From Murphy Ganagana, Jos
on a trip by road from Abuja to Plateau State, you transit to a treacherous way that snakes through the Hawon Kibo hills, about 65 kilometres away from Jos. Hacked out of the barren hills, there are no guardrails, and an error at the drop-offs is at your peril. Potholes and a slippery tar that weakens a driver’s control, makes the route a nightmare.
As if these were not dreary enough, vicious assaults by armed bandits had compelled drivers to speed through the stretch in a bid to evade attacks. By so doing, you might be lucky to escape anticipated enemies, but it also invites worse disasters that had claimed lives in dozens. Unfortunately, there seems no alternative to this valley of death.
Welcome to Fiss, a popular settlement among a cluster of villages situated around a hilly area along the busy Abuja-Jos road commonly known as Hawon Kibo, which evokes a momentary sense of an imminent encounter with the shadow of death to motorists passing by the community at any time of the day. Riding through the serene and seemingly innocent community means different things to different folks.
The area’s popularity is not because of commercial viability or tourist attraction to Riyom Local Government Council and Plateau State in general, but its notoriety as an enclave for harbingers of death. For some, the Hawon Kibo hills personify death. For others, it is a place where calamity had taken sanctuary.
This was the spot where, on January 25, 2009, 15 footballers of the Jimeta Football Club, Yola, their coach and an official, met their sudden death when the bus in which they were riding en route Abuja for a Division One amateur league match plunged into a gully, killing all on board.
It was the same area where decomposed bodies of four unidentified persons were discovered by a Fulani herder late last month and recovered by officials of the Federal Road Safety Corps inside a private car, marked AL 578 DKA, in a gully. The victims were suspected to have embarked on the ill-fated trip in the vehicle reportedly loaded with Irish potato, from an unknown destination to Abuja, when they met their death in hazy circumstances.
And only recently, two mobile policemen were gruesomely cut down in a hail of bullets in the line of duty at the spot, when armed men in military fatigue ambushed a convoy of bullion vans belonging to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on transit from Jos, in an early morning attack.
The stretch has, indeed, been christened, ‘many have gone’, as the list of souls that had perished there gets longer by the day, becoming mere decimals in computing statistics of calamities at Hawon Kibo. Ironically, the scary occurrences are not strange to the inhabitants of the area, who had indulged religiously in the simultaneous worship of God and Mammon.
Seated atop the hills of Hawon Kibo, is a shrine where Lo-Ngam, a god of rain, was worshipped and invoked when necessary, for high yields in farm produce by the native Berom people inhabiting the area mainly engaged in agriculture. They had believed the deity paved the way for their financial fortunes with proper regulation of rainfall to boost their agricultural yields.
A surrounding thick forest also served as a dependable source of income for the villagers who went in and came out from it brimming with smiles in anticipation of swelled pockets from hunting, fruits and firewood fetching, among other activities.
“While worshipping idol, we also prayed to God to answer our prayers; we believed then that if God does not answer us, whatever we did would not have result. So we were not depending solely on our gods that we worshipped, but we also trusted in the Almighty God in heaven.
“We called our god, Lo-Ngam; we usually carried a male goat to the shrine for sacrifice, particularly when there was shortage of rain for farming and when the village experienced a whirlwind; that is the time such sacrifices are performed. I used to follow my parents to the shrine without doing anything serious, but I was fully initiated when I became 18 years,” says Da Bwade Choji, Village Head of Fiss (Hawon Kibo), in a chat with Sunday Sun reporter at his residence.
“If we go to the shrine with a goat, there is a hole that we forced the head of the goat in and within two minutes, it will begin to die slowly. After that, we would remove the skin and cook the meat in a special pot kept in the shrine and then eat it there; it is an abomination for anyone to carry the meat home. While cooking the meat, we don’t add any ingredient to it, not even salt; we only boil and eat it like that. It is an abomination for anyone to take it home. There was an instance where somebody hid the skin and took it home without our knowledge; he drowned in a river,” 51-year-old Choji who spoke in Hausa, further revealed.
Giving a rare insight into the mystery surrounding the Hawon Kibo hills, he took the reporter on a mental tour of events in the past when idol worship reigned in the community, and in the present, after the practice was abandoned 14 years ago when Christianity suddenly swept through the land in a rage.
But the shrine remained a secret among the natives, and it is a taboo for anyone to encroach into its fortress and fetch firewood for sale or domestic use. Choji declares: “People don’t go there because there are implications; anybody who went there to cut fire wood, attracted calamity to the village. A whirlwind would blow across the community, destroying houses and farm produce. That is why we cautioned people on the implications of going to such places. The person must provide a goat for sacrifice to stop any calamity from occurring in the village.”
His claims are echoed by a 68-year-old woman, Ngo Ladi Dalyop, who, though, distanced herself from the aged practice of idol worship in the village, delivered her narrative of the consequences of contravening the dictates of Lo-Ngam, with emphasis. “Any person who, by an act of commission or omission, cut firewood close to the shrine is liable to provide a male goat for spiritual cleansing of the abomination committed,” she stressed.
Once a bustling community, Fiss in Hawon Kibo, is now a shadow of itself, buffeted by several challenges. Choji holds belief that but for Christianity, idol worship would have remedied contemporary human problems, as its intents were neither evil-inclined nor destructive. Hear him: “Presently, we no longer have idol worshippers in this village; people have abandoned traditional beliefs for Christianity and if you don’t follow the modern trend, you will be seen to be abnormal in the community. Yet, we still have places that we used to perform rituals before we accepted Christianity.
“When there was absolute peace, our village market used to close about 2am daily. If you had come around the village during that period, you will see people buying and selling, especially those on night journey; this is where they stopped to eat and buy whatever they wanted, it was that time of the night that the village market boomed, and traders, including men and women, the young and old, made good sales.
“But that was then; in recent times, violence and incessant armed robbery attacks have snuffed life out of the village. There is a thick air of suspense and fear of the unknown hanging over the community; if people are not afraid of being attacked by armed bandits, they are afraid of incursions by suspected militants. Though people still move here freely, but not at late hours. We’ve had experiences where people had been robbed and killed here. Sometimes when we hear gunshots, we will all take refuge in our homes and that will be the end of the market for that day, but we don’t know where those robbers come from.
“Recently, some armed men robbed all the shops here; a boy charging phone was also robbed and they carted away with almost all the mobile phones in his shop. They come here at night and shoot sporadically, and when people run for cover, they loot goods in all the shops. There was a time they came and robbed one woman here; after the robbery; they raped the woman and her daughter.”
Asked if the villages would have been spared of enemy attacks if the natives were still worshipping ‘Lo-Ngam’, Choji replied swiftly: “It’s unfortunate that during the Jos crisis when herdsmen began to attack our rural farmers in some of our communities, we had quit idol worship and embraced Christianity; we were not willing to go back to the dark age, the only thing we do daily is to pray to God for protection.”
Fear is the four-letter word from which all mortals desire to be poles apart; it is what momentarily captures the hearts of motorists transiting the undulating hills of Hawon Kibo, a settlement enveloped in the mystery of an enclave where human blood flows.