In the village of Okoroba in Nembe Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, a group of eight women aged between 68 and 87 have become unlikely cultural guardians -- the last living repositories of oral histories, traditional songs, proverbs, and ceremonial knowledge that date back centuries in the Nembe Ijaw tradition.
Every Saturday morning under a communal tree, the women gather with young people from the village and nearby settlements to transmit what they know: the genealogies of founding families, the histories of boundary agreements with neighbouring kingdoms, the protocols of funeral ceremonies, the lyrics of harvest songs that have not been written down anywhere, and the names and uses of plants and creek fish that younger generations no longer recognise.
The sessions, which have been running for three years, were initiated by retired schoolteacher Mrs. Priye Selebirimoye, 74, who was alarmed by what she described as a crisis of cultural amnesia among young Nembe people who can name American rappers but cannot name their own great-grandparents.
University of Port Harcourt researcher Dr. Tonye Briggs has been documenting the sessions with audio and video equipment, building an archive that he hopes to deposit with the Nigerian National Archives as a permanent record of Nembe oral heritage.
Community leaders have asked the Bayelsa State Ministry of Culture to provide funding for the formalisation of the programme and its expansion to other communities in Nembe and Ogbia LGAs before the last bearers of this knowledge are gone.
