Mpanaka

Mpanaka Photo credit: nairaland forum

Oluka was a very restless boy yet very loveable. He had a way of making someone very upset one minute and laughing the very next. He was the first child of his parents and hardship was their second name. 

His father Okereke was quite notorious in his hay days. He saw himself as a gift to the ladies and so he never hesitated to sleep with any lady young or old who succumbed to his charms.

Oluka’s mother was not very popular among the indigenes of Lokpanta for obvious reasons; pure jealousy - she was from another village and the only woman who Okereke was humble enough to call wife. 

He had gone to Okigwe town to get away for a while from the bad image he had created for himself in Lokpanta. 

While in Okigwe he engaged himself with a motorcycle (a.k.a okada) business and worked very hard towards going back to Lokpanta at Christmas with a lot of money from his new venture. 

It was in his favourite buka that he met Obioma; she washed plates there and also served customers sometimes. Obioma was very chatty and she was the one who first started speaking to Okereke and gradually they became good friends.

December in Lokpanta is usually very bubbly, a time when those who had left the land would come back to show how successful they had become. 

Everyone wore almost the same outfits and you could tell what group had come from which "township". The clothes were always the same which showed that it was the fashion in vogue in the town where they lived.

Very busy jeans skirts with embroideries or jeans jackets or local turbans; and children walked all over the place in oversized shoes.

The Nkwo market turned to Sodom and Gomorrah in the night and if you dared drive through, you would find different young couples in very compromising positions. After the festive period, and towards April, the results of the celebrations would start to show; young girls would suddenly start to look very robust and in another couple of months there would be cries of babies in different homes. 

It was December and finally time to return home after almost a year’s exile from Lokpanta. Okereke took Obioma back to Lokpanta, at that time she was nurturing Okereke's first child in her womb.

His son’s birth brought a lot of joy to Okereke’s family for they believed that their wayward son had finally become responsible but he never really changed and quickly went back to his old ways. 

They had more children in quick succession regardless of the extreme poverty that they experienced. When they could no longer bear it, they sent Oluka to the big city to live with a distant relation; it was one less mouth to feed.

While there, Oluka got up to all sorts of mischief and when it was clear to his guardian that Oluka could put him in a lot of trouble with the law, he sent him back to his parents.

A month after Oluka went back to Lokpanta, he passed on in a very sad manner aged only 13. He had been enrolled into the National school Lokpanta and his mother had warned him to always come back home at the end of school without branching off anywhere.

Obioma was in her small stall at the Nkwo market when she received a message to go home immediately. She went back home to meet Oluka lying lifeless in the family compound and it was more than she could take. She passed out, when she came to some minutes later she was made to sit while some young people narrated to her how they had gone for a swim at the Mmavu Stream where Oluka drowned.

When she found her voice, Obioma stated that there were no traces of water in Oluka, she kept touching her son’s body and dipped her finger into his ears and other body parts looking for traces of water.

She came to the conclusion that her first son was strangled to death by his friends who lured him to the stream.

This is an allegation that Obioma may never get to the bottom of; Oluka was buried as soon as his mother saw her son for the last time. 

There are no mortuaries in Lokpanta and so everyone both young and old was buried before the sun set. Only those who had the funds could take their dead to a nearby mortuary in the neighbouring village “Awgu”.

There is also definitely no way of finding out what caused Oluka’s death, a forensic lab may come up in Lokpanta after I pass on at a hundred years old and then spend another hundred years in heaven. 

My Lokpanta people still use “mpanaka” and still go to a neighbour’s house just to light their mpanaka. The closest we have come to electricity are just the poles that we see on our roads that have been used to pull light into the nearby “Awgu” village.

Only God knows how Oluka passed on, we pray his soul finds rest! Amen!