You are welcome to the top of the Gerinjina mountain in Gashaka Local Government area of Taraba State.
It was like a story from Mars when a casual talk to the hearing of this reporter indicated that there was a community up the mountain that lived worse than those of the Koma people who were discovered in the mid-1980s by a group of National youth corps members in the then Gongola State, now split into Adamawa and Taraba states. While the Koma community resides in Adamawa State, the new Stone Age people are in Taraba State.
They are called, the JIBU PEOPLE and they are descendants of the Kwarafa Kingdom who lived for centuries in nine communities scattered around on the mountains in Gashaka.
Historical accounts have it that the people lived together with their fellow brothers in the kingdom until about 1807 when Fulani Jihadists invaded the kingdom. They were said to have run to the mountain top where they now live and are completely cut off from other tribes, and by extension the whole world. Not even the activities of the colonial masters reached them, largely because of the difficult terrain of their new abode. The mountain top is characterised by rivers, deep gullies and huge rocks.
Just like any other group of human beings, the Jibu people have their ways of life. These include collective circumcision of boys born within the same age group, a ceremony performed with the use sharp objects.
It is considered a test of strength and character for their boys not to cry during the ceremony. The circumcised are kept on bamboo beds and covered with fresh leaves that are gathered and burnt after the wound has healed.
For a young Jibu man to get a wife, he must serve the family of his bride for five years. Nonetheless, the marriage is determined by the capacity of the woman to conceive. This is measured by a dried long firewood that is set on fire for at least three months, within which if the woman does not become pregnant, the simple communication is the gods do not want the marriage.
Pregnant women work on the farms to the day of their delivery.They have a communal life and are ruled by the Waziri Garinjina, Tann Shidin Zunbi, who confirmed in an interview with the Nigerian Compass on Saturday that maternal and child mortality rates are high among them.
The Jibu people are neither Christians nor Muslims. Rather, they believe in their own gods and the ancestors. In an event of violation of their natural laws by any individual, animals are slaughtered to appease the land. It is also a similar story during every cropping season.
The harvests are brought before the Waziri for sacrifice to the gods, after which their brand of liquor is prepared for everybody to drink in merriment. Incidentally too, the Jibu people believe that some gods are not friendly with women.
Thus, throughout the period of ritual preparations, women remain indoors to avoid being exposed to the gods who could be harmful to them.When our correspondent visited Gerinjina, their condition of living was worse than that of the much-talked about Koma people. There is no access road.
They drink water with animals from the same rivers. In their scattered settlement system, there is no school around except for some missionaries who have a thatched space for that purpose but is yet to have any student. After a day's job on the farm, their women still have the task of grinding raw corn with heavy stones before food is ready for their male counterparts.
RELIGIOUS BELIEF
The Koma people believe in the existence of a supreme being variously called Zum or Nu. These words are also used for the sun. The neighbouring Chamba also use the same word Su for the sun, as well as for Almighty God.
In order to get what man likes within the unalterable wheel of God's arrangements, the Koma recognise the powers of local deities such as Kene which can be appealed to for health, vitality and fertility. Each hamlet and household has her Ken, shrine under the charge of male ritual functionaries, Kene-Mari who is assisted by male prophets, Kpani.
SOCIO-POLITICAL STRUCTURE (Authority and leaders)
Koma Society is an acephalous one. There is no single tribal head over the whole of the Koma groups,which are made up of over thirty hamlets dotted over the Alantika hills and the adjoining lowlands. Each hamlet, however, has a group of all-male ritual functionaries (Kpane ) led by a Priest King (Kene Mari). The Kene-Mari-in- Council settles disputes between individuals and groups within hamlets and between them. Cases of homicide between neighbouring hamlets are settled by vengeance if compensation is not made in good time.
Disputes between men and women, wife come under the adjudication of -in-Council. Elders are also generally respected in the society.
MARRIAGE AND INHERITANCE
Marriage amongst the hill-dwelling Koma, as with their Verre lowlanders is endogamous and polygynous. Levirate marriage is also practised amongst the Koma. These serve to promote their cultural and ethnic identities, which they cherish in the face of historical and present-day realities.
It is estimated that, between the ages of 10 and l4, both sexes undergo puberty rituals which involve circumcision for boys and extraction of teeth for girls. These are prerequisites for bethrothal and marriage. They are also visible signs of maturity. The ceremonies are controlled in groups and at village levels (usually after the harvest season, between the months of October and January) by a group of ritual functionaries
called the Kene-Mari.
