These Herbs Know You by Name by Okechi Okeke
1.
The second time you, my dead grandmother, came to me, we didn’t hug, didn’t speak to each other. You were outside your mud-house, seated on a low wooden stool. A big bowl full of various herbs sat at your feet. You stood up, stoked the fire. I called you; you turned and saw me standing close to the clothesline, staring and grinning. You smiled, turned back to your boiling pot as you threw those herbs inside it.
2.
I want to pull out, from my finely stored memories of you, an incident that happened from my childhood. I was in junior high school and I’d returned from school one day. I became dizzy suddenly. My temperature was high and my body was eager to burn out, to return me to ash. My head ached, and then my eyes became so heavy with an itching pain as though slices of pepper had entered them. The test result, a few days after, showed malaria. So my mother rushed to the pharmacy, got some medicines. And I slept afterwards. But the next day, malaria didn’t leave me. The symptoms, though minimal, lingered.
You had heard of my illness, and the next day you appeared in our house with a can filled to the brim with herbal medicine. You said it was ogwu iba. You touched my forehead and my torso and my arm. You prised my eyes and peered at them. ‘Ndo,’ you said to me before decanting the medicine into a slim stainless-steel cup. I peeked into the cup and the dark-brown colour of the medicine made me queasy. The bitter smell wafted through my nostrils. I shuddered. Something in me resisted it, especially the distasteful smell. I shook my head. I didn’t want to drink it. No, mba.
But you compelled me to drink it. ‘Drink it osiso-osiso,’ you told me. Crying, I gulped down the medicine, the bitterness stuck to my lips and hid behind my throat so that it seemed I would need something to push it away. I spat again and again. Yet, the bitterness was there. I wanted to throw up. I belched. But you rubbed my back, told me to be calm, that I would be fine in a few hours.
3.
Slightly tall with your skin dark like the shade of pear, and eyes almond-shaped, you walked with your head high and shoulders squared. Like the illuminating beauty of a rose flower, you magnetized a lot of people and goodness to yourself. This benevolent attraction was matched with corresponding foes, too. Some people hated you for your eloquence, for your reluctance to never be silenced. At a meeting with the village head, you often recounted, you stood up and told the village head—a powerful man who was feared greatly—that his decision about annexing another man’s land was dubious and selfish. The other people there pinched themselves in wild surprise and seemed to be asking each other, in their puzzled gazes, how you, of all people there, had spoken up. They feared you’d be penalized by the village head. And even as you sat there, you said, nobody could see that your mind wrenched in anxiety too; that you would jolt, every day, after that incident, when anyone visited you because you thought they carried the news of your penalty.
But you were various things to various people. Some called you Mama Akara because, as a widow who had eleven children to feed, you sold akara and yours were sought after. Your eyes crinkled with pride anytime you unfurled this experience from the pockets of your memory. Some pronounced you Nwanyi ike — for you were brave and strong. Unstoppable too. And you once, in your young age, boasted of carrying men up and throwing their backs to the ground. Even as tasty and crispy as your akara was, even as your hands steadied men, hoisted them and dashed them on the ground, even as you were liked and disliked, feared and loved, you remained relevant. Because you cured people with your incredible knowledge of herbs. You were a herbalist.
4.
You lived in a bungalow that stood arm in arm with an old mud-house in Obeama, a rural area in the small town of Oyigbo, a southern part of the crude oil-producing Rivers State. The mud-house had a raffia thatch pulled over its roof as a low hat. You’d decided to keep the mud-house despite the comfortable modernity and convenience of the bungalow. In Igboland, it is believed that an old woman doesn’t get tired of the music she knows well. Perhaps, having known and lived in the mud-house until when, much recently, the bungalow was erected, you wanted to keep it. This, for you, was more of retaining that part of your Africanness that mattered to you.
Before the entrance to your compound stood scarlet roses waving and dancing like delighted balloons. Then various trees were planted at various positions. At the open space in front of the house, a guava tree was there. Beside it was the pawpaw tree. At the back of the mud-house, the orange tree with its broad branches rooted itself. There was an ube tree. Other plants were aloe vera and oroma nkirisi. You planted vegetables such as pumpkin, bitter leaf, waterleaf, scent leaf and so on.
You got some of those herbs from the leaves, bark and roots of certain trees for you thought it wise to plant some of them around you. With this, it cut down the burden of roaming the bush looking for those trees, although you sought certain wild herbs in the bush.
