By Sunny Awhefeada
Ogboruane is what the Urhobo people call the cock or rooster and ogboruane holds a multiplicity of significance for them. It also does among other ethnicities in Nigeria. Besides it being a source of meat, it is also a pet as well as a sacrificial animal. Quite significantly, the rooster is the village or neighbourhood’s natural clock or timekeeper. The Urhobo people in their communities are famous for keeping pets or rearing birds and animals for different reasons. Urhobo households in the countryside boast of cocks, hens, ducks, goats, sheep, dogs and cats. It was part of their unconscious, may be conscious, efforts at balancing the ecosystem. Every child in Urhobo households of old was brought up to know how to rear pets as part of informal education and acculturation. Growing up in Kaduna and Ibadan, the cock was not part of my ecology. Our encounters with cocks were rare and we could not tell much about them. The chickens we ate were either from poultries or frozen food items. My earliest memories of the cock as a phenomenon dates back to the 1970s when we holidayed as children in one of the Ikale villages across the River Oluwa beyond Okitipupa. The village was one of those Urhobo Ukane settlements where our ancestors in their quest for prosperity settled and made a living and raising children that went to school to begin iruo igometi! Among the domestic animals were cocks and they were distinctive. Brightly coloured, with the red comb sitting on their heads like a crown they often chased and climbed the backs of hens, an act we later understood to be mating. They flapped their wings and crowed, something the other birds or animals could not do. The crowing of the cock finds a unique onomatopoeic rendition in kokorokooo!
My conscious apprehension of the cock evolved in Evwreni. Besides seeing them daily in our new homestead there was also the folkloric and popular representation of the cock. There were folktales that thematized the factors that defined the existential condition of the cock. The stories vary. The cock became a sacrificial animal because he did not attend the meeting where the decision of how to pacify a rapacious predator was taken. The other animals voted that the cock should be offered to the predator to pacify him and save them. That is why till this day the cock is used for sacrifice. Once upon a time, predators mistook the cock’s red comb for fire and for that reason did not dare go near it. Then the wife had a quarrel with him and in anger told the world that the red comb was not fire. From that moment the hawk began to prey on the cock’s household. Many “sweet” enchanting folktales woven around the cock motif abound. Part of the lore that we learnt was that cocks do not crow at night. It was a taboo and ominous. And if it happened, the cock was apprehended, slaughtered, roasted and eaten immediately. I recall that once a cock crowed near us at night and a day or two later someone fell off a palm tree and died. We were petrified. Looking back, I also recall a television drama Cock Crow at Dawn which aired on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) many years ago. Produced by legendary Peter Igho, the drama was heralded by a theme song by unforgettable Bongos Ikwue. The cock also saunters in the domain of politics. The defunct National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) have the cock as their mascot.
Africa’s leading novelist, Chinua Achebe, also finds significant space for the cock in his novels. When Okonkwo, in Things Fall Apart, needed yam seedlings to take off as a prosperous farmer, one of the items he took to Nwakibie, his benefactor to be was a cock. Elsewhere, Achebe rightly admonishes the reader “he who chases the cock for him is the fall”, which finds equivalent in Urhobo, “oro tue oho oyi she”. He also reminds us “a chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the day it hatches”. In his last fictional work Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe not only privileges the cock, but draws a correlate between it and the voice which seeks a holistic reconstruction of society in the character of Ikem. The famous novelist says “the cock which wakes up the neighbourhood belongs to one household, but its voice belongs to the entire community”. Yes, the cock wakes up the community. This act of waking up is beyond getting up from sleep and loafing around. No! The crowing of the cock at dawn is a call which rouses us to action telling us that a new day was here and we should go out to work. The crowing prods us to rise and do something. It is one of the cock’s appointed assignments. As children, many of us did not like the crowing of the cock especially during the rainy season and the harmattan. Still enveloped by darkness and with no way of telling the time, the crowing of the cock was what grandma needed to say “oke rhiere” meaning “it is dawn” as she makes the round to tap us to rise from sweet sleep.
The present intervention about the cock owes its thread to a December 2025 whatsapp post by my good friend Moses Darah in which he advertised a mature native cock. Resplendent in its red-brown feathers, red comb and dangling red wattles, the image foisted nostalgia on me as images of cocks in my childhood flooded me. I called Moses asking how I could get one or two cocks the exact type he advertised. He brought them to my place on Christmas day of all days! The cocks survived the yuletide. They are still alive, clucking, crowing and prancing around the compound. Some friends queried why I got two cocks without getting hens for their companionship. I told them I was going to oblige them. In the intervening time, I discovered that the cocks were attempting to mate some birds that often play in my compound. The cocks would go after the birds whenever they land, attempt to circle and mount, and the birds will fly away. The cocks would then cluck in desperation. I have, just five days ago through Moses, got two hens for the cocks. Both cocks have become more sprightly and I have seen them severally mating the hens. Even now, as I write they are only a few feet away clustered under the moringa tree. Hopefully, in the next few weeks or months, as they mate, lay eggs and hatch them, I would be the proud owner of many chicks that will grow into cocks and hens. My family and friends will be eating fawo as we call cocks and hens around here. And who says I cannot begin a small and medium scale enterprise by selling cocks, hens and eggs?
Breeding or taking care of them is at no cost. They feed on whatever they find. Bread crust, cooked food and just anything that is harmless if feed for them. Unlike hybrid chickens that we call “agric fowl” these ones are healthy, strong and seldom take ill or die. I am just waiting for boom time. Thank you, Moses. These days, since the dawn of 26th December 2025, my cocks have been waking my neighboruhood and I have heard neighbours asking, “prof don dey train fawo?” and some have also answered “na waaooo!” In thinking and writing about the cocks I have sought refuge from the forthcoming election brouhaha, the crisis in Iran, the spiraling cost of fuel and the many aches that afflict us. Let me listen to the crowing of the ogboruane and watch their mating antics! This is therapy!
