Cultures Collide in My Nigeria

Cultures C

ollide in My N

igeria G

erald A. N

eher

What great experiences! Interaction with others who grew up in a culture different from one’s own creates interesting encounters. Living in

another culture broadens one’s understanding of human nature and opens a door to life’s richest blessings. Even if you have not lived in another culture, you can share in-sights the author brings to you in this treasury of stories.

These stories are not fiction, but descriptions of real experiences lived by the author and his family in the village of Chibok and at Kulp Bible College in North-east Nigeria in the 1950s and 60s. Often humorous, the stories illustrate what can happen when cultures col-lide. Confusion, misunderstanding, chagrin, wonder, amusement, relief, disappointment, and even fear arise in many of these situations.

Author Gerald A. Neher is a trained agriculturalist and anthropologist, having studied at McPherson College, Cornell University, Kansas University, and Southern Illinois University. He is a keen observer of life in other cultures. He and his wife Lois co-authored the book, Life Among the Chibok of Nigeria.

Cultures Collide in

My NigeriaBy Gerald A. Neher

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Our Fulani Neighbors

The word ‘Fulani’ designates the nomadic cattle herders of West Africa. There are sev-eral different ethnic groups among them. Some would stay in our area most of the year around. Others would migrate in and out. Some might come only once every six or seven

years. These last individuals were always suspect because they would often steal cattle and then move on. Other groups would come only in the dry season and some would come only in the rainy season.

One group that came in the rainy season and often stayed until the dry season was the Mbororo. They were a very colorful people and had large, dark red cattle. They reportedly came from the Nile River valley two or three hundred years ago. They have a much lighter complexion than do the agrarian people among whom we worked. They live in the bush in shelters which they make by digging a shallow trench in the form of a circle. Small green limbs or saplings are placed in the trench and pulled together at the top where they are tied with tree bark. Grass mats and grass are then placed on top of the structure to shed water. They do not build more sturdy houses because they soon move on to find more luscious grass for their cattle.

Their cattle spend the night near their huts in a corral surrounded with tree limbs and thorns. Outside of the corral they tie large vicious dogs to protect the cattle from hyenas or other predators. The Fulani do not drive their cattle. They always walk ahead of their cattle with a stick over their shoulders singing or talking to encourage their cattle to follow them.

Our house was between their encampment and the Chibok weekly market. We had a large front porch where they would congregate if they got caught in a rain going to or from market. They sang, danced, and yodeled on our front porch. This was not strange because our cook Bata often bought milk from them.

One time I was buying some cattle to use as oxen for plowing. It was with some

Fulani huts. In the foreground is part of a corral in which the cattle will spend the night.

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women were all looking at me because many of them had never seen a white man before. The village elders said a white man had not been to their village since some German soldiers were there in World War I, and they came in from the Cameroon side of the mountain.

(I had an experience several years earlier when some women from this village or a nearby village came to our house. They were quite apprehensive. Our cook Bata went out and talked to them. These women had never seen a white man before. Finally, they got nerve enough to come up to me. They pulled the hair on my arm to see if it was attached, as Nigeri-ans have little hair on their arms and legs.)

We started down the mountain in the early afternoon. It was then that I discovered that it was much easier to climb up a mountain than to descend from one. After many steps down and sliding over rocks, we arrived back at the Land Rover after dark. It seemed that my knees wanted to bend the opposite way. When we were nearly down, Audu said, “My mother lied to me. My mother lied to me.” That seemed a rather strange thing for him to say. I asked him what his mother had lied to him about. He said that she told him that a person could not go to that village and back in one day. I was ready to agree!

Searching for brass high in the Mandara Mountains

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The Seasons

There are basically two seasons of the year in northern Nigeria, the

rainy season and the dry season. The Nigerians break it down further to include the very hot season, the cool season when the harmattan blows in, and other lesser categories. The activities of life are based on the seasons.

People get a new lease on life when the rains come. The rains do not always come when they are wanted. Some-times they start and then stop, which causes problems. The worst thing that can happen is for several little showers to come and sprout the grass. Eventually a rain of a half-inch or more will come and everyone goes to plant—but then they have to plant in the sprouted grass.

