TThe rumour sweeping Kantin Kwari was that Mai Tatsine and his followers had ambushed a police van, beaten the officers to death, and set their bodies ablaze. Now, they were supposedly targeting anyone in uniform. Garba had been glued to his radio all day, but he’d heard nothing of the sort—only static and the usual broadcasts.

Around midday, a dark plume of smoke bloomed somewhere far in the distance, and a siren rang continuously like an ice cream jingle. There was tension in the air now, wafting down like soot. Garba watched as stalls closed and shops shuttered down. He switched channels on the radio; no one was saying anything new. All day there’d been a kind of muted terror on the streets and avenues of Kantin Kwari, and the shops closing off seemed like a confirmation, a death knell. The market was closing down, as was usual during periods of unrest. People trotted past briskly, some almost breaking into a run. A woman screamed at the dan-dako hauling her load. A man struggled to extricate his wheelbarrow from mud. 

The two brothers who owned the shop next to Garba slammed shut their door. Both had round, jiggling bellies. Both grunted as they knelt to lock the door frames. 

“They’ll call in the military,” said one, with a short laugh. “I tell you the police can’t handle this.”

The other brother straightened, and he turned, as if addressing Garba. “The world is coming to an end,” he said with a solemn nod. He descended down the short steps and, looking up at Garba, without a hint of mirth, indeed with genuine concern, said, “It’s the end of the world.” 

Garba watched them dawdle into the crowd. The acrid smell of something burning filled the air. And as he locked his door, he saw there were now three plumes of smoke in the distance. 

---

The road to Dan Maliki teemed with vehicles, most of them empty but armed with branches whose leaves fluttered out of doors and atop lamps, bobbing over exhausts like flags of parley. A convoy of buses were packed under the large poster of a bespectacled Shehu Shagari smiling down benignly, these too sporting branches and leaves. Garba wondered if the greenery somehow bestowed immunity upon the vehicles and their occupants. Were passersby also going to hold branches above their heads or perhaps tuck them into the sides of their caps? Even the traffic warden’s shed at the roundabout sported two thick branches on either side, thick leaves swaying in the hot breeze. The warden was not there. Perhaps there was some truth in the rumours, and every uniformed officer was in trouble. 

The mood on Garba’s street was the same. Neighbours emerged from their homes, crowding in small groups and muttering amongst themselves with the expression of people who knew something was afoot but couldn’t find evidence of it. Some of the men who would normally be away at work, like himself, were at home. They were all repeating the story about the policemen; a few were off pointing at the columns of smoke. 

Garba thought the blind panic was ridiculous, and it all annoyed him. It wasn’t just because he’d had to walk all the way home. If something was really afoot, surely there’d be something regarding it on the radio. And how incompetent could the police be that they’d be overpowered by Mai Tatsine and his followers? Garba had heard of the preacher, his fiery sermons, and his cursing. His followers had had brushes with the law over the years, but attacking a van full of policemen seemed a far stretch. After all, the police had guns and Mai Tatsine’s followers did not. 

Garba salaamed to Mallam Abdu, who sat behind his counter, counting notes from his money bag with such concentration that he could only give Garba a bob of his head. Even now a customer entered the shop, walked over to the shelves, and took a bar of soap. ‘Level-headed people,’ thought Garba. 

Mariya was pacing the yard when he arrived. “What’s happening?” she asked on sight.

Garba waved his hand in annoyance. “Rumours. Upsetting the whole town. Just rumours.” He shrugged off his soaked kaftan and opened the door. Mariya remained outside, face tinged with worry, eyes peering at the distance. Garba stared forward. “The smoke could be from anything. Don’t worry yourself over rumours.”

“Umar has gone out to play,” she said. 

“He should be with one of those friends of his. He’ll be home soon enough.”

“But it has been some hours and —”

“Leave me be, woman! The boy will find his way home.”

 Garba ducked inside to the slightly cooler air of the house. There was a bucket of water in the bathroom. The heat was oppressive, and his singlet was soaked through with sweat. He took off his battered wristwatch. It was only a few minutes past four.  

---

Garba was pulled into wakefulness by a hand tugging his knee. He groggily sat up on the sofa. It was almost nightfall, and somewhere a radio blared static. He’d been having a bizarre dream, the details of which were fading even as he tried to remember them. He remembered he’d been at his shop. There’d been a woman and a bale of clothes, and when it was time to pay, she’d simply transformed into a large bird and took off with the goods under her claws. 

“Baba Umar,” said Mariya.

Garba turned. “What happened?” he mumbled. 

“I can’t find Umar.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and when they did, a chill ran through Garba’s bones. He jumped to his feet, snatching the shirt lying on the back of the sofa. The boy would most likely be at the home of one of his friends, he thought. But why did he feel dread? 

“Have you been to Danladi?” he asked.

“Yes. They haven’t seen him all day.” 

“Maybe he’s with that classmate of his. The one he’s always together with. What’s his name—”

“I’ve gone there. Inusa hasn’t seen Umar since they returned from school.”

It seemed that, for every moment he stood there, in the darkening light of the living room, the feeling of terror spread. Garba could no longer see Mariya’s face, only the whites of her eyes. He charged outside, feeling terribly guilty that he’d dismissed her concerns earlier. Somewhere, the first Maghrib adhan was ringing across rooftops. He burst out into the street, looking left and right, feeling so utterly lost. Where would he begin his search from? He heard Mariya behind him and told her to stay back in case the boy returned. 

Garba went around to the houses of the boys Umar played with. The Danladis’ boy said they’d returned from school together. The butcher’s boy was down with malaria and hadn’t been out in days. With each home Garba headed to, each door he knocked on, his fears were being confirmed. At the Danejos’, their son claimed to have parted ways with Umar shortly after noon, and at Mama Bode’s house, the woman poked her head out to tell him, in heavily accented Hausa, that her son, Bode, knew nothing about Umar’s whereabouts. She wouldn’t let Garba speak with Bode. 

Garba walked all the way to the bus stop, where he crossed the main road, keeping to the side lit irregularly by the sickly glow of street lights as darkness twisted down. He realised only a few minutes later that he was sweeping the streets for Umar, hoping to find him seated at some corner, waiting for his Baba to come get him. The heat streamed over his face as he crossed into the old district, which the rest of the town had expanded out of, and the outskirts of which one could still find chunks of Kano’s old walls. There were people out and about: children playing Langa in the sand, young men loitering around fruit stalls, and old men sitting on mats outside a mosque. Garba scrutinised the face of every child he saw, turning at every cry and shriek. He went around the suburbs, looping back on a dozen streets. It seemed like hours had passed when he suddenly found himself in an alley. There was the rumble of a huge vehicle ahead, and when he exited the alley, he found soldiers sharing cigarettes behind a van. One of them jabbed a finger in his direction and swung his rifle around. “Kai! Stop there. So you don’t know there’s a curfew?” 

