Mystical Eggs
Each Wednesday, as I was writing at my desk by the window, I’d look up to see a distant figure biking down the road towards our block. Then I’d recognize the egg seller. His head held high, his robes billowing like giant outstretched wings above his bicycle, his thin legs peddling sedately. He’d pull up to the building and dismount, pushing down his kickstand. He’d ring his bicycle bell, then climb the three flights of stairs to our door.
I always looked forward to his coming. I liked the look of him. He was a tall lean man, perhaps in his forties. His light brown face was scored with fine curving lines delicately accentuating the shape of his cheekbones and down to his chin. The scars were formed in his childhood by village elders marking him in a pattern that defined his ethnic group. The pattern was startlingly familiar to me. I’d seen museum photographs of a centuries-old Nigerian bronze head, long before I ever came to Africa. Art had now come to life before me. He was dressed in yards of patterned robes reaching to mid-calf. My favorite was printed with a great swirl of giant snails and waves in blues and browns. I never understood why his robe didn’t get caught in the bike wheels. Though I felt hot and sticky much of the time, he always looked cool. Didn’t he sweat at all?
I knew nothing about him, not where he lived, nor if he had a family. I didn’t even know if he raised chickens himself. We didn’t talk much. His English was sketchy, and I didn’t know his language. I think he wouldn’t have been a big talker in any case.
“Good morning, madam,” he’d say, with a rather grave smile.
“Good morning,” I’d reply, and he would ceremoniously hand the cardboard carton of eggs to me with both hands.
I would put four shillings six pence—big coins—in his hand and give him last week’s empty carton. Then, without further talk, he’d go back down the stairs, mount his bicycle, and pedal away down the road until another week.
One Wednesday, after our business had been going on for some time, we had a problem.
“Some of the eggs you brought me last week were rotten,” I said.
“Madam,” he responded, throwing up his long hands, robe flaring to either side, “but that is very mystical.”
For the rest of the time we lived in Ibadan, he brought me eggs every week, and they were never mystical again. Though to my mind, he was.
As the months went on, memories of Shagunu receded. I was much involved with my new life in Ibadan. I made friends in the university community, and I wrote almost daily. I never saw any of the Shagunu staff again. Did they all get back safely to the east? I thought it likely. I only knew for sure that Paul did, for we heard that he had spoken on the radio in the east, saying that Jonathan had saved his life, and the lives of many others.
… I now have a clearer view of the happenings throughout Nigeria during that ominous winter of 1966 to 1967 than I knew while I was living in it. I have learned that between 7,000 and 50,000 non-northerners were massacred across the savanna lands by northern Nigerians, beginning at the time of “The Troubles” in Shagunu. No exact numbers are known, or ever will be.
I’ve learned that this time was actually the early rumblings of the Nigerian Civil War. The desire of the Ibo peoples of the east to secede—to become the nation of Biafra—signaled the breakdown of a fragile coalition of widely different ethnic groups.
The north, with its great ancient cities of Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Sokoto, was predominantly Hausa and Muslim. In the 19th century the British saw the vast northern savanna area they wanted to control. It was three times the size of Great Britain, and with several million people. They realized they had to govern through the existing traditional emirs, and they did so. This was known as the “indirect rule.”
British dominance and control along the coast of Nigeria was quite a different picture. The slave trade and the production and extraction of other valuable commodities created a far greater intrusion of the colonial world. The British encouraged missionaries to come and set up schools to produce an “educated class.” The western region of Nigeria that was predominantly Yoruba, was educated in the new sense, and many people were converted to Christianity. The large cities of Ibadan and Lagos became modern, bustling, and energetic. The east, where the Ibos were in the majority, was similarly educated; they were forward-looking, assertive, entrepreneurial. Easterners subsequently spread throughout the north as traders, skilled workers, and businesspeople. They were envied and resented.
Each group harbored deep suspicions of the others. The federal government mirrored these divisions in a series of coups and assassinations. The result was a deadly civil war.