“Let the Tiv come”, was the immediate answer from Ulari’s father to her mother.
By Lechi Eke
George Ugorji, Ulari’s father had said to Fiberesima, ‘Let the Tiv come!” His wife, Ulari’s mother thought she knew what was playing out when she observed her husband’s reception of the general, the emissary from “the Northerner.” Over the years, Ori suspected her husband’s dissatisfaction with the subtle prejudice in the east. There was this faint but certain cooling of interaction amongst men his age grade when matters of tradition arose. He was subtly treated as an outcast. Most times his name was dropped from the list of those who should gather when serious traditional decisions were to be made. And he felt more at home in the city, like the Enyimba, than in the countryside, in the village, where traditionally, Igbos spend the holiday seasons like Christmas, Easter, New Yam festival, August meetings, and so forth. One or two times, he had let it drop casually that he would love to travel, to see the world, to live in other places. But he married a local-hearted woman who was satisfied living among her own people.
However, George, it seemed, secretly longed for foreign places and strange people; he also loved people of power like Fiberesima. Secretly, he longed for people his age who knew not his genealogy. So, when Fiberesima arrived in his home fully attired in Nigerian Army regalia, and he listened to the story he brought, George began to think, this might be God’s answer to his deep unexpressed heart’s desire.
The following, is the story Ulari Ruth Ugorji could not tell her suitor, Benjamin Nguuma Torkular.
The story she could not tell him
George Ugorji came from a long way – from a place where two cultures met, two races; from shame and bewilderment and disgrace. On October 1, 1936, a day that would later become the Independence Day of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a baby named George was born to no family at all. He was conceived of a teenage high school girl named Ulari Ruth Okpo and sired by a white colonial master working with the British Railways (BR) Aba. Both biological parents were unhappily unmarried and neither knew the exact where-about of the other at the time of George’s birth.
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Little George arrived in the world with a skin colour that was against him and a birth circumstance that was not in his favour. He was worse than an orphan being a bastard at a time there were not many bastards; in a world where loose-living was a taboo and, in a city, where single parenthood was unacceptable except by misfortune of death. Divorce was not only non-existent but unimaginable. Marriage was ‘until death do us part’. Everything was against George and his mother. They literally lived on the street until the Catholic nuns of Christ the King Church (CKC) came to their rescue.
George’s mother’s father, Mr Desmond Okpo, when asked by some concerned individuals why he allowed his daughter to suffer so much, had replied, “So, she’d learn that loose-living does not pay.”
“What about your grandson?”
“I’ve no grandson yet. The child should also learn that hastiness doesn’t pay; he came too early,” he would reply.
Miss Ulari Okpo’s father was one of the affluent men of his time, a rare personality- he worked with the white man! That in itself was a great achievement. Mr Desmond Okpo was one of the few educated Nigerians east of the Niger. He was very good at book-keeping and so was employed by the British Railways in the office of the Chief Accountant as an accounts clerk.
Mr Okpo owned the sharpest ride of his time: a white bicycle called the ‘White Horse’. He was also the flashiest dresser in town. He owned five pairs of khaki shorts, one for each working day so that they would keep clean and, five white linen shirts. All clothes, always starched and well-pressed with charcoal iron. At weekends he would go native, wearing his impeccable white singlet upon his ‘plain george’ wrapper tied around his thick waist on Saturdays. On Sundays, since he never went to church, he would adorn himself in flowing gold-button male velvet gown over a pair of khaki shorts loosely covered with colourful george wrapper. A helmet-like bowler hat and a walking stick as accessories would complete his dressing and off, he would go, to visit those of his kinsmen with lifestyles agreeable to him. He was a very dressy fellow by the standard of his day and by reason of being neatly turned out all the time. He also owned real leather shoes with knee-length socks and sandals made of burned rubber and animal hide. His posts came with Desmond Okpo Esquire. He was a respectable man.
