THE WAKA-VENTURES OF MALLAM PELLYKS (Part 1)
by Felix Abrahams Obi on Sunday, April 1, 2012 at 2:52am ·
THE WAKA-VENTURES OF MALLAM PELLYKS (Part 1)
©Felix Abrahams Obi,
Abuja, April 1st 2012
…………………………………………………
My name is Mallam Pellyks…and I’m not a Boko Haram terrorist because my email (halal3k) is the opposite of haram and it’s been in use since 1998 or thereabout when I registered the email way back in Benin. Then the cost of browsing for about an hour was about 1k, and the dial-ups were in the vogue. Only the rich installed computers with internet at home, and in order to properly browse and rove round the net, we paid for ‘all night browsing’ even though many of us hated ‘all night prayer vigils’. Now I digress, please forgive my distracted and philosophical adumbrations. Ewoooo, I have ‘spoke’ a vocab ooooh…chaiiii!
OK. Emm let’s go back to the origins of my special name. I was not born in the North of Nigeria, but I’m as dark, and ebony-hued and proudly black Naija dude from the South-East of Naija. My parents are full-blooded Igbo with no phenotypic or genetic ambiguities or abnormalities distorting their anatomical and physiological to warrant any reconstructive surgery to make them look more Igbotic, than necessary.
Yet I am taller than my parents, and long before I became a ‘fatty bombooo’, I used to be as slim, cute and tall like a Fulani herd’s boy. But the years of sitting at long meetings where coffee breaks are served have not helped my esteemed goal of returning back to my six-packed-abs frame of yesteryears. But they assure me that if I keep hoping without going to the gym like I used to in the past, I can still lower my BMR so long as I take the vow of fasting and poverty, save that this my big-man look may vanish in a jiffy.
Please forgive my soliloquy as it is not an indication for enduring the searchlight of a psychiatrist. So as a child, it was obvious I had the Hausa gene in my system, and how this hybridization happened has remained a mystery to all and sundry. As a ‘bomboy’ growing up in my village, I used to squat while eating alone or with my wonderful cousins. While they sit comfy on any available seats, my ‘humble self’ will lower my butts, bend my knees, and gbam, I’ll rest my bombom on the fictitious seat. They told me that’s how mallams or ‘aboki nnama’ used to sit when they eat or taking a rest from chasing their unruly cows around from one green pasture to the other.
This innate squatting style of mine marked me out as a special kid. And to add to this uniqueness, I had very flexible joints that should have made me one of the best gymnasts had my parents thought seriously about relocating to European countries like Bulgaria, Poland or Russia. To display the versatility of my skeletal appendages (otherwise called ‘joints’ for the uninitiated), I could easily sprawl on the floor with my legs twisted in what may seem to be an awkward but painless position to the chagrin of my relatives. And when you look around Igboland, you are sure to not find men sprawled on a floor mat, eating ‘tuwo shinkaffa’ or ‘tuwo masara’ with ‘mia akwuka’. No mind my ‘nyamiri dodondoya’ people who make balls of ‘akpu’ as powerful as bullets while taking a ride from the esophagus to the gastric chambers, after the mastication have been done in the buccal cavity before the downward acceleration into the abdominal cavity.
With all this precocious display of this arewa-like genius, my classmates in my village secondary school had no difficulty nicknaming me ‘Mallam Abubakar’, thinking such a nickname would haunt me for life. To their shame, all efforts to have me enroll for a degree in the universities in Igboland were providentially thwarted against all odds, and like a crown-prince on a mission to reclaim his suzerain power, I was carried on the coaches of destiny (train) till I docked at the final station in Kano. And when my former school mates heard that I had gone to Kano to acquire my first degree, they now reckoned that the name they taunted me with, had turned into a self-fulfilling miracle of a prophesy. In capitulation to providence, they screamed like a defeated foe, ‘ Cheii, he has gone back to his brothers and sisters in Kano’!
And what a home-coming it was for me to be among my arewa brethren, only that after almost 6years in Kano studying for a degree in ‘Okpukpology’ (aka physiotherapy), I could only mutter a few incomplete sentences in Hausa to the shame of all those who made me speak ‘dogo turenci’ (big big, English grammar) in the class and lecture rooms. Then at Bayero University Kano, I tried a few times to attend the meetings of the Igbo students Association where ‘turenci’ was banned, and since I couldn’t address a gathering in Igbo, I respected myself and quietly developed cold feet whenever the notice of these meeting (ogbako umuada na umuokorobia na Mahadum Ado Bayero, nke no na obodo Kano) reach my ears or are spotted by my eyes.
