A community dreading twins, surviving odds

The dread of twins made them terrors to beware, and targets to watch out for. They were marked out, amulets tied around their wrists for identification. The reason: to make them stay alive. “If you don’t tie it, if they are not happy with the family, they go back and leave,” explains the resident. “It […]

The dread of twins made them terrors to beware, and targets to watch out for. They were marked out, amulets tied around their wrists for identification. The reason: to make them stay alive. “If you don’t tie it, if they are not happy with the family, they go back and leave,” explains the resident. “It was the belief.”
Beyond Kaida Sabo, in communities deeper inside remote Kuje, Kwali and Abaji area councils, the dread of twins have resulted in their killing. Villagers hardly admit it, and telltale signs are easy to misread. Investigators say the practice is still ongoing.
“No. We don’t do it,” says Suleiman Ismail emphatically. Instead twin babies are looked on “like stubborn children,” he says.
“They fear them. If they need anything, the parents must provide it, because they have spiritual powers. They give them total attention, because they see them as special children,” he tells Weekly Trust.
And if you don’t, what happens? “It is the tradition,” he answers. “Even that is changing now. That was then.”
Kaida Sabo paints the picture of backblocks Nigeria caught between holding onto its traditions and riding the tide of modernity. In hundreds of years, the mostly Gwari community, dominated by the Gbagyi tongue, has only dipped a toe in modern Nigeria, never swept along.
The brash development that’s turned the nation’s capital into a growing concrete jungle has rubbed on Gwagwalada but eludes Kaida Sabo. A bus ride some 45km from the city gets to Gwagwalada. From there a car ride picks up loads of purchase by market women-six of them squeezed into the car and their bundles in the boot and on the hood-and delivers both cargo and human to Dobi. A motorcycle ride picks up from Dobi, through the roughest terrain-nearly an hour of sand, rocks, thorns-until a signboard in the middle of a forked path announces “Welcome to Kaida Sabo”.
The road is shared with hundreds of cattle, women with firewood precariously balanced against the back of their neck, pickup trucks chugging through the sand, and cars that have choked, lost exhaust pipes and died along the way.
Campaign posters are on nearly every tree. In the market square, more campaign posters show, all promising to change Kaida Sabo, but the community can look the other way. It has lived with roads, water, a health centre for the ages.
The first place to visit is the Gidan Garki (palace or house of the king). Its occupant is Yakubu Magaji, an amiable elderly man. His voice rings clear as a news broadcast in his native Gbagyi tongue, and his typical “zh’s” are crisp. He offers his visitors a drink of water in courtesy. Not sachets, not in a clay pot or calabash. The water is in a stainless steel bowl, and it is brown as dirt.
His visitors return the courtesy and sip from the bowl. “The water you that you take is sample. There’s no drinking water in this huge kaida sabo community,” says the sarki. “All [the water] is like this. There’s even some that is worse than this.”
It is dry season and the river through the community has run dry. The river bed is bare, apart water pooled in pockets in some sections of the bed. Women and children launder family clothes in a large pond. Young girls scoop water from another pond, green with spirogyra and lichen.
The riverbed is dotted by droppings from cattle crossing, marked by tyre tracks of trucks driving through. Residents have also defecated in the open here, a common practice in rural communities as Kaida Sabo.
On a stretch of brown riverbed sand, a young child digs sand with his hands. In minutes, the hole in the sand gets bigger and deeper. The hole rests and gradually, ground water rushes in from underground to fill it. That’s how Kaida Sabo gets its water.
And there’s no treatment at all, says Ismail. “We just use it like that, for drinking, cooking, bathing, anything.”
Falling ill is not an option. The village has no health centre. For years, its health was maintained out of a portable health centre, but rains destroyed it last year.
“If anybody is sick here, we must carry him to Dobi,” says Ismail. “What if is an emergency?” The lone health centre is in Dobi, a ward that administratively includes Kaida Sabo. Dobi is around 40km from Kaida Sabo, but bad road means the travel time is same as a trip from Abuja to Kaduna.
“The road is not good. When it rains, you cannot get on a motorbike to Dobi, talk less of using motor.” The lone secondary school is in Dobi too, so Kaida Sabo’s children must trek long hours to school or stop only at primary school.
Ismail has been out of the community, graduated from FUT Minna, and now back home waiting for work. He speaks good English, interprets English questions in Gbagyi and Hausa for his community.
But the much change he sees is very little. The fathers of Kaida Sabo once wore just loincloths.
“They cover their private parts and most of them remain naked, even [walking] from their farms,” he says. “They didn’t care about clothing.”
The changes haven’t cost Kaida Sabo its tradition. Some still are, says Magaji. But his community is still forgotten-remembered only when teams of supporters invade to staple campaign posters on trees, forgotten once voting is over.
Along with other villages beyond it-Dawaki, Kwalita, Pete, Ashara, Darko, Warambi, Tudun Wasa. Several pleas to council authorities have gone unheard, says Asabe, a mother who packs vegetables to Dobi daily for sale. Her children have permanently moved there to attend school.
The official response was to bring water tanks into the community, but not everybody gets it, says Asabe.  “There are many villages under us. If Kaida doesn’t have drinking water, health care, good road, they too will not get,” says Magaji. Not even schools. Though he hopes Kaida Sabo’s children can step into the gap eventually.