Garba ducked back into the alley, running, the patter of his feet echoing. He retraced his steps, sprinting all the way back. Now, he found no one in the streets. To his relief, the soldiers weren’t in pursuit, but he didn’t stop running until he got to Dan Maliki. On arrival, Mariya rushed up to meet him. 

“Where is my son?” she wailed. She stamped her feet, let her scarf loose, and sat flat on the ground. She raised her hands wide, as if in invocation. “Wayyo Allah. Where is my son?”

Mariya’s agony was being surveilled by faces behind windows and by the eyes of the beggars with their bowls. Garba wanted to yell at them to go away. Somewhere in the distance, a siren blared. Garba grabbed Mariya by the armpit and brought her to her feet. 

---

For the next two days, Garba and Mariya took turns circling the neighbourhood and beyond, knocking on doors within the 7 am to 8 pm curfew. The police stations in Dan Maliki had been barricaded shut, and policemen were nowhere to be seen. Soldiers patrolled the streets in vans and tanks. The mood was that of a brood of chicks frozen under the shadow of a hawk, unsure whether the great terror was passing by or alighting. 

On Thursday, Garba took pictures of Umar to Kanawa Radio, where he was shocked to find that an entire ten-minute segment had been dedicated to children who had gone missing since the start of the crisis. He then made a stop at the printers and, armed with dozens of posters and a bowl of koko, went round the neighbourhood pasting them on walls. ‘Have you seen me?’ they read. There was a picture of Umar from his last birthday, and underneath was a number to the landline, which Garba had reconnected earlier. 

When he got home, he found Mariya barricaded in the bedroom. She’d refused to rise or eat all day. He felt awful for shouting at her the other evening, and even more awful that he’d dismissed her concerns. Now, he wanted nothing more than for her to scream at him, to beat his chest, to blame him for their son being missing. Mariya did none of that. She wouldn’t even look at him. Garba turned on the radio in the bedroom corner and tuned in to the channel. He waited for the segment to roll past, and when it did, he found himself nodding — they’d got the descriptions right. His mind drifted to the telephone sitting on the table in the living room. His ears strained for the shrill ring, his whole body hoped for good news. He sat beside Mariya on the bed and patted her feet. “We’ll find him,” he said. “I promise.”

---

On Friday, they received the ransom note. 

It’d been slipped in through the louvres, and it sat on the window’s metal frame: a square of paper folded into a white envelope, the very thin edge poking into the living room. Garba had been on his way back from the mosque, where the imam, after the morning prayers, had led the congregation in a prayer for Umar. Then he’d shuffled home, his head buzzing from lack of sleep, and when he saw the paper, his first thought had been to ask Mariya if the previous month’s NEPA bill hadn’t been delivered already. The dawn light was bright enough to read with, but Garba couldn’t digest the note until he’d shone a torchlight on the printed words.  

‘We have Umar. Tomorrow, come to the river at Dotsa with ₦9000. No games.’

Garba sat flat on the floor, half relieved and half stunned. How did Umar get kidnapped? And how would he gather that amount of money within a day? The only way was to sell everything they owned. He thought about the rows of atampa, lace, and brocade in his shop. There was no question as to what needed to be done. Mariya, wet from her ablutions, found him there. He handed her the note. She went to the bedroom and came out moments later with three jewellery boxes containing all the jewellery she owned, some of them her wedding gifts. She snapped them open with trembling hands, the velvet inner linings spilling necklaces, rings, bangles, and a handful of precious stones, falling out and bouncing on the floor in a coruscating kaleidoscope of colours. Dawn had suffused the air with a soft orange light, and the living room lit up—the lacquered centre table, the radio, the sturdy television, the pressing iron, and even the red carpet worn through to a brown gauze.

---

“They burned someone here yesterday,” said the man seated next to him.

Garba stared at the mound of ash as it loomed closer. It looked like any other spread of ash you could find beneath a Mai Shayi’s cauldron or in the kitchen or cooking space of a random home. Around the ash was a dark, vague outline. It couldn’t possibly be a human being, Garba thought. He peered closer and gleaned what seemed to be a tooth, glistening sharp like a shard of ceramic. Bile rose up his throat. He blinked rapidly and averted his eyes. The idea of a human being reduced to a mound of ash seemed too unsettling to contemplate, so he cast his thoughts on the journey ahead.

The bus conductor was quiet, his demeanour at odds with his appearance. He rubbed his pigtails as if trying to flatten them and pursed his cigarette-charred lips as he collected the fares. There were no arguments regarding change; no wanton displays of thuggery. They drove on morosely, sometimes the only vehicle on what was usually a very busy road. They went past the police headquarters, where the windows were covered with newspapers and the front doors were barricaded with sandbags. At a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts, three sweating soldiers held up gloved palms, and the bus slowed as the driver navigated the barrels placed on the road. The soldiers began a search of the bus. A few meters off the side of the road, their van, complete with a gun turret, wavered in the heat. They peered into the bus, barking questions about their destination, about where they were coming from. One of them, stone-faced, demanded they all come down to be searched properly. The driver exchanged a few words with him, including a quick handshake, and was waved on. 

A battered sign flashed past, saying Dotsa was five kilometres away. The road wound around tilled farmlands. The first rain had fallen only a few days ago, and the farmers must have planted their seeds already. A herdsman flashed past with a herd of cattle. Settlements were scattered about, some of them no larger than a collection of thatched huts. A range of hills stood in the distance.

The driver switched on the radio and flitted through channels. A grave show host announced that the authorities were searching for Mai Tatsine. Anyone with information as to his whereabouts was implored to forward it. And was the federal government going to declare a state of emergency in Kano now that soldiers were already all over the streets?

All at once, the bus was drowned in noise. Passengers speculated and recycled rumours. One woman at the back said her mother-in-law’s cousin, a policeman, no longer wore his uniform outside. A man at the front said he was returning to his village with his family. Another wondered if anyone could be safe when the police themselves were targets. All Garba could think of was getting Umar back. Besides, there was nowhere he could run to. He’d lived all his life in the city. 

A few moments later, the river flashed, glistening blue and brown, and Garba alighted. As the bus zoomed off, he felt for the comfortable weight of the thick envelope in his pocket. He fished out the paper, just to be sure, squinting his eyes at the spelling of Dotsa. Down the dirt path near the river, the heat was prodigious, but cool air blew in from the river. Canoes lay by the bank, half in the water. Some were upturned by the side, apparently discarded. 

