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Ebbaken: the “Message of the Swallows”
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 The following excerpts are from a planned book on Ebbaken and the wintering Barn Swallows there, and were written by Justina Abang (Pierfrancesco Micheloni's wife) and translated into English.
I am very grateful to Pierfrancesco and Justina for sending them to me and allowing me to post them. These excerpts vividly bring to life the reality of living in a remote Nigerian village, the origins of swallow hunting in the region, and the story of how Justina was transformed from "swallow hunter to swallow expert"...
For the original blog posting on Ebbaken, please go to Ebbaken
EBBAKEN VILLAGE, NIGERIA - one day in June 15 years ago, at the height of the rainy season.
 "At Ebbaken it can rain uninterruptedly for days on end, stopping people from working on their farms or going to school. That day the downpour was even heavier than usual, and we children from my compound (an extended family living in a group of huts) couldn't make it to our school 5 km away, as the incessant rain had turned the roads into rivers of mud. So that day we were all inside the great hut, waiting excitedly because a very important person was coming. The excitement had been mounting since early that morning, when we were doing our chores – sweeping the floor, cooking our breakfast of boiled and mashed yam or cassava. I could see from my mother's face that she was coming: old grannie, the mother of all our mothers. Some said she was 110, some 120, some 90, but no one knew her real age: how could they, when there was no registry office ? We weren't allowed to look her in the eye, out of respect and because for us her wisdom was sacred. She it was who had taught our mothers all the traditional medicine, the cures for snakebite, stomach ache, cuts and bruises and other injuries.
Nowadays we can get medicines from Europe, and people say they're more effective, but I'm not so sure of that.
Grannie arrived, supported by her many daughters and grandchildren. All the family were there, about a hundred of us, from the oldest men down to the youngest babies still in their mothers' arms. We approached her and, bowing respectfully, we touched her hand like you do with the Pope and said "Ajubedč" which means "good day".
Her name was Takha and she had had 8 husbands; some of them had died, while others had gone away, and others had been struck by Juju (Voodoo rites) and had disappeared, or so they told us. What I remember most clearly about her was that as soon as she sat down, one of her grandchildren started to busy himself with long thin wooden object. It was so silent in the great hut that you could hear the sunflies, which had begun biting us voraciously. The man filled the wooden thing with tobacco and, with a bow of respect, handed it to our old grandmother. It was her inseparable pipe, which was also a symbol of her authority – how many stories it could tell !
After a long silence, and a couple of pulls on her pipe, Takha began telling us that Ebbaken village used to be called Barry and that it had been somewhere else, but 50 years before, she and our mothers had left that place. In those days my people lived high up in the forests of the Afi mountains, and my grannie said that there was bushmeat (forest game) everywhere: there were thousands of monkeys in the trees around the village, and herds of antelope roamed the countryside. So they could hunt near the village, and had as much meat as they wanted. There was a natural balance between man and animals. At that time they all lived together with the people of another village called Kabaken. There was no farming, as cocoa had not yet reached Boje and there was plenty of wildlife. But the population was rising drastically. And 50 years ago, to my grannie's disapproval, the first rifles arrived in the village. Each shot made a loud bang which scared not only the forest animals but also the people living in the Afi mountains.
One tragic day a hunter fired into the bush and killed one of our sisters who was out gathering wild herbs. The girl's husband and brothers went to the other village to look for the hunter, but the people there refused to help and were very hostile, so they went back to the forest to look for him. That evening news came that a hunter had been hacked to death with a machete; the next day, the dead woman's husband was killed. The day after that there was a massacre, and many brothers and sisters were killed. My grannie and mother were among the few who survived. Then my grandfather called the family together and they fled down from the mountains until they met a man who lived alone in a valley. This man was from a nearby village called Ebranta, and he told them that if they wanted to settle there and share the land, they would first have to get permission from the village. This they did. Then they tried to raise goats, but some big cats – leopards or lions – came into the village and killed them..."
"Someone told me recently that the last leopard was killed here about 15 years ago. The same goes for the last elephant. And in fact that's when the local wildlife began to die out: not only because the villages were full of guns by then and they were competing with each other, but also because the forest was being cut down by the villagers for "slash-and-burn" subsistence farming. We had to work harder and harder to devise more efficient traps to catch animals, and we had to set more and more of them.
Then we began to notice the swirling black clouds of "Akbang" (as we call swallows here). Milllions of these birds would arrive and leave punctually at specific times of year: when they arrived, we knew the rainy season was over, and then when they departed we knew it was about to begin again.
