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Seeds Of Change By Benn Ik
Seeds of Change is a short fictional story by Benn Ik an award winning poet and novelist. Author of the award winning novel THE TRUTH and many other short stories and poems like the anthology of poems "Poems from the cloud of reality published on Amazon. He has also been published and featured in many magazines and blogazines both local and internationally. He was the secetary of the Nigerian Young Writers Association.
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Seeds of Change: The Odyssey of Adebayo, Who Fed a Continent
In the village of Igbó-Ọrẹ, where the earth was red as clay and the sun hung low like a ripe mango, a boy named Adebayo learned the language of the land before he could speak his own. His cradle was the furrowed rows of cassava and yam his parents tended, his lullaby the rhythmic scrape of hoes against soil. By age six, he could predict rain by the scent of the wind and coax life from stubborn seeds that others discarded. “Ọmọ ilé,” the villagers called him—child of the earth—for his hands held a magic they could not name.
But Igbó-Ọrẹ was a place of paradox. Though the soil was fertile, hunger haunted the village like a shadow. Crops withered under erratic rains, and families traded ancestral land for bags of foreign fertilizer that burned the earth. Adebayo’s father, Olúwáṣeun, often said, “The land is our mother, but even mothers grow tired.”
Adebayo vowed to reawaken her.
At ten, Adebayo began his experiments. Behind the family hut, he carved a secret plot from the bush—a mosaic of raised beds, companion crops, and homemade compost brewed from palm fronds and fish bones. While other boys chased goats, he charted the growth of millet sown with groundnuts, noting how their roots entwined like lovers, sharing nutrients.
One scorching dry season, when the village’s maize stalks bowed like mourners, Adebayo’s plot thrived. He had buried clay pots filled with water beside each plant, a trick he’d adapted from an elder’s tale of ancient Saharan gardens. The village buzzed. “The boy is a juju man!” some whispered. Others laughed, “Let him play. Farming is for those who cannot read.”
But Olúwáṣeun saw divinity in his son’s dirt-stained hands. On Adebayo’s fourteenth birthday, he gifted him a rusted machete and a single plea: “Make her speak again.”
Adebayo’s brilliance outgrew Igbó-Ọrẹ. At sixteen, he won a scholarship to the University of Ibadan, where concrete towers replaced baobabs, and professors scoffed at “superstitious” farming lore. Undeterred, he merged ancestral wisdom with science. In lecture halls, he debated the ethics of hybrid seeds; in labs, he crossbred indigenous cowpeas to withstand droughts, humming his mother’s planting songs as he worked.
Yet his fiercest lessons came during holidays. Returning home, he found the village besieged by “miracle” GMO seeds peddled by foreign conglomerates. The yields soared—then collapsed, leaving soils salted with debt. “They call this progress,” spat his father, now gaunt from backbreaking loans.
That night, Adebayo buried his face in the earth and wept. The soil drank his tears and whispered back: “Fight.”
A scholarship to Cornell University flung Adebayo into a world of glass-greenhouse labs and drone-monitored fields. Fellow students marveled at robotic harvesters; Adebayo marveled at their waste. “Your machines are wise,” he told a professor, “but they do not listen.”
His breakthrough came during a midnight experiment in a campus greenhouse. Drawing on childhood memories of clay-pot irrigation, he designed a sub-surface “root veil” from recycled plastics—a mesh that funneled water directly to plant roots, slashing usage by 70%. The invention won him the Borlaug Fellowship… and a $2 million offer from a agro-tech giant.
“Sell out,” urged his advisor. “You’ll die a hero in Nigeria.”
Adebayo refused. The next morning, he boarded a plane to Nairobi, a prototype root veil in his backpack.
Africa became his classroom. In Kenya’s Rift Valley, he taught Maasai women to revive fallow lands with nitrogen-fixing acacias. In drought-ravaged Niger, he partnered with griots to encode farming hacks into folk songs. But his fiercest battle raged in his homeland.
Returning to Igbó-Ọrẹ, Adebayo found it strangled by a foreign-owned plantation. The once-vibrant community farm was now a monoculture of soybeans for export. Children scavenged the edges for scraps.
“You took their future,” Adebayo accused the plantation manager.
“We gave them jobs,” the man shrugged.
That night, Adebayo ignited a quiet revolution. With savings from his fellowship, he bought back ten acres—a scarred patch deemed “barren” by the corporation. Villagers scoffed until he recreated his childhood plot: drought-resistant sorghum intertwined with hibiscus (a natural pest repellent), watered by root veils fed from a reclaimed creek.
Within a year, the plot yielded triple the plantation’s output. The village awoke.
News of the “Igbó-Ọrẹ miracle” spread like harmattan fire. Farmers from across West Africa pilgrimaged to Adebayo’s fields. He trained them in moonlit workshops, eschewing PowerPoint for proverbs: “A single tree cannot battle the storm—but a forest bends the wind.”
His crowning feat was the Ọṣ̀pá Project—a digital platform connecting smallholders to real-time weather data, microloans, and markets. Built with coders in Lagos and tested on his mother’s phone, it cut out exploitative middlemen. When skeptics asked, “Why not sell it?” Adebayo laughed. “Can you sell air?”
In 2019, the UN named him a FAO Goodwill Ambassador. At the ceremony, he wore not a suit but his father’s faded àdìrẹ shirt, stained with the red earth of Igbó-Ọrẹ.
Today, Adebayo’s hair is threaded with gray, but his hands remain forever young—calloused, fertile, eternally cradling seeds. His two daughters, Ìyáwó and Ọmọ́ṣadé, lead youth cooperatives teaching regenerative farming in schools.
Yet his deepest pride blooms each rainy season in Igbó-Ọrẹ. Where the foreign plantation once sprawled, a community forest now thrives: teak trees sheltering mushrooms, beehives humming atop sweet potato mounds, and children selling “Adebayo melons” to passing trucks.
At dusk, the villagers gather beneath the ìrókò tree where Olúwáṣeun is buried. They pour libations and sing old planting songs, now laced with new verses:
“The soil is not silent—
She sings through the hands
Of those who remember
Their mother’s hands.”
Adebayo joins them, his voice blending with the chorus. Some say the earth itself harmonizes.
The End
