12/04/2026
CHARRED
Creative non-fiction by Regina Awase Achie
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
- Mahatma Gandi
One of my sweetest memories of childhood was the sight of colourful birds with various beautiful patterns circling the top of the tropical almond tree in front of our house and some nestling in its branches. They were mostly pigeons and doves which sometimes left the trees to perch on our roofs and doorsteps. There were also the owls which only came at dusk. We hardly got a look at the beautiful birds with saucer-like eyes as the slightest sounds of their hooting sent us all – adults and children – scampering into our houses. “Winch bird! Winch bird!” “Holy Ghost fire! Holy Ghost fire!” we screamed, running away from what we believed was an evil creature bearing news of misfortune and death.
The cattle egrets, which we called Leke Leke, usually trailed the cattle that were driven in hundreds by the Fulani cattle drivers, their noisy hooves mashing the vegetable gardens that surrounded our row of family houses as they trod on to find tall, juicy grasses on which to feed. Whenever we saw these white birds, we would hold out our hands and sing, “Leke Leke Bambo, give me water finger,” waving frantically with the belief that they would give us white marks on our fingers. Often, after singing this song to the white birds, we saw white marks on our fingers which we believed had come from the birds.
The cattle usually milled around for a while after the initial rush to tear at a stretch of lush vegetation, until a cowboy raised his rod and let it fall on their backs with a “kpakah!” sound. This was followed by some utterances we did not understand, but obviously, the cattle did as they heeded the order and headed in one direction on their endless search for more vegetation to plunder. One neighbour or the other was often engaged in an argument with the cattle drivers over their indiscriminate grazing and the mashing of plants.
One could hear a neighbour rage, “Kai! Carry your coow commot dia! You no see how e de spoil my farm? Commot dia!”
To this, the cattle boy in question would often respond with a lackadaisical cackle of his rods on the back of one of the offenders. It was clear they didn’t see why they were being troubled, but had to appear to be doing something so as to avoid some trouble. That was before they became so audacious as they are now, brandishing AK 47 guns and leveling whole farms and villages. We often heard the adults lamenting that nothing grew for a very long time wherever the cattle grazed consistently.
Beside the tropical almond tree – which we simply called ‘fruit tree’ – stood two equally huge neem trees which shared with it the task of providing shelter for our chirping friends and shade for the grapevine of the neighbourhood. It was under this cluster of trees that some grown-ups formed a park of sorts where they sat on plastic chairs in the evenings, exchanging the latest gist they had acquired. If someone’s daughter fell pregnant, or a son had dropped out of school, the grapevine was the sure place to find out even before the parents of such a child knew. This was the reason some hated the spot so much that when the trees were tragically cut down to make room for a shopping mall, they didn’t mind that they would lose its enormous benefits of serving as a sink to flush away the large quantities of carbon dioxide we must have emitted from our houses while giving out oxygen. Our two bedroom houses were usually filled to the brim with every family having between five to ten children and some extended family members living with them.
For us the children, the painful strokes that could be delivered to our behind by a tiny branch of the neem tree whenever we were naughty coupled with the bitter taste of the water often extracted from boiling some leaves and stems of it to treat us when we had malaria were enough to make us ready to forgo the pleasure of watching birds, climbing the trees and eating fruits. It was in the climbing of these gigantic trees that I first witnessed the breaking of the gender bias as all the children in the neighbourhood – male and female – dared the heights to obtain some juicy, delicious almonds. Climbing the trees was fun to us, but it was a grave offence to our parents and guardians who punished us severely anytime we were caught on a tree. The reason for this became somewhat clear to us when Zayol, our next door neighbour who was exactly my age – 13 years old – fell from the tropical almond tree in 1997 and broke his waist. He had to learn how to walk all over again after spending several weeks with his legs tied up in the hospital. I recall how our parents took us all to pay him a visit, to sympathise with him and also, equally importantly, to see the painful consequences of climbing trees. This was not enough to deter us from climbing the trees though.
Our house sat at the south end of the street of family houses, on a small rise that was nearly imperceptible like the bump in the middle of a poorly moulded calabash. The neighbourhood had no flower beds, but the huge trees which seemed to have been there forever – no one seemed to know how they had got there – had provided enough colour in the surroundings. The leaves took on different shades of green, brown and yellow in different seasons. Sweeping dead brown leaves was a sport for us. When chores were shared at the start of the day, we often made a run for that.