A metal shack shimmered and glinted down at the end of the path, and halfway down, he heard a succession of whistles, which he determined had come out of the shack, and he went on, the path twisting around trees and shrubs, dry grass crumbling under his feet, with the riverbank always in sight. The shack was all rusty zinc supported with slabs of wood. Garba looked around, wondering if he was being watched. There was no one in sight, and he didn’t hear any sounds apart from leaves rustling slightly from the breeze and a frog croaking nearby. He knocked at the door, shouting a salam. The heat wafting off the corrugated metal was enough to sting his knuckles. He hoped the kidnappers had Umar inside. A quick exchange and he’ll be gone with his son; the entire nightmare over. Garba said a short prayer.

He bunched his sleeves around his palms and pushed the door. It wouldn’t open all the way, and it was utterly dark inside. The shaft of sunlight he’d let in only illumined two or three strides, and all he saw were rotten planks on the ground. 

A voice bid him to close the door. 

The air was stifling, and the heat tyrannical. The smell was of damp earth, but so close-up that it nauseated him. Garba cast his eyes around, and though they soon adjusted to the darkness, all he could see were vague shapes: tables, perhaps, or bricks stacked upon each other. The only light was the pinpricks stabbing in from the sides of the door. 

“I have the money here,” Garba croaked. “Where is my son?”

“You came alone?”

“Yes. I’ve done all you asked.”

“And the money?”

“No,” said Garba. He tried to put as much conviction as he could into his voice. “My son, first.” 

The man chuckled. Garba advanced into the darkness. His sandal caught on something, and he stumbled and fell to his knees. He’d hit his shin on something, and he remained there, willing the pain to go away. Sweat trailed rapidly into his eyes. They stung as he blinked. 

“How do we know the money is not marked? How do we know the police didn’t come behind you?”

“Wallahi, I didn’t go to the police.”

The man chuckled again. His voice was measured, almost soft. He spoke with careful enunciation. “We have followed all your movements. We watched you at the bus stop. We’ve been watching you from the beginning. If you had contacted the police, you would not have met us here.”

Garba closed his eyes and sagged on his haunches. He became aware that the man was pacing. He could hear him breathing somewhere to his left. 

“I just want my son,” said Garba. “His mother is sick with worry.”

“Hmm. Mothers worry about their children. Your boy, Umar, is being taken care of. We had faith in you that you’d deliver. We don’t usually do that. Trust is hard to come by these days. Sometimes we show our seriousness by sending the family an ear or a finger.”

Garba gasped.

“Some are still foolish enough to involve the police. We find that very annoying. A breach of trust. At that point, we take more than ears and fingers. When someone comes to you with a clean conscience, it is only proper to engage with an equally clean conscience, eh?”

“But I’m telling you I haven’t gone to the police,” said Garba, feeling a wave of nausea.

“Throw the money over here.”

 Garba had started to entertain the sickening feeling that the kidnapper—or whoever this man was—did not, in fact, have his son. He considered mustering some defiance, but perhaps they did have Umar after all. Perhaps he was being held outside and would be released at some signal. Garba threw the envelope into the dark. There was the sound of the envelope unfolding, crisp notes crinkling and sliding over each other. 

“Good,” said the man. He paced for a bit. “Now, listen. Let’s consider a boy who is missing. A boy who wandered a little too far from home. He’s playing with his friends, and they lose track of him, perhaps. The boy is a bit challenged, not very vocal. He is unable to communicate the fact that he is lost. He wanders the streets. Night falls and maybe someone notices a boy standing awkwardly by the roadside. He looks clean and well-fed, so he’s definitely not an almajiri. This person tries to get the boy to say where he’s from, but he’s unsuccessful. This person takes the boy in out of the kindness of their heart. There are very few such people these days, you know. The next day they hand over the boy to Mai Unguwa, who, in theory, knows everyone residing in his district. But the district is no longer a collection of huts, you understand?”

Garba swallowed. “Are you saying that—”

“And of course, it’s quite unfortunate that they can’t immediately report him missing because the police are, one might say, occupied. So, the boy is taken to an orphanage. A home for children abandoned, children lost, children forgotten, children far from home.”

Garba’s head throbbed. A rush of white-hot rage rushed through him as the man spoke. He had the impulse to seize the man, choke him, and force out the whereabouts of Umar from him. He didn’t remember lurching forward; he caught a grip of the man’s collar, but the man danced out of his reach. Garba spun. There was a whoosh as something sliced the air, and he was on his back, temple pounding, a noise in his ear like a church bell tolling. 

He must have been out for less than a second because he willed himself to his feet just as a dash of blue flitted out into the sun. Garba hurried towards the door, squinting at the light. He scrambled out and tottered about like a drunk trying desperately to find his balance. A bird sang somewhere in the trees. Garba ran down the path, parting the tall grass and slapping off insects that flew into his face. He stopped at the river; he could see the path stretching all the way to the highway, and it was empty. He drank in the cool breeze that wafted in from the river, a drastic change from the thick heat of the shack. A trio of giggling boys pushed a canoe into the water and jumped in as it cleared the bank. One of them stood, shielding his eyes and gazing into the distance as his companions worked the oars; he turned around as though he could feel Garba’s eyes on him. He was lean, somewhere in that stage between childhood and adolescence. The tails of his blue shirt danced as the canoe ferried them into the distance.

---

Ridwan Badamasi writes from the ancient city of Kano in northern Nigeria. His works have appeared in Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, 20.35 Africa, Efiko Magazine, and elsewhere. He’s the co-winner of the 2024 Nigeria NewsDirect Chapbook Series and the winner of the 2025 Awele Creative Trust Short Story Prize.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

There is an ugba tree at the edge of my grandmother’s compound in Oguta, Imo State, that has never been cut. My grandmother, Mama Chidinma, said it was older than the war. She said it stood through everything: through the sound of federal jets overhead, through the weeks when there was no salt, and through the morning they buried her brother under moonlight because the daytime was too dangerous for the living. She said the tree had seen things she could not speak of. And so, as a child, I would press my palm against its bark and try to listen.

I am the grandchild of Biafra. I did not live through the war; I was born decades after January 1970, when Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu fled the country and the Republic of Biafra formally surrendered. But the war did not end for our family when the guns went silent. It ended, if ever, in fragments. 

What My Grandmother Carried

Mama Chidinma was seventeen when the war began. She had been living in Enugu, where her father, my great-grandfather, Ichie Nwofor, worked as a primary school headmaster. In May 1967, when Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra, there was, she told me, a kind of wild joy in the streets; the relief of a people who had finally named their wounds. 

The federal military government’s response to the secession was swift: General Yakubu Gowon ordered what he called a ‘police action’—a phrase that, my grandmother said, was the first lie of the war. By July 1967, federal troops invaded the Biafran territory in what became a full-scale military campaign. Within months, the federal government imposed a naval and land blockade that cut off Biafra from food imports. This was not incidental; the blockade was a deliberate strategy—starvation as a weapon of war.

