Twins poser for
fertility boffs
ADE OBISESAN, Igbo-Ora, Nigeria | Sunday
A SIGNPOST put up a few kilometres outside Igbo-Ora, a sleepy southwest Nigerian town, proudly welcomes visitors to "the land of twins".
With a population of around 60 000, most of them farmers, the town lacks
electricity, drinking water and a doctor at its run-down general hospital,
but not progeny.
"It is God's work and it is beyond any human understanding," Adeyemi Ajibade,
a 65-year-old elder in the town, told AFP on a visit here. "There is hardly a house in Igbo-Ora without twins or sometimes triplets," he
said.
Ajibade should know. Last year, he held a joint church wedding for his three grown triplet sons, all born and wed together.
Of the 25 homes visited by an AFP correspondent in Igbo-Ora, 140km north of Lagos, 19 had twins or triplets.
Firm population figures do not exist and no census has been conducted in Nigeria for 10 years.
But population experts agree Nigeria, overall, has one of the world's highest rates of multiple births, with the southwest being particularly prone.
A study conducted between 1972 and 1982 by researcher P.S. Nylander recorded an average of 45 to 50 sets of twins per 1 000 live births in the southwest,
four times higher than in Europe or the United States.
In Igbo-Ora, residents have no explanation of why their own town should be more twin prone than any other. Some attribute the phenomenon to providence, others to lineage and still
others to diet, specifically the reputed high oestrogen content of agida, a local variant of the popular yam root tuber used as a staple.
"Agida grows in clusters and anybody who eats it is bound to have babies in
multiples" said Mojisola Adeniyi, whose father had four sets of twins, of
which she was one. Robert Asiedu, a yam specialist at the internationally-funded International
Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, 60km east of Igbo-Ora, is sceptical of a yam link.
"Nobody has provided any scientific explanation or evidence that could prove that yam consumption can cause multiple births," he said.
He noted that there are even species of yams cultivated, especially in Asia, for contraceptive purposes.
Scientists at the University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan are meanwhile still researching the Igbo-Ora twinning phenomenon, K.A. Okumade, a senior
doctor at the hospital, said.
A study conducted in Igbo-Ora from 1985 to 1995 found that the rate of
twinning "increases with maternal age" and that "twins run in families and
heredity plays an important part." But it has found no explanation for the twinning rate particular to the town.
In the past, before the arrival of Christianity here in the 19th century, twinning was considered a bad omen in much of Nigeria, especially among the
Igbo and Efik ethnic groups in the southeast. In these cultures, twins were either drowned at birth or cast in the
so-called "evil forest" to die.
But among the ethnic Yoruba in the southwest twins are traditionally regarded
as special gifts from God and harbinger of good luck. Wooden images of twins are placed in special corners of homes where they are worshipped at regular
intervals.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria four years ago set up an office in Igbo-Ora to educate the town's women on the essence of good family
planning. - AFP
|
