By Sunny Igboanugo
After my passing out from the orientation camp in Zaria, Kaduna State in November 1988, I had no place to call my own where I could lay my head.
Some of my friends in camp were lucky to get instant accommodation. But what I didn’t get in accommodation, I got in monetary terms. The company where I was posted for my primary assignment had no accommodation, but they paid handsomely in lieu. Ordinarily, it would have posed a problem. But it didn’t. Why? The Igbo culture took care of that. I didn’t have to think twice. There were several people from my community in the town.
I simply headed to the Nigerian Defence Academy, to the office of my town’s man, then a young lecturer at the premium military institution.
Of course, the visit was without warning. I neither wrote a letter nor telephoned him prior to that. I needed not to. The only credential and clearance I needed was that of our common affinity. We’re from the same community. Period.
On being informed that he had a Youth Corper visitor from his village, he left everything he was doing to meet and make me welcome. There and then, he took over. My welfare had become his responsibility from that moment.
Now, it didn’t matter that he was not my father. It didn’t even matter that we were not even blood relations. All that mattered was the aforesaid affinity. But he assumed the role of a father, elder brother, patron and mentor.
After making me welcome, he sent me straight to his house in Malali GRA, an exclusive area in Kaduna city. Again, on getting there, his wife, also an academic, who was on maternity leave, nursing a new baby took over. I was ushered into a guest room, which she personally prepared and made ready, despite the wide gap in age and status. Here was a PhD holder sweeping the room and making the bed for a lowly corper! For in Igbo land, you’re entitled to all other privileges a woman gives the husband outside her body.
I’m sure there was no communication between her and the husband. She didn’t even call to verify my identity. It was enough that this is my husband’s brother.
Immediately after freshning up and joining the rest of the young family in the living room, a hot delicious meal was on the table for me. It didn’t matter that this woman was already well established in the society. It didn’t matter that she was every bit a woman of class both in her personal achievement, her sheer elegance and other features that made her way out of my class.
In fact, for all it was worth, I could easily occupy the position of a servant in the house. That ought to be my place in terms of comparison.
But then that would have defeated the essence of a well-established and acceptable norm, the major characteristic that captures the life of the Igbo people – the doctrine of onye aghana nwanneya.
Of course, it’s only the Igbo that understand the full meaning of this expression because it’s far deeper than being your brother’s keeper, which it connotes.
Now, by the time I finished eating my meal, my role in the house had begun. As I sat on the sofa, she placed the newborn in my laps as she retired to other chores. I had become family. It was now my duty to ensure that I took care of other roles while she did her wifely duties, including cooking and waiting on me as part of her husband’s family, which also placed me in the position of her husband.
Now, this is the beautiful culture some people want to kill. Nowadays, my heading to the office of this lecturer and expecting him to harbour and care for me would have been interpreted as “entitlement mentality.” Yes! That is the new expression many people of today prefer to hide under to shirk the responsibility the society entrusts on them, especially in the Igbo environment, where it has singularly accounted for the quantum leaps the people have made, that have made them the envy of the rest of their compatriots in Nigeria and beyond.
Why should I have gone there? Was he my father? Did he owe me anything? Didn’t he have his responsibility? Where would he sacrifice his comfort for me? These and numerous others would have been the question many are wont to ask today. It would even have been worse that I should expect the wife to descend so low to wait on me, more or less wash the dishes thereafter.
But if that didn’t happen, I would have borne the grudges today and supposed ill-treatment therefrom would definitely have reached home and become a source of animosity between the two families at the extended level. Yes! That treatment under the Igbo culture is seen as a duty rather than a privilege.
Ironically, I’ve not paid back this treatment. I’m not expected to do so directly. I don’t even have to. They only expectation is for me to return the gesture to someone else. The only time it would become an issue is when I fail another person in such need.
Many people have been wondering how the igbo people recovered so quickly from the devastating effects of the civil war. This is one of the biggest factors. I came to Lagos in the mid 70s to witness it myself. I cannot count the number of people who came to crash in our one room house back then at 14 Uzor Street in Ajegunle. Some of them were traders who came to buy goods or sell things in Lagos, whose only hotel was our house. Some were applicants who came to look for jobs, others artisans who came to establish their individual trades. Some were actually people of means that would readily share and make their contributions to the financial needs while others were indigent and needed to be fed and taken care of to the level of even transport fares. Yet everyone ate from the same pot without complaints.