My grandmother’s family fled Enugu when the city fell in October 1967. They walked. She was responsible for her younger sister, Ada, who was eleven, and her baby brother, Obiora, whom she carried on her back. Ichie Nwofor led them south, towards Oguta, following other families along roads thick with people who had lost the same things. She told me they ate ugwu leaves. She told me Ada’s legs swelled. She told me that when Obiora was very still on her back, she would hum, and when he moved his fingers against her neck, she knew to keep going.

Obiora did not survive the war. He died in 1969 of kwashiorkor, the protein-deficiency disease that became the face of the Biafran famine. His face is in one of the photographs. Eyes too large, belly swollen, the skin of a child who has eaten nothing for too long. My grandmother kept no photograph of him. She kept only his name, which she said aloud every year on the anniversary of his death, alone in her room, when she thought no one could hear.

I want to be precise here, because precision is a form of love: Obiora Nwofor died on a Wednesday. He was two years old. He weighed, my grandmother estimated, as much as a handful of cassava. She buried him with her father’s help in the compound of a stranger who had taken them in. She did not cry at the burial. She had not learned yet what she had lost. That understanding would come later, in waves, for the rest of her life.

Twenty Pounds

My grandfather, Papa Emeka, was twenty-three when the war ended. He had fought with the Biafran army, although he never fully disclosed in what capacity. He spoke instead about the engineers, the improvised armouries, the students who became soldiers in a single afternoon. 

When Biafra fell in January 1970, the federal government announced a policy of reconciliation, reconstruction, and reintegration; the ‘3Rs’, as it became known. General Gowon declared that there was ‘No Victor, No Vanquished.’ My grandfather said this was the second lie of the war. 

The evidence was the money. Every Igbo person who had held Biafran pounds was permitted to exchange them for Nigerian currency, but regardless of how much Biafran currency they held, the government set the exchange rate at a flat 20 Nigerian pounds per person. A trader who had saved 3,000 Biafran pounds received 20 pounds. A farmer who had buried his life’s earnings in a clay pot received twenty pounds. A schoolteacher, a market woman, a carpenter—twenty pounds each.

My grandfather received twenty pounds. He had been, before the war, a tradesman who dealt in dry goods between Onitsha and Port Harcourt. He had savings. He had a bicycle. He had plans. After the exchange, he had twenty pounds, no bicycle—it had been commandeered during the war—and a scar on his left arm from a piece of shrapnel he had dug out himself with a kitchen knife because there was no doctor available. 

This dispossession was not individual. It was collective and it was thorough. The economic devastation of Igboland after 1970 set the community back by at least a generation. Properties that Igbo people had owned in the North and in Lagos had been seized; federal appointments rarely reached them; oil revenues flowed through Port Harcourt to Abuja and back, largely without benefit to the Igbo communities from whose land the oil came. 

My grandfather rebuilt anyway. This is what I mean when I say I am the grandchild of Biafra; not just of the war, but also of the rebuilding. He began again with twenty shillings and what he knew. He bought kerosene in small quantities and resold it at a margin. He saved. He bought a parcel of land. He built a single room, then added a second. He married my grandmother, who was, he told me, ‘the bravest person I had ever met, and I had met soldiers’, and they had seven children, and they sent every one of them to university.

The Language of What Is Not Said

Growing up in my grandparents’ compound, I learned a third language alongside Igbo and English: the language of the unsaid. It was spoken when my grandmother left the room when the television news turned to military matters, or when no one in the family said the word ‘Biafra’ at the dinner table: the word still had weight, and still carried the full mass of everything it meant.

I was twelve when I first heard the full story. My grandmother was sick. Not gravely, but enough to be confined to bed, which meant she had time, and I had proximity. I sat at the foot of her bed for three afternoons in a row. She told me about Enugu. About walking. About Obiora. About the tree in the compound, which she had planted herself from a seedling her father had given her before the bombing began, the last ordinary thing she remembered receiving as a child.

She told me that for years after the war, she could not see a thin child without her heart seizing. She told me she had nightmares in which she was still on the road, still carrying Obiora, and she would wake and reach across to her husband’s side of the bed to assure herself that the walking was over. She told me that she had prayed, truly prayed, only twice in her life: once when Ada’s leg swelling finally went down and once when her first child was born whole and fat and screaming, and she said the screaming was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard, because it meant the child had enough air in its lungs, enough flesh on its bones.

What the Tree Knows

The ugba tree in my grandmother’s compound is still standing. I know this because I was there last harmattan season, and I pressed my palm against it the way I did as a child. It is broader now. Its roots have pushed up through the earth around its base in great knuckled ridges so that, walking near it, you have to watch your step. My grandmother is eighty-one. She moves slowly, but she moves, and on the morning I arrived, she was already in the compound when I woke, sitting in her low chair in the shade of that tree, shelling melon seeds.

We did not talk about the war that morning. We shelled melon seeds together, and she told me about the neighbour’s goat, which had gotten into her garden again, and about the price of palm oil in the market, which she found outrageous. She laughed at something I said, and the laugh was so complete, so effortless, that for a moment I could only look at her.

This woman walked from Enugu. This woman buried Obiora under moonlight. This woman received 20 pounds for her husband’s savings, planted an ugba tree, raised seven children and sat here in the shade of the tree she planted and laughed at her grandchild.

I do not know how to explain what it means to be descended from people like this. There is no adequate word for it in English, and even in Igbo, the vocabulary of survival can sound like an abstraction until it sits across from you in a low chair, shelling melon seeds. The history books will tell you about the Nigeria-Biafra War in geopolitical terms—the Cold War interests of Britain and the Soviet Union, the oil, and the ethnic arithmetic of a postcolonial state that was never designed to be governed peaceably. All of that is true, and all of it matters. But what the history books will not tell you is the precise feeling of Obiora’s fingers against your neck on a road south of Enugu and what it means to carry that feeling for sixty years and still get up in the morning and shell melon seeds and laugh. 

The Ugba Tree Will Remain

My grandmother is eighty-one. She has not, in six decades, received an acknowledgement from Nigeria for what her family lost in the war. Not a formal apology. Not a recognition. Not even a museum exhibit in Oguta that says, ‘Here, in this community, people suffered this, and we remember them.’ She has not asked for these things either. She is, as I said, a woman of great practicality. But I am her grandchild, and I am asking. Not for her sake alone, but for Obiora’s. For all the Obioras who did not live to ask for themselves.

When my grandmother is gone—and I pray God gives her many more harmattan seasons—the ugba tree will remain. It will go on growing in the compound as it has for more than sixty years, its roots deeper in the earth than anyone can see and its shadow wide enough that three people can sit beneath it comfortably. My children, if I have them, will sit under it. I will tell them, ‘Your great-grandmother planted this tree.’ She carried her brother on her back, and he died, and she planted this tree, and it is still here.

