THE MAGIC OF CHILDHOOD.
At christmas,in my hometown of Okija, when the sky
must have been lit up gloriously in a dazzling
splendour,the moon and stars would assemble in a
powerful unison to gossip about the earth in the
crescent of the night.
The breeze not so powerful but cool enough would
wound up its pedantry.
Grandmother would assemble us-my siblings,cousins
and I to a sensational time of powerful narration.
She would tell us a handful of stories enough to
quench my curiosity for the night__genealogy and
folktales were all she got.
The tortoise and his mischievous escapades takes
the frontline in folktales. She had once told me of the
proverbial traveler to distant places who must not
cultivate enmity on his route too. Recently,she
released that of an orphan fed grudgingly by a cruel
foster mother and often denied the udala fruit. But
the spirits so benign threw down for her in bounty,
the fruits once she sang to the tree of her plight and
misery when she visited the bush. One of my
favorite stories featured Ojadili the legendary
wrestler who had beaten the spirits one after the
other at different locations,and had laughed at them
a mirthless laughter when he was on a quest in the
spirit land.
I liked the good fare,the resultant gayness and
briskness that came from it. I liked most of all, that in
this shared space of Africanness I could sit and enjoy
effortlessly stories incarnated with an assemblage of
impossible excellencies and told with a new
freshness and local flavor of an aged mother.
I had known Ugoo Mkpa all through my life in the
ancient town of Onitsha in those days but they left
when we were in primary four for Enugu.
Ugoo was fairer,taller and stronger quite frankly. We
played detective in games and crime scenes,looked
for troubles and teamed up in fights.
He taught me how to harvest vegetables from
farms,how to weed,how to climb especially paw-paw
trees. These were because he was as well older. We
rolled tyres,wheels,tubes,boyless,played acrobatics
on sands,cooked raw rubbish,went topless and bare-
footed,made catapults and guns from cassava
stem,made flutes with paw-paw stalk.
But we were good children and went on errands.
My childhood was bereft of luxury and affluence,that
we wore our poverty and smallness of our lives like
camwoods drawn nicely on our bodies with perfect
curves and linings. We wore it like logo.
But yet,my childhood of poverty,of countless
playtimes and ceaseless stories,of beans and
mangoes that lay balmy in my stomach always,of
seasoned laughter,was not baseless.
It was unique,something close to magic.
I had sometimes considered them as mysteries of
toddlership.
We lived concretely.
More now than ever before,I have seen children with
absolutely no knowledge of folk tales,no genealogy of
their family. Children with their childhood set free
from every primordial hardship at the cost of their
moral worth.
I feared most all whether they'll have any story to tell
their children.
The 21st century Nigerian Igbo wealthy parents,lock
their children upstairs,dissociates them from their
folks,tell them no stories,then take them to village
once in a decade. Inturn,they take them to summer
holidays in Bahamas,takes them to fanciful places
and eateries.
They become children with no knowledge of whom
they are,lack peers,lack stories,lack experiences.
They lack their identity and heritage and most of all
live in the creasing mess of life their parents had
imagined and created for them,it would never be
funny playing the role.
It would be much better to allow the children an
integral toddlership,while they are grown,they can
make a distinguished choice for their mode of living.
My cap up for my mothers-revels,such distinguished
tutors for my childhood of plays and stories, with a
such glorious flourish.
Help breach the flow of unafricanness in children
when you become a parent.
Such will rob a child of the joys and magic of
childhood.
I love Africa!
#my_Africa_of_folktales!
