To the Bringer of English
Nearly twenty years ago, I encountered an elderly retired teacher in Amawbia, my hometown in southeastern Nigeria. Eyes gleaming, he asked how I—whom he’d known as an often unfocused child—became an author.
It was a familiar question, and I had a ready-made answer. My mother was a retired schoolteacher who offered two options for penance when I misbehaved: a caning or a book. Gradually, as the story goes, I’d come to prefer the latter, becoming an absorbed reader, then a writer.
He patiently heard me out, then said in a knowing air: “Let me tell you how you became a writer. You became a writer because your grandfather was the first person to bring English to our town.”
“How so?” I said.
“Go and ask.”
*
I never met you, grandfather. You died ten years before my parents married, twelve before I was born. When you visit me in my dreams, your face is an older, scarred version of your first grandchild’s, my older brother. It was Aunt Eleti, your only daughter, who declared years ago that my brother didn’t just resemble you; he was a revenant, a reincarnated you.
But then why was I bestowed with your facility in the British colonizer’s language, while my older brother—your supposed reincarnation—became a medical doctor? Perhaps the elderly teacher was onto something in giving me marching orders. I couldn’t take these questions to my father, who had by then passed away, so I went to Uncle Ochendo, his immediate younger brother, to ask about you.
To my double fortune, Aunt Eleti happened to be visiting Uncle Ochendo that day, and a debate ensued between them. My aunt affirmed you were the first in our town to speak English; my uncle laughed off the notion.
“What do you know? You’re Itibolibo!” he teased her.
Itibolibo is a sometimes playful, sometimes slashing epithet for an illiterate person. Aunt Eleti howled with laughter, taking the ribbing in stride. In the fashion of her time, she had married early and not received even the most rudimentary formal education.
The three of us sat in my uncle’s living room, which was bathed in sunlight, the air hot and tinged with the aroma of ripe fruits. As my uncle began recounting your sagas, I listened, astounded by the stories I’d never heard.
*
Early in the 20th century, a strange party of white British merchants, accompanied by their retinue of Black servants, made a sensational appearance in Amawbia. At the time, Britain was consolidating her aim to meld some three hundred ethnic groups into the behemoth named Nigeria.
These Englishmen were early exploiters of a booming trade in timber. They had a mission: to recruit strong young men to saw wood. The work was to be done in a vast rainforest that bordered a network of creeks whose waters merge into rivers which in turn empty themselves into the Atlantic Ocean near Nigeria’s southernmost tip.
Most of your peers steered clear of the sun-slapped, pink-fleshed strangers who sought recruits from Amawbia. But not you, grandfather. Along with a handful of fellow adventurers, you took up the merchants’ offer.
You were young and fearless, known for your agility as a wrestler, perhaps also restless and keen for new experiences. Once, at a festival in your town, you challenged a famous wrestler to a fight. Daunted, he asked that the match be postponed for a day, to which you replied, “But why not today?” Friends went on to call you Kaodiechi, a nickname that translates to: “Let it be tomorrow.”
I wonder—how did the English strangers win your trust? You who were reputed to be a cheerful, sunny fellow, did you see them as kindred spirits? Did you imagine, with youthful naivety, that life with the merchants would be full of excitement?
At the time, there were few, if any, motorable roads. To reach the work site, you and the rest of the band had to trek close to 150 miles, sometimes on footpaths that traversed thickly forested land. No question, you had the stamina for the bruising journey—and for the brutal demands of hewing wood.
No sooner did you arrive in the timber-rich delta than you were disabused of any illusions of your employers’ good-heartedness. They proved to be cruel taskmasters. To the British, you were just another disposable Black body, no more or less than a beast of burden. They fully expected you to be immune to tiredness and sickness. If you were ever fatigued from long hours of harsh labor, they saw it as clear proof of indolence. It infuriated them, and they lashed out with whips. As you strained at the saw, your bare back was exposed to relentless scourging.
Quickly, you and your cohorts set a date to flee hell and head homeward. But you fell ill, unable to make the torturous trek. For weeks, your relatives awaited your return, in vain. They surmised you were dead, and held a burial, as their tradition demanded. In place of your body, the earth received the stump of a plantain tree. A week or two later, you sauntered back to Amawbia.
“I wonder what it cost you to pluck each puzzling new word, the price you paid in welts on your back.”
Your appearance was a terrible omen, an anomaly. Your people believed—believe—that ghosts co-exist with humans, but ghosts are by nature invisible, never embodied. That was why kids fled at the sight of you. Adults stood aside trembling, their backs turned to you. Nobody dared speak to you, grandfather; the living and the dead did not hold each other in dialogue.
When you finally arrived at your parents’ home, they did not rush out to hug you, nor did they usher you into their hearth. A riot of shifting emotions must have beat in their hearts—great joy at your return, dread that the rites of internment might prove impossible to reverse, a cold fear that, perhaps, you had shambled home to dislodge the stand-in stump and claim your grave. They signalled to you to stand outside, waiting. Finally, they sent for a dibia, a traditional healer and priest, to officiate a rite of cleansing.
The ceremony called for peppers and a young, unblemished chick. With the chick, the dibia touched different parts of your body. As he did, he chanted petitions to the gods, beseeching them to let the chick assume all the aberration of a ghost materialized as human. He threw dried hot peppers at you, invoking their abrasive potency. Then he ordered the digging of a new grave. The chick and peppers were swept into the new grave, along with a fresh stump. The dibia implored the earth to accept the new offering in reparation for you—who had now been “exhumed.”
You might have become infamous forever for this rare spectacle—a “spirit” re-humanized. But you had returned, Uncle Ochendo disclosed, with a magical new skill. During your time with the abusive British merchants, you had memorized some of the pejoratives they flung at hapless Black workers. Each evening, a small crowd would gather at your home, curious to hear you “speak” the white man’s tongue. You, ever cheeky and gregarious, would oblige them. In your heavy accent and mangled pronunciation, you voiced choice British-made insults to entertain your audience. Scallywag became sukaliwagi, nincompoop turned into ninicompoopoo, bloody fool incarnated as buladi foolu, bastard emerged as basutardi, stupid was reborn as sutupidi, idiot as idiotu.
Thus sprung your reputation as the pioneer bringer of English to Amawbia. I wonder what it cost you to pluck each puzzling new word, the price you paid in welts on your back. Your recitation of English epithets brought laughter to your townsfolk. Was it also your peculiar revenge, a way of wielding a linguistic whip against those who, while acting savagely, proclaimed themselves bringers of civilization?
There’s a good reason I’m in awe of you, grandfather. Though tormented by the imperious, brutish British, you refused to cede the last word to them. Your words and exploits remain alive in my heart, in the hearts of many others. In short, they defy the grave.
I came to believe the schoolteacher’s assertion that your anguish at the hands of Englishmen—and the boon of language you wrested from them—somehow prefigured and irrigated my writing life. Perhaps you have indeed chosen me to transcribe and flesh out your story. And so my ears are attuned, ready to pick up what you may whisper from across the wide valley of time that separates and connects us. I must stay alert, for I have much to learn when next you visit my dreams.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain; a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye; and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has taught at universities including St. Lawrence University, Brown University, Trinity College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). He was a 2015 Shearing Fellow of the Black Mountain Institute (BMI) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was an editorial writer for the Hartford Courant, and has written for publications including the New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, Financial Times, and D La Repubblica.
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Header photo courtesy of USGS.
