According to an Annang proverb, "There's no music played in the home of a big chief that
someone cannot step out to dance with skill and dexterity." And so it was in my grandfather's
sprawling family. His empire of thirty-six wives and colony of children was a medley of
characters, fun and incidents.
Grandpa was a diviner and local seer. He used traditional wisdom and discipline to keep drama
and chaos at bay in his house. His favorite proverb was that though milk and honey differ in
color and taste, yet they never play discordant tunes when placed together on the tongue. This
principle inspired harmony in his household.
Since he had land and sufficient workforce, there were no food fights in his home. A strict but
fair man, he ran his large family and the village he presided over in a way that hate, envies and
squabbles usual to such groups were not virulent.
The entire village was one extended family. Sharing was norm. We shared cooking pots as well
as what was cooked in them; we shared our living space including sleeping mats. We could not
eat a fruit, corn cob, or sugar cane stalk without sharing. Everyone lived as Mark Twain dreamed
when he suggested that, "To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with."
The family consisted of seventy or more uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces, live-in in-laws and
grandchildren. Others who could not trace themselves to my grandpa easily connected their
ancestry to someone down the family tree.
Since everyone was a branch on the same tree, there were inevitable clashing and clanging,
especially when the wind shook up things a bit roughly. Occasional jealousies notwithstanding,
everyone managed to get along without bad blood. The family was one big playground
constantly animated by plays, mock battles and the defense of family honor.
Bonding was so tight and close-knit that kids orphaned of their mothers had their grief cushioned
by surviving co-wives. Dad was one such unfortunate child who lost his mother at birth. But he
was adopted and integrated into the rest of the family by his father's other wives.
As might be expected, conditions were not exactly as being raised by one's mother. Often, he
made do with wild fruits so abundant in our forest. At other times, especially when village
politics and administration took his doting father away from the family, he depended on coconut
juices and improvised meals.
But when the father was home, he buffered his young son's insecurity by turning his food over to
him, much to the displeasure of the other wives who were jealous their husband gave choice food
to his orphaned son at the expense of theirs.
My interest here is not the politics of grandpa's polygamous home. I am rather thinking of the
character types in that family. For example, pressures in such a big family made some to seek
comfort from alcohol that was abundantly available in the village. Others rebelled in more
positive directions.
Long before a corrupted version of women's liberation seeped into our nation, some of my aunts
rebelled against the exclusion imposed by men who didn't know any better than to make women
cower before their chauvinistic traditions.
My aunts were accomplished storytellers who wove their experiences into songs and tales. Some
of their stories were so memorable that even now I feel like Ernest Hemingway did when
hunting in Africa. He wrote, "I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not
happy."
Like the characters in their folktales, my aunts were a cocktail. Some were tricksters who easily
charmed and electrified our imagination. Others were severe, scary or funny like Halloween
masks. While some accepted the culture they grew up in, others were more expansive and open
to questioning the labels branding them.
Either way, they were compelling. Though our society was structured on male authority, yet I
remember some of my uncles doing the unexpected when their sisters visited. For example, at
the approach of these women, the men hid the bottles of alcohol they loved so much.
Their sisters' tongues stung worse than scorpions, so the brothers never spoiled for a fight. Mary,
their firstborn sister, was the most dreaded. She was tall, in fact so tall she was said to be long.
Perhaps that added to her fierce and feisty personality, for among us descendants of the Bantus,
being tall was not one of our weaknesses.
Also because of her height, she was said to have the soul of a king cobra. It did not help matters
that she frequently spat out long streaks of saliva. In our animist culture that was a sure sign of
her connection with that fearsome beast.
The myth about this aunt probably had to do with her stunning height and her bearing. Though
graceful, she could just as easily chew up any brother who stepped out of line. I remember her
encounter with an uncle who was such a problem drinker that after inflaming himself with
alcohol, he hurled obscenities at women.
Occasionally his siblings cajoled him out of the rut, but before long he would regress to drinking
himself into a vegetative condition as if to make up for his brief spell of abstinence.
One day Mary visited him unannounced. She met him not only hugging his beloved bottle, but
also having a hilarious discussion and debate with it. "Yesterday, when I drank you what did you
do to me," he repeatedly sang and danced in honor of the bottle of shame.
Incensed at her brother's miserable condition, Mary lashed out, "So this is what you do while
flaming cockerels rule your roost?"
The jibe was a cruel reference to the fact that while her brother drank his manhood into
impotence, others took over his family affairs. Powerlessness between the thighs was slight
enough. To suggest that others were taking advantage of his self-imposed impoverishment to
father his children was the ultimate insult.
Mad and in between hiccups, the uncle in turn launched his broadside. He might be a cuckold
but he had never attempted to murder anyone, he said with venom darting from his eyes.
That legend had to do with Aunt Mary's first and only husband. She had married a much older
man, as was our tradition in those days. Though the man's family had some pretensions to
village royalty, grandfather was against the marriage. The man's family, he said, were bats that
were neither birds nor animals.
His headstrong daughter, however, ignored his objections and went ahead with the marriage. In
those days, it was our custom that a newly married wife should test her strength climbing a cliff-like hill. She would go to the river and fetch water with a big clay pot and tote it home up this
steep incline.
Aunt Mary's ordeal happened during our tropical rainy season when the skies rumble like a
battalion of tanks and shell the earth with a deluge. Drenched, the land becomes sodden and
mudslides abound.
It was against such challenges that Aunt Mary struggled after two muscular men had hefted a
large water pot on her head. She sank her bare toes into the soggy laterite, which was by now as
slippery as rotting banana peelings.
Ordinarily, walking on such surfaces requires tenacity and grit, both of which Mary had (though
she never dreamed she would need to use it as a rented mule). As she crested the hill, she
slipped, fell and broke the pot. Her husband, who was whistling idly behind her, was enraged by
her failure to live up his repugnant expectations, so he pulled an irate Taliban stunt.
He slapped and kicked her savagely. Pretending she was prostrating for forgiveness, Mary swept
the unsuspecting man off his feet and together they rolled back to the river. Swiftly, she got on
top of him, locked his neck in her powerful arms and submerged him in the muddy river.
No amount of yelling by onlookers or the sordid husband's splashing and thrashing like a fish
pulled out of its elements would persuade Mary to release him from her chokehold. She only let
him go after he had passed out. She then took a shortcut back to her father's house for good.
It was this to this incident that her drunken brother alluded.
Imo Ben Eshiet was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Raised in his village, Uruk Enung, and at
several cities in his country including Nsukka, Enugu, Umuahia, Eket and Calabar, Eshiet is a
detribalized Nigerian. Although he was extensively exposed to Western education right from
childhood in his country where he obtained a PhD in English and Literary Studies from the
University of Calabar, he is well nurtured in African history, politics, culture and traditions.
Imo is currently a teacher in the high priests group in the Summit Ward of the Greensboro North
Carolina Stake.