I didn’t leave Kano without an arewa lingua after all for I got tutored in one of the sweetest Creole-like languages I’ve ever known. It’s far sweeter than the ‘waffi’ pidgin and it’s especially unique because only a few mallams like me can speak it fluently. Our only grouse is that some comedians like ‘Holy Mallam” have used this our language to make millions without our permission. When we quip “Wallahi I dey craze?” while chatting with you, it’s obvious you are displaying signs and symptoms of the inmates that keep psychiatrists busy as companions in a mental home. If we ask you “Wetin be my name?”, it’s obvious we’re being courteous in trying to know your name, even when you haven’t introduced your name to us as expected when people meet the very first time.
We are often amused when we say “Kwonduster”, and the uninitiated acts as if we’re in a classroom where dusters are used to wipe out chalk from a blackboard. So we call the conductor, “Kwonduster” because it’s his duty to clean and dust the buses that ply on the streets of Kano. And when Oyinbo people come to Nigeria to pose as tourists, they are shocked when we buy all their “pelenti pelenti dollars”. And we wonder why people are amused when Dame Peshee says ‘womens’ because that is because when you add women plus women, the plural becomes womens shikina!
So in the last 3 weeks, I went on a tour of Kano, Jigawa and Sokoto (Sakwoto) on an official assignment. Since my Hausa language skills have grown so rusty and mundane, I switched easily to my ‘arewa english’ as my legs landed on the dusty streets of Kano. Wallahi it was like homecoming after missing my ‘fiful’ who call me “Pellyks” in a sonorous manner. Though I was happy being back to Kano, I wasn’t happy with what these Boko Haram boys have done to Kano. Kai, ‘ebiri wia I gwo, I see am 4 pelenti pelenti sodja fiful as ip we I dey fight am 4 sibul war! Police fiful I put am 4 road block ebiriwia. Ip I drive am 4 my mota, dem telli me to ofun ya boot!
But I enjoyed my stay in Kano, save that pelenti fiful 4 Sabon Gari, I don kwomot. Wallahi dey telli me dat book haram I no gwood wallahi tallahi. Dem telli me say, book haram I no like am 4 makaranta to go and learn and do akaratu. Haba! This people should know that if you say education is expensive; try to aacquire ignorance…kowaiii! This book people are just full of pelenti pelenti iskanci’ and behave like a dan-iska…but one day be one day when they will try to detonate bomb, and the bomb go shout, ‘wallahi you is a dan-iska faah…me I no wan explode again to killing innocent fiful gaskiya…
(To be continued)
……………………….
(Felix Abrahams Obi is an Abuja-based physiotherapist and poet )
North embracing South
Arewa of the Future
©Felix Abrahams Obi,
Abuja, April 1st 2012
…………………………………………………
My name is Mallam Pellyks…and I’m not a Boko Haram terrorist because my email (halal3k) is the opposite of haram and it’s been in use since 1998 or thereabout when I registered the email way back in Benin. Then the cost of browsing for about an hour was about 1k, and the dial-ups were in the vogue. Only the rich installed computers with internet at home, and in order to properly browse and rove round the net, we paid for ‘all night browsing’ even though many of us hated ‘all night prayer vigils’. Now I digress, please forgive my distracted and philosophical adumbrations. Ewoooo, I have ‘spoke’ a vocab ooooh…chaiiii!
OK. Emm let’s go back to the origins of my special name. I was not born in the North of Nigeria, but I’m as dark, and ebony-hued and proudly black Naija dude from the South-East of Naija. My parents are full-blooded Igbo with no phenotypic or genetic ambiguities or abnormalities distorting their anatomical and physiological to warrant any reconstructive surgery to make them look more Igbotic, than necessary.
Yet I am taller than my parents, and long before I became a ‘fatty bombooo’, I used to be as slim, cute and tall like a Fulani herd’s boy. But the years of sitting at long meetings where coffee breaks are served have not helped my esteemed goal of returning back to my six-packed-abs frame of yesteryears. But they assure me that if I keep hoping without going to the gym like I used to in the past, I can still lower my BMR so long as I take the vow of fasting and poverty, save that this my big-man look may vanish in a jiffy.
Please forgive my soliloquy as it is not an indication for enduring the searchlight of a psychiatrist. So as a child, it was obvious I had the Hausa gene in my system, and how this hybridization happened has remained a mystery to all and sundry. As a ‘bomboy’ growing up in my village, I used to squat while eating alone or with my wonderful cousins. While they sit comfy on any available seats, my ‘humble self’ will lower my butts, bend my knees, and gbam, I’ll rest my bombom on the fictitious seat. They told me that’s how mallams or ‘aboki nnama’ used to sit when they eat or taking a rest from chasing their unruly cows around from one green pasture to the other.
