Olu Afufu Dike’s life has been shaped by what he went through in life. First of all, his muscles are the envy of body builders. It is not just the size of his biceps and chest muscle that makes him formidable to behold, but the muscle definition also. His well defined chest and hand muscles make him a standout in any crowd. But he got that shape, not from the gymnasium, like body builders, but from suffer-head work. He is one of those unfortunate ones, laborers, who follow tippers (or teapers or teepers) around. When these Dump Trucks are to load their sand cargo, these men get to work. They begin throwing in shovel-fulls of sand, one at a time, until the whole cargo space is filled up, in all its cubit feet capacity. No rest for the wicked. The tipper drives off to its destination, dumps its sand load, turns around and comes back for more. Who knows how many such trips they make in a day? Ten, fifteen, twenty, who knows? It just depends on the contract for the day. However many times the dump truck pulls up, these men get to work, filling it by throwing sand into it one shovel full at a time. They stand on the ground, shovel in hand, scoop up sand and throw it up, against gravity, into the waiting dump truck, fill it to capacity again, and the cycle repeats. At the end of the day, these laborers are paid whatever meager sum the owner of the truck determines, or bargains with them. It hardly ever amounts to much. Sometimes, by the time a laborer buys food, his lunch, from the roadside cook, and buys APC tablet for his aching back muscles and spine, the leftover amount that follows him home is next to nothing. Such men don’t have wives. What woman would want to marry a man who can’t provide for the family? From the nature of the work, and from the restlessness of the workers, as the Dump truck owner hurries them back and forth so he can make as many trips in a day as possible, mischievous boys in Igbo land have come up with a nickname for the workers. The work itself is called Olu Afufu, ie, Suffer-Head Work, while the workers are called Ndi Olu Afufu, suffer-head workers. But, caller beware. These men are mean, made so by that name-calling. Such a name you do not call them while standing on a spot. No. Usually, before you call them that evil name, you begin running away into the bush, or bush path, where you are sure they can’t reach you even if they tried. And then, as you run, and when you are sure you have put some real estate between you and them, you can then scream for them to hear: Ndi Olu Afufuuuuuu! You must disappear quickly too, or else. The derogatory name is so annoying to these dump truck fillers that, if possible, they will pursue you into your mother’s womb and pull you out to deal with you; peradventure you had run in there to hide. When they pull you out, they will work on your bloody lips that called them that hated name. They will thoroughly work on it with that their well-defined muscle; I mean, those well-defined muscles that body builders would envy. On you it will be exercised that day. And, woe betide any man, any woman, I mean any person, who tries to intervene or tries to stop them. Usually too, passersby just continue their journey. They never border to plead for a stop when these men are fighting to redeem their honor. Even the well-defined muscle these laborers have on their chest, their hands and back, that body builders would envy, these rascals have coined a name for. It is not called ‘chest muscle’ if it belongs to a tipper filler. Instead it is called Akpu Obi, “Chest hump”; equating it with the hump on the back of long-horn-cattle we call Nama in Nigeria. But, Akpu Obi, for some reason, does not elicit the type of outrage and indignation the name “Olu Afufu” gets out of these laborers. No, Akpu Obi does not get the same response as Olu Afufu. If you ever call them ‘ndi olu afufu’ and are unfortunate enough for them to catch up with you, and if they start pummeling you, the police will not even arrest them. The police have reached that understanding within their ranks. That’s how offensive that name is. You are free to call the police all you want, or your parents can do it for you if you have been reduced to a helpless state. When the police arrive and ask to know the cause of the physical abuse, all these laborers need to say in their defense is: “He called us Ndi Olu Afufu”. Once the police hear that, they just turn around. Actually they say, “Yes beat him/her”, and then they turn and walk away, leaving you in their merciless hands. Some lads quickly devised a way to insult and get away with murder. If the tipper, the dump truck, is driving on a road in which it is easy for the driver to stop and the laborers give chase, usually no kid tries to derogate by calling them that hated name. Kids just hold their peace and behave like good children. But if the tipper is cruising on a highway; oh easy. You just scream ndi olu afufuuuu, knowing that it will not be easy for them to stop abruptly. You must pick race though, because you never know. But, as Eneke Nti Nkpo, the sparrow, said in that age old proverb, “Since men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark, I have also learnt to fly without perching”. What am I insinuating? Before long, these dump truck workers devised a way to deal with the highway insult. This was what they began to do to get at call-and-run kids: After their dump truck has been filled to capacity with sand, and is