I Have Benefitted from the Kindness of People from All Over Nigeria
Magnus Abe, politician and lawyer, was born just before the Civil war in 1965. The war experience remains indelible in his memory. Strangers in Umunkwo village, somewhere in Igboland took good care of the young Magnus and his family during the war. He rem
GI believe that life is a continuous process of learning and improvement. I was born in Eleme which is in Rivers state. I was born just before the Civil war in 1965 and after I was born, my father left for England and when the war started, my mother had to run with five of us to Igboland, somewhere called Umunkwo, which we had to trek to. I still have vivid memories of that experience; we were running with
other refugees. My sister was in her teens at that time and she was very fair and very pretty and the story about a fair girl then was premium so we had to be hiding her in a basket and all sorts of things while we ran from the soldiers on both sides and there was no transportation. It was a long hard journey. Strangers in Umunkwo village, somewhere in Igboland welcomed us, they gave us a place to stay and we spent years in that community and I remain forever indebted to them for the protection, love and support that they gave to my family.
In fact, even up till last year, one of them had a severe medical emergency and was still reaching out to us. So, we have maintained that relationship since after the civil war. When my father came back and found us, he took us back to Rivers State. My father was a priest of the Anglican Church. He had six children and he was earning barely N90 a month at that time and with six children but was determined to give us education because he kept promising us that was what he owed us. He said we were here to struggle for ourselves but he would do everything he could so that we can have an education and he did his best.
I am a product of a public school system
I am a product of a public school system because my father didn’t have any money to pay for private tutors or private school and I keep telling people that if our public schools were the way they are now, I will not be speaking the kind of English I can speak today. I probably would have been a tout or a militant because the opportunity of public education, quality education for the children of the poor was something that the leaders of that time understood as a basic foundation for life and the growth of the country so that was one of the things that made me so passionate about education because I know if not for public education, if not for public libraries, I wouldn’t have had any opportunity to be the kind of person that I am today. So that is my story growing up and my father as a priest was transferred from place to place, so we had to keep moving. We moved to Okrika to Calabar then later on he joined politics and we came back to Rivers state.
I have a different world view from a lot of other people
First of all, I find out that I have a different world view from a lot of other people because I was privileged to benefit from the kindness and from systems that worked for everybody. I tell people about the experience I had when I was a student in Saint Patrick’s college Calabar and my father retired from the Anglican Church and moved back to Rivers State so I was left to stay in Calabar on my own. I could remember one instance I fell ill and the school bus in Saint Patrick’s College took me to Saint Margaret’s Hospital, which I think that is what it is called in Calabar and the hospital took care of me. They gave me so much food, the nurses were nice to me and I was so at home in the hospital that when I was discharged and the school bus came back to return me to school, I was hiding in the hospital, I didn’t want to go and they had to be chasing me up and down, I cried they pursued me to go back to school.
These were nurses, these were strangers, these were not Rivers people and I wasn’t a child from South Eastern State as it was called at that time; I was just a Nigerian child and I didn’t have anybody and the system provided for me. Today, the kind of quality healthcare and support that I got as a Rivers child in South Eastern state, today, no child even those from Cross River will get that kind of support from the system. So like I said, I have benefitted so much from strangers, people from different tribes and ethnicity and so I have a wider world view, I know that human beings are basically human beings, they are good and bad people everywhere and you can never find me either in thinking, action or words to be stereotyping people saying ‘oh Igbo people are like this’ because I know that if Igbo people were bad