Planting is hard on the back, and backs ache as they have not been accustomed to bending over for several months. If one visits a com-pound in the evening during this time, he will often hear a moan coming from another part of the compound and a voice saying, “Oh, my aching back!” There was nothing one could do to relieve the back pain which would last for most of the rainy season. Dr. Burke mixed shea-nut oil with finely ground, hot peppers and sold it as a back rub. It did not have any great

Women at the well during the rainy season

Women at the same well in the dry season

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Farming on rock terraces made raising a crop difficult for those living in the hills.

Planting and weeding are hard on the back.

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healing powers, other than that of a placebo, I guess, but worked because it caused another less-severe pain that distracted one’s attention from the initial pain.

With the introduction of oxen and plows, the villagers were quite happy to see the grass sprout as they could then turn the sprouted grass under with a plow and have an even start with any new grass. The introduc-tion of oxen and plows was revolutionary, but it also created a few problems. Traditionally, a man and his wife could plant, cultivate, and harvest three or four acres of guinea corn. With the advent of oxen, that could increase to more than twenty acres. Some women decided that they did not want to go to the farms as they had previously, or at least they wanted to put in fewer hours in the farm. Also, both men and women would pay to have land plowed if they did not have their own team of oxen.

Land was often planted to peanuts which were sold as a cash crop. Their traditional peanut plant would spread into an

Plowing with oxen increased the amount of land that families could farm.

Harvesting the peanut crop at the end of the dry season was no longer tedious work after the intro-duction of oxen and plows.

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area three feet or more in diameter. A single peanut could be found every few inches along the root runners. The women and children would spend most of the dry season digging the peanuts. With oxen, a ridging plow, and a new variety of bunching peanuts, life became easier. The peanuts were planted on the ridge made by the plow. When harvest time came, the ridge was hit a couple of times with the hoe to break up the soil, and the peanuts were easily plucked from the runners. Harvest time came at the end of the rains. Then the dry sea-son occurred. Eventually rains came to bring the planting season and the cycle began again.

Bush fires naturally occurred in the dry season. We always cleared the grass away from our houses and sometimes set backfires. There were grasses of different heights and thicknesses. The Nigerians used some of the taller varieties to make mats for fencing their compounds; these mats were about six feet tall, or taller. In general, the grass grew about waist high. Much of this grass was gathered

Harvesting guinea corn at the end of the rains at KBC

Large, plump heads of guinea corn at KBC show the benefit of fertilizer.

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Always Have Your Hands Free

Whenever men or women are walking along the road, they will have their hands free. A man will have his loads on his head. A woman will have her baby on her back. If a man is coming or going to his farm,

his hoe will be thrown over his shoulder. There are a few exceptions. Chibok

women carry their calabashes on their shoul-ders and support them with the hand on the side that the calabash is on. Women in most other ethnic groups in the area carry their loads on their heads. Carrying a load on one’s head is really a difficult thing to do and must be learned from early childhood. I once heard a Chibok woman verbally abuse her daughter when she was trying to carry something on her head. The mother said, “Do you want to be one of us, or are you going to go and live with some other tribe?”

The origin of this custom is not known, but I suspect that it might have something to do with being prepared for a surprise attack in the days when fighting was common.

Carrying a baby in a back sling is convenient, too.

Sili Bata (Bata’s wife) carries her baby in typical Chibok fashion.

The basket shape is made for carrying on the head.

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were not available. The last I heard anything from Nigeria about the mango trees was that they were producing much fruit, but it was a battle between man and monkey to see who got the prized fruit first.

A tree with an unusual growth pattern was the baobab tree, often referred to as the monkey bread tree, and sometimes known as the upside-down tree because of its shape. Some say that God just stuffed them in the earth upside-down. Others say that God just placed them where they are—fully grown—because small baobab trees are seldom seen.

As the largest succulent plant in the world, these giants live to be more than 2000 years old and can grow to 30 or more feet in diameter. The circumference can vary significantly between the seasons, as the tree takes on large quantities of water during the rainy season and loses considerable water during the dry season. If one goes to the tree after a big rain at the beginning of the rainy season and puts his ear against the tree, he can hear the tree cracking as it takes on water. The soft composition of the baobab tree’s interior allows this to happen.

These trees flower for the first time when they are about twenty years of age. The fruit is a

This baobab tree stood near our house in Chibok.

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South Marghi woman

Bura man

Fulani man

Fali man

Chibok boy Woman from the Mandara mountains

They all speak different languages but now live peaceably together.