Travel Thursday: A visit to Bakassi Peninsula

 

Awofeso on the Ikang jetty.

It’s late afternoon when I reach the riverside town of Ikang on the Nigerian side of the Bakassi Peninsula in Cross River state. The town’s fishermen have been gone all day and they are yet to return.
“They will start to come back anytime from seven in the evening,” Victor says looking out into the distance, where the Kwa River flows quietly and without an end in sight.
We both stand on the jetty, our backs to the river, now on a low tide. The breeze is gentle and the air holds a tinge of the almond trees nearby.  To our right lie three ships, destroyed and stripped to their bare shells; and to our left a couple of empty boats lay still.  An NNPC gas station floats in the distance, the first time in all of my travels that I would see one like that.

On a normal day, the brightly painted boats, numbering about 20, ferry locals and travelers to communities far afield as Malabo and Limbe. But not tonight.
“There are no passengers anymore,” Victor says, regret in his voice.
And the absence of passengers is not because there are no boat operators; if anything, there are many of them. Since the oil-rich Bakassi was ceded to Cameroon in August 2008, the lifestyle and pre-occupation of the people has been altered. Ikang, some 80km from Calabar and one of the affected communities, is stark, silent and sad.

Motorised boats in Ikang.

One of the consequences of the land loss is that Bakassi indigenes became citizens of another country overnight without as much as a referendum; their fates were sealed at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Most, naturally, would rather remain Nigerians: and that means they will have to relocate from a place that they have lived all of their lives to a re-settlement camp.
But some of the indigenes have stayed put in Bakassi, including a huge number of the Igbos who settled there generations back to trade. They don’t think it makes good business sense to lose all that they’ve toiled for these many years. They are Nigerians at heart and Cameroonians by choice.
The returnees have been resettled further inland in Akpabuyo, New Bakassi and Ikang. And the folks here do nothing (at least the ones I meet) but sit around sulking, like the woman by the door of her home chewing bitter leaf to cure her failing health. Like others around the vicinity, they seem to be waiting for some miracle to lift them out of despair and brighten their existence in a place where the only bright features of the place are the empty flying boats, which are no consolation in themselves.

Victor and most of the young men in the area survive by hustling, much of that involving labour intensive work at the waterfront.
“Anything coming from France or Cameroon through the waterways, like wild rubber and wines, we help to offload,” Victor says. “And from here, we pack things like chewing sticks and other goods from Nigeria into the vessels on their return journey from Nigeria heading out to Cameroon.”
And they have very fanciful names for both trips, same as one would encounter at an airport. The ‘arrival’, which is when the vessels berth on the Nigerian side, earns Victor and his posse the most money. The ‘departures’, when the vessels face Cameroon, pay little. “That’s how we are able to be men in this vicinity.”

A local makes a big catch in the Calabar River.

The Kwa River is visibly polluted. It’s not fit for bathing or washing, so the people depend on boreholes for domestic chores.
“The only thing we do in this river is we catch fish and crayfish, that’s all,” Victor says.
Victor’s palms are fat and thick, apparently from having to lift very heavy load all the time; dressed in a faded T-shirt and trousers and standing just above five feet, he reflects on the dreary living that is the lot of his peers in the neighbourhood.
“See, I’m wearing just slippers. This is what I wear all the time, because I cannot afford to buy better footwear.”
But Victor, who speaks both Efik and Ibibio fluently, is one example of the usual saying that appearances can be misleading: he speaks intelligently, with a remarkable sense of humour (‘don’t dance me’; ‘I am puffing’); and he seems to be abreast with global events.
As he leads me through the quiet jetty, past some of his friends and relatives who are just chatting away, he tells me he knows that Tupac Shakur, the American rapper, is still alive.
“The BBC has shown me 21 reasons to prove that he is not dead,” he says, bouncing ahead of me and smiling as he does. “And I have every reason to believe the BBC.”

Foreign news aside, residents of Ikang still fear the mermaid spirit, widely believed to inhabit the surrounding waters.
“It is a common belief among the south-south communities that mammy-water drowns people,” says David, who has come with me on this trip and recalls a sad occasion at the Kwa Falls where a young boy was sucked away into the water depths. A local church had visited the Falls on a special occasion and everybody was warned not to venture too far. Obviously, someone didn’t listen.
“I saw the water spin furiously, lifted the boy up and dragged him down twice before he finally disappeared and we never saw him again.”
I am a few feet from the river myself, staring down at it from the raised platform of the Jetty. A canoe sails by smoothly, paddled by the two young boys. I wonder just how far down the river bed might be. Centuries ago, this river was packed with canoes and fishermen; elephants and other wildlife roamed the mangrove forest in large numbers. But that era has since passed. On my way back to Calabar, I stop over at Atimbo to order palmwine and bush-meat, served with boiled plantain and scent-leaf sauce. It is a delicacy the town is known for, one travellers on that route are advised never to miss.

Source: NAIJ.COM