MY SOJOURN BY TONY EKATA (PART 11)

The first casualty of my father’s determination to send me to boarding school, come rain or shine, was his Singer sewing machine. Although he was no longer using it for business, he still kept it and it came in useful to patch our school uniforms and other attires when they needed to be repaired. As these were few and overused and we were very playful and showed them no respect, that was quite often. But something had to give when the terms’ fees needed to be paid. For boarding students then, it was 30 naira (about two rand, forty cents or ten US cents) per term while day students paid 10 naira per term. Yet some parents had to wipe sweat off their brows to get that. Mine, obviously, were in that category. The pressure was much because sometimes you were not allowed into the classroom or even the dining hall without proof that you had paid your school fees. So, off his precious sewing machine went for whatever flimsy amount he sold it to the lucky buyer.

To make ends meet, though they never ever met, he kept cultivating yam and making plots of farmland available for our mothers to cultivate cassava and melon. Incidentally, our Unohio farmland was on the Ubiaja axis. Once or twice a week, he would ride his bicycle to work at Ubiaja, ride it through Udo to the farm, do some farm work and ride back home through Eko-Idemudia, Ualor, Ebheibe and Afuda. He was literally riding in circles on his bicycle – all for our sakes. Weekends hardly existed for him. They were almost always spent on the farm.

My mother on her part offered whatever assistance was within her means. To complement my father’s efforts, she kept on harvesting her cassava and sold them raw or processed into garri to add some value before selling. Like a typical African woman, she would tie one of her younger children on her back and walk the long distance to and fro after washing her ripe and fermented melon in the farm which was later dried for sale and for domestic consumption. Sometimes, it would be a baby on her back and a basin of cassava on her head. The children (including me, during the holidays) helped out with farm work grudgingly. We would pray for rain to start falling before cockcrow which was the time we were often woken up to start going to the farm; so that we might be told to stay at home. What we did not know, or knew but cared less about, was the fact that each time rain fell and we stayed at home, we had more weed waiting to welcome us to the farm the next time we went there. But who could blame us? Our peers used their weekends and holidays to play soccer and other fun games and we were expected to spend ours with yam tendrils, thorns, the wickedly itchy devil beans (otue’e) and smelly fermented melon. It did not help either that we often left in the dark and walked through some lonely strips of the road to the farm before dawn, amidst the fear of witches and wizards holding their nocturnal meetings on top of some of the many big trees that littered the road to the farm. Owls were regarded as evil birds and we were scared of them. Sighting the shining eyes of an owl in the distance gave you goose bumps and made your head heavy. Such a spectacle was automatically interpreted to mean that a witch or wizard was waiting for you and sometimes we ran back to some house along the way and waited for daybreak or for a group of other adult farm-goers before proceeding