No one ever got bored with Chris. You were enchanted by who he was, what he did, what he said or how he said it, if he said it. He was that bundle of jovial conciliation of opposites. He was born in the rustic Kutiang hills of Obudu where heaven and earth meet in a kiss of clouds. Brought up in Obudu, he studied and practised Medicine in Italy, erstwhile home of the comedia de l’arte. Chris was one in whom the epicurean mutually co-habited with the stoic.
In an era where wide travelling and long sojourns in the West occasioned intractable problems of elite alienation, Chris used such experience to re-engineer his anchor to his native Obudu. His attachment to the rollicking hills and the rollon-roll-off forests is legendary. Our parents used to say that Chris had the magic of Obudu bound in him.
We all have pleasant memories of each of his home-comings in Kutiang both as a child and as an adult. Once he was signaled by the villagers, his uncle, Angilibi, would welcome him with gun-salutes, and hail him with a dozen pet names. Each occasion was marked with feasts in which goats and fowls paid the supreme price. To the villagers, that was too little a price to pay for such an illustrious son. Chris used to tell us that nobody ever saw the Kutiang hills and ever forgot its enchantment. Kutiang hills was the place where fiercely friendly animals and birds criss-cross in a magical web of paths that could derail the most practiced hunters. That was where Chris could find his path unaided. Kutiang hills knew Chris by name as every ancestor did. He lived in the hills and the hills lived in him even when he was in far away Italy.
In an era where wide travelling and long sojourns in the West occasioned intractable problems of elite alienation, Chris used such experience to re-engineer his anchor to his native Obudu.
The dialectics of Chris’ life lay in the fact that in-spite of that intense communion, with his ancestral home, and people he could without difficulty adapt to the aristocratic life of Northern Italy where wine and cuisine demand a practiced palate and where opera houses demand unadulterated ears.
As a supreme effort to link the rustic with the metropolitan, the past with the present and particularly to conciliate the many Chrises that seemed to pop out of our CHRIS, he undertook a research in a London Library to dig up historical facts about the link between Obudu and the West. It was thanks to that effort that we knew that Chris’ Grand Father, Chief Udama Ubua, was the one who received the first colonial administrator at Obudu. A visit that was not innocent of the jovial enigma that was Chris.
It is therefore befitting that Obudu land should receive its illustrious son for eternal repose.
For his selfless service to society, Dr. Chris was nominated by Talata Marfara Local Government in Sokoto (Now Zamfara State) and the Cross River State Government nominated him for the award of the National Productivity Order of Merit. He was conferred a posthumous National Productivity Order of Merit (NPOM) Award by the President Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, His Excellency, Umar Musa Yar’Adua GCFR on the 12th May, 2009.
