Walking in the East Bay hills and childhood memories of Africa

I spent a little bit of time with my daughter in law and one of my grandkids today, the youngest one.  He's nine but a big kid for his age and, like a lot of the young ones today, he's quite the little fellow. We went up to the hills with our dogs and walked the trails a little bit; I've put some scenes of these walks on this blog, including the one of the waterfall.

At first it didn't seem like he'd like it, not too cool walking with granddad and mum on a nature trail, after all, he's in to Facebook now and even sent me an invitation to play Tetris. But he began to enjoy it more as the dogs played with one another as well as with other dogs whose owners had brought them on the trail.  I showed him some fungi and we heard some frog croaking loudly in the various mini ponds formed by the recent rains.  Then I remembered the pond that is a real bullrush pond. It is full from about October to May if the rains are good and we have had good rain this winter. 

I hadn't been to this particular pond for a long time and it wasn't easy to find the trail to it.  It's about a quarter of a mile off the main trail but the trail was overgrown with foilage, particularly a shrub known as French Broom that is very invasive and overwhelms the local vegetation. But we found the pond and the dogs ran around and in and out of it.  In the end, my grandson definitely had a great time, but he didn't think he would.  A friend of mine who I walk with said, as we were photographing some rather spectacular fungi that, "Isn't it funny, some people are at home sitting on the couch saying they have nothing to do or nowhere to go and there's this." The power of the capitalist media and selling machine is so widespread that being in nature for young people is not cool We are very lucky living in the San Francisco bay Area as we have such great regional parks so close.

Anyway, we stopped to get a coffee for the adults and a snack for my grandson on the way home. I had a couple of these bran things to eat and my grandson had some other packaged thing.  I asked him if I could have a look at the back of the package but he laughed and pulled away.

"Grandpa's going to tell me how bad it is and it'll rot my teeth" he said looking at his mum and smiling, "He'll give me a whole story about it."

Abel and an albino girl

The three of us laughed.  He knows me so well the little bugger, and he's only nine.  But it made me think when I was about his age.  I was living in Nigeria and have great memories of that time.  Not all the details but of certain events and places. I wrote a little about it here, very little.  My dad was in the army and his best friend was a Nigerian who we rented a place from; he became a very wealthy man.  But, like the Americans did up at the air base in England near where I lived, my mum and dad hired local people to help.  We had a man named Abel who used to help with chores and look after me if my folks went out, that's him on the right.

I have very fond memories of Abel. He was very good to me and I used to enjoy being with him.  I remember him taking me for walks and always felt secure in his company.  I remember him being a strong, very fit man but very kind and gentle.  Whenever the Juju man would be about I would feel safe knowing I was with Abel although I am sure he had some belief in the Juju at that time.  He showed me little trinkets and bags of bones and other things that were hanging in trees but he never touched them or moved them.

In the picture above he is showing us an albino girl.  He would talk of some Africans with white skin, and he wasn't referring to Berbers or other North African people. So he brought this girl to show us and was showing us her arm and how it was white.

I have inquired abut Abel in my adult years and asked my father's friend Sam if he knew anything about Abel when I saw him in England shortly before his death.  Sam told me that Abel died in the Biafran War, or the Nigerian civil war as it is called also.  This was a terrible conflict that occurred in the late 60's when the Igbo people of the south east attempted secession.

Nigeria, like all the nation states that were drawn up by colonial powers is continually in conflict as these states did not develop organically but were shaped in the interests of the colonial occupiers, in Nigeria's case, Britain. Nigeria had some 60 million people consisting of some 300 differing ethnic and cultural groups at the time of its independence, the three dominant ones being the Muslim Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the south west and the Igbo in the south east and who are predominantly Christian.
The creation of the modern nation state of Nigeria by British imperialism, just like Iraq, was not done with the interest of its residents in mind.

I regret not being  been able to go back there as an adult and meet Abel.  Who knows how old he was or what his real name was if it wasn't Abel; being Christian though it may well have been. The Biafran War was a horrible conflict that took his life and the lives of another two million or so Nigerians, a huge percentage of the Igbo, or Ibo as they are also called.

Being with my grandson today made me think of what those years meant to me and where I was when I was his age.  I was lucky in a way, in a beautiful place, unaware of the events that were shaping the world around me, and Abel was helping to shape me, even though I didn't know it.