When next you go home, you should hug a tree and take its photograph! Take a long, hard look at it, and try to remember it, because it may not be there when you return. I had not gone home for some time, and all the trees I used to know were gone when I arrived last August.  It was the second most depressing thing I noticed -- the first was the sorry, beggared state of most of our people -- and I mean beggared.  Hand-out-face-anxious-biko-nyetüm beggared! Anyway, that is a matter for another time. 

     For now, let's stay with the observation that there are no tall trees left in Igboland -- at least not in my part of Ngwaland! 

None!

I did not see one tree taller than a hundred feet. 

Few more than fifty feet.

 No Orji!

No Apu!

 No Okwe!

No Egbu!

 No Ekpu!

 No Achi!

     There was no Orji in the whole town of Amorji, no Ekpu anywhere in Ama-Ekpu, no Oko in Umu Oko, no Udara in Nkwo Udara, no Ugiri in Afor Ugiri!

     Should all of these places give up their names?

     Trees are probably the most important natural landmarks in Igboland.  They mark village squares, markets, road junctions, and farms.  Amapu, Ama-okwe, Okporo Ahaba, Ugba Okpo-o, Osisi-Oma.   My home village is named Egbelu Mbutu.  Anyone who knows the meaning of Egbelu knows that it is where the kite-hawks are -- in other words a place of thick bushes and tall trees.  Egbelu connotes not only tall trees like Achi-Aru and Uhie but hardwood bushes  like Ahaba and Ntikiri-nkwa. 

     Gone! 

     Ahaba makes the best firewood by far, of all the common shrubs in Igboland.  Followed by Ntïkïrï-nkwa, which, in addition, produces a very delectable fruit.  Ötïrï burns better than Ahaba, but Ötïrï is not common, and is apt to burn away before the soup you are cooking is done.  Ahaba was such  good wood that tinkers and blacksmiths burned fresh branches to make Icheku, which was like lumps of coal and could be used with bellows to melt metal.  Ürüh burns terribly, usually producing more smoke than flame.  However, Uruh was good for keeping your grandfather warm through the long Harmattan night.  Once it gets going, it tends to glow for a long time.  Uruh was the wood of choice for the open fire that was left burning all day in a compound's ovu, so that you could come by and roast a yam or some corn or Ube, or a woman who wanted to start a fire in her kitchen would not have to trek to another compound in search of fire  -- during those days long, long ago when matches were not common or were sold expensively by the stick.   

     Gone also was the softwood, Ububa, which together with Ahaba and Ntikiri-nkwa was  the most common shrub in the bushes of fifty years ago.  Does anyone remember Ero Ububa, the delectable mushroom that used to grow under the beds of leaves shed by the Ububa tree?  

    Trekking to primary school in the late forties and early fifties, I used to pass by our four-day market, Ahia Orie, which  had more than a dozen very tall trees all around it.  There was also a lower echelon of medium-sized trees like Ugba, Avu, Udara, mango, Ube and Ugiri.   Several of the trees had legends attached to them.  Older people remembered important historical  events that took place underneath them: Achi, OKoh, Apu, and so on.  In March, the Apu trees shed cotton bolls that traveled several miles in every direction.  In April, during Nkpe-Mbutu, a juju festival, smashed eggs, wreaths, garlands and other signs of sacrifice marked the trees.  Before reaching Ahia Orie, I passed by Ukwu Orji, and then Nkwo Ugba.  On the way to and from school, children often took a longer route to make sure that they passed by an Ube or Udara tree in fruit. 

     Am I the only one who remembers traipsing eagerly around an Udara tree, looking for fruit, on the way to or from school?  Or waking up very early in the morning and hurrying to the base of an Udara tree to look for fruit that fell during the night?  And asking your mother to wake you up very early, so that you could beat the other children to the tree? 

     Does anyone remember waiting underneath the Ugba trees, which lined most roads, for the pods to explode and fling their seeds in every direction?  You ran and scrambled and dived -- and sometimes you fought -- to get a seed, and you bragged about whose basket or bowl was more full. 

     On Saturdays, during the dry season, children sat for hours under the trees, playing games and telling stories, waiting and waiting, and waiting -- for a crackling sound  in the tree above.  As soon as one was heard, everyone looked up, quickly gauged where the Ugba seeds seemed to be about to fall and then made a dash.  Five seeds came down!  Twelve children scrambled for them!  Five children are holding up their trophies.  Seven are  returning to their games disappointed but resolved not to be out-run the next time.

     Palm trees.  The insignia on our coins and currencies and stamps through the years.  The second highest producer(after cocoa) of foreign exchange for decades.  Ngwaland was at the center of the Palm Zone, which ran from Port Harcourt on the coast past Enugu in the north.   Traveling from Aba to Enugu by road or rail was like traveling in one endless palm grove, with the forests becoming less dense with waving fronds as you went further north.  For most of the twentieth century, the economic life of Ngwa people was built around palm oil and palm kernel.  Month by month, men harvested ripe fruit from their palm groves.  Wives and children extracted the nuts and boiled them.  Men pounded them in huge mortars.  The women squeezed out the oil and saved it in large calabashes and tins.  Two or three days later, it was off to the depots to sell them. 