This innate squatting style of mine marked me out as a special kid. And to add to this uniqueness, I had very flexible joints that should have made me one of the best gymnasts had my parents thought seriously about relocating to European countries like Bulgaria, Poland or Russia. To display the versatility of my skeletal appendages (otherwise called ‘joints’ for the uninitiated), I could easily sprawl on the floor with my legs twisted in what may seem to be an awkward but painless position to the chagrin of my relatives. And when you look around Igboland, you are sure to not find men sprawled on a floor mat, eating ‘tuwo shinkaffa’ or ‘tuwo masara’ with ‘mia akwuka’. No mind my ‘nyamiri dodondoya’ people who make balls of ‘akpu’ as powerful as bullets while taking a ride from the esophagus to the gastric chambers, after the mastication have been done in the buccal cavity before the downward acceleration into the abdominal cavity.
With all this precocious display of this arewa-like genius, my classmates in my village secondary school had no difficulty nicknaming me ‘Mallam Abubakar’, thinking such a nickname would haunt me for life. To their shame, all efforts to have me enroll for a degree in the universities in Igboland were providentially thwarted against all odds, and like a crown-prince on a mission to reclaim his suzerain power, I was carried on the coaches of destiny (train) till I docked at the final station in Kano. And when my former school mates heard that I had gone to Kano to acquire my first degree, they now reckoned that the name they taunted me with, had turned into a self-fulfilling miracle of a prophesy. In capitulation to providence, they screamed like a defeated foe, ‘ Cheii, he has gone back to his brothers and sisters in Kano’!
And what a home-coming it was for me to be among my arewa brethren, only that after almost 6years in Kano studying for a degree in ‘Okpukpology’ (aka physiotherapy), I could only mutter a few incomplete sentences in Hausa to the shame of all those who made me speak ‘dogo turenci’ (big big, English grammar) in the class and lecture rooms. Then at Bayero University Kano, I tried a few times to attend the meetings of the Igbo students Association where ‘turenci’ was banned, and since I couldn’t address a gathering in Igbo, I respected myself and quietly developed cold feet whenever the notice of these meeting (ogbako umuada na umuokorobia na Mahadum Ado Bayero, nke no na obodo Kano) reach my ears or are spotted by my eyes.
I didn’t leave Kano without an arewa lingua after all for I got tutored in one of the sweetest Creole-like languages I’ve ever known. It’s far sweeter than the ‘waffi’ pidgin and it’s especially unique because only a few mallams like me can speak it fluently. Our only grouse is that some comedians like ‘Holy Mallam” have used this our language to make millions without our permission. When we quip “Wallahi I dey craze?” while chatting with you, it’s obvious you are displaying signs and symptoms of the inmates that keep psychiatrists busy as companions in a mental home. If we ask you “Wetin be my name?”, it’s obvious we’re being courteous in trying to know your name, even when you haven’t introduced your name to us as expected when people meet the very first time.
We are often amused when we say “Kwonduster”, and the uninitiated acts as if we’re in a classroom where dusters are used to wipe out chalk from a blackboard. So we call the conductor, “Kwonduster” because it’s his duty to clean and dust the buses that ply on the streets of Kano. And when Oyinbo people come to Nigeria to pose as tourists, they are shocked when we buy all their “pelenti pelenti dollars”. And we wonder why people are amused when Dame Peshee says ‘womens’ because that is because when you add women plus women, the plural becomes womens shikina!
So in the last 3 weeks, I went on a tour of Kano, Jigawa and Sokoto (Sakwoto) on an official assignment. Since my Hausa language skills have grown so rusty and mundane, I switched easily to my ‘arewa english’ as my legs landed on the dusty streets of Kano. Wallahi it was like homecoming after missing my ‘fiful’ who call me “Pellyks” in a sonorous manner. Though I was happy being back to Kano, I wasn’t happy with what these Boko Haram boys have done to Kano. Kai, ‘ebiri wia I gwo, I see am 4 pelenti pelenti sodja fiful as ip we I dey fight am 4 sibul war! Police fiful I put am 4 road block ebiriwia. Ip I drive am 4 my mota, dem telli me to ofun ya boot!
But I enjoyed my stay in Kano, save that pelenti fiful 4 Sabon Gari, I don kwomot. Wallahi dey telli me dat book haram I no gwood wallahi tallahi. Dem telli me say, book haram I no like am 4 makaranta to go and learn and do akaratu. Haba! This people should know that if you say education is expensive; try to aacquire ignorance…kowaiii! This book people are just full of pelenti pelenti iskanci’ and behave like a dan-iska…but one day be one day when they will try to detonate bomb, and the bomb go shout, ‘wallahi you is a dan-iska faah…me I no wan explode again to killing innocent fiful gaskiya…
(To be continued)
……………………….
(Felix Abrahams Obi is an Abuja-based physiotherapist and poet )
North embracing SouthArewa of the Future