TRADE/MARKET
Markets do not exist in the hills but in the lowlands where the Koma trade with the Fulani, Bata, Chamba and other tribes. From them, the hill-dwellers procure scarce items of clothing which are used by men on ceremonial occasions. They also buy Salt, beeds enamel plates and agricultural implements such as hoes and cutlasses.
The Koma women usually bring their guinea corn, tobacco and millets down for sale. In turn, they use the proceeds to buy needed commodities. Large quantities of beer brewed by both men and women are carried in elongated baskets to the lowland markets for either sale or on-the-spot consumption.
Thus, the market is also a socio-spatial venue for interactions between distant hill and lowland friends, siblings and affines. The Koma hill-dwellers and their migrant lowland farmers sit in groups after the day’s sales to drink, gossip and exchange views. Males and females, bride and groom all sit down in circles to exchange pleasantries. The men in their textile dress and the women with their lubricated bodies and waist
leaves feel apparently free and uninhibited in their interactions with one another. They show no signs of inferiority before their more elaborately- dressed Fulani, Chamba and Bata neighbours. The language of commerce between the Koma and non-Koma groups such as the Verre is Hausa which the Koma hill dwellers are beginning to learn. However, the Verre, Koma and Chamba speaks a related dialect (Momi), recently identified as part of the Verre Duru group of the Adamawa family of languages.
Amongst the hiIl-dwellers, a moral economy which involves sharing, reciprocity and direct exchanges between neighbours, affines and siblings prevails. Money in the modern sense is only used in transactions between the hills and the lowland.
AGRICULTURAL
This has been made more easily possible by the three farming systems which the ecology favours - hill-top farming which favours multi-cropping of millet (maiwa), maize ('forrer) and groundnuts; Valley-farming, whose warmer temperatures favour cultivation of guinea corn and tobacco; and open-plain farming, which favours the cultivation of groundnuts.
DIVISION OF LABOUR
The nuclear family of a man, his wife/wives and adult children constitute the regular work force on a farm. While younger sons and daughters take care of the babies at home in the hills, the parents go to the valleys and plains to cultivate and tend their farm.
The children at home also scare away birds and troublesome rodents from the domestic farms. There are no specialised chores of work which women are thought incapable of carrying out. Women weed, hoe, dig and harvest crops as men do. Men help to carry children on their backs with leather skins as women do. There is a high degree of cooperation and collaboration. Women brew, men weave and also cook.
Another source of labour is the organisation of work parties (SOL) based on reciprocity and equivalent returns. These are organised at the Peak of the weeding seasons (July-September) when the domestic labour force becomes rather inadequate. Age-mates, friends and affines always constitute the core of work parties. The number of farm hands a man and his wife can muster depends on the number of such voluntary contracts they have entered into and honoured in the past, as well as on their general net of social relations. The investment cost includes the provisions of meals cooked by women and wine provided by men.
During recesses from work, both men and women, husbands/wives sit in circles as they do in the markets, eating freely together, exchanging fumes of tobacco pipes and drinking from the same cup. Women are not usually segregated from men, whereas they are amongst the Higi and in most Islamised comnmunities in the neighbouring lowlands, where women are kept in purdah. Nor is the Koma women's lot like that of their Gwari counterparts in the Niger State of Nigeria, who exist essentially as "donkeys" carrying loads for their husbands. In the latter society, only men till the land and harvest the crops. it is the duty of the husbands to provide loads while it is the duty of the wife to carry them. However, for carrying their loads, a certain portion of the yields goes to the wife as compensation for services rendered. From these, she buys essential requirements such as clothing for herself and her children.
However, the Koma field materials reveal a considerable degree of sharing, and cooperation in agricultural and most economic activities, between men and women. In fact, women have control over the granaries from where the daily supplies of food for the household are fetched.
One cannot therefore talk of a strict division of labour in the agricultural sphere amongst the Koma people. However, it is only men Who hunt. Hunting serves as a means of procurement of meat and protection for crops against the menace of monkeys, baboons and a variety of birds and rodents.
Both men and women gather forest products such as bananas, locust beans and canarium which is used for producing oil and used for body lubrication.
ECONOMY
The occupation of the Koma hill-dwellers centres around farming, hunting and gathering.Except for hunting, both men and women engage in cultivation, weeding and gathering. Women often have their own farms separate from their male counterparts. However, both cooperate at appropriate times in helping with each others' farms.