---

Bill Nwonwu is a passionate young writer, student, and creative thinker from Nigeria. Bill has worked on essays exploring social issues, African democracy, Christian theology, poverty, and early Christian history.

Cover credit: Ifeoluwasé Taiwo

What once felt inseparable from my memory has, in the years since, begun to fade. The more I look inward to remember the details—the scene, atmosphere—the clearer it becomes that time has a way of blurring even the events and things we thought we would never forget. The events of the 2020 End SARS protests shouldn’t be one that I would find difficult to remember, especially its rough edges, but what is life if not the slow fading of memory?

Before my encounter with the protest that would soon have a significance on the lives of Nigerian youths, I had often heard of stories of protests, the civil war, and of ethnic rivalries that spiralled into chaos. These stories came either from elders or were encountered in historical accounts. However, this event would take what once existed as fiction to me and turn it into reality.

I was a student living in Ibadan when the End SARS protests occurred. I was into graphics design, learning the intricacies of, and techniques employed in making compelling visuals. On a not-so-vivid date, afternoon precisely, a few days into the protests, my colleagues and I in the graphics shop heard of the killing of a primary school boy by a police officer at Ojoo. The boy, returning from school after closing, was hit by a stray bullet during a confrontation between the police and protesters. He died instantly. Within a moment of hearing this news, everything stood still. Seconds stretched into minutes; grief and fear held me. Grief for a boy I never knew, and fear for my family members who had businesses in this area.

Instinctively, I borrowed a phone from a colleague to make a call to my mother, who had her shop close to the police station on the street where the boy was killed. For some minutes, she didn’t pick up, and this complicated the troubled emotions inside me. I kept having the wildest imaginations, and a lot of questions kept popping up in my head: Where could she be? Hope she hadn’t fallen victim to the chaos following the boy’s death? Where could she have left her phone? I kept having these thoughts. After about three attempts at calling her, she picked up. Relief washed over me. The several questions disappeared, and all I could ask was why she didn’t pick up early.

She said she wasn’t in the shop when the trouble started. She had been on her way there before she heard gunshots and ‘had to run for her dear life.’ She assured me she was safe. I didn’t inquire further; knowing she was safe returned my peace of mind. I dropped the call and returned the phone. Everyone in the shop was a bit apprehensive. One of my colleagues expressed pity for the boy’s parents, while another prayed that the incident would not escalate. We were wary of what the situation could cause. Already, the nation’s stability was fragile, even with the protests that had so far been considered peaceful. But now everything could, it seemed, go the other way from this incident.

Shortly after, our boss parked in front of the shop. She entered and asked if we had heard the latest news. We answered in affirmation. She was distraught, feeling sympathy for the bereaved family. We resolved into discussion for the rest of the day as customers had reduced in their numbers. Those who had promised to come back for their designs couldn’t do so again. And those who were in the shop before the news hurried home for safety.

Before the unfortunate incident, we had planned to design some t-shirts to show our solidarity for the #EndSARS movement. The inscriptions would read ‘Soro Soke,’ which meant ‘Speak up.’ My creative vision for the design was a microphone with the words booming out of it. A colleague wanted to use the iconic photograph of activist Aishat Yesufu from the protest. Many of us explored different ways to bring these two ideas to life. When we finished, I copied them onto a flash drive to take to Mokola, where the final printing was to take place.

On my way there, I noticed some shops and stall owners closing up. There were only a few people on the road I was walking on. Transport fare had skyrocketed. Yet, this did not dissuade people from boarding cars to take them home. The atmosphere was tense. Some people were still in their shops selling goods, and others went about their normal trade; after all, the chaos was slightly far off from where they were. In this moment, I became conscious of the varying degrees of decisions or options available to humans. While some people were running for their lives, others chose to sit still and go about their normal business like nothing had happened or was happening.

Then it dawned on me that I myself hadn’t thought of how I would get home safely after my Mokola trip. I realised I wasn’t exempt from the situation unfolding in front of my eyes. Maybe I had not considered it because I knew I would have to pass through Ojoo to my destination, and I could have waited till nighttime, when the chaos would have subsided, to catch a bus home. Or maybe it was because there was another road, along Ajibode, that I could have taken to avoid encountering any problems. All these options were available to me, and they explain why I remained calm even though the atmosphere around me suggested I be otherwise.

I got into a cab going to Mokola. There was silence until someone broke it with commentary on the present situation in the country. Other passengers followed suit with their takes, and the conversation broadened. I listened attentively to their opinions, and all were critical of the excesses of the SARS—Special Anti-Robbery Squad—in the country. On a number of occasions, I myself had been waylaid by some SARS officials and, on no grounds of a criminal offence, been told I had to follow them to their station. My ‘offence’ was ‘looking like a yahoo boy’—an internet fraudster—because of the way I was supposedly dressed. There were a number of other horrendous things youths were subjected to, making my co-passengers’ opinions valid. Even if you were trying to do your job and curb the ills of society, it must be done in a sane and orderly manner, someone said, and he couldn’t have been more right.

These early moments are those I can still recall faintly. Dropped the design at the printer, but what the atmosphere felt like, I can not remember anymore. Was it peaceful? Did the situation happening in Ojoo have an effect on people here in Mokola? These memories, I dare say, have escaped my mind. What is more baffling for me is how I have lost track of the sequence of events. There was a protest at the Bodija Market Junction. When this happened, I can not precisely say. Was it the day I came back from Mokola, or was it the following days of the protest? These are memories I would have loved to restore for posterity. Whether the Bodija protesters were made up of youths only, with no older people in attendance, is hard to say. What I can remember, however in fragments, was people moving along the road, some on foot, others in cars, a few perched on car boots holding placards. Most of what was written on them has faded from memory, but phrases like “Enough is Enough,” “Soro Soke,” and “End SARS Brutality” have remained with me. I remember, too, walking behind a group of protesters. On the part of the road they did not occupy, there were burnt tyres, thick smoke rising into the air. Whether the protest was on the verge of being hijacked, I can not clearly say. But I can still hear a voice insisting that it should remain peaceful, pushing back against fears of disruption.

My trip home after returning from Mokola is now hazy in my memory. Whether I later passed through Ojoo or followed another route has become difficult to determine. What I remember was the debate by passengers in the car I boarded on which road to take between the available two. Did I see the burnt police station, the scattered marketplace, and the goods pillaged? The mood in this vicinity—whether weary, tense, or gloomy—I can not recollect. Or maybe we later passed the second road, which might be the reason the images remain difficult to conjure in my mind.

While these are the fragments I can recall of the End SARS protest, what makes the blurring so personal for me is this: I no longer clearly remember the burning of the police station by protesters or when the clashes that led to the burning occurred. What bridges this now is a gap—an absence where something once real was. Today, the station stands reconstructed, wearing a new look, which could make a visitor doubt if a protest or burning ever happened.

