The Choirmaster (5)

Times changed and the choirmaster saw some changes around the ekpo masquerade that made him cringe. He called one of the changes an idiotic display. Young people, mostly teenagers, were openly hooting at the masked men, jumping up to catch arrows the masked men shot at them and would race off as the ekpo chased them and shot arrows at their fleeing backs. Parents shouted themselves hoarse at their wards to stay away from the rowdy elements teeming through the streets. Now and then, one or two youngsters lost their eyes.

As the aura around the masquerade was dimmed by the changing times, the choirmaster borrowed a beat or two from the masked folks into the songs he composed for his choir. That got the core traditionalists cross-carpeting. You would see them taking special seats on Sundays to nod their heads to the choirmaster's special anthems till the ekpo season returned. Then some got sucked up and left the shrine permanently for the altar. One even became an elder.

Elder Uteh was so angry once that a young man had the nerves to pick up a stone and throw it at a masked man. 'Oh, how I have lost all my teeth now there's a contest for eating corn!' he cried. 'If it was in my days,' he said to the young man, 'you were the type I would chase and even if you would run to the remotest closet in your parents' home and lock the door, I would stay outside and shoot my arrow and it would strike you right there where you hid!' How that arrow flew through the walls and roof of the house was hard to explain but it had been said the wound it left on you would become instantly infected and not much victims survived it without the expert help of an abia ibok, the native doctor.

The aura of the ekpo masquerade was further dimmed when a masked man recently pointed a gun at a visitor and ran away with his valuables. The Akuku, paramount ruler, of the Annangs banned them indefinitely from grouping and parading the streets.

But the piano stole the rhythm from the ekpo drums or played it in tandem and the music is now heard in every festivity, marriage or burial, across the clans where the non-initiates and women would crazily dance and do the traditional hoots even more intensely than the initiates used to. The earliest innovator of the beat was the choirmaster.

THE END