One evening, one of our hunters went into the elephant grass where there were millions of swallows roosting, and started catching them with his bare hands. He could see in the dark like a cat, and he jumped about wildly, snatching dozens of them off the plants. Then he went back to his hut and had a feast. He had discovered an alternative to our normal bushmeat. This hunter realised that the other villagers would like the taste of swallows, so he thought up a way to catch them in bulk – far more than he was able to catch with his bare hands. He tried covering twigs with a very sticky glue, a kind of birdlime made from lianas, and after a lot of trial and error he developed a very effective swallow trap. He caught so many swallows that after eating as many as he could stomach he had a surplus, which he began selling to the other villagers.
The swallow meat was so good that the children (always on the lookout for food) copied him, at the same time improving on his hunting method: for example, they began imitating the swallow's call this attracts other swallows, which come to see what's going on. This method was still being used in Ebbaken when 200,000 swallows were caught in 1995..."
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JUSTINA ABANG: swallow hunting in Ebbaken
"When I was still a child, my family trained me to catch swallows for food, and when I was about ten I started to go hunting with my brothers and sisters in the elephant grass on nights of a full moon.
My brother would go off into the forest to look for a rather uncommon liana from which he extracted the jelly-like "glue" or birdlime, while my job was to spread this on little sticks or twigs which I then stored in a holder made from bamboo. The hunting season started in November. We were not allowed to disturb the roost before this period, because the swallows hadn't settled in yet and they might have left our area for good if they were disturbed.
For us children the swallow hunt was not just a way to get food, but also an important and enjoyable form of socialization, and perhaps a way to strengthen the bonds between us. And besides being a sure supply of food, it also provided our families with a small income, because we could sell off the surplus swallows: the going price for a swallow was 2 naira (35 eurocents), and this money came in useful for paying the government school fees..."
"As I said before, the hunting expeditions take place on nights of a full moon.
To be successful you have to pick the exact spot where the swallows will roost that night. Each family group sets off into the hills with its trap – a bamboo cane with the birdlimed twigs fixed at the top, looking much like a sticky umbrella – and a sack to put the birds in. I used to go with my sister Cecilia and my brother Brian. It takes from 45 minutes to an hour to reach the right area, depending on where the swallows choose to roost.
Once there, the groups cut out a clearing in the elephant grass with their machetes, and then they get their traps ready and wait hopefully for the hunt to begin at sunset.
The swallows arrive just before dusk. A sudden downdraught from their rapidly beating wings strikes us as we crouch in the clearing. In a few seconds we are engulfed in an orgy of blood, of hope, of pain. Your heart seems to be bursting. Millions of swallows descend on us, shrieking deafeningly. Breathlessly we struggle to repeat their calls. We catch one swallow, then 15, 30, 70. Again and again we lower our trap, strip off the swallows and press them into the sack as fast as our hands can move. There's no time to kill them, they suffocate to death. My brother takes one and breaks its wing to make it utter a cry of pain to attract more birds. This inferno among the heat and humidity of the elephant grass can last until dawn: it depends whether the swallows keep on coming, whether the moon is bright enough for the swallows to fly around in the night, flock after flock of them alighting on our trap..."
"At dawn, exhausted, we return home, the groups calling out to each other "We caught 250", "We got 300"; the group next to us chose a bad place and only caught 50, so tomorrow we'll invite them to eat with us. As we come in sight of the compound, our families run out to greet us, laughing and hugging us when they see our bulging sacks. Everyone's there: my father, my little sisters and brothers, my sister's children . We pass them our sack to take back home to mum. Later, we empty all the sacks in the same place. Amazingly, a dozen or so swallows are still alive; the children finish them off as if it were a game. Some people throw the live swallows into the fire to see them jump. But I never approved of this, because I think anyone who does it must be possessed by the devil.
Then the birds are plucked, and for a day or two there are feathers everywhere. When we arrive at school with feathers in our hair, the teachers ask us to bring them some swallows to eat. After plucking, we put some of the swallows on spits, 20 – 30 per spit, and roast them over the fire. Others we dry and then remove their giblets, which we wash and fry in palm oil: this is a great delicacy reserved exclusively for the old people.
Now the swallows are ready to eat: you can cook them in a sauce, or eat them with your fufu, or fry them in palm oil. There is a frenzied rush to eat them – me and my sister often used to squabble fiercely over them..."
"Lastly, as we haven't got fridges, some of the swallows are smoked: we put the plucked birds in a broad-meshed steel basket and hang them over the fire for a few hours, out of reach of the flames. When they are nicely dried out and blackened, they can be kept for over a week.