And for the dates of the clashes, their disappearance might have been shaped by how prominent the Lekki toll-gate incident, in Lagos, became, taking the spotlight from similar events of the protests in other parts of the country. Even when the End SARS remembrance is observed every year, the protests in Lagos receive the most attention, standing at the forefront of national discourse—however, rightfully so.

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Azeez Adekunle is a Nigerian writer interested in music, culture, and the intersections of memory and social experience.

Cover credit: Victor Ola-Matthew.

I remember the day our school closed, particularly because everything felt so unfinished. I remember the day started off normal, although news of a lockdown had been circulating. On the assembly ground, we were formally informed about the lockdown and the school shutdown. We, the students, were all happy with the thought of a holiday. Nobody knew how it was going to turn out.

I was in JSS 3, transitioning to SS1 before the lockdown began. Then, every day felt like a countdown: to BECE, the national exam for final-year Junior Secondary School students; to finally retiring our uniforms; to the alleged greener grass on the other side of secondary school education. We had plans stacked neatly in our heads. Timetables. Revision notes. Teachers who kept reminding us that this academic year mattered more than all the others, until COVID-19 arrived and pressed pause.

At first, the closure of educational institutions sounded temporary. Two weeks, a month, but at least  enough time for the world to “sort itself out.” It was how it was said on the radio, and how the adults explained it to us at the onset, until days began to pile into weeks, and weeks into something shapeless. Our school gates stayed locked, uniforms folded somewhere, and our futures waited without instructions.

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We were living in Ikorodu, Lagos, at the time, and Ikorodu does not know how to be quiet for long. There is always movement: buses, conductors calling destinations, traders announcing their markets, customers haggling prices, children running errands with slippers slapping against the road, people, vehicles, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, colours, voices. During the lockdown, all of that slowed down.  The streets did not empty completely, but there were fewer people, and the urgency was gone.  

We could not go out. We could not visit friends. We could not go to school. Movement itself became suspicious. Inside our house, time fused. Morning and afternoon felt the same. News updates replaced school bells, and every cough carried a question mark. We washed our hands more than we spoke. The world outside was talking about case numbers and infection rates, but inside our home, COVID-19 felt like uncertainty, quietly sitting in corners.

All admission and qualification examinations were postponed, including BECE, the big exam that would mark the end of my junior secondary school. Initially, it felt like relief, like a gift of extra preparation time, but soon the delay became a ghost haunting every thought. We tried to watch lessons on LTV, Lagos State Television, but without smartphones or stable access, it was patchy. Some days, I learned algebra from the TV; other days, nothing but waiting.

---

What I remember most clearly is money, or rather, the absence of it. I had savings then. One thousand, five hundred naira. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. Money saved from small gifts and balances from errands, the kind of savings that mattered deeply to a secondary school student. When the world paused, that money suddenly felt important in a new way. Not as spending money, but as a possibility.

My mother had a small shop. During lockdown, it became both refuge and responsibility. People could not move freely, but they still needed essentials. Food. Small household items. Life was still happening, even if slowly. I started helping her, at first absentmindedly, then deliberately. Selling small, small things. Learning how to talk to customers through masks. Learning how to calculate quickly, how to stretch stock, how to make do.

Sometimes, the shop ran low. Rice bags got smaller. Beans sold out. Oil bottles became rare. But we adapted. I learned to ration goods, suggest alternatives, and smile while keeping my fear in check. My one thousand five hundred naira became capital, as school stopped being the centre of my days, to make room for survival.

I didn’t think of it as entrepreneurship then. It was survival, something useful to do with days that refused to move forward. While school waited for us to return, life quietly redirected my education. I learned pricing before I learned quadratic equations again. I learned negotiation before essay writing resumed. I learned that waiting did not mean standing still. Students were at home because schools were closed, but I remember being at work.

I remember counting change with hands that still smelled of sanitiser. I remember customers standing a little too far away, voices muffled behind cloth masks. I remember the anxiety of wondering whether tomorrow would bring restocking or restriction. I remember my mother’s quiet resilience — how she did not dramatise the situation, how quietly she adjusted.

Pandemic, lockdown, and global disruption were the terms used to describe the times. They were accurate words, but they did not do justice. They did not capture what it felt like to be a teenager whose final year of junior secondary school dissolved in the waiting. They did not capture the strange grief of not saying goodbye properly, to classrooms, to routines, to the version we expected to share in common with those before us.

There was no formal closure. No final assembly. No shared last day. On some days, Ikorodu was ominously quiet. Policemen occasionally passed, reminding everyone that movement was restricted. Shops that weren’t essential stayed closed. Children stared at the sky from their gates. All that global tension entered into our homes, our conversations, our meals, and our becoming. It was a world that expected stillness but did not teach how to fill it.

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When schools eventually reopened, we returned older in ways that had nothing to do with age. I used the profits from my little shop to buy a school bag. When my brother saw what I was doing, he also saved some money and started selling things. We both resumed with the new bags we bought.

My classmates looked different and older. People had lost relatives, and some families had lost income and stability, and many of us had learned lessons that would never appear in the NERDC curriculum. I remember when life pressed pause, and how, quietly, we learned to keep going anyway.

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Rachael Ajisafe is a law student at Olabisi Onabanjo University with a strong passion for storytelling, poetry, and essay writing. Her work explores themes of identity, self-discovery, and the complexities of human emotion through a lyrical and reflective style. She was longlisted for the Dele-Balogun Prize for flash fiction, shortlisted for the Eriata Oribhabor Prize for Poetry 2025, placed 2nd in The Framefest Abuja storytelling competition, and placed 2nd in the ZODML poetry prize 2025. Also, she was the Inaugural winner of the Witsprouts storytelling prize 2025 and has participated in several literary and poetry competitions, continually refining her voice as a writer and performer. Beyond writing, she is actively involved in literary and leadership communities, using her craft to inspire, connect, and challenge perspectives. 

Cover credit: Victor Ola-Matthew.

The night we fled into Olumo, my mother’s hand gripped my wrist until my pulse throbbed against her fingers. Our village burned behind us. Huts collapsed into ash. Screams tore through the air. My father’s last act was to press his kòso bead into my palm, its smooth wood warm from his hand. ‘Keep it close, Adérónkẹ́,’ he said, his voice steady even as flames licked our compound. I was twelve, old enough to know what death sounded like. The Dahomey raiders had come at dusk, their drums pounding like a heartbeat across the hills. My father stood at the gate, machete in hand, buying us time. I didn’t see him fall. I heard the silence that followed.

