Before “Detty December,” there was “Onwa December”…
According to Google, Onwa December is an Igbo phrase that means “December Month,” used in Nigeria to describe the vibrant, festive, homecoming season when people return to their villages or small communities for Christmas and New Year, filled with celebrations, feasts, and cultural events. It signifies a period of joy, feasting, and reunion.
Just like other terms, Onwa December, regardless of the fact that it is an Igbo phrase, is a popular term in Nigeria. Gen Zs have Detty December, while Onwa December gives off the vibe of the older generation, but they both mean the same thing in a little different way.
Meanwhile, for some others, Onwa December is an opportunity to visit the neighbors in an unusual way.
Let’s talk about what happened in this small community in Abuja during this festive period.
A few days before the Christmas celebration, a teenage girl walked around a neighborhood, asking different things from different houses. The first house, she asked for water to drink, and she was given money to go and buy water.
The second house, she asked for directions to where she could get water to buy. The third house, she barged into the gate, asking for a teacher whom no one knew. People saw her walking around aimlessly that particular afternoon, but no one paid attention to her.
She was just a teenager after all.
The next day, she was caught stealing tubers of yams from the first house she visited the previous day. She didn’t just steal one or five tubers of yams; she almost emptied the room where the yams were kept.
While the family was having a good time in their home, this teenage girl, from the window at the back of the house, was taking the yams tuber by tuber. In the room, they stored some tubers of yams, and like most local houses, it was built in a way that the window wasn’t far from the ground level, and being that they had already arranged yams in it, it made it easy for her to reach into the room through the window – which didn’t have a burglary anyway – and take yams.
She would take one after another, walk a few feet away from the house, and bury them in the ground, in the bush. She was doing so, probably with the intention to empty the room, until she was caught by a concerned neighbor who was passing by and saw her.
The family raised an alarm, and people gathered.
They asked her questions, but she kept playing around with the truth. At first, she claimed to be nine years old, but when her eyes felt the impact of pepper spray, she confessed that she was thirteen. Then she was asked for the phone number of her parents, and again, she refused to cooperate.
However, when a stroke of cane landed on her back without warning, she eventually called out the phone number effortlessly.
Fortunately, the number connected, and the woman who picked up didn’t deny knowing the girl. However, she wasn’t interested in intervening.
“She has been doing this for a long time. Do to her whatever you wish.”
After that statement, the affected family decided to take her to the vigilante group, even though some of their neighbors wanted the girl to be disciplined by being thoroughly flogged. When they got to the vigilantes, they also had the same thing to say about her.
“She is known for this. We are tired of dealing with her.”
Apparently, she was a regular thief in the community, and not one single punishment was meted out to her. The affected family, not wanting to be held responsible should anything happen to her, left her there and returned to their home.
A day before the New Year, another family was visited by an uninvited guest.
A woman and her children stepped out of the house for a few minutes, and by the time they returned, their door was in a bad shape; someone had broken into their home in broad daylight. However, the burglar hadn’t gone far as she saw him walking away with her daughter’s school bag.
The thief had filled the school bag with lots of her dry peppers. It was a local community, and most of the residents were good farmers. He couldn’t find a nylon bag to take the dry peppers, so he looked for an alternative, which happened to be the woman’s daughter’s school bag.
She raised an alarm.
They ran after him, but he was already far gone. If she had returned a few minutes earlier, he would have been caught.
She had to return to her home, where concerned neighbors had already gathered.
Nothing could be done because the thief wasn’t caught. They only lamented about it before everyone else went back to their homes to continue with preparations for the New Year celebration. Some families did not go through the Onwa December without a memorable drama.
What drama happened around/to you during Onwa December?
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Crazy things are happening
They really are!