any form of domination by larger groups especially Ibos who were beginning to take up residence in Calabar in large numbers. The people's hospitality, their love of order has often been attributed to their early contact with the white man. My father's theory is that the weather should be held responsible: rains all year round, abundance of game in the forests, enough land to be cultivated by a small population; rivers bursting with fish and other aquatic food, with beautiful women in the community and men with extra-ordinary libidos - these are likely to produce a people with a sober outlook, and their hospitality seems given since they do not lack enough food to give outsiders. Military rule served the people badly, the civil war bruised them, the development of the area was arrested due to Nigeria's peculiar politics, but this did not rob the people of their humanity. When I visited recently, I was struck by the efforts that are being made, through public sector-private sector partnership to optimise the people's natural potentials, to develop an environment that encourages business and tourism. I did not see rocket science at work but pure common sense. The people love nature. So, the streets of Calabar and its environs have been fitted out with trees and beautiful flowers, giving the town a lovely scent and appearance. The people are naturally clean, so a campaign for environmental sanitation has turned Calabar into probably the cleanest city in Nigeria. There are no heaps of pure water sachets on the streets, no mounds of dirt. You are not likely to find a man or woman relieving his bowels by the road side, spitting into your face, or carrying a hot bowl of shit across the road. While in Calabar, I used to wonder whether some of the women ever went to toilet. They looked too clean, too beautiful to do anything that smelly. When I began to complain about too much pepper in my mother's soup and the lack of variety in the things we ate, my father decreed that I would not be allowed to go back to Calabar nor would I be allowed to marry a Calabar woman! He said I was beginning to show too much interest in food. In those days, we drank a kind of pinkish palm wine called "mmin efik". Night life was rich. The pepper soup was good. Today, the hospitality business thrives in Calabar. The city is being branded around its traditions. I know people who travel to Calabar with the hope that they will experience all the myths about the area as lived experience. Many Nigerians seek out Ibibio, Efik, and Annang, efut, efik, and atam dishes the same way they crave Chinese cuisine. Edikang Ikon in particular has become a national icon. The women of Calabar have been immortalised forever in a play by Elechi Amadi titled "The Woman of Calabar". Sadly, though, references to the Calabar woman are often sexist, and denigrating as represented by a joke on the MTN network, currently making the rounds which says: "Behind every successful Benin woman there is a satisfied man but behind every satisfied Calabar woman, there is an exhausted man". The women of Calabar won't like this certainly. Calabar today, is a city where a nexus has been created between social development and the people's culture, with an accent on general ownership. In many of our states, crisis results, the spectre of alienation is created because of the dissonance between the people's character and expectations. TINAPA is perhaps the loudest expression of this marriage of project and tradition. It is conceived as a miniaturised version of Dubai, an export duty free zone, covering a wide expanse of land, close to the Cross River, a few minutes away from the airport, on the right as you enter Calabar from the Ikot Ansa direction, before you get to the city gate, where there is a broad stone marker which tells you proudly: "This is Calabar". TINAPA is named after a tin fish of the same name which was popular among the people in the past. It was imported from Portugal and although the poor could not afford it, they composed songs about it. It stands for class, taste and sophistication. It now exists as a tourism dream land comprising emporiums, shopping centres, entertainment arcades, a 600-bedroom hotel, an artificial lake that opens into the river, warehouses and a 10 km mono-rail that is directly linked to the airport, joined together in a seamless fashion, involving landscape, nature and design. We were taken to TINAPA by a tour guide who regaled us with the story of Calabar. And I wondered: a tour guide in Nigeria? Being a tour guide to visitors is a growing industry that is managed by the Cross River State Bureau of Tourism. I met another guide on the way to the Obudu Cattle Ranch, a confident young man from Becheve in Obalinku local government area in Northern Cross River who spoke English with a local tint, but whose mastery of his assignment and the joy with which he told his tale is all that I remember. He too had been trained, and so as we travelled from the Bebi airstrip, where Aero contractors has a fully staffed desk, he gave the life history of every village along the way, pointing out the parts where Cross River merges with Benue state. At a point, we were told that the road on which we travelled could be divided between Benue and Cross River states. The confusing character of boundaries even in this remote part offered a graphic explanation of the reason for boundary clashes in Nigerian communities. Obudu Cattle Ranch had been there, over time. It was set up by the colonial missionaries but we knew it as a place in Obudu, up the mountains where cattle was grazed, in a foreign, temperate weather and holiday makers could hire a room for the night. The Obudu Ranch has now being transformed beyond its beginnings into an amazing holiday resort in the Southern heart of the country, at a height that is over 5,000 feet above sea level where the weather is so cold you would need winter jackets, and a fire place, to keep warm. At the ranch, the old has given way to the new. At the foot of the mountains is a water park for holiday makers and a cable car system which takes you into the sky, on suspended ropes, on a 15 minutes journey to the Ranch. The attraction of the ranch is the thrill of adventure that it offers. But if you have high blood pressure, be careful. Inside the cable car, suspended in the middle of the sky, it was scary looking down at the deep valleys below. If you travelled up the mountains in a vehicle, you must be armed with prayers, the bends are sharp and convoluted; any wrong turn, the vehicle and its passengers could end up in the belly of the valley. The Ranch promised even greater excitement: the walkway made up of net ropes which dangled as you walked along, threatening to snap or throw you into the jungle below, where you had been told some baboons were sighted recently and a leopard had been killed in the past. There is the grotto, a trip down the belly of the earth where you end up surrounded by nature in its purest form. The expansion of the Ranch includes the building of a Presidential retreat, a full-scale Presidential camp carved out of the hills in a picturesque manner. A ziggurat leads to the Presidential villa, a place fit only for kings and gods, a helicopter pad, a conference centre, houses for the President's security and guests, and down the hill, expressionistic guest houses for any holiday maker who feels like getting away from it all. I loved the spread of nature, the intimations of the artistry of God, the fresh air, the fresh milk from the farm, the honey from the honey factory on the Ranch, the lovely food provided by Protea Hotel which manages the guest houses. We met indigenous communities on that great height, including one exotic looking fellow, looking like he was a hundred years old. His name: Mountain!. We ran into families there who had travelled from as far away as Lagos and Abuja, to relax and commune with nature: oil company executives, the children of judges, students etc. I returned to Lagos to find that the trees lining the roadside on the way to the International Airport were being cut down. It seemed to me as if a human being had been beheaded. "Who ordered that those trees should be cut please?", I ask. Living in the city we tend to lose sight of nature and its wondrous gifts. In Obudu, Calabar and elsewhere in rural Nigeria, the Almighty still talks to the people from mountain tops, and through rivers that flow from the heart of rocks, landscapes that look like a piece of Heaven, vegetation that lifts the spirit, and encounters that purify the soul. Those who will not build cities, should not desecrate them. The cutting of the trees on the way to the airport in Lagos, must stop, now.
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