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Among the Goemai of Shendam, a prince may not see his father's body or watch him buried. He finds the grave only on the day he becomes king.
Picture a young man whose father has just died. In most of Nigeria, he would be at the centre of everything: receiving visitors, arguing over the burial date, standing by the grave as the earth goes in. Among the Goemai people of Shendam, in the south of Plateau State, the rule for one family runs the other way. If your father was the Long Goemai, the paramount ruler, you do not see his body. You do not take part in his burial. You are not even told, in any way that matters, where exactly he lies.
We know this not from an outsider's guess but from a man who lived through it. In January 2020 the reigning ruler, Miskoom Martin Mudu'utrie Shaldas III, sat down with the journalist James Abraham of Punch and explained it plainly. Princes, he said, are culturally forbidden to see the corpse of a king, and they are not allowed to join in the burial. There are particular people, permitted by tradition, who handle all of that. The sons stay away.
His own father was Miskoom Hubert Shaldas II, who had come to the throne in 1988. Daily Trust reported that he died after a long illness at the age of 78 and that he was one of the oldest traditional rulers in Plateau. He was also president of the Shendam Traditional Council, so his death left a large gap. It took almost a year before the kingmakers met to choose his successor, early in 2017.
It helps to know what kind of office this is. The Long Goemai is not only a political chief. His people call him the Fertility Chief. He is expected to bring in the rains for the farming season and to bless the harvest, and most of the old festivals in Shendam follow the farming year, from preparing the land to bringing in the crops. A king like that is tied to the land and the ancestors in a way that ordinary people are not, and it makes some sense that his body and his grave would be kept apart from those who might one day take his place.
The throne does not pass automatically from father to son. Shaldas III explained that there are two ruling houses, and any male child from either house can become Long Goemai if the people responsible for the selection find him worthy. Every prince, in that sense, is an heir. That makes the succession less like a coronation and more like an election with a very small, very powerful electorate.
In 2017 there were seven kingmakers. Daily Trust noted something about where they met. In the past, selections had taken place at a famous spot called the Jalba rock in Shendam. This time the choice was to be made at the palace. The paper named five contestants, among them the late king's own son, Mipo Shaldas, along with Elias Nkwap, Alhaji Yakubu Othman, Colonel Danladi Neylong and Julius Neylong. The state's commissioner for chieftaincy affairs said the kingmakers had been given seven days to prepare.
The man who won tells a bigger story. Speaking to Punch three years later, he said twenty-four princes contested and the field was cut down to seven before the final stage. He did not pretend it was gentle. It was, in his words, hotly contested, with many interests and the influence of moneybags involved, and anything anyone could do to outwit the others was done. The two newspaper numbers do not match, and we cannot settle which is right, but the picture is the same: a crowded and bitter race.
The bitterness lasted. Shaldas III said the hardest time of his reign was the division the contest left behind, made worse because it ran straight into the campaigns for the 2019 elections. He also admitted he never expected the throne. He had an elder brother, and as a young man he was too adventurous to imagine outliving him. Before all this he had spent his working life in local government, a job his father pushed him into, he said, when he would rather have gone to the city to work for a big company.
Once the kingmakers have spoken, the new Long Goemai still has a long road to walk, and much of it is literal. Shaldas III described it step by step. First he is taken to a place about fifteen kilometres outside the town, where rites are performed and a red cap is placed on his head for the first time. From there he walks roughly twelve kilometres to a second site. There a horse is killed.
Then comes the part that explains the whole custom. From the place of the horse, the new king is led about seven kilometres further, to the burial ground of all the past Long Goemais. "That was the first time I saw where my father was buried," he told Punch. Only the prince who wins the throne ever gets to stand there. The others, his brothers and cousins included, never do. At the graveyard, a tusk is placed on his head, which frees him to go about without the red cap. Then he rides a horse back into town, and the installation is complete. He said he went through every step himself.
The old faith that holds all this together is, in his telling, about purity of mind and body. Anyone who goes into the shrine with bad intentions may be struck with a terrible disease. A king must not take food from a woman who is menstruating, and he said that rule is still observed in Shendam. He also admitted that some of the old practices are now considered illegal, without saying which.
Much has changed around the throne. The ruler dates the first Long Goemai at Shendam to 1875. Around 1902 his great-grandparents gave land to the Catholic mission, and the church spread from Shendam into the far north. Today, he said, more than three in four Goemai people are Catholic, and he himself has two wives where his father had eleven. Yet the walk to the graves survives, and with it a strange, moving rule: a son meets his father's grave only on the day he takes his father's place.