Whenever we caught a lot of swallows, my mum didn't send me to school the next day, but put 50 or 60 swallows in a bag and got someone to give me a lift in to Okunde on their motor-bike. That was a two hour ride. Once there, I sold them in the market at 2 naira each. Sometimes I earned more than 100 naira (€8,50). I took 50 naira home, and with the other 50 I bought things for the family: soap, onions, jars of tomatoes. And I usually managed to get something for myself on the sly – maybe a Coke and a rice snack.
Nowadays hunting swallows is prohibited, but last year it was allowed just for Christmas and the going price was 3 swallows for 10 naira..."
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JUSTINA ABANG MEETS PIERFRANCESCO MICHELONI
Piefrancesco Micheloni and Justina Abang, January 1996. Photo property of P. Micheloni
"One day in January 1996, I was called to the village chief: some "whites" who studied swallows had arrived and they wanted to speak to some of the young folk to find out about the swallows we caught. So I went over to one of them who was called Francesco and gave him a detailed description of our hunting methods. I can still remember the look of surprise on his face! Then he asked me if any of the birds I caught had rings on their legs. "Yes, lots of them!", I answered. Francesco eagerly asked if I had saved any of these rings, as they were very important for studying swallow migration and because he and his friends in Europe had put them on the birds in the first place.
That came as a sudden revelation to me. We kept on finding rings, but nobody was able to tell us what they were for, and the explanations our fathers gave were always different and often bizarre. We read the names of different countries on the rings, but didn't pay much attention - we just thought that a swallow with a ring would bring us luck. But when I saw the look in Francesco's eyes that day, I realized that those rings were vitally important, and I was stirred to help him. So I asked all my friends and brothers and sisters to give me any rings they had saved, and then I presented them to Francesco. He was very, very happy.
The Italians were really nice people. They asked me and my brother Stanley to cook for them (never swallows, though!). I was then 14 years old, and working for white people was very important for us. When the group of Italians left, I remember Francesco gave me lots of presents, things we couldn't afford, like clothes, shoes, and rice. When he left I cried and cried: I never imagined the westerners (Okara, we called them) loved our swallows so much that they would come back. No one comes to visit our village, because we are too poor..."
"The next year the swallows came back as usual. In my village the rumour went around that the whites had returned to Nigeria too, that they were buying provisions in Lagos and were on their way to Ebbaken. It was true: when they arrived we were working on our farms in the forest, and we could hear the children's screams of glee all the way from the village. My heart was beating wildly as I raced over to look for Francesco. Yes, he had come back ! I was beside myself with joy, but then I felt ashamed of my mad excitement so I ran back to my farm.
Everyone said Francesco was looking for me, but I avoided him because I was ashamed. I met him the next day along with the rest of his group. We recognised each other immediately, a smile was enough. That day I think we realised that something had sparked between us. Francesco asked if I had any rings for him and I answered "Yes, sir!"
Since then, I've grown keener and keener on swallows – not from the culinary or commercial point of view, of course. Francesco told me the swallows could help my people in other ways, through a project which would both save the swallows and give my people an alternative.
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JUSTINA ABANG IN ITALY TO DEFEND SWALLOWS: swallow hunter to swallow expert
"In 2000 a great opportunity came my way: I was sent to Italy on a LIPU-sponsored course in organic farming, along with a young man also from Ebbaken. I learned many things on this course, and while I was there the relationship between me and Francesco deepened.
The people in our village didn't believe that the whites were really interested in protecting the swallows: we thought that was just an excuse, and that they were looking for something valuable in the elephant grass. But after living in Italy and getting involved in research and conservation, I have now come to understand the importance of bird ringing. The swallows' migration flight is just amazing. I have flown back and forth between Nigeria and Italy two or three times, and each time the flight seemed endless. To think that swallows do this twice a year, without a plane – it's incredible ! Everyone here in Europe loves these birds..."
"Francesco took me to see the byres where they nest, and showed me how to ring them. It's such a shame that after flying so far, they end up being killed by my people. Of course, I don't eat swallows any more; but I have to say that here in Europe the situation is very different and very strange: so much food gets thrown away or given to animals, while we even eat the bones, and nothing gets thrown away except paper and plastic.
Now Francesco and I are married and we have a beautiful baby boy. We live in the Marche, where they take organic farming very seriously, it isn't just a passing fad. In the future I hope I will be able to go back and explain my experience and my feelings to the young folk in my village.
I want to tell the girls that prostitution isn't the only way out.
We can do something for ourselves, for the swallows, and for the future. I want to bring them the "Message of the Swallows" – that little black and white bird which, while it brings Summer to Europe, can bring to my people the message of Hope."
© Justina Abang, 2005
Interested in swallows and swifts? Join the Yahoo Group ""Swallows, Martins & Swifts WorldWide"...go to groups.yahoo.com/group/Swallows-Martins-Swifts-Worldwide for details...
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