The rock’s mouth loomed ahead, wide and jagged, pulling us in. We crawled on hands and knees, cloth tearing on stone. A woman panted, her breath ragged as if something clawed her from within. A boy sobbed through his nose, muffling the sound as if silence could save him. The air stank of sweat and hot dust. Inside, the walls closed tight, scraping our backs, bending our necks low. A man in front of me muttered prayers to Ogun, god of iron, his forehead pressed to the ground. Behind me, someone coughed and spat something thick. None of us turned around.

The dark wasn’t just the absence of light. It was heavy, like the proverb my father loved: when the mouth is quiet, the heart speaks loudest. I clutched the bead, wondering if it could still protect me.

Hundreds filled the cave, people from Ẹgba, Ẹgba Aláke, Owu, Ake, Ibara, villages I knew only from market songs about rivers and yam harvests. We came with nothing but our clothes and names, though names soon lost meaning. Inside Olumo, we were just bodies. Hungry. Bending. Breathing. Waiting. The walls dripped water that tasted of stone. The floor reeked of damp earth. We called the driest corner the kitchen, though no fire burned. A woman with cheeks as round as a calabash mashed dried yams with her gums and fed them to her daughter, who ate with closed eyes. Children sucked locust beans, passing them mouth to mouth. We chewed without tasting and swallowed without speaking. Hunger was a fist in our bellies, but we ate to live, not to savour.

Our bodies changed. Backs curved. Knees stayed bent. A boy, maybe eleven, forgot how to stand. His mother, a thin woman with eyes like burnt wood, whispered that Olumo had claimed him. He’s the rock’s son now, she said. I believed her. My thighs hardened from squatting. My neck forgot how to tilt back. I pressed my father’s bead against my chest, rolling it until it warmed, a small pulse against the cave’s cold. At night, I traced its grooves, remembering my father weaving baskets in our compound, singing oríkì praises to our ancestors. He’d taught me to sing them too, his voice loud as a drum during the Egungun festival. The memory stung more than hunger, but I held it close, like the bead.

We pissed in corners. Shat in bowls. Someone covered the mess with dry leaves and carried it to the cave’s far end, where we didn’t go. Shame was a luxury we couldn’t afford. The air was thick with other people’s breath. Skin itched with dirt. Some heard voices in the dark, whispers of ancestors or enemies. Others saw lights flicker where none existed. I saw my village gate once, shimmering in a puddle, its wooden posts carved with spirals. I reached for it, but my fingers met only stone. We didn’t speak of these things. What use was sanity when the world had gone mad?

Fear lived in our throats. Stories of Dahomey raiders spread like smoke. They said the warriors cut off women’s breasts for charms and tied them to their belts. That Owu fighters, broken by their city’s fall, roasted enemies over slow fires. True or not, we knew one thing: outside meant noise, and noise meant death. Inside, the silence was louder than our heartbeats. Only the rock spoke. It groaned, low and deep, like it was stretching. The elders said it was Olumo waking, guarding us. Bàbá Yínká, an elder with a limp, pressed his ear to the wall one night. The rock sings to Yemoja, he said. She cradles us. I wanted to believe him, but the cold stone felt more like a cage.

We slept in shifts. Not for lack of space, though space was scarce, but because dreams brought fire. Screams. Metal on bone. Some woke clutching their throats; others bled from gums they’d clenched too hard. I shared a mat with a girl whose name I never asked. A scar ran down her chest, rough like a rope had been dragged across it. One night, she whispered into my neck, ‘My mother, my brothers, all gone.’ She didn’t speak again for three days. But in the dark, her hand always found mine. I let her hold it, her fingers cold but steady.

One evening, as we crouched near the kitchen, she spoke again. ‘I was fetching water when they came,’ she said, her voice barely above a breath. My mother pushed me into the bush. I heard her scream, then nothing. I didn’t know what to say, so I pressed the kòso bead into her palm. She held it for a moment, then gave it back. Keep it, she said. It’s yours. Her eyes met mine, and I saw something flicker there, not hope, but something close.

A boy and girl kissed once, near the edge of our fireless light. Their lips moved slowly, not for desire but for memory, as if tasting what it meant to be human. Nobody stopped them. We all needed reminders. I touched the kòso bead and thought of my father’s laugh, loud as a drum. It felt like a lie.

On what might have been a morning, though the cave kept no time, an old man named Baba Olúkún decided to leave. He’d been a war chief in Ake, his voice rough as palm bark. Years ago, he’d brokered peace with Ijebu traders, his words stronger than swords. He believed the soldiers outside would respect his age. Warriors honour warriors, he said, adjusting his white agbádá like a king’s robe. He crawled toward the crack of sunlight, his back straight despite the stone’s weight. We watched his back vanish, a ghost walking to judgement.

Three days later, a boy returned with Baba Olúkún’s wrapper. It was wet and stained brown at the hem. We said nothing. We pushed deeper into the rock.

The walls weren’t just stone; they thrummed. I pressed my palm against them one night and felt a pulse, steady as a heartbeat. Bàbá Yínká said Olumo was alive, tied to Ogun, the god of iron and war. I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer my father taught me. Ogun, make my bones strong. For a moment, I believed the rock heard me. The next day, I found a new charcoal drawing on the wall. A fish, its tail curved like a sickle. Nobody claimed it, but the drawings grew each day. Eyes. Birds with no wings. A hand with fingers spread wide. I traced the fish, its lines sharp as a blade. It felt like a message, though I didn’t know what it meant. Maybe hope. Maybe madness. I looked for them every morning, a small anchor in the dark.

One night, whispers woke me. Men huddled near the kitchen, their voices low but sharp. ‘The soldiers are closer,’ one said. I heard their drums last night. Another shook his head. Olumo will protect us. We stay. A woman, her voice trembling, said, ‘We’re rotting here. I’d rather die under the sky.’ My mother, who rarely spoke, touched my arm. ‘Adérónkẹ́, trust the rock,’ she said. Her eyes were tired, but her grip was firm. The girl with the scar leaned closer. If we die, we die together, she whispered. Her words were heavy, but they steadied me. The argument faded into silence. We stayed.

A woman named Mama Adéṣọlá gave birth one night. Her screams cracked the silence like thunder. The men turned away. The women gathered around her, their bodies a shield. One held her legs. Another stuffed a cloth in her mouth. The baby came with a cry, thin and fierce, a sound that didn’t belong in the cave. A woman hissed, ‘Quiet it, they’ll hear.’ But Mama Adéṣọlá clutched the child, a boy, and whispered, Adéwálé, naming him for her father, lost in the Owu wars. The name felt like defiance. She hummed a lullaby, soft as a breeze, one my mother sang during harvest festivals. We held our breath, waiting for soldiers’ boots. They didn’t come. Not then.

