By Sunny Awhefeada
I do not know if Christmas is anticipated in the same manner around the world. My experience of the festival woven around the birth of Jesus Christ has so far been triangular, mutating with age, location and exposure. My earliest memories of Christmas took roots in Ibadan in the early part of the Second Republic. We looked forward to the season with unquantifiable joy. The event that kicked off the Christmas mood was the end of the first term examination in the second week of December. The stress of examination yielded space for the leisure and beautiful expectations of the season of celebration.
As children, we attached no spiritual content to the idea of Christmas, but we were conscious of the story of Angel Gabriel, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. We heard of Jerusalem and Bethlehem as the carols mentioned them again and again. We would think about new clothes, new shoes, specially prepared dishes especially rice and stew exuding memorable aroma! We also looked forward to the visit to the zoological garden at the University of Ibadan. We attended a few Christmas carols and the radio and television regaled us with us “jingle bells” and “odun lo so pin ooo Baba mimo” and others that made it unmistakable that Christmas was in the air. Christmas day saw us receiving dishes and also giving out same. We would visit neighbours, known and unknown, and we returned home richer with monetary gifts. Ibadan was and still is a big town and Christmas took on different colours and rhythms. Those memories remain indelible.
Relocating from Ibadan to Evwreni threw up a new reality of Christmas. We lived in the staff quarters of a teachers’ training college that was far flung from the hurly-burly of town. The staff quarters was nothing like Oke-Ado in Ibadan. We were surrounded by trees and tall grasses that threw us back to the primordial. Since we were isolated from the hustle and bustle of the town, Christmas there was not a loud experience. Its colour and rhythm were also toned down, but the college annually organized thrilling Christmas carols.
Although not comparable with Ibadan, we had our own share of the fun that came with the season. We also looked forward to new clothes, rice and stew and other such merriments that the locale offered. The eve of Christmas would see everybody in the quarters going to the residence of the most elderly man around for a get together, which we called watch night, during which ukodo was served. We would remain there until the big clock chimed 12 midnight and we would all scream “happy Christmas!” We organized masquerade dances and we made sure that those of us dancing were not recognized, but my cousins recognized me on one occasion and screamed “see Sunny”. We received cash gifts as we performed. We enjoyed all of the season of Christmas in our own way. But one year, the beauty of that experience got shattered and what we had on our hands young as we were was the ugliness of the reality of untimely death.
Two days to the Christmas of 1984, an accident which shook the staff quarters happened just a few kilometres away. It involved a teacher and the husband of another teacher both of whom were resident in the staff quarters. When word came in that both men died in the accident the conclusion if not consensus among the staff was that both men were “killed for Christmas” by witches and wizards in their families! The story gained traction and it frightened us children no end. The quarters mourned. There was no Christmas for us that year. The food was tasteless and there were neither gatherings nor movements. No child wore new clothes. We were all frightened. We heard more stories that witches and wizards usually “kill” promising people during Christmas and that was why many people die around the time especially through road accidents. What further scared us the most were stories that a popular prophet identified the killers of one of the dead during the burial. So it was true, after all! Our young and innocent souls had thought. From that moment our conception of Christmas as a period of celebration got altered. We began seeing Christmas as a season of apprehension. I think three years later the father of a schoolmate also died by accident on the same road and the story was the same. The witches and wizards “ate” him for Christmas. Our apprehension doubled. It was that year that a Pentecostal group visited our household and not only preached to us but asked us to pray against death and other misfortunes that characterized Christmas and end of year. I was scared! Christmas then lost its thrills and it took another eleven years for me to break free of that Christmas and end of year apprehension. I came to realize that people die every day for different reasons and the death rate was high in December because there were more vehicular movements.
I do not know how my folks in the staff quarters at Evwreni would have received the news of the death of between sixty and one hundred people in four days just before this year’s Christmas! The deaths took place in Ibadan, Okija and Abuja. Would they have ascribed the deaths to witches and wizards or seen it from a rational point of view as a consequence of the acute poverty and extreme hunger to which many years of wrongheaded policies and corruption have plunged us? The dead, whether they were sixty seven or one hundred, died in the stampede to benefit from charity. The locations: Ibadan, Okija and Abuja, only indicate that the condition of endemic poverty and unimaginable hunger which necessitated the charity that brought death upon these people is pervasive and not restricted to just an area or zone. Poverty stalks the North as it walks on all fours in the South. If the people were not poor and hungry, it would have been beyond their dignity to go and queue for food. Come what may, they would have been able to afford their needs just like their more fortunate compatriots. Sadly, more than one hundred million Nigerians go to bed hungry not because they are fasting. They hunger because the system has pauperized them. So whenever they hear that a “good Samaritan”, a Non-Governmental Organization or a church was given out free food they thronged such places in their numbers hoping to grab something to take home to dry and empty kitchens. That was what happened in those three locations where the victims were driven to death by hunger.
Those who have been ruling Nigeria since 1999 are aware of the parlous condition of the common man, but they have deliberately refused to remedy the situation. Thus year in year out despite the humungous amount budgeted for the affairs of state, the condition of the people continue to get worse as they recede into the dehumanizing zone of poverty. One of the South-South states once gave us a weeping governor who cried over the poor condition of the people he was elected to serve. Despite entertaining us with the grandiloquence of budget presentation the state under his watch was stuck in the cesspool of poverty. What happened to that state is reflective of the lot of Nigeria and Nigerians. The indices of our underdevelopment are scary and many still think that we have not seen anything. The present regime rode into office under the ruse of “renewed hope”, but what the drivers of the regime threw at us has been hopelessness if not those who died in the food stampede preceding the Christmas would not have died. As the dead undergo requiem rites Nigeria and Nigerians appear solemn and held down by the buffetings of a bad economy, anxiety and uncertainty! The shouts of “merry Christmas” are muffled and unheard. But all we can say in consolation is, it is well!
