The Thrills of a Semi-urban Childhood

Growing up in a semi-urban community comes with a blessing that permits you to experience rural life and urban life; at the end of the day, you have the best of both worlds. Some of the things I loved about the marriage of these two worlds are the stories we told and the games we played. With friends and peers, we told the famous “John and Mary” stories, tortoise stories, fox stories and those who had watched cartoons or read a few books came in with Cinderella and Snow White stories. The games we played ranged from dodging, stone, pitai, stinging, kaks, outh, one two, play-play, mbanga, hopscotch (tabala), scrabble, snakes and ladders,  monopoly, reresin (rope) and hide and seek. Story telling was my favourite activity.

Very few of these stories were told to us by the fireside like was the case with our aunts (who told us these stories). When our aunts were around, we shared a room with them, so storytelling became a bedtime thing. There were times when negotiations were made in relation to how many stories had to be told. Sometimes, these stories were payments for services that were rendered earlier in the day. Our first contact with Lamnso and songs in Oku were through stories. It felt like we had discovered some lost treasure. We repeated the expressions and songs so many times in a day that they remained stuck in our heads.

A few years ago, when I became an auntie, I wanted to continue with the storytelling tradition when I visited my nephews. I was delighted to see books in their playhouse but these books expressed realities that were a little foreign.  I remember going through my father’s old books to see if I could find the folktales, riddles and proverbs we read as kids. All I could see where a few pages of these books and this broke my heart because I could not remember even one tenth of these folktales. To say the least, I could remember just a couple of riddles and proverbs. I was angry with myself because it had taken me an eternity to realize the real value of these books. Finding copies today would almost be impossible; they were typewritten with a typewriter and that alone tells you how old they are and how limited they are in number. 

Out of curiosity, I asked a good number of my friends and acquaintances questions on folktales with respect to their tribes and villages. Most of their answers made me realize how rich my childhood was. While some of them expressed regret because they remembered very little, others though just a small fraction of my sample, took pride in their ignorance. They gave replies like “I don’t know such things”, “asking me about that is like asking a priest about sex” and “I didn’t grow up in the village”.  When I asked what stories they were going to tell their children, most of them laughed or ignored the question. This is why our children think Spiderman, Batman and Wonder Woman are universal super heroes and  Hercules, Robin Hood and Perseus are universal legends. I had the best of two worlds.  Why can’t our children have both?

Linda Norwan