By Ogbemi O. Omatete
THEN she asked me what happened.  Sobbing, I narrated the dream. She, too, started to weep and made a promise. “With the help of Almighty God and our forebears, we shall pay your fees, son.  Don’t worry.

Go back to sleep.” As I slowly drifted back to sleep, I wondered whom mother meant by “we” who would pay my fees.

As was the tradition, my uncles, aunts and mother dressed in black clothes at all times as they mourned the loss of my father. My little sister and I also had our head shaved clean to mourn Father.

Seeing these around me daily made me sad and I would occasionally burst into tears. Consequently, I was sent to my aunt in Sapele, where secondary school students with whom I could relate were on vacation. Meanwhile, unknown to me, these dedicated and determined women, my mother, my aunt, and my sister went into action planning how to pay my school fees. I found these out later on in my life.

The first thing they did was to join other women in forming an “Esusu.” This was in 1955 and it predates the idea of micro financing but similar to it in its concept and execution.

The Esusu was made up of a circle of few trusted friends, probably about five to ten in number.  Every month, each member donates a small amount of money, for example, two pounds and the total, twenty pounds for a ten-member Esusu, is given to a member, who needs it.

The ensuing month, another member gets the total. My mother, my aunt, and my sister, would arrange to collect theirs in consecutive months around when my fees were due. The Esusu provided the platform; their industriousness provided the money that funded my education at this critical junction.

As petty traders, the three women constituted themselves into a miniature trading company, with Mother and Sister based in the village, Ugborodo, and Aunt based in the town, Sapele.

Sister, young and energetic, operated between the village and the town. Ugborodo was a cashless society then and trading was by barter with dried crayfish as the medium of exchange. Mother and Sister prepared large pots of deliciously spiced, mouth-watering rice loaded with fresh crayfish.

This rice meal was very popular in the village.  Sister hawked it along with goods that Aunt had sent from Sapele in exchange for crayfish.

During the weekly Saturday market day, people hurried toMother’s shed to purchase the rice before it sold out. They stored the dried crayfish obtained from the bartering of goods and food in large, approximately hundred-liter bags woven from raffia.

When there were six to eight bags of crayfish, Sister transported them in a “Kpekpekpe” to Sapele, a journey of about seven hours. At Sapele, Aunt took over and sold the bags of crayfish. If prices were unfavorable, Sister, with Aunt’s consent, loaded the bags of crayfish into lorries and transported them to the large commercial city, Onitsha, up the Niger River.

In the 1950’s, this trip was as tedious as it was dangerous. There were no bridges on the rivers along the single lane dirt roads, so they crossed over the EthiopeRiver at Sapele, in the famous “Pontoon” and took a ferry over the Niger River from Asaba to Onitsha.

The prices in Onitsha were usually much higher than in Sapele, consequently, Sister would sell the crayfish and buy some goods to be bartered at Ugborodo. She would return to Sapele and in consultation with Aunt would buy more goods for Ugborodo.

She would return to Ugborodo to Mother, and the trading process would be repeated. Thus, Mother, Sister and Aunt laboriously raised the cash for the Esusu, through which they funded my education in the elite boarding secondary school, GovernmentCollege, Ughelli.

Three years after Father’s death, 1958, I was in Form V, the final year at GCU preparing for the West African School Certificate Examinations (WAEC), and these three women’s labour had kept me there for those years. Also, an advanced-level instruction requiring an additional two years preparation at GCU for the Cambridge Overseas’ Higher School Certificate (HSC) had been introduced.

I took the entrance examination for it and, not unexpectedly, was selected. I did not mention this to my family because the fees for HSC was sixty pounds per annum, nearly double the thirty-two pounds they started paying when Father died. Especially since I was aware that they had some difficulty paying the fees when it was increased to forty-eight pounds, although they laboured bravely on.

Coincidentally, in 1958, the Shell-BP Petroleum Oil Company, which had been exploring for oil in the Niger Delta and found some recently at Oloibiri, decided to offer scholarships for young Nigerians to study in tertiary institutions. Consequently, it sent its technical staff to all appropriate secondary schools in the Eastern Region, the Western Region and the Lagos Territory of Nigeria to teach those in Form V, a six-week course on Petroleum Production Technology.

National papers

The Company gave an examination at the end of the course and the first student in each secondary school was given a gold plated Parker pen engraved with the year and the Company’s logo. The top three students in each region were invited to their headquarters in Owerri for interview.  Although, my sister travelled often to Onitsha, I was a little worried when I was invited to Owerri, which was deep down in far-away Igbo land.  At nearly nineteen, I put up a bold face but travelled with trepidation to Owerri for the interview.

A couple of weeks later, the results were out in the national papers and in the Shell BP bulletin. Mr. Carter, our principal invited me to his office gave me the letter of offer and congratulated me.  In addition to the gold plated Parker pen, I had won the first Shell BP Scholarship to study in any tertiary institution for being first in the Western Region; a boy won that for the Eastern Region; and a girl won for Lagos territory. As I took the letter from Mr. Carter, tears of joy, which I concealed from him, rolled down my checks.