cruising on the express, on its way to the dump site, these men, while perching on the sand dune in the truck, will bury empty bottles in the sand and pretend as if everything is normal. As soon as they hear that name, “Ndi Olu Afufuuuu” they quickly dig up one or two bottles and fire it in the general direction from which the sound came. But, if they are lucky enough to hear and see the actual person who did the name calling, ho, thank God. They simply pick up all their bottles and pepper that person with them. They just throw these bottles at the caller till ‘come what may’. When heads began to break here and there, the highway insult began to prove too risky for these mischievous juveniles. Once upon a time in Enugu, a dump truck, laden full with sand cargo, came to discharge its load at a building site. Near that site was a well-manicured lawn belonging to a rich man. The dump truck driver began to reverse so that, as soon as he dumps the sand he can just drive off. While turning, the driver made the mistake to run one of the wheels over the edge of the well-manicured lawn. Boy-Oh-Boy!, come and see drama that day. The rich owner of the lawn came charging out, shouting : “You common comot your truck from there, you this olu afufu”. Ouch! Immediately the term “Olu Afufu” came out from the rich man’s mouth, the driver calmly turned off his engine, and climbed down. The laborers too, heard the insult and began climbing down from their sand dune canopy. The driver calmly walked up to the rich man and asked him, gently, “What did you just call us sir?” “I said Olu Afufu, what are you going to do?”, he jeered at them. “Common remove that your dirty truck from here and carry your suffer-head to somewhere else. Idiot.” By now the beehive of angry laborers closed in on him. They encircled him, put him in the middle and began to teach him a lesson in deformable body mechanics. At first the rich man thought he was tough. He thought he could fight. But one or two punches later and he began looking for an escape route. “Bum!” came the first punch. He tried to run but, because he was inside a circle, he, in his dazed state, ran into the next man. Gbozuai, a dirty slap. Sparks flew out of his eye. He groped his way but it was towards the other person. Upper cut. He was on his butt. A few seconds passed and he dragged himself up, dreamt death to the other side, thinking he was escaping. Hmmm, see dazing. Gbimmm! It sounded like a big base drum. He fell on his butt. He sat there for a few seconds to recoup, like a lizard just fallen from a height. His eyes were white-blank and fast-blinking. He looked dazed and confused. He tried to move again. Kafan-kano greeted his lower rib cage. The kick bent him into two halves as began falling like the proverbial Iroko tree. He fell towards the next assailant who delivered a devastating blow to the crown of his bent head. He staggered to the other side only to receive a physical payment for his big mouth. Bum!, Gboa!!, kaboom!!!, the punches were coming from all sides. Then came a ‘hen’ squeaking kwoor! Kwoor!. His wife came out like a wet chicken. “Una won kill am?”, she squeaked. They cast an angry look at her but did nothing. She was not a match, physically. She began to scream for help from passersby to help separate the one-sided fight. But nobody did. The bystanders heard the scream, saw the fight, which was easy to see with or without any scream, but the muscles of the combatants was too intimidating for anybody to do anything. Nobody had the strength, or is it the skill, to separate or pacify such dreadful looking creatures. They simply stood by and watched as a rich man was being physically abused by dirt-poor men. Some of these bystanders may have even been saying, even if inaudibly, “yes, that serves him right. Beat that money out of him.” This is just my guess though. When the wife saw that nobody was ready to help, she hastily drove to the nearest police station. Soon policemen arrived at the scene to meet the physical abuse still continuing. They met it in progress. These angry men were still pummeling the big-mouthed rich man when the law enforcement got there. But then, the police also saw a tipper parked nearby. And then they saw that the fighters beating up this rich man were bulky-chested men, so they quickly put two and two together. “Na wetin de happen for here?”, asked one officer in pidgin English. He figured the fighters were probably uneducated. Not that himself is educated either. “I say na wetin de happen for here wey una won kill somebody?” “He called us Ndi Olu Afufu”, said one of them to the law enforcement agent. “Is that right? Okay, you can beat him then”, said the police, and turned and walked away. Bum!, Gbim!, Mimm!, it kept coming unabatedly. They were hitting this rich man from all sides. ‘This is it’, concluded the wife. My husband is dying today. These people are going to kill him for me. Oh my God! She went into the panic mode. Just then an idea came to her mind. She just knelt down and began begging. “I beg make una leave am. Please forgive him. Are you not Christians? Jesus taught us to forgive. Please forgive.” One of them, after casting an angry look at her, just picked her up with his left hand, carried her to the door of their mansion, pushed her inside and shut the door behind her. “Do not come out here again or we go begin beat you too”, he warned. And he returned and rejoined the kicking and punching. It was