Mr Desmond Okpo never drank, smoked pipe nor used snuff. He had little patience with those who did and with shiftless freeloaders. Since he had little or no patience with many people, he kept to himself to avoid stirring up his adrenalin. When he did, it took quite a while to settle down and when it settled, it usually left what wise folks called ‘root of bitterness’. This never went away. Mr Okpo was an unforgiving man. Nevertheless, he had a soft spot – he loved the white man. He was a great admirer and imitator of the white man and had the singular good fortune of living amongst them in reserved quarters of his city.
His family was small; his living quarters clean and peaceful, beautified with flowers. He had only five children at a time his kinsmen were having a dozen per wife and polygamy thrived. Mr Okpo believed in one man one wife just like his masters. He was a very diligent man which endeared him to his employers. To him, only jobless and slothful persons pestered God with requests; he believed in hard work and not in prayers. His philosophy was, serve God by doing your job well. Mr Alan, the Chief Accountant of British Railways, believed so too and thought Desmond a good man. So, he offered him his Boys’ Quarters where his cook/gardener was to live. When Mr Alan left and Mr Ashby came, he was magnanimous enough to let the Okpos stay on for it gave him company and a sense of security. Especially, company for their first daughter was very tall and beautiful and had just started sprouting breasts when he arrived. And Mr Ashby was young and lonely, his wife having declined coming to live in Africa because of the climate and the menace of mosquitoes.
Miss Ulari was Mr Desmond Okpo’s lovely first child and Mr Ashby cast his eyes on her. A promising young woman but no one taught her the way. So, she derailed.
Young Ulari Okpo, (Ulari Ugorji’s paternal grandma) ran errands for her mother. From the age of twelve she had become her mother’s field man. And that was her undoing. Mrs Nnenna Okpo made fashionable clothes for the enlightened community of European Quarters (EQ) and the working class of Aba; a class of people so few you could number them on your fingers and toes. She enjoyed good patronage and could hardly keep up with clientele demands. This was good for the whole family. They afforded things the average family could not afford. This transported them to the middle class. Their first child was in high school, a rare feat.
Young Ulari Okpo was too free running errands that sometimes she had free unaccountable time on her hands when she could be anywhere – without anybody knowing where she was or what she was doing. And it was not of any particular interest to her parents.
Mr Colin Ashby, the new Chief Accountant, (everyone referred to him as ‘new’ although it had been three years he took over from Mr Allan) watched her growth unknown to the literate community of EQ. He was an affable man especially to his squatters, the Okpos, for they paid no rent and could not be regarded as tenants.
Ashby had confessed his fondness for Africans. The Igbo man interested him, he said, and according to him, he loved the Igbo cuisine. It had started with a simple request. Mr Ashby came over to the BQ (Boy’s Quarters), admired Mrs Nnenna Okpo’s couture and expressed amazement at her talent. Then he gave a whooping one shilling for Mrs Okpo to make him an Igbo soup. What exactly, she wanted to know. Mr Ashby had no particular choice. Anything, he had replied. So, Mrs Okpo made him the ợha soup with dried catfish and the highly tasty smoked bush-meat, nchi. She spiced it with uziza leaves and garnished it with mortar-beaten egusi or melon balls to be eaten with the fluffy yam Nnenna herself pounded.
Young Ulari was sent to deliver it. In her words, Mr Ashby “loved the aroma” of the ợha soup. And he was supposedly delighted with the taste. He gave young Ulari half a shilling which delighted her mother so much so that another day she cooked unrequested. Sometimes, she would cook with her own money and send to him. She was observant enough to note that when she sent Ulari’s siblings to her landlord, Mr Ashby, they came back with nothing or pennies. But with Ulari, a shilling or half almost always followed her back. In one occasion, two!
Then, came the day Mr Colin Ashby’s groping hands found Miss Ulari’s body. She had taken some cooked pumpkin seeds to the big house for the white man.
“Come, my bonnie lass,” he said in a lust-laden voice. “Take me into you and imprison me forever. Ever will I be chaste until you ravish me.”
