Of Wives, Talismans and the Dead by I.N.C. Aniebo

Author:I.N.C. Aniebo [Aniebo, I.N.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803288833
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Forbidden Fruit

Two old men sat in a village, facing each other under the shade of the huge mahogany tree a few yards in front of the home of one of them. The other man was a visitor from Oku, a town nearby.

All around them, the activities that herald the approach of night to an Eastern Nigerian village went on. The hens, clucking and always cocking a quizzical eye at the fast-setting sun, guided their broods home. Smoke issued from the conically thatched roofs of the surrounding mud huts and the reverberation of the mortar musically beaten with the pestle mixed with the bleating of goats being dragged home.

The village, Eze-ikpa, had only one dusty road running down its entire length, which the villagers proudly called ‘the way’ or, after they’d imbibed some palm wine, ‘the motor-way’. Down this way now came naked children, some eagerly running, some lethargic and a few taking their time, but all bound for home, incredibly dusty and happily tired. Also along this busy thoroughfare came a string of maidens clad in multi-coloured strings of beads, their waterpots balanced on their heads, and their walk springy, their full breasts quivering like the rippling waters of the stream they had just come from.

The two old men sighed simultaneously and the fat, well-kept one, dressed in a priest’s white soutane, his short plump legs crossed, intoned: ‘What heavenly peace!’

The other, dressed only in a loincloth, to whom the scene was familiar and very dear, threw the priest a curious glance. To him, what the priest had said sounded hollow.

‘Why did you say that, Father Matthew?’ he asked in the slow way he had to do things nowadays. ‘Surely this,’ and he waved a gnarled, wrinkled, thin hand at the village scene, ‘doesn’t mean a thing to you. It’s barbarian and heathen.’

Father Matthew’s grave, round face broke into a tolerant smile. He’d always liked Ogbuefi ever since they met three years before. In fact, if a heathen could be called a good man, Ogbuefi was, although a very suspicious and obstinate one.

‘You’ve always doubted my feelings, Ogbuefi. Why is that?’

‘Well,’ drawled Ogbuefi, his throat making wrinkled efforts at drawing at his old clay pipe, ‘you’re the priest of a foreign religion. And, although you’re Ibo, you don’t belong to us any more. You were brought up by foreigners. And you’ve taken to their ways as fish to water. Even your name …’ His voice trailed off into silence.

Father Matthew looked again at the emaciated man in front of him. The breastbone and the ribs were almost piercing the wrinkled ashy-black skin; the stomach was practically non-existent and the legs looked more like matchsticks. The lined, high forehead told a tale of hard work and suffering to scrape a living from the earth; and yet the spirit was not broken, nor the mind as careworn as its exterior.

And for the hundredth time Father Matthew wondered if it was worthwhile converting this man to Christianity, since it might, with its attendant Western materialism destroy, the old man’s peace of mind.

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