5.
In one of my numerous visits to your house, I met a woman sprawling on the ground, wailing while carrying her baby in the crook of her hands. You called her “Nne Nwa” repeatedly while asking her to gather herself together. She was in front of your bungalow and in her sob-infested words were pleas to you to save her baby whose eyes were jaundiced and arms lean. The baby, maybe two or three years old, shriveled with the thrust of pains in his stomach. He teared up as he stared at his mother.
Later, Nne Nwa narrated how she had toured the crevices of the Teaching Hospital in Port Harcourt, endured the antiseptic smells and repeated questions by nurses who said it was cold and recommended drugs. And when her son kept wincing in pains at night, she returned and a test was done and malaria diagnosed. Drugs were given to her, although her petty business wasn’t thriving, she bought the medicines. A few days later the pain still wrenched her baby and people pointed them to prophets. They said maybe it was a spiritual affliction. She met a prophet who demanded money from her, heaped prayers on her baby, conducted deliverances and dipped him in holy water. And yet, she said, like a gem in her hands, death wanted to prise her hands open, to collect her baby until a friend of hers who visited her, saw the baby, saw how he wailed harder when she touched her stomach. She asked her to try herbal medicine and directed her to you.
After inspecting the child, prising open and peering into his eyes, pressing his stomach and watching the baby flinch and wince, you told Nne Nwa that her son had “Apa afo.” I had not heard such a name. It sounded like a menacing companion of death, something too volatile to hold inside the human body. I was terrified but Nne Nwa’s face was scrapped clean of the comprehension of what you had said. Her only words to you were: “Please help me. He’s my only child.”
6.
Unlike a few others who combined divination and spiritualism and herbalism to heal their patients, you employed only herbs to cure and prevent diseases. The traditional healers, I mean those who are adroit at divination and spiritualism, are called dibia or babalawo. They, most times, commune with the spirits, throw cowries on the ground which they encircle with white chalk, and make sacrifices and seek ways to cure diseases or cases that are very dire.
But you were neither a dibia nor a babalawo. Because in all your dealings with your patients, you made no sacrifices or consulted spirits. Not that you found them odd or bad—not at all. In fact, you said you would have been so delighted if you had, together with herbalism, used divination and spiritualism. But what your father, a herbalist too, transferred to you was the act of using herbs to cure, the sensibility of knowing the medicinal importance of herbs and roots and leaves.
7.
As Nne Nwa wept, as you told her that you didn’t have the herbs to prepare some medicine for her baby, my eyes did not stray from the baby. Nothing pelted my mind with throbbing fear more than the thought of seeing that baby, inept. Because I had heard stories about that, about Uncle Dona who had been poisoned. He had gone out with friends, at a pub, drinking. He said he’d left his drink to pee but returned quickly afterwards. He suspected nothing and continued drinking. When he returned to his house, he began writhing in pain, clutching his stomach. His wife carried him to the hospital the next morning. While series of tests were done to ascertain the cause of his stomach ache and sudden emaciation, he exited life. The news broke you. You refused food. You rejected comfort. You hardly slept. Grief wriggled sanity out of your mind. And we’d feared you might kill yourself. The fragility of life is not about how short it is but how unexpectedly the world carries on when someone dies, as though the person was never here. As I stared at that baby I imagined so much life ahead of him. My bones shivered with tremor. I quickly told you that I could get some of those herbs. You widened your eyes in confusion and shook your head no. You knew I knew nothing about those herbs. In a few minutes, you were already outside, towards the path leading to the bush. You called me to get you a knife with which you could get some of the herbs. When I came running to you, I saw fear in your eyes. You told me how unsure you were about the baby surviving that. I stood there, my lips partly open and my mind foggy with disbelief. But I hurried to Nne Nwa, tried to console her and offered her a cup of water. And I told her that her baby would be fine.
8.
As a herbalist, you wore it proudly. This pride was a thousand lines of happiness across your face each time someone referred another person to you or each time someone returned with a heart full of thanks and bags heavy with gifts. They affirmed the potency of those medicines, especially, most of them would say, after how they had toured the hospitals and taken a series of medications. One day, you told me about Nne Nwa after I had asked you, after one of your patients gifted you vials of perfume and wrappers and a bunch of plantains. You said Nne Nwa’s baby was well. That Nne Nwa came with her husband, to thank you.
