The Pere of Kabowei kingdom, HRM (Barrister) Shadrach Erebulu, Aduo lll, was presented with his staff of office on October 23, 2017, and has been doing his utmost to revive the culture of the land.
Before his ascension to the throne, the Delta State University (DELSU) graduate was a lawyer practising law in a Warri-based law firm.
The monarch, whose kingdom falls between Delta and Bayelsa states, said he enforced the compulsory speaking of the local dialect (Ijaw) for indigenes and banned women from wearing trousers within the palace grounds to revive the culture of the land.
In an interview with Gbaramatu Voice News in his palace in Patani, Delta state, he spoke about his drive to preserve the cultural heritage of his people.
Reacting to a question his achievement since coming to office, he said, “Before my emergence, I understood the fact that our cultures and traditions are fast fading away. Even our youths find it hard to understand and speak our language. Due to modernisation, everybody now feels that going back to traditional language makes one a lesser person. That was eating fast into our way of life, so my major drive was that as a young traditional ruler, I should be able to reverse these things.
I think my function is not political. It is to keep and preserve the traditions of our people. I had to bring some strict rules. Before now, people came into the palace and they wanted to speak English language while addressing the king. I made it a point for anybody coming into the palace, except you are not from Kabowei kingdom, not to speak the English language, but our language. If you are not fluent in it, mix it, but endeavour to see that you can speak it.
I made it a taboo for any woman to walk into the palace wearing trousers. We see how girls wear all manner of things and walk down the street; that is not our way of life. So even within the town, I had to call the chairmen of the communities to educate their young people to see that they try as much as possible to go back to our tradition. I also set up a committee to see how we can come up with our own cultural heritage, that is how the Kabowei man used to be.
Because Kabowei or the Kabo man as he is popularly called, is a unique Ijaw person. We are unique in all we do because our own tongue is different from every other Ijaw man.
If a Kabowei man speaks here, it is different from the way someone from Bomadi or Sagbama would speak. So if we can go back to the way we speak our language, it will help our culture, it will help our uniqueness, because once you lose your culture, you have lost your identity. I try to see how we can bring that back…”