The salt lakes that only women may work, and that no machine has beaten

01A green lake that tastes of the sea

In Ohaozara, in Ebonyi State, there's a small lake at a place called Ivuezizor in Okposi Okwu. It isn't big. Daily Trust measured it at about three plots of land, roughly 100 by 70. Up close the water is green and it glitters, and trees and grass crowd in around its edges. Scoop some into your palm and you'll find out why it matters: it's salty. A few kilometres away, in the community of Uburu, there's another one.

People in Okposi tell a story about how the lake was found. Two hunters were out in the forest looking for animals, and they were thirsty. When they saw water they were relieved. They cupped it in their hands, and it was too salty to drink. The legend says the gods then told them that to keep the lake, they had to give up the thing they loved most in the world. For one of the hunters, that was his only child, a daughter, and she was sacrificed. A prince of the village, Benson Agwu, put the ending simply: "That is why the salt is not seasonal."

Not everyone tells it the same way. Professor Ikechukwu Ugwuenyi, an Okposi man who teaches at Ebonyi State University, said the two hunters came from the two villages that make up Okposi, Okposi Achara and Okposi Okwu. The first hunter refused what the oracle asked. The second accepted, and asked for a share in the lake, as hunters do. That, he said, is why the chief priest of the lake still comes from his family. He agreed a sacrifice was made, but wouldn't go into the details. "It is not a good thing to say," he told the paper.

Prince Agwu also pointed out something people there find strange. However hard the rain falls, he said, the lake never floods or spills over its banks. Where a little of its water runs off into a lake next to it, that water isn't salty at all.

02Women's work, with women's rules

Making salt here belongs to women. An 82-year-old woman, Mrs Evenly Aja, explained the rules she grew up with. Men can't fetch the salt water. They aren't even allowed to help a woman lift the pot full of it. Nobody uses gallons or plastic containers to draw it. Visitors, women included, can't walk into the lake or near it wearing shoes. A woman on her period has to stay away from the lake and everything around it. "We inherited these norms and tradition from our forefathers," she said. Break them, people say, and the goddess of the lake deals with you, with madness or even death.

There are fish in the Okposi lake, and residents say stockfish and crocodiles too, but no one may kill or eat them.

The work itself is slow. Mrs Mary Nwite, a widow and a mother of six, said you boil the brine for about 12 hours to get a good amount of salt, feeding the fire the whole time. Her biggest problem isn't the lake. It's finding enough firewood. She sells her salt at N300, N400, N500 and up, and with that money she put three of her children through higher institutions. "This is my only business," she said. "It is from this salt business that I have been feeding myself and my six children after the death of my husband."

Uburu does things a little differently. Its lake dries up in the dry season, unlike Okposi's. The women there filter the brine first. Victoria Akpa, another widow who lives off the trade, described it: you set a calabash at the lake with holes in the bottom, plugged with broom bristles, and the salt water drips through into the pot you'll boil. At Uburu the fish can be eaten. Before a woman comes to fetch brine, her hair has to be cut. Men aren't allowed there at all. And there's a mermaid, she said, the goddess of the lake, who walks around it at night holding a lamp. You can't catch her on camera. Mrs Akpa also had a view on the rivalry between the two places. "Our salt tastes better than that of Okposi," she said.

03The machines that broke

People have tried to turn these lakes into an industry. Samuel Onyenaturuchi, secretary of the Okposi youth union in the village, listed the attempts. One came during the time of former governor Martin Elechi, through his wife, Josephine. Another came from a team of American miners, who put a machine in the lake and ran a pipe out to the bank. "Both the machine and the pipe got damaged," he said. Professor Ugwuenyi added German miners to the list, and said the Americans also drilled a borehole to pump the brine out, and that failed too.

To Mr Onyenaturuchi the reason was plain. "The goddess of our salt lake doesn't need technology," he said. If machines took over, the rules and beliefs around the lake would be wiped out, and the gods wouldn't allow it.

Not everyone buys that. Samuel Udeogu, another Okposi man, said flatly: "I don't believe in the mysticism surrounding the lake." To him it's about whether a government has the will. He thinks the lake could give more than 2,000 people in Okposi jobs if salt were made in bulk, and he says its salt is better than any other.

He also remembered what the lake meant in harder times. During the civil war, he said, it was the area's main source of income. Because of it, Okposi never suffered kwashiorkor, and Biafran soldiers had salt in their food. "Many people from Igbo land get salt to cook from this lake," he said.

So the lakes sit where they are, small and green, with women bent over pots and fires the way they always have. Whether you believe it's the goddess, the custom, or just bad engineering that keeps the machines out, the result is the same. The salt still comes out one boiled pot at a time.