The Evil Palm Tree and the Village Terror (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Revere Amadioha the god of Thunder and live long.The Traditional African Society was full of strange things before the White man came with his God. The Deities were so powerful that nobody dared challenge them. When Onyemuche Abangwo, the son of Akuta thought he could walk where even the strongest of men dared not tarry, he never lived to see how fiery Amadioha, the god of thunder cold be in its anger.DEEP down in the rain forests of Eastern Nigeria, there used to be a village called Umuene. Though a small and obscure dwelling of about two thousand people who were mostly small scale farmers, fishermen and hunters, it somehow managed to become known among the folks east of the Niger River mostly for the wrong reasons. When they were not killing each other over some small piece of farmland, they were engaged in inter clan wars with their neighbors over very silly issues like fishing rights, which could have easily been settled amicably without recourse to conflicts. There was even this bizarre occasion when they engaged each other in a frightening contest of who had the most potent charms or juju powers. Being a small place by the great river which had no end or beginning, most of the participants in this dangerous contest used their canoes to paddle deep down the thousand tributaries of the River Niger in search of powerful medicine men and witch doctors to fortify them. Some went to Efurun, others to Sapele, Aboh, Borokiri, Abolema, Nembe and even as far as a place called Okitipupa which was rumored to be the beginning and ending of African Juju medicine. The outcome of this dangerous endeavor was that many innocent passers-by and vibrant men met their untimely death during this earth shaking contest. After ten deaths within the first two days of the ill-advised contest, the youths of the land led by a rascal called Onyemuche Abangwo the son of Akuta who was equally a law onto himself organized themselves into a vigilante outfit and chased the wicked old juju men out of the Nkwo Udara market square, the venue of the event. As a place by the great river, Umuene had many advantages of location. It had only one entry or exit point which was through the river. There were no roads leading into it as the main bush part from Umuwa and Umuekwune ended on the other side of the water. At all times therefore, one would need a canoe to cross over into Umuene. This shielded its people from any surprise attacks from their aggrieved and hostile neighbors. On the few occasions the people of Umuwa and Umuekwune had tried to invade them, the warriors of Umuene had stayed on their own side of the water and picked them out with their den guns, bows and arrows like kites. With a number of the invading forces dead or maimed just after an hour of the one sided fierce fighting, the remaining ones were forced to scamper back safely to the other side of the river in their small canoes. After that episode, other towns thought twice before engaging in any fool hardy attempts at mass suicide in the hands of the battle hardened people of Umuene. Due to this skirmishes and their own intra village differences, their population continued to decrease from the high point when they were around six thousand to their present size of slightly more than two thousand souls. So, cut off from the happenings of the outside world, the people of Umuene now lived in a reclusive environment and every now and then one strange event or the other occurred. But all this was well before civilization and the first white man arrived through the great river which had hitherto acted as a fortress and buffer for them. During the days in question, there was neither education nor such unimportant things like calendars. Years were counted by farming seasons, months by the appearance of the moon and weeks by market days. Anything over ten years was described as 19 ‘kiridim.’ So the exact dates of most events were lost with simply saying they occurred in 19 kiridim.