only when the rich man laid motionless on the ground that they left off beating him and continued their business. Dike was not part of this gang though. And he does not remember being involved in any fight this brutal in defense of truck loader’s honor. But he knows a few who have. II I do not know why some people get so worked up about names. What’s in a name anyway? There is a man I know, back in my secondary school days, when I lived in Issele-uku. He alone was that angry about name-calling. He will go to any length to discipline any child who makes fun of his physical deformity by turning it into name-calling. Actually, he was not physically deformed. He was just ugly. God was in a hurry the day he made him. Somebody must have been praying hard somewhere, and God needed to go and answer him. So He hurriedly finished the work he had at hand, which unfortunately, was the making of this Igbo man. This man’s face was square, or near so. But it is slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom. His pointed lower jaw made his face appear more like a pentagon (five sided figure) than a square. It had sharp edges at the two lower corners. His mouth was small and pointed, as if he wants to spit or whistle. It is as if he had just said the word “YOU” and his mouth froze in motion. To add to all these, his chin was puffy. This gave him the look of a rabbit that has just sniffed up a bunch of corn seeds, or palm nuts, into its mouth. This is what rabbits do when they have more than they can eat. They eat all they can at the scene, and the rest they sniff up into their mouth to take back to base, to the hole. Such a rabbit will be easily identified because the chin will be puffy. That’s what this man’s face, mouth and chin looked like. Soon Issele-uku boys came up with a befitting name, (sorry nickname) for him. Nti Aku, (palm nut stuffed chin), became his identity. This man had a Raleigh bicycle that he cherished so much. He would not let a fly, as much as, perch on it. He cleaned it, oiled it, and it sparkled and shun bright in the sun. But, on the occasion that a child makes the mistake to call him Nti Aku, he wouldn’t mind. He will just throw that Raleigh bicycle down, even if it was in the middle of the express road. An automobile could crush his beloved bicycle and he wouldn’t care under that circumstance. He will throw down the bike and pursue that child into a rabbit hole, if the kid could run in there. And when he lays his hands on that child, woe betide him/her that day. This man’s slaps don’t sound kpoa!, kpoa!, like slaps do when they are administered. His own sounds dry. Tai, taii, taiii. That ensures maximum pain for that unfortunate brat. Getting caught by this man is like the unfortunate incident of having a farm and inside your farm a fleeing antelope is caught. The owner of the farm will lose half of his crops to the struggle to catch and contain the antelope. That’s how bad getting into this ugly man’s trouble is. His slaps don’t hurt, per say. I mean that you do not feel the pain of him hitting you on the chin. No. Instead, it burns like fire, as he releases them dryly, tai, taiii, taiiii. His slaps sting like wasp-sting. He slaps you and leaves his hand where it landed. This is done to ensure maximum discomfort. Make the thing for soak in. He wants you to feel it and know that what you did is wrong, so you do not try it again. And don’t ask me how I know because I will not tell you. No way. How can I tell you such a thing? I will not tell you how he caught one boy one day, (whether that boy is me or somebody else I know not, God alone knows). Nti Aku caught the boy as the rascal was trying to call and hide. The boy’s hiding place that day was inside the hole of a rabbit but before the whole of his body could fit into the hole, Nti Aku caught him by the tail and pulled him back out. And then the baptism of dry slaps commenced. The caller called, “Nti Aku” from a hidden corner thinking that the man will not know who did the name-calling. But Nti Aku’s ugly radar located the caller. That’s how sensitive he is to being called that name. Under such circumstances, he could see through a wall and know who, or what, is behind it. He looked in the direction from which the name ‘Nti Aku’ came and saw the caller. The lad ran but the breeze brought the pursuer to the fleer fast. Or so it seemed. He was on the boy in no time. Ala ona apuu gi, You day craze?, he asked as the first ‘taiiii’ came. And another followed. And another. Ahhhh! Meanwhile his right hand held my left hand so tight my skin would peel off if I tried to struggle to free myself. I just stood there like the old rugged Mahogany as he baptized me in the name of all the saints in heaven. From left and right it rained. Tai; left. Tam; right. Taiii left again. And tammm; right. And on and on it rained, until I started begging. “I beg sir. Biko. I will give you fish tomorrow when we cook. I will give you Udala if you stop now. Please oga. I beg.” But he appeared deaf. “Do you want to kill somebody’s child?” That one made no difference. He just continued until his hands began to hurt him. That was when he stopped. And I never made that mistake again. So then, answer the original question; “What’s in a name anyway? What’s in a name that somebody go won make he kill another person for? Na wah o.-
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 18:16:38 +0000
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