By constantly sending her daughter, Mrs Nnenna Okpo inadvertently pushed her into the lonely arms of the sex-starved white man, her interest being partly monetary and partly egoistic. The mere fact that she related with the expatriate Chief Accountant to the degree of cooking for him was a story she relished telling – to the envy of her friends, family and clients.
The cooking and the sending continued. Unknown to her mother, Mr Ashby would draw Ulari close to himself drawling, “Come hither, bright star, inside my blood factory and make it spring. Let me in, let me in until the rocks melt. So deep in love am I and I’d love you still.” Some days he would say to her, “Come my bonnie lass, let’s see who’s taller today, you or I.” Then, he would press her to himself, pinch her fanny and breathe down heavily on her face rubbing his thickened shorts’ front on her upper belly. Some other days he would make her sit hard on his laps until his pole shudder and spurt and become limp.
As Mrs Okpo mindlessly continued to send Ulari, the young girl began to look forward to these errands. The white man had begun to awaken in her, feelings. He gave her E.E. Cummings poem- ‘She being Brand new’ to memorise and recite to him. And not too long after, Mr Ashby was fondling her breasts. He was a crafty man who really knew how to get around the teenage girl’s naivety. He knew that if he ravished her it would be found out. So, he worked on her emotions gently luring her into the pitch of ecstasy but never going all the way. He always left her panting with desire, her body dripping wet. By the time he went all the way, it was more of a mercy act from him to her than to satisfy his own lust. That day Miss Ulari Okpo had taken to the white man the Igbo cuisine of ukwa, breadfruit porridge, made with virgin palm oil because he had complained that his visiting Calabar cook was no good with Igbo cuisine. Ulari came back that day with two whole shillings and no pains at all and her innocence gone.
Most evenings after work and at weekends, Ulari would just disappear into Mr Ashby’s house and stay there for unending minutes. She was now addicted to the game they played. Mother would not miss her because she was her fieldman.
It was late May 1936 and Ulari was five months gone that Mother woke up one day to the shock that her daughter was pregnant. Ulari had not realised what had happened to her. She had not connected the cessation of “the holy” to her gradually increasing breasts and her gently thickening waistline. By then, Mr Ashby had been transferred to East Africa, to Tanzania, with a promise to Ulari that he would come for her.
The white man was generous to the Okpos when he was leaving. He gave her one pound in the denominations of shillings and half shillings and quarters; gave mama one pound in one crispy note but to papa an undisclosed amount. It was enough for papa to buy a house in town for the eventuality of his retirement or his being evicted. And to all four remaining Okpo offspring, he gave a shilling each. Like the Israelites, the meat was still in their mouths as ‘un-chewed’ lumpy morsels, when they discovered Mr Colin Ashby’s legacy to the family.
It shattered the Okpos. It was a family calamity. All the reputation Mr Desmond Okpo painstakingly built over the years, crashed. Folks soon began to address him by that calamity. He could not forgive his daughter or the perpetrator of the evil nor the gate crasher grandson, the mulatto whose name he never knew until the earth covered him.
Miss Ulari Okpo lived the nightmare. It began after her money ran out in the little motel on the outskirt of Aba where she met the cleaning woman who introduced her to the God that forgives bad girls.
She and her family became a gazing stock and the talk of the town. When her son was born on the street, they suffered unimaginable humiliation and deprivation. Some said that Mr Ashby came for her; there were so many stories. But the woman is the loser, Ma Ugorji often told her family and extended family.
When Elder George Ugorji, Ulari’s father, returned from Lagos after encountering Jamin, and he thought it was a sign from God, he went to see his old octogenarian mother who still lived with the man that later married her and gave her the Ugorji name that wiped away their shame and blessed them with social covering. Only someone like George’s mother could read and interpret the handwriting on the wall because the writing could only be deciphered by one who had gone through sorrow’s street and lived the nightmare.
“The young man who’s asking for Ulari’s hand in marriage is like you. He is a man of rare faith in prayer,” Elder George told his mother with a hint of tears in his eyes.
