By Ademola Adegbamigbe
I was just a lad when the civil war started. Our house was at Ijigbo Street Ado Ekiti, adjacent to Abiara Record Stores and opposite Bata Shop. It was not far from the Ungbagba house of Bamidele Johnson’s grandfather, the front of where new yams must first be sold before they enter the Erekesan or Oja Oba Market about two kilometers away.
One day, as I sat playing with my mates, Abayomi (Telemi’s younger brother), Isiaka, an Insurance broker now, Jimoh, of blessed memory and others, two of the tenants in the two big shops in our house were packing their wares into a big lorry, one of those ubiquitous contraptions with such inscriptions as “No King as God,” “One with God is a Majority,” “Bi a ko ku ise ko tan (when one is alive, one has hope)”, “Chinedu”…I remember that particular lorry. A monkey, with a long chain, was doing acrobatics on its wooden top.
Nearby, Mama Ibiyinka (wife of Chief Olaosebikan, the late landlord) who was selling bread and barafin (that’s what old women call kerosine in my town) was shaking her head in pitifully.
The two tenants were Igbo traders: Mr Brown and Mogambo (perhaps, their appellations). They were close to my older brothers: Raji, T.J and Femi.
The two Igbo men always gave us toys, Fanta (I liked counting the lines on the bottle to ensure slow enjoyment), biscuits, goody goody and sweets and we, children, loved the men. They slammed the doors of their shops shot, trapping what they could not carry inside till, hopefully, their return. The war was about to start and it was a matter of “To your tents oh Israel”.
Almost simultaneously, the owners of Okoli stores near LA School Aafin, not far from the Ewi’s palace, were about to depart the city for the East. They locked their supermarket and, as I learnt later, the Ewi, Oba Aladesanmi, made sure their wares (and others belonging to our Igbo brothers) were intact. Henceforth, Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), before it changed to NEPA and later PHCN, stopped switching on all street lights in the city.
The Okolis came back to start their business in 1970.
Mr Brown and Mogambo, unfortunately, did not return. I never saw them again, even after the war! I have two Yoruba friends whose fathers did not make it back. I refrain from mentioning the names of those friends of mine in order not to evoke painful reminiscences.
Each time the Yoruba and Igbo stoke embers of hatred and war, I remember Mr Brown and Mogambo and I still hear the creaking of their giant shop doors on their greased hinges.
May we never experience war again in Nigeria. May next Saturday come and pass quickly…
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