Weekend Titbits
By Boma Nwuke PhD
There are names that people merely answer to, and there are names that seem to follow people around like shadows. Some names are given in celebration; others are reminders of a difficult season, a family experience or an event that left an indelible mark on the parents. A child may therefore be named after happiness, prosperity, gratitude, disappointment, struggle or even a prayer for a better tomorrow.
But what happens when a child grows up and begins to live his name?
That was Atubokiki.
In our part of the world, names often tell stories. They can reveal what the parents were going through when the child arrived or what they hoped the child would become. Some children grow into their names beautifully. Others appear to fight them all their lives.
There was, for instance, a man whose childhood name was “Oruama,” meaning the home of Satan. As he grew older, perhaps uncomfortable with the dark imagery surrounding the name, he changed it to one associated with a biblical figure whose life represented goodness and righteousness. Whether a name determines destiny is another matter entirely, but there are people who seem to carry their names with an almost uncanny accuracy.
Atubokiki was one of them.
His name, loosely translated, means, “Who did I stop?” It was a name that seemed harmless enough when he was a little boy. But as he grew, he appeared to ask that question through his actions, almost as though daring the world to tell him who could stop him.
He was brilliant. That was never in doubt.
He could recite children’s books almost word for word. He could sing hymns with a high tenor voice that would make people turn around to find out where such a powerful sound was coming from. His memory was remarkable, and when it came to literature, words seemed to settle naturally in his head.
But brilliance was only one side of Atubokiki.
The other side was mischief.
He was stubborn. Stubborn in a way that made adults shake their heads. He could be troublesome and would not easily let anyone be. He was particularly notorious among the young girls in his age group, who regarded him as a nuisance they were better off avoiding.
Even elderly men and women were not spared his antics.
Those who walked with sticks were especially vulnerable. Atubokiki could quietly take away an elderly person’s walking stick and then stand somewhere nearby watching the unfortunate victim grope for it. The curses that followed only seemed to amuse him.
He was not the kind of boy who accepted every errand either. If he calculated that an assignment would bring him nothing meaningful, he simply refused. But let there be an errand that could make his pockets bulge, and suddenly he became available.
He was the only boy in a family of four children, and perhaps that position contributed to his confidence. He was pampered by his parents, especially his mother. Like many mothers who have only one son among several daughters, she probably saw something special in him and was inclined to overlook some of his excesses.
But children have their own way of keeping score.
Those who could not match Atubokiki’s toughness avoided him. Some children simply did not want to fight him, and because of his reputation, they kept away from Ezinwain Polo, the neighbourhood where he lived.
Then life changed.
Just as Atubokiki was preparing to enter secondary school, his father died.
Death has a cruel way of rearranging the furniture of a family.
The boy who had once moved around with the confidence of someone who believed there would always be a way suddenly discovered that life had become a different game. There was no money to pay his school fees. There was no money to pay the fees of his sisters. There was certainly no longer enough money to keep filling his pockets.
“What will I do?” he asked himself.
“Who will I meet to help us?”
For perhaps the first time in his young life, Atubokiki discovered that there were questions no amount of stubbornness could answer.
He tried the riverside.
Perhaps the river would be kinder to him.
He went fishing, hoping to return home with enough fish to sell and make some money. But each day he went, it seemed as if the fish had held a meeting before his arrival and agreed to swim far into the deep.
He returned empty-handed.
“What shall I do?” he asked himself again.
There was no miracle waiting around the corner. No generous benefactor appeared. No one came knocking at the family door with a bag of money.
So Atubokiki did something that his old friends might never have imagined.
He humbled himself.
He went to Ibuluya Dikibo Park and began carrying loads for travellers and people returning home. At first, his old “gra gra”—that exaggerated confidence and larger-than-life personality—did not work there.
Nobody cared about how tough he had been in Ezinwain Polo.
At the park, everybody had a job to do.
If you wanted to eat, you worked.
Slowly, Atubokiki began to understand a lesson that childhood mischief had never taught him: sometimes life does not respond to noise; it responds to discipline.
He softened.He became less troublesome.
He began to behave more like the ordinary human being he had always been underneath the bravado.
And the money, though small, began to come.
He paid his sisters’ school fees and started saving towards his own.
Those were not the days of self-paced online learning, virtual classrooms or digital education. School meant sitting in a classroom, listening to a teacher and working through lessons the traditional way.
Atubokiki eventually enrolled.
And he took his studies seriously.
Perhaps it was because he had already tasted hardship. Perhaps the death of his father had matured him earlier than his peers. Or perhaps he finally understood that the intelligence everyone had seen in him as a child could become something useful if properly directed.
He gravitated towards the arts, particularly Literature.
There, he found a world in which his remarkable memory could shine.
He could quote William Shakespeare and other renowned writers with confidence. Verses and memorable lines seemed to flow effortlessly from him. The boy who once used his mouth and memory mainly to entertain himself had discovered that those same gifts could earn him respect.
He was making progress.
But life has a way of reminding us that success in one area does not automatically erase the memories people have of us in another.
The girls who had known Atubokiki as a troublesome boy were not suddenly convinced that he had become a different person. The mothers who had watched him grow up were not necessarily ready to celebrate his transformation.
They remembered.
And sometimes, the past has a longer memory than we expect.
Atubokiki’s academic progress was gradually overshadowed by his social reputation. The boy who had become serious about school still carried the burden of the boy he used to be.
Perhaps that was when something inside him began to change again.
He withdrew.Then he withdrew some more.
And eventually, he seemed to withdraw completely.
The last time his name was mentioned, Atubokiki had relocated somewhere else, perhaps in search of a quieter place where nobody knew the mischievous child he had once been. Maybe he wanted a fresh beginning. Maybe he simply wanted to escape the eyes and whispers of those who remembered him.
Who knows?
Perhaps somewhere far away, Atubokiki finally found the peace he had been looking for.
But there is something haunting about his story.
The boy who was named “Who did I stop?” grew into someone who stopped himself—not from education, not from hard work, but from social interaction with the people of his childhood.
He had fought his way through poverty.
He had survived the loss of his father.
He had gone from the riverside to the loading park, from carrying people’s luggage to carrying the burden of his own future. He had discovered his intellectual gifts and used them to pursue education.
Yet, somehow, the memories of his childhood became a wall between him and the community that had watched him grow.
Atubokiki lived his name in the most unexpected way.
“Who did I stop?”
Perhaps, in the end, the person he stopped was himself.
And that is the strange irony of life: sometimes, the people who appear most difficult to stop are not stopped by enemies, poverty or failure. They are stopped by the memories they carry, the reputation they leave behind and the walls they build around themselves.
Names may not determine destiny, but sometimes they tell stories.
And Atubokiki’s story remains one of those childhood stories that make us smile at the antics of yesterday, shake our heads at the twists of life and wonder about the human being behind the name.
Who did I stop?
Perhaps the better question is:
What stopped Atubokiki?
Boy’s image sketch
Courtesy dreams time
Atubokiki: The Wonder Boy Who Lived His Name
