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You go down 312 steps and take off your shoes. Water drips from the rock that people carry home for healing, bats fill the dark, and once, a politician said, a python guarded the mace of the Nigerian Senate.
Off the old road between Awka and Onitsha, at Ogbunike in Oyi Local Government Area, a tarred road runs for about three kilometres and then simply stops. There is an open space, a shade tree with young men sitting under it, and a signpost telling you that you have arrived at Ogbunike Cave.
The young men are the guides. When a Punch reporter, Ozioma Ubabukoh, went there in late 2017, one of them, a man called Ebuka, took him down. Ebuka explained the basics as they went. There are 312 steps leading into the cave, going about fifty feet below the ground. Before you go in, you take off your shoes. That is the rule, and it is written on the signpost along with others, including a warning that stealing near the cave is an abomination that brings heavy punishment.
Even so, Ebuka told the reporter to carry his shoes inside with him. They looked expensive, he said, and village boys might take them. Asked why the gods of the cave did not punish such thieves, he gave a patient answer. The punishment may come later in life, he said, and who knows where some people's troubles began? But your shoes will still be gone.
Inside, the air is cool, like a room with an air conditioner. On hot days, the guides said, they go down into the cave themselves just to cool off. Water drips from the rock overhead, and that water is the cave's most prized gift. Many people believe it heals. Visitors bring jerrycans to fill and carry home to drink. Pastors come for it. So do native doctors, who prefer to collect it on Eke market days, great days in the Igbo calendar when, people believe, great things happen, and the water is thought to be stronger.
According to Ebuka, the cave was found several hundred years ago. He spoke of it as if it were a house, with an outer part like a verandah and inner chambers like bedrooms, each with its own doorway. He said strange beings once lived there, and that creatures such as pythons and bats live inside now. He even claimed lions. Everything in there is harmless, he assured his visitors.
Part of what makes the cave memorable is simply how hard it is to move through. The tour begins in the bats' section, where a whole colony wheels about in the dark. From there you crawl. The reporter set off towards the part the guides call the pythons' section and decided partway along that he had seen enough, because, as he put it, the trip had become more punishment than pleasure.
A man named John Ifeanyichukwu, who lives in Awka, remembered a visit long before that. In March 1965 he was one of thirty members of a geographical society who went on an excursion to the cave. At the entrance, in a valley, an old man who kept the cave met them at about eleven in the morning, carrying a hurricane lamp. He warned them about the darkness. Then he split them into three groups of ten and lined each group up as if for a tug of war, every person holding the waist of the one in front. Never let go, he told them, or you could lose your way.
The guide went first with his lamp, and each group went in turn. Ifeanyichukwu recalled that the cave was really many caves joined inside one large hollow, linked by winding paths that were easy to lose. The darkness was so thick that the lamp lit only a little space around them. The roof rose and fell. The passages narrowed until there was hardly room to wriggle. Holding on to one another, they bent, twisted and crawled their way through. Even then, he said, some of the walls were scrawled with writing left by earlier visitors.
He was surprised, decades later, that a place already drawing visitors in the 1960s had still not become a real earner for the state.
The cave's most famous story belongs to a politician. In 2000, when there were plots to impeach him, the late Senate President Chuba Okadigbo hid the Senate mace, the symbol of the legislature's authority. He later said he had put it in Ogbunike Cave for safekeeping among the reptiles, especially the python. Anyone who wanted it back, he said, would have to pay their way into the cave and then fight the python that guarded it.
By 2017, visitors paid N3,000 each to go in, and groups paid between N5,000 and N10,000. The guides earned a share, paid through an official of the Ogbunike community. Ebuka said 25 to 40 people came on an ordinary day, and that at Christmas, Easter, the New Yam Festival and school holidays the number could pass 100 and sometimes near 200.
Yet the place was plain. A visiting surveyor from Ebonyi State, Chief Joseph Ezenwanne, complained that after a hard tour there was not even a small shop to buy water. In 2015, Governor Willie Obiano had visited and promised to turn the cave into a source of income. His government signed an agreement with a company to build a theme park and resort for N250 million, with shares set aside for the state, Oyi Local Government and Ifite-Ogbunike. Two years later nothing had been built, and the tourism commissioner said investors were still being sought.
One of the cave's managers, Elochukwu, put it simply. The governor had promised, the people had voted for him again, and now they were waiting for him to keep his word.