One morning in the year 2000, when I was 16 and in final year in secondary school, we woke to the sight of a bulldozer grinding at the roots of one of the trees. The occupants of nearby houses had not been given any prior information about the plan to cut down the trees. The operator of the machines was irritated when we all trooped out of our houses and gathered around him to find out what he was up to.
“Na my work I de do o! Na government land, and government don sell am. Na de new owner send me. See wia your land stop dia,” he pointed rudely to a spot few meters away from our houses in response to the queries. It appeared that he had prepared himself adequately for this reaction from the occupants of the houses. He continued, “Na una plant de trees? Pesin don buy de land from government, and de pesin wan build house hia.”
“So pesin no go even fit breathe for this place again? Una wan use house lock us inside here, no ventilation, no fresh air? Haba!”
The operator of the machine snorted. “So pesin no go build house again because you wan breath?”
“But pesin no suppose build house hia nau! This place na green patch!” another man who was a Geography teacher in a nearby secondary school protested. He had often told us about some parts of Makurdi town that were supposed to be reserved for vegetation only, adding proudly that we were lucky to be living directly opposite one of such areas.
“Go speak dat grammar for Lands and Survey,” the machine guy shot back as he started his machine which he had switched off temporarily to respond to the queries. This time, he appeared ready to crush anyone who would dare to stand in his way.
We all retired into our houses to watch helplessly and mournfully through the windows as the trees we had known all our lives, which had become like an indispensable part of our lives, fell to the mindless blades one after the other.
This was at the onset of the rains, in April. Few weeks after the fall of the trees, for the first time in our lives, we knew what was a real storm. That night, it blew, whooshed, roared and crashed. The humming sound of the trees breaking the wind was missing. The sky growled and rumbled in anger while lightening flashed. There was the sound of objects being thrown against the fast rising walls of the shopping mall and a woman screamed as the roof was peeled off her house. We all cowered fearfully in our houses.
When I wondered aloud wondered why the rains had become so fierce all of a sudden, my father said there was a gradual change in the climate of the country due to accumulation of greenhouse gases and depletion of the ozone layer. He however added that the absence of the trees which had served as some sort of shield for us in the past had worsened things. Our houses now stood naked, without any form of protection from the fierce wind.
“Humans and nature have not always been friends,” Baba said sadly, shaking his head. “While nature seeks to protect humans and provide for them, humans keep pushing her away. It didn’t begin today.”
“True!” Mama said excitedly as if she had just remembered something very important. “It didn’t begin today at all,” she echoed Baba. She then proceeded to tell us a story.
“Many centuries ago, the sky was very low and near to humans. It provided shelter such that humans needed no houses with roofs. It was also edible such that one could cut a piece of it and prepare a meal. However, some people always cut more that they needed for the day and let the rest waste, and this angered the sky. The last straw that finally made the sky lose patience with humans was the actions of a woman who kept hitting the sky with her pestle while pounding food. All appeals that she should be careful with the sky which was given for free as shelter and food to humans fell on deaf ears. One day, the entire community woke up to find that the sky had moved out of reach. Humans then had to find their own shelter and work hard to get something to eat.”
We sat in silence for a while after she was done, reflecting on the story and comparing the actions of the tree cutters to that of the obstinate woman.
“I hope we don’t wake up one day to find that all the trees in the world have angrily uprooted themselves and left us naked to the glare of the sun and heavy storms like this,” my immediate elder sister, Shanpepe, had said worriedly.
We all laughed at the note of genuine worry in her voice while imagining such an impossible situation.
***
Recently, as I stood with my sister close to the sun baked stumps that were left of the once huge trees, waiting for a cab to pick us up, I sighed wearily, taking short breaths and dabbing at the sweat that ran down the sides of my face.
“I could actually melt in this sun if I stood here long enough,” I said, squinting at the harsh metallic rays of the sun which seemed artificial to me. I couldn’t believe that nature, which I had been taught all my life was created to support the existence of life, could produce anything so harsh and harmful. The glare of the sun was fierce, the heat simmering.
“How much longer do you think the earth and humans can hold up under this heat?” My sister hissed. She sounded genuinely worried that the earth may crumple around us any second.
