It was the last Saturday of the month at the Old Hide Out in Surulere. When the music stopped, Taiwo, Ogbuagu and I—the Three Happy Cheers!—we headed for the stage but the proper Comedian stopped us in mid-stride.
“Your night, but—no break for me tonight,” he announced.
“Three happy cheers, anyway,” shouted Ogbuagu, raising high his big mug of beer.
“Kwenu!”
“Hey!”
“Kwenu!”
“Hey!”
“Kwenu!”
“Hey!”
The comedian dived straight into his jokes. He mimicked every ethnic speaking style he could remember. Then he told the one about the Yoruba man who went to bed with a ruler to measure how long he slept; the Hausa man who removed his shoes to enter a taxi; the Igbo man who went to the bank with a spanner to open a bank account; and the Efik nurse who woke a sleeping patient because she forgot to give him his sleeping pills. The crowd were roaring and falling out.
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“Comedian-in-Chief!”
“Corner-Corner Commentator!”
“Clown Colony!”
“Ali Baba and the Forty Laughs!”
Then came a discordant voice from a distant corner.
“I remember you! . . . You’re the joker who tells the same bad jokes at every wedding. Last Saturday you were so awful the Isoko bride said I don’t and walked off leaving her Gwari groom standing at the altar!”
“No, that wasn’t me,” protested the poor comedian. “That was a Kollywood movie from East Africa!”
The crowd was a little bewildered. Was this real or just another joke?
“Your jokes are not real,” continued the accuser. “For instance, I haven’t heard you say anything funny about Fulani cattlemen.”
“What’s funny about Fulani cattlemen?”
“What’s NOT funny about Fulani cattlemen? Abi you no de read newspaper?”
“That’s right,” shouted someone. “Now that you mention it, every other day the papers report how Fulani cattlemen descended on a peaceful village, set houses on fire, slaughtered ten, twenty, forty, hundred people and more.”
“That’s Boko Haram!”
“No, this is from before-before!”
The crowd froze.
“That’s a fact,” shouted another diner. “For years and years, Fulani cattlemen have butchered farmers in the Lower North—Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, Kwara, Kogi, Benue. Now they’ve come down to Edo, Delta, Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Abia, Cross River . . .”
“Don’t the villagers ever fight back?”
“They do. But they are caught by surprise, so they get the worst of it.”
“What do the authorities do?”
“Nothing! Sometimes they even punish the villagers.”
“So the Fulani cattlemen commit these atrocities and get away with it? Why?”
“I hear their final destination is the Atlantic Ocean where they will have enough water for their cattle to drink.”
“No, they’re trying to reach their governor who lives on Banana Island.”
Now the crowd thawed and laughter rained down in torrents.
“I thought the governors all live in Abuja these days.”
“Yes, but no one can talk to them there. The Governor’s Lodge is unapproachable.”
“I hear one or two Southern governors signed an agreement with Fulani cattlemen to allow them grazing rights . . .”
“You mean the right to trample the farms and eat up the crops?”
“. . . all because they want to be re-elected.”
“How many votes do Fulani cattlemen have?”
“They claim they number 12 million.”
“Isn’t that larger than the population of the entire North?”
“You mean the real figures, not the fictional quota fixed by the British?”
“What sort of government do we have anyway?”
Sudden silence.
The speaker was a little old lady sitting up-front.
“So backward! . . . . America alone produces enough cattle-meat to feed the entire world. At the same time, they produce enough wheat and maize to cover half the globe. How do they do it if their cattlemen have grazing rights to trample and chew up the wheat and maize?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said another lady to the left. “What they do in America as well as Europe, China and everywhere else in the modern world, is to create animal farms where cows can wander about and eat green grass plus dry grass (hay) and other food supplements provided them in huge quantities. Goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and other animals are reared in their own separate sections. The entire farm is protected with a wire fence so the animals don’t wander off. Sheep’s wool is sheared when due. Goats and cows are milked and chicken eggs harvested daily. In due course these animals are transported by rail and trailer to faraway slaughter-houses. Simple.”
Then a voice from the rear, a deep baritone.
“Wonderful! Wonderful!! And so simple. No need for these cows to tramp all the way from Sokoto, Kano and Maiduguri to slaughterhouses in Ibadan, Umuahia and Port Harcourt. No need for bloody confrontations between cattlemen and farmers, each of them equally necessary to the national economy. The entire nomadic herding system is outdated. The North has vast expanses of land where large animal farms can be established. Even the South has land. The bottom-line is that cows must be confined to farms. The bloody conflicts between cattlemen and farmers must stop. And it is the government’s responsibility to organize it. Where is the president, the governors, the minister of agriculture? Are they sleeping??!!!”
A huge applause went up. The avalanche of sound shook the rafters. The musicians came hurrying back.
“Strike up the music!!! . . . .”
Onwuchekwa Jemie