Adroit at treating whitlow, aching tooth, infections, fever and infertility, you got those medicines from plant parts with cellular structures like leaves (anunebe, akata, bitter leaf, scent leaf); barks and roots of trees like guava, oroma nkirisi; bulbs like garlic; and woody or fleshy rhizome stems like ginger, lemon grass, turmeric. And okpete (costus afar) commonly known as bush cane.
In preparing, for instance, the medicine for fever, you would wash guava leaves, oroma nkrisi, ginger, the root of ubulu inu – nauclea latifolia and okpete (its leaves and stem). You would boil the woody pieces and leaves for a specific time in a large pot, in front of your mud-house. Later, this boiled medicine would be filtered and poured, when cold, into jerry cans of different sizes. Sometimes, you never boiled the woody pieces but put them in a bottle or plastic can together with other things like ginger and garlic. Then a local gin, ogogoro, would be poured into it.
9.
On a bus traveling from Abuja to Onitsha, I met a man with a jaundiced view of the word herbalist. It was in September 2020. A long-winded, exhaustive journey. The long bus, parked with over 25 passengers, took us through the chilly, dark soul of the night
Inside the bus, the atmosphere was peppered with the lively humming and chatting of other passengers. And the sharing of intimate stories. I plugged earphones into my ears and nodded to music.
Out of the corner of my eye, I peeked at the man seated close to me. His head was shaved clean, his nose huge. He could be in his late thirties. Maybe early forties. The man was too wayward with words, always talking, but very generous with his smiles. You detested, mildly, people who were never prudent with words in public. If you had been there, you would have asked the man to minimize his talking. The man and I only exchanged greetings. ‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘Well done my brother,’ he responded. ‘How you dey?’ He asked to which I replied, ‘fine’ with a nod.
When we approached Benin in the morning, a man hopped into our bus. A slim, tall man whose eyes sank deep into his sockets. He would alight at Asaba, the town before Onitsha, our destination. He greeted everybody on the bus with his genial smile. People were awake with patches of lazy sleep in their eyes. People yawned. Some rushed out to pee. Some, through the open window, called and haggled over prices of bread, groundnuts, gala, bitter kola, walnuts.
When everyone had returned to their seats, and the bus started to move, he began to speak. He spoke about various sicknesses, how he used local herbs and roots to prepare potent medicines. And that he’d learnt it from his father.
Behind the bus, someone confirmed the potency of the medicine. Her neighbour had bought it, she said. And it worked. The man smiled and jumped on that testimony. “Nobody has regretted buying it,” he boasted.
The man beside me bought two. And showing me the medicine, he grinned. Finally, he said under his breath, ‘This thing go comot from my body.’ He leaned his head forward. ‘See, infection don kill me. I don go hospital, take drugs but the thing still dey’— he pointed to his groin — ‘and person tell me say make I try herbal medicine.’ He raised the container of the medicine.
I almost laughed at the way the man contorted his face.
‘Sorry, sir.’ I waved at the slim man and asked him some of the herbs he had used. I added, ‘You’re a herbalist, right?’ He was silent for a few seconds, and swiftly, stunningly, he lifted his face. Then I saw anger, like venom, shooting out of his eyes, falling heavily on me.
‘God forbid.’ he shrugged. ‘I am not a herbalist,’ he smirked. ‘I am a local doctor,’ he said, eyed me and quickly moved to the back, to attend to other people’s demands.
10.
In one of your numerous tales, you unearthed the harshness your father together with other herbalists faced, and how they were dismissed as evil, as backward during colonialism. Your voice had a whiff of disappointment. People were made to turn down our traditional medicines for Western medicines. Ogwu nwa bekee. And in fact, you said, the dibia and babalawo and their spiritualism were linked to witchcraft. Any time I listened to you recount this event, you always frowned your face, especially as you mumbled the word witchcraft. You picked up a fight with that language. And now, thinking about it, I believe anybody describing African medicine and traditional healers should expunge that word.
Such language, among other things, is a weighty tool that robs one of one’s identities and pushes one into a state of inferiority. It can be used to make one find no pride in the things that make one unique. It is a blade that slashes through the soul of our belief, of our humanity. To control a people’s language is to control their narratives, which is an expression of power. And power is used to satisfy the intent of its holder. But Chinua Achebe reminds us that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” For Achebe, to have our own historians is about liberation, about the desire for our own language. Because our language is an object of our desire, an expression of our love, of who we are. Like love, sometimes it’s chaotic but we recognize it and look beyond its burning state. Fire can’t burn itself down.
