Every write-up begins with a caption O.K? In the present context, always use the word “Ebonyi or Abonyi if Ijekebee accent poses a problem just as the alphabets ‘L’ and ‘R’ frighten an Anambra person. “West Africa Wild Animal (WAWA)”, is also very suitable titles. Your subtitles may include the words “Cannibals”, “Lepers’, “Maids”, and ”Chimpanzees”.
“Ebonyi People” refers to settlers; while “The Ebonyi People” refers to indigenes. Right!
On your cover page design, don’t be so stupid to use a picture of a healthy looking Ebonyian. If you must, the Ebonyian must have His Excellency, Ambassador, or Senator attached to his name, those you will deceive with your intelligence to sponsor your project.
Don’t be too enthusiastic using “Honourable” because even a bicycle repairer can go with that title here. Not even KSJ, KSM should feature supposing you aim to treat Church in the book, unless such a personality is already an MD of a reputable Aluminium company. If you must use traditional rulers, just get one whose traditional title is not indigenous like Owelle of Ezza nation. This saves you from serious malapropism.
In your text, treat Ebonyi as if it were one community. It is an arid and dusty savanna with rolling grass lands, forests and huge herds of animals like pigs, cows, donkeys, horses, goats, etc and tall thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates.
Precise description would not do. Ebonyi is big: over seventy Development Centres, 2.4million people who are busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The state is full of jungles, highlands, deserts, grasslands, but your reader doesn’t care about all that since he is semi-literate, well-laden with inferiority complex and wouldn’t go beyond the level you would wish to keep him. Keep your descriptions romantic, evocative, comparative and unparticular. If the reader is not an indigene, engage him/her in a conspiracy and carry on.
Describe how people eat things no other human beings eat. Do not mention rice and yam and local beef and popular bush meats because rat are Ebonyian’s cuisine of choice, along with snakes, worms, lizards, and all manners of reptiles. Even if you never ate them as one coming from a civilized culture, pretend that you are able to eat such food in your book without flinching, and describe how you have come to enjoy it simply because you care.
Tell them that Ebonyians have no business with love. A man goes out with his wife only to the farm, funerals or to the stream to fetch muddy water. Mock their marriage ceremonies- poor wedding reception where visitors are served with eba and groundnut soup. Don’t forget that palm wine substitutes for Spanish brandy and remember to include dried okra, yams, goats, hens, and all that as wedding gifts.
Any reference to the Ebonyi intellectuals or writers must mention a Roman Catholic priest if you want people to believe you. School children must be those with deep tribal marks, wearing slippers if at all they put any foot wears to match their ‘it-was-white’ school uniforms. They must have long chewing sticks if at all they care to brush their teeth. Forget not their kwashiorkor and female genital mutilations. Of course, you must mention at the beginning of the book how much you love Ebonyi, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Ebonyi is the only state you can love because the indigenes are terribly ignorant- take advantage of this.
If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin business opportunities. If you are a woman, treat the Ebonyian as a man who wears a coco-yam leaves-jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Ebonyi is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Ebonyi is doomed.
Your characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, beggars, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendor .The ancient old man must have rheumy eyes and is close to specie that has gone extinct. They may be corrupt politicians, inept polygamous husbands, prostitutes and maids you have slept with for cubes of magi and bulbs of onions. The loyal servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand. He is good at baby nursing, and with only knowledge of boiling hot water with firewood and earthen pots. Show how you involve him in domestic cooking to teach him how to prepare exotic dishes.
The modern Ebonyian is a fat man who steals and works in government offices, refusing to employ qualified settlers who really care about Ebonyi. He is an enemy of development working against the settlers. He denies settlers land to build good houses, hotels, industries, or offices for setting NGOs that would uplift the state.
Among your minor characters, you must always include the starving Ebonyian, who wanders at the streets, church premises in the urban nearly naked and waiting for the benevolence of the settlers. She has herds of children since she breeds every year. Her children have flies on their eyelids and her breasts are flat and empty. And if any of her male children has come of age, he must be riding okada on hire-purchase for the settlers, working in the quarry industry, operating machine owned by the settlers at the Rice Mill Industry, or an apprentice attached to settlers in the mechanic villager, a sales boy in Abakpa main market, timber shade, the building materials or at best a house boy in any of the old houses in Abakaliki and Afikpo metropolis.
All your characters must look utterly helpless and dependent on the settlers. They must have no past, no history; such diversions sustain the dramatic moment. Mockery is good. They must never say anything about themselves in the dialogue except to speak about their unspeakable suffering- how they cultivate the best of yams, sell them off for a cup of salt and a cube of magi, come back to beg of the fall offs.
Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned with your well-being. She brings you firewood, vegetables, mushrooms, bush-meats, and all that just to establish friendship with you as a way of brightening her future. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent.
These characters should buzz around your main hero making him look good. Your hero can teach them, actions that must be exposing him to a great risk. He carries a lot of babies and is really charitable. Your hero is you, or a religious celebrity who now cares for both human and animals (The Ebonyi People). At best, he should be an elderly priest or pastor.
Settlers’ characters may include children of the settling industrialists, traders, employees of government. When talking about exploitation by foreigners in the area, mention the Anambra, Imo, Enugu, and Abia traders. Blame these foreigners for the Ebonyi’s situation. But do not be too specific.
Avoid having Ebonyi characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. The Ebonyi characters should be colourful, exotic, and larger than life and yet empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.
Describe Ebonyi girls in detail: dirty, smelling, naked breasts (rough and flat), naked virgins recently raped by either a maniac or a ritualist. No sane mind dares them.
Ensure that any work you submit must be one in which people look filthy and miserable. That would be referred as “real Ebonyi”. Do not feel queasy about this: you are helping them get aid from outside. The biggest taboo in writing about Ebonyi is to show or describe death or suffering of settlers. Never ever say anything negative about them.
Always end your book with Akanu Ibiam saying something in the past about the poverty in the land.
Imagine a friend tells you: “you don’t look like Abakaliki person!” should I take it as a compliment? Enya ali Izhi must hear this! Nonsense!