     If a man wanted to buy a new bicycle -- if a man wanted to marry a new wife -- if a man needed to pay the school fees for his children, if it was Harvest time or time for any other festival and a man needed money to outfit the members of his family -- the palm was the answer.  The proceeds from the oil belonged to the man.  The proceeds from the kernels belonged to the woman. 

     Iwu Nkwu and Nmachi-Nkwu were two co-operative practices that contributed to solidarity of a village, by "communalizing" all the palm trees in a paticular town or village for a month or two and  designating the proceeds from those months to common purpose.  Examples of such  purposes would include paying the salaries of teachers at a local school, funding a church or school building, funding scholarships for promising sons and daughters in secondary schools.  A majority of Ngwa men and women who went overseas for further study received gifts from their villages funded through  Nmachi-Nkwu by their respective villages.  

     Communalization -- the act of declaring an important economic asset the common property of the community for a period of time -- was a remarkable economic equalizer as well as a way of raising funds for common purposes.  An Amala Assemby said:  "For the month of March all the palm trees in Egbelu-Mbutu belong to Egbelu-Mbutu.  No one will harvest any of them for private use.  We need to raise money for the send-off gift for one of our sons who is going to England for university study."  

    Iwu-Nkwu pertained to palms that grew on community land, which therefore were harvested as community property.  Once a month, on a designated day, all men who were off age assembled at a spot, usually at an Ama Ukwu or Okasaa, and at the sound of a gong were free to head into the bushes and harvest whatever the could get to ahead of others.  Whatever you were able to harvest during that day, but on that day alone, was yours.  This was usually done once a month. 

     Participation in Iwu-Nkwu was a kind of rite of passage for young men.  When you got your own climbing ropes, you were of age and could line up with the adults and run for bushes when the gong sounded!  Ngwa people are known for climbing palm trees with two ropes of Uga, attached to "stirrups."  Most of the people in the rest of Igboland use Ete.

    So, what happened to the palm trees?  Arent' they still there?

     Yes, they are there, but one wonders how many will remain and how much longer?  Those that remain are old  and gaunt -- and effete.  Their trunks are no longer stout and their heads (the cluster of fruit that is harvested) are no longer large.  The trees which remain have seen their best days and are not being replaced by younger sapling.  In other words, when you enter a palm grove, you do not see old trees (Abu Nkwu), younger trees that have not yet evolved a smooth trunk (Opere) and newly germinated sapling waiting to replace their elders.  Most of what you see are the old trees.   If you see stout trees, you are probably in someone's palm plantation.  

     What is true of the regular palm tree (Nkwu or eleis guinensis) is true of the wine tree, Ngwo (raffia viniferra).  Ngwo used to be marker of family domiciles throughout Ngwaland. 

    Birds!

    The big birds.  The high-flying birds that used to favor the tall trees -- they are gone too.  Ugo.  Egbe.  Akpapia.  Oti-nkwu. Ndu-akpuru.  Igoro-omirima.  Ugo was gone before my time, but Egbe used to be plentiful when I was growing up.  No more. 

     Egbe bere, Ugo bere!  An Igbo man born more than sixty years ago does not know what ugo is, except for seeing one in an American zoo!  Will an Igbo child born ten years from now know what an Egbe is?

It was truly saddening.  I stood around and looked in every direction.  The trees which used to be landmarks, the big trees which used to serve as landmarks, or provide pleasant shades over market places -- they were all gone.  The horizon was unmarked in every direction.  The palm trees were old and gaunt and effete -- no young sapling (opere) grew around them, meaning that when the present ones die, there will be no replacements. 

     And the birds seem to have gone with the trees.  Few of them around.  I was immensely grateful to hear an ovo singing early in the morning, ran out with a camera to get her picture. 

     It wasn't just at the tree level.  Even at the bush and shrub  level the vegetation is totally different from what I used to know.  No opete, no achara, or waghiriwa, or azughzu, uvune, or agbannu, or enyim-ocha.  An alien species of achara which looks like what we used to call "Elephant Grass" has invaded the land and apparently killed off the normal achara (andropogon?)of old .  As a young man I used to drag out seven or eight sheep to tether every morning before I left for school, staking them in places where there was plenty for them to eat before I came home in the afternoon to re-tether them.  I looked around in vain for places where one might tether a goat or sheep.  Nowhere!

      There is nothing left in the places of the things that are no longer there.  The land is jsut barren.  Just barren.   It is dying.  We need to re-plant, re-seed, re-grow our trees, or our children will never even know what used to be there.  My young relatives probably thought I was being eccentric when they saw how much I rued the demise of the trees.  Some of them didn't even know what I was talking about.  Perhaps because there is no Ubaba left anywhere, there is no Ero Ububa anywhere. 

(To be continued)