While the slim man on the bus acknowledged his knowledge of herbs, which he’d learnt from his father, and the potency of his medicine, he failed to acknowledge the identity of who he was, of what it meant to us, Nigerians. Perhaps he didn’t understand what it meant. Perhaps he loathed the word for how demeaning he thought it would sound in the mouth of people —our people. Maybe it was a shield against the derision he thought would come from the people or their refusal to buy his medicine. For him, ‘local doctor’ should and must be used to refer to him.
But, for me, to dismiss the name herbalist, to wear instead the foreign insignia of ‘local doctor’ is to kill the pride that comes with the work. It’s to deny that, before the infiltration of colonialism and its language, we ever existed. To deny that we ever cured—and still cure—ourselves with our herbal medicines.
11.
The week you died, you called me and my sister, Toochi. It was on Thursday. You told us you had been a bit sick, that my Aunty Salo, whom you were living with in her residence in Umuahia, had taken you to the hospital. In fact, you were calling us from the hospital. Delighted to hear your voice, we told you you’d be fine. Then I sang for you because you always enjoyed listening to me singing. I wanted you to feel less lonely. And you handed us a bouquet of your blessings: It shall be well with us. Nothing will hurt us in life. Heaven and earth will protect us. To each of those blessings, of those prayers, we said Amen and Amen and Amen. Before you hung up, you told us you wanted to see us as soon as possible. Toochi and I promised we would come, but we never did. Because on Sunday, a few days later, Aunty Salo called my mother. You’re dead.
12.
In his poem “Spirits”, Birago Diop, a Senegalese poet, says that, “Those who are dead are not ever gone, they are in the darkness that grows lighter.” In Igboland, this is what we believe too; how we perceive death, which is not a breach but a bridge. It’s a passageway that connects us, the living, with the dead. We don’t call them demons whom we should be protected from. That’s not our language. In our tongue, we name them our Ndiichie or Ndibunze, who sometimes serve as our chi.
You are still here, somewhere between this life and the next, growing lighter. You have visited a lot of people since you died: uncles, aunties, members of the extended family and friends. To some, you came to in a dream and others in a trance. Uncle Igwe told us you came to him in your most splendid attire, a glow on your face. You told him how you didn’t want to leave because you loved us; how you struggled in your sick bed, gagging, until you finally left your body. Aunty C said you came too. She saw you in a place that seemed like her room. Your face was hidden behind the wall. Only your back was to her. She pleaded with you to return. But you told her to tell us that our cries were distancing you from us. She pleaded with you to return. Did you not see that your absence had deepened the scabs on our wounded hearts? Before you left her, you assured her you’d return but not then or now. That you’d come to her as her child and you would want her to pamper you. I have heard stories of reincarnation, of people returning to their loved ones as their children. Such news delighted—and still delights—me.
A day after you died, you visited me. On 28th October, 2019. It was in a dream. I had cried and cried, unsure of how to swallow the new reality without you. At first silence terrified me. I felt you were there, in the dark night, your hands outstretched towards me. I didn’t sleep in my room. My mother and I slept in her bed. And then you came to me with open arms. Your face was punctuated with smiles. You wore your favourite white bulbous blouse and knotted your jumping-horse wrapper. I fell into your embrace. You called my name. I called you your favourite name: Mama Rose. I told you that I knew you’d return, that you had not left us. You mentioned my name again and didn’t say any other words. We stayed there, in each other’s arms.
13.
And now, every night, in every dream, I await your arms splayed open, your lips bearing kind messages or warnings. Alone, sometimes I sing to one of your favorite songs, Oji Nwa Eme Onu by Nkwerre Aborigines Women. Do you still remember it? Do you hear me humming its lyrics the same way you did? Sometimes I wail when I call you and you are not at the door, walking through it with your measured, audacious swagger. Sometimes I feel your presence, like a shadow, clinging to my silhouette. Quietly, I say your name, “Mama Rose,” and then whisper, “If you ever decide to come back, I’ll be here, waiting for you. And in my next life, you’ll always be my grandmother.”