We were silent for a moment, both of us yearning in our hearts for a return of the clement weather of our childhood days. I felt streams of sweat eroding the layer of sunscreen I had carefully applied that morning before leaving home. The sunscreen was one of humans’ efforts to keep at bay the consequences of rendering the earth uninhabitable for themselves. It was meant to alleviate the effect of the sun on the human skin but, as I could see from my experience that afternoon, the effort was futile as the sweat gushing out from my skin pores washed away the screen in much the same way as the rains washed away top soil exposed to its full fury due to the mindless cutting of trees.
The squeaking tires of a well beaten pick-up van turning into our street in laborious slow motion startled us out of our thoughts. The vehicle was laden with bags of charcoal made from ironwood – the new gold in these parts. Just as oil exploration had rendered the environment nearly uninhabitable for humans in the South South region of the country through unwholesome practices like gas flaring and oil spillage, the uncontrolled burning of ironwood trees to make charcoal which was used by many families as cooking fuel was steadily destroying the environment.
The rickety van coughed, je**ed and climbed the slight rise on which our house stood to stop at the next house where a big time charcoal dealer lived with his family. In the effort to climb the mound, the exhaust blew out thick, dark smoke in shapes that chased each other around a bit before rising into the air to sneak, unseen, into our nostrils and down our lungs. I cringed as I imagined how black my lungs must be from the constant intake of combustion smoke.
“This is smoke that the trees would have sucked in, in one breath,” Shanpepe snapped her fingers for emphasis.
Exaggerations and a fertile imagination are my sister’s trademark. She continued sadly, “But now our lungs are helpless in the face of the onslaught of the monstrous fumes, just as our eyes are to the metallic claws of the sun which seem to be peeling off layer after layer of my eyeballs. The sunscreen is a joke in the face of these fierce rays of the sun.”
“True,” I concurred, wrinkling my nose as if to prevent more of the fumes from getting into my nostrils. Then I added, “The sight of this beat up van with the charcoal and fumes contrasts sharply with the dream I had two weeks ago”.
“You and your weird dreams,” she laughed. We both seemed to have forgotten our initial hurry to find a cab and get out of the harsh glare of the sun momentarily.
“In the dream,” I continued as if I had not heard her, “the earth was a beautiful brown skinned woman with lush, dark green hair. It appeared so natural in the dream for a woman’s hair to be green. She was the mother of many children and together they owned many livestock, birds and other animals. They all loved her and cared for her, and did all they could to preserve her and keep her young and beautiful. It was such a wonderful reciprocal relationship. The people made use of natural resources like vegetation for their needs, but they worked very hard to replenish whatever they took and avoid wastage. If one cut down one tree, he was sure to plant three or four.
“Nature was so happy with this. In return, she gave them healthy food, good water and clean air to breath. While she bloomed, they flourished and glowed, and everyone lived long. It was such a lovely world, not charred like the one we live in, being fried constantly by the heat of the sun.”
A cab stopped in front of us and honked.
“That’s the life of the earth being charred steadily, deliberately. We definitely are in a hurry to bring life on this planet to an end”. I shuddered as I took another look at the bags of charcoal that were being offloaded hurriedly. The activity produced a spray of black dust that rose in the air and fell lazily on walls and on the ground like a mourning veil.
The charcoal business was booming in the state as the stuff got from burning of the desert ironwood tree had become of high economic value. Everyone wanted to burn and sell as much as possible, but no one seemed to be planting new trees. My beloved state seemed to be in a competition with the Niger Delta where the air and water pollution was at an unprecedented level with no committed efforts to clean up the environment. Suddenly, the image of a tottering giant being de-limbed steadily, drawing its last breath of polluted air as it staggered to its death, loomed in my mind. I shuddered again, thinking of what we were doing to the earth and by extension, to ourselves.
As my sister and I stepped into the cab, I shook my head and said, “It’s all so hopeless!”
“Well, not totally so,” she countered. “Not if we can tell the younger generation often enough and loudly too, about the harmful effects of our actions on the earth and what they can do to make it better.”
My eyes suddenly brightened at the prospect of a campaign to combat environmental degradation.
“Where una de go?”
The voice of the cab driver reminded us that we had company.
“Oh! Sorry. Wadata Market.”
As he engaged gear and took off, I focused my thoughts on planned campaigns that I believed would help revive the charred earth.
