Tosin Makinde, recently visited a ‘forgotten’ community in Niger State. He found a community that is akin to the Koma people of Adamawa State. He reports.
IBRAHIM Magaji, 19, is a married young man with two kids, Zaratu, 12, a girl is about to get married against her will to a man in his 30s, Esther, 8, has a marriage proposal, while Deborah, 17, is a hardworking lady whose father is hell bent on giving her out for marriage. On the other hand, Joseph is a primary three pupil who neither reads nor write English or Hausa, Baba Paul is a village elder who had farmed all his life with little economic prosperity to show for it.
Welcome to the world of the Kambari of Dorowa-Albarka village, one of the hard to reach remote Kambari villages that surround the market town of Guffanti, under Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State.
Hard to believe might be the feeling on learning about and coming to live with the people called Kambari who are mostly found along the upper Niger region, more specifically on both sides of Lake Kainji. The road to this community is as challenging as the challenges facing the people in this environment that a first timer or anyone from the big civilised cities would be highly tempted to return not with the erosion laden, bumpy, rocky path with the leaves and those sharp grasses beating your leg and head as a way of telling you ‘welcome to our world’.
Mostly farmers, the Kambari, also known as the Ashinghi people for generations make a living moving from place to place, cutting down and burning trees within North-west area of the country seeking for fertile farming lands.
On first contact, one might be led to think and speak with them in Hausa, the most widely speaking language in Northern Nigeria but the shocker that would await you is that majority of the people in this area cannot speak, read or write in either Hausa or English, an interpreter is a most essential human resources you must have to work with the Kambari.
A family of farmers
The Kambari Language had no written form until the early part of the 90s and the Kamberi Language Project is still an ongoing task that seeks to bring together Kamberi words for everyday usage in order to promote it. The Kambari are perhaps the largest of the Kainji subgroups, numerically with an estimated population of about 650, 000. Their languages have been studied more extensively than others in the group although much research has never been completely published.
Surnames among the Kambari usually got transformed in their pronunciation and spelling as they travel across villages, family unions, and countries across time. In times when literacy was uncommon, names such as Kambari were transliterated based on how they sounded when people’s names were recorded in government records. This could have resulted in misspellings of Kambari.
The Kambari people live in small villages of 100 people or less. Most Kambari families are farmers, growing corn, millet, peanuts, beans, and rice. Nearly all keep chickens and goats for meat; a few have cattle. Most Kambari speak two languages – Hausa and their own mother tongue. Very few are educated; a few, the “elite”, speak English and are mostly employed in these areas as interpreters or village teachers. A segment of the population practices traditional religion, believing that curses, witchcraft and magic are the basis for everything that goes on in their lives.
The Kambari people living mostly in Niger State are divided into various sub-groups, including the Auna-Agwara. Most of them in rural areas like Dorowa-Albarka live in a high state of poverty, with poor to non- existent health care and few educational opportunities. Kambari witch doctors are perceived to communicate with ancestral spirits for blessings in matters of health, good harvests and other aspects of daily life despite the presence of missionaries from the two major religions.
In most Kambari communities, children under the age of 15 account for most of the population but ironically most of them are not allowed to attend any school far or near but are rather educated on the farms of their parents. For example, in Albarka Village which boasts of about 150 children only 23 attend the highly sub-standard village primary school with 17 boys and six girls.
According to Pastor Luka Maigizo, a Kambari himself, who is in charge of the local Baptist Church in the area, it is a belief among the Kambari that the female child needs no education than to help with house chores and learn about marriage while the first born of every family are not allowed to go to school.
Among the Kambari in Guffanti and other Kambari dominated places, early marriage is an acceptable and common practice that even the Christianity some of them claimed to practice could not take away from them. Virtually every parent in this community attend the village church yet virtually all of them have one or two early marriage proposals for their small female children with age ranging from as small as six to 17 years already on their marital journey that they have little or no knowledge of.
Deborah (17 years), Esther (12 years), Zaratu (8 years), Zaraya, Hanatu, Martha (the ages are speculations, no one is sure of their age in this place) are good examples of young innocent Kambari girls living in Albarka village who despite showing interest in going to school are denied of such but are rather on their way to their husbands’ houses as arranged by their parents, almost solely by the father. The mother who traditionally plays second fiddle in the house dare not question the authority and judgement of the father. Early marriage is a struggle the girls have no idea on how they can get out of while the parents who are victims of such practice themselves are not willing to do anything less believing they are doing it for the progress of their daughters.
It is not only young girls that get married early among the Kamberis, young men with the little money that they presumably garnered from harvest sales are known to always get married at an early age.
If you are thinking of large scale agricultural investment, then Dorowa-Albarka and its surrounding communities are unexplored gold mines. The lands here are fertile arable lands that are been worked on by archaic farming oriented individuals who are in dire need of modern farming techniques. Major crops that are planted are rice, beans, groundnut, maize, millet, guinea corn, and cassava. Harvest time is a good time for the farmers to make some money that they usually divest them wrongly while the dry season is a time of chronic poverty.
The Kamberis are semi-nomadic, their homes are mostly houses constructed of mud sticks and straw amazingly practical, providing a strong cool place in the blistering summer heat of that environment where disease-carrying insects abound.
Living with the Kamberis even for a week requires you prepare your intestine for one particular meal called Masara or Twashiwele made from corn flour, which looks like semovita but is nothing close to that.
Neglected heath care
Their health requires urgent attention with the continuing high rate of births. A single family may have as much as 10 children while the least you could come across might range from four to six and they will tell you they are still counting. Surprisingly the case of maternal death is on the low side despite the absence of any clinic close to them. Most of them usually give birth at home and attended to by other women from the community. Women especially the young victims of early child marriage are not fully aware of the health risk when they are about to deliver. Regrettably, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) pregnant young women who are less than 20 years who give birth between ages of 15 and 20 are twice as likely to die during childbirth as women in their 20s or older while girls under the age of 15 are five times more likely to die during childbirth. They don’t know this.
Rough, torn-clothes, bare footed and sand playing children running around in the blistering heat of the north in a silent community is the atmosphere that welcomes you to this community and no doubt gives you an impression that if you are looking for where to carry out development intervention, Dorowa-Albarka village and its surrounding cousins are the best place to do that.
As it stands presently in communities like this, achieving any of the eight goals of the Millennium Development Goals is virtually a mirage. The people fall short on all the eight goals using all indices available.
Kambari people’s state of acute poverty and disconnection is not because they are unintelligent or not creative, they just have not got that chance a chance to get the necessary standard basic education for their children, a chance at good, quality and affordable health care services, a chance to be knowledgeable in the best farming practices for better yield and better profit, a chance to have the orientations that the young ones need to live a purposeful life of their own rather getting married at an early age, a chance to eat well balance, nutritious and enriching food, a chance to look forward to bright future and live a life full of hope.
