CHAPTER NINETEEN
Leaving Home
Mother knew she could survive without me around. My younger ones have grown to be useful and they now handled some worked which were mine. I also need to be a man now. So she arranged for me to be taken to the city, not because of the trouble I was causing her, for she knew it was normal and that we loved each other but because she heard that my chances of improving our lives was better sought in the city than in our village. That was October 7, 1943. It was the first time I heard it from my master, a date the way an English man pronounced it in Gregory calendar. I mastered it so fast that I wished if not for the death of father, I would have joined other children in Ama and Isiakwu in college. Poverty and ignorance cost me this precious privilege. We had no school in my village but our people send their children to school outside our village. Education then was for the rich and fools. It was considered foolish to send a child to school when he was supposed to learn the ways of our fathers from home – the many rules and basic rules of black man. And to the rich, it was a way to waste their money in the knowledge they would not gain anything from. It was only aunty Agnes who had come from the city that was telling people that those who could send their children to school would be great in the future and she was warned to keep off from many families. Today, she was late but her prophecy had turned true, as most families who went to college then were now the voice and the eyes of our people in the government.
City was a place far from home and in our entire village it was only Amadi who knew the road to the west. It was called Lagos – ala ndi Yoroba. We were told that they were blacks, our brothers too who speak another language but they saw the white man first because the big river which we were told was bigger than all the rivers in our community was the route through which the white man came. He also told that the river formed a big boundary between the land of the white and the black. His father was a cook to the white man in the colonial years and took him to Britain. He died during the world war in an accident with his master. The British government took his mother back to Lagos and provided shelter and some money for the family to start up a business. His father had served his white master well that it was clear that his family would not be left to starve to death.
People who lived in the West in those days were highly respected and worshiped. Amadi was rich and was the first man to build a zinc house in our entire village. In the sun, that old corrugated zinc shone and we sometimes climbed a tall tree to watch it with pleasure. How the carpenters fixed the nails and the zinc was to us a marvel. They were experts we had then who came from Ijebu that did the work.
Amadi honored my Mother’s plea and agreed to take me to the city. He considered many things but especially my calm nature and fatherlessness. I was not happy but Mother convinced me that I should be happy for various reasons. It was really a privilege that he accepted to take me to the city as many parents had pleaded for such and it was denied them. I was only a little above sixteen to my calculation. I did not know exactly when I was born. This was made worse by the fact that I was not baptized in the church. I had reasons to give in to Mother because my younger ones were rapidly growing and could as well help her in the farm.
A night to my departure from home for the city, Mother and I talked slowly into the heart of the night about the many problems of the family which I hope we could solve as soon as things improves in our home. Discussions that could have lasted for a little less than one minute dragged so long for emphasis. She was slowly telling me to know that everything had been placed on me and that it was possible that I would be seeing her standing strong for the last time. She also told me that as the first son, that the future of my younger ones and the family lies in my hands and that I should always remember them.