By Okon Nna-etuk
I discovered lately that there are still many things I don’t know how to do but which I ought to know as a man. I realise the environment is key to helping us acquire skills and knowledge.
For example, because of where I was born and bred, I could use palm fronds to make baskets, but to date I don’t know how to make cane chairs like some of my friends from Itu can do. I can use raffia palm fronds and ferns to prepare thatches/mats (nkanya). I can set traps for animals and rodents but I cannot do fishing on the river. I cannot row or paddle a boat even on the smallest of rivers but it amazes me to see women on a large body of water like Cross River and the Niger River paddling canoes and throwing nets to catch fishes.
When I was a little boy growing up in the village, an uncle of mine from my mother’s side took me to the bush in the middle of the night to extract honey from honeycomb/beehives. The bush was dead quiet and terrifying. He rubbed honey all over me, pouring much into my hair. He instructed me to comport myself even if the bees came over me, assuring me that the bees would not sting me because of the honey on my body. After that nightmarish experience, I never had the courage to accompany him on the expedition of extracting honey from beehive.
My grandfather and my father, in turn, taught me how to plant yam: how to make the hole, placing emphasis on how to handle the hoe attached to a long stick which had a spike on its tip to give it the required torque as you dug the ground, how to place the yam seed and how to cover the mounds and erect the stakes. The way the tendril of a yam is wound anticlockwise is different from the winding of the tendril of sweet yam (anem) clockwise.
I was taught very many things but I could not climb and cut palm fruits from palm trees because the height was frightening. But once the palm fruits were brought down, processing of the fruits from the cones, pounding them in middle-sized mortars and taking them to the oil press were my duties.
Work on the farm and at home during holidays deprived me of the time to learn many other things I should have known. If there were hobbies, one had to squeeze time to indulge in them. In those days, the football we played at home or primary school field was made up of dried grass or dried banana leaves pressed and wound up with rye rope. Or, we obtained the latex from rubber tree and moulded manually into hard balls or blew into something roundish but the sand would easily weather it down. We played draft on wooden board with wooden pieces, played ludo, but we had never played chess then. I am learning to play chess now but it is difficult. I don’t play golf.
In my time, we played tennis using wooden bat, not racket. To run around the tennis lawn with heavy wooden bat was energy sapping! I don’t think it is worthwhile now to learn to paddle canoe. What for at my age?
But I would like to learn to shoot rifles of different makes, not for any ulterior motive. Can you imagine at my age the only gun I can cock and shoot is the dane gun my grandfather taught me decades ago? Long ago, I had cause to shoot a revolver. The owner of the revolver was a court bailiff stationed at the Customary Court, Obong Ntak. He had asked my cousin and I to stay in his flat as he travelled home for a weekend.
On the second night as we were staying in the flat, a thief came and was trying to gain entry into the flat through the window. My cousin alerted me and brought out the revolver the man kept in the house. Earlier in the day, he had told me the man had shown him how to use the gun in case of any emergency. When the emergency arose, he was too scared to use the gun; so he gave me the gun. I took the gun from him after he had loaded it. I aimed at the window which was now open (the thieves have forced it open). They were yet to come in but we could hear their murmuring and we couldn’t figure out how many they were. From inside the room I aimed the gun at a blank window and pulled the trigger. The revolver exploded with a loud report but jumped out of my hands (I used both hands). The gun flung out of the window! It was the loud report of the gun and the shattering splints of the wooden window frame that sent the thieves away. If they had known the revolver had jumped out of my hands and was lying outside they would have boldly come into the flat.
Since that incident, I have never handled gun again, especially when a hunter from my village got badly injured as the chambers of his local gun exploded on firing. He lost his fingers and got burnt on the chest. My contemporaries in Europe and United States of America handle guns with dexterity. They row boat, go fishing in the open seas, climb mountains, among others.
A few years ago I felt challenged when I could not move a car with manual gearshift, yet I would brag I could drive a car. Thank God I can now drive a car with a manual gearshift. If you think it doesn’t matter, let a situation arise and you are left with only a car with a manual gearshift, you would know it is important to know these things.
I want to learn to shoot AK-47 Rifle. I am not buying one, but let me know. It may come handy some day as Nigeria progresses to higher level! If herdsmen and Fulani women can handle AK-47 Rifle, why can’t I?