This was not peculiar to my brother. It was the standard. A popular trailer driver, was something else. His home, a two-room affair was the general rendezvous where virtually everyone converged. In fact it’s doubtful that a day would pass by without a new arrival at his, including those who sought him out for just fun, being a jolly good fellow.
Today, most of the millionaires in Lagos from my community could trace their success to that man’s house at the same Uzor Street in Ajegunle. It’s either they made it themselves or their children did.
As it was in Lagos, so it was in other places. You heard that one of your town’s men were living in Kano, you simply found your way to his house, sometimes with your last card and you got fixed up without questions. Surprisingly, it wouldn’t be that your host was so successful and had much to spare, or well-to-do. It’s just about the spirit of sharing. Sometimes, it’s the visitor that eventually hits it big and takes it from there.
Ironically, the “me and my family” synonym is being trumpeted as the new paradigm – a disruptive and dangerous trend that is practically asphyxiating an otherwise, plural, robust and thriving culture with mutation and multiplicity as the byproduct. Painfully, some Igbo people have joined in trumpeting the obviously distasteful and totally reprehensible mantra.
Today, even nuclear families are breaking down because a wife sees the husband’s family members as intruders and the house is usually set on fire because they detest breathing the same air with them not talk about sharing the same table.
Today, the wife of that generous trailer driver, is pampered like a matriarch with everyone kowtowing to her wishes with all those she gave food without grudges competing with each other and her children to please her. London today to take a rest, US tomorrow for medical checkup – long after the death of her husband.
Imagine a friend of mine, telling me that he wanted to send his younger sister home. Guess why? His pastor told him that since he was getting married, he needed no interference in his new life and that everyone had to give way so they could “study each other.”
Do you know that he bought into such infantile gibberish? And when I asked what he wanted to study in the woman he had been chopping regularly for years, only that they were not married, and why this should make him visit hardship on the sister, disrupting her education and why he wanted to burden the poor mother at home, hitherto relieved that a weight had been lifted off her weak shoulders, my friend declared me an enemy. The said wife stopped greeting me while my friend kept his distance.
That’s how our society is crumbling.
Meanwhile, it didn’t matter to my friend that one of the marks of success especially for a man is to take away some of the responsibilities of your parents including taking care of your siblings, relatives and even outsiders as much as you could.
Agreed that it doesn’t really work out all the time and many times, it has led to regrets, but is focusing on the negative outcomes a better option? At best, it’s a convenient way of living a lie.
In the last 24 hours or so since Wisdom Macaulay, accused his younger sister, Annie Macaulay-Idibia of neglect, which is really the essence of this intervention, you could hear many people screaming ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY on social media – a simple function of a mindset that is focused on mundane things – money, cars, houses rather than the more enduring elements of humanity – unity, care, love.
Apart from the initial shock, my next reaction watching that video, was pity. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to know that that man is in trouble. His restlessness and darting eyes bear the tell-tale signs of drug reactions of an addict.
So, what do you do with someone in that state? What would help such a situation – condemnation? Naaah!
What do you think would have made more sense – Annie going public to list all she did for him, from paying his house rents, buying pants for his wife and Christmas clothes for the children or Annie telling the same audience she addressed immediately that this is a family affair. Where I come from, there’s nothing you give your brother or sister that he or she doesn’t deserve or not entitled to. It’s like listing how much you gave to your parents.
But because she seemed to see her public status as more important and apparently due to wrong advise, she was quick to choose the former option. How sad!
She forgets that the same audience would be the one pointing to the same man if his condition degenerates to outright madness tomorrow, as “Annie’s brother” and making fun of her, thus hitting at the same image she seems too eager to protect.
So, to Annie, I say, it’s early yet. Pick up your brother, clean him up, pay for his rehabilitation in a good hospital and when he’s through, find him something to do. Also keep your eyes on him to ensure he doesn’t relapse. But above all, go on your knees to pray for him.
It’s too late to blame him at this period. The horse has already escaped from the stable. Drug addicts could do anything including killing people, which includes themselves.
Entitlement mentality is acceptable here. We’re not Oyibo. Yes! Wisdom is bad now. But, Wisdom is your blood, Wisdom is your brother, Wisdom is FAMILY! Good luck! Good luck! – The Tiny Voice!
• Igboanugo, a senior journalist, is the Publisher of Whirlwind News.