But that night, a boy fetching rainwater saw smoke curling above the trees. Too close. Panic spread like a spark. Whispers turned to arguments. A man swore Olumo had spoken to him, urging us to stay. A woman shouted she’d rather die outside than rot within. My mother spoke softly. I’f we leave, we die. If we stay, we live.’  Her voice was steady, but her hand trembled around mine. The girl with the scar pressed closer, her breath warm against my neck. ‘Your mother’s right,’ she said. Nobody moved. We stayed.

Time stopped being days. It became hunger, bone, memory. A girl had her first blood, her mother wrapping her in cloth torn from her own wrapper. An old woman died in her sleep; her body carried to the cave’s end with quiet prayers to Yemoja, goddess of rivers. A baby, not Adéwálé, learned to laugh without sound.

I added to the charcoal drawings once, scratching a small circle beside a bird. It felt like claiming something, though I didn’t know what. One day, I heard my father’s voice, not real but clear, singing a market song about Ẹgba’s rivers. I followed it to a corner where water dripped. I drank, and for a moment, I tasted home, the sweet tang of palm wine my father shared during festivals. The girl with the scar saw me and smiled, her first smile. ‘You’re still here,’ she said. I nodded. Her hand found mine again, warmer now.

Another day, a boy named Táyé, no older than me, began to sing. His voice was quiet, an oríkì praising Ẹgba warriors. ‘Our fathers fought, and we endure,’ he sang. The elders shushed him, fearing the sound would carry, but he kept going, his words weaving courage into the air. A few joined, their voices barely a whisper. My mother hummed along, her eyes closed, and I saw her smile for the first time since the fire. I clutched the kòso bead and mouthed the words, feeling their rhythm in my chest.

Weeks passed, or so it seemed. The cave warped time. One night, a woman named Àbíkẹ began telling stories to the children, her voice low to avoid waking the fear. She spoke of Olumo’s birth, how the gods carved it to shield the Ẹgba from invaders. ‘This rock is our mother,’ she said, ‘and mothers do not abandon their children.’ The children listened, wide-eyed, their small hands clutching each other. I listened too, the kòso bead warm in my palm. Àbíkẹ’s stories became a ritual, a thread tying us to the world we’d lost. She spoke of the Owu wars, of warriors who stood against Dahomey, their machetes gleaming like stars. Her words painted pictures in the dark, and for a moment, we weren’t just bodies. We were Ẹgba.

Another time, a man named Kúnlé tried to teach the younger boys how to carve. He had no knife, only a sharp stone, but he scratched patterns into the cave floor: spirals, waves, and the shape of a cowrie shell. ‘This is who we are,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘We make, even when we have nothing.’ The boys watched, their fingers tracing his lines. I watched too, wondering if I could make something to hold onto, something to carry out of the rock. I scratched a small spiral beside my mat, next to the girl with the scar. She saw it and added a line of her own, a crooked arrow. We didn’t speak, but our marks did.

The girl with the scar began to hum one night, a tune I recognised from market days, when women sang while pounding yam. It was soft, almost swallowed by the cave’s silence, but it grew. Others joined, their voices weaving a fragile thread of sound. My mother touched my shoulder, her fingers lighter now, and hummed too. I didn’t sing, but I pressed the kòso bead to my lips, letting the tune fill me. It wasn’t joy, but it was life.

The world outside grew quiet one morning. No drums. No gunshots. No shouts. The men sent scouts, three boys with quick feet. They returned with wide eyes.

‘The soldiers are gone,’ one said. ‘North, to a new war.’

We didn’t cheer. We crawled out slowly, one by one, like ants from a broken nest. The sun hit my face, and I screamed. My knees wouldn’t straighten. My back fought to stay curved. It took days to stand tall again, to feel the ground without wincing. The world outside was too bright, too open. I clutched the kòso bead, its weight anchoring me to the earth.

Some stayed in Abeokuta, rebuilding among the ashes. Others left to find what remained of their villages. My mother traded again, selling yam flour with a smile that hid her cracks. I looked for the girl with the scar in the market crowds, but her face was gone, swallowed by the world outside. I kept my father’s bead, wearing it on a string around my neck.

Sometimes, I return to Olumo. I press my hand to its side, feeling for the pulse. On quiet days, I hear it. Breathing.

I leave small offerings: a handful of kola nuts or a whispered prayer to Ogun.

The rock doesn’t answer, but it listens.

And I remember what it taught me: to bend, to breathe, to live.

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Tomilola Adejumo is an emerging writer from Lagos, Nigeria, with published work featured in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, African Writer Magazine, The Shallow Tales Review, Efiko Magazine, Afritondo, Akpata Magazine, Punocracy and elsewhere. Her upcoming publications include pieces in Omenana, Culture Custodian and The Republic. Tomi shares engaging stories and essays on her Substack page, “Thoughts Archive“. She is on Twitter at ‘earth2Tomi’. 

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

My passion for dolphins started after my father told me how dolphins saved their lives when they were shipwrecked during the Nigerian civil war. Dad told us that their ship, NNS Ogoja, was shot by a missile from the hinterlands of the Eastern waterfront. The bomb, then known as “Ogbunigwe,” which means “a killer in the heavens,” blew their ship in half, and as it sank, they scrambled out of the ship, abandoning it for the lifeboats that were tied to the side of the huge ship.

Frightened and confused, they scampered into the lifeboats and hurriedly paddled their boats away from the sight of Biafran soldiers. Unknowingly to them, they had ventured too deep into the sea, and away from the coordinates that the Nigerian Navy could easily use to rescue them. For days, they stayed at sea, with no food, water, or communication with land, and at night, they held their breaths in fear because they could not see each other. The sea was pitch black, smelly, and extremely quiet, except for the sounds of clashing waves that tossed their boats up and down. Days went by with hope, but the nights were lived in fear; still, they waited for help even though there was no sign of a rescue mission. With the only walkie-talkie he had grabbed while jumping into the lifeboat, my dad tried desperately to communicate their dire situation to the headquarters in Lagos, but it was to no avail. 

They were on troubled waters for days, drifting far away from the creeks where they had fired their rockets some days before. The Biafran soldiers had endured several hits from their ships, but they quickly recovered to counterstrike against the Nigerian Navy warships. It was a huge shock to my dad and his crew members when the first bombs struck their ships. In the bombardment, two ships were destroyed, and some men died in the fury of the attack. Alone at sea, several attempts to get the Naval Base to respond to their SOS were carried out, but only crackling static sounds over the walkie-talkie were heard. Due to their inability to contact base, they began to fall into depression. They were cold at night, shivering all through the dark night, and during the day, the hot, humid air was harsh on their bodies. 

With no land in sight—and no means of mapping out the drift of their boats—they could not calculate the actual coordinates that could be used to trace and rescue them. In those days, ships used radar equipment to navigate their way through endless waters to their destinations, and my dad was one of the best radar and communication officers recruited into the Nigerian Navy. Although he earnestly sent desperate calls to the Lagos port in order to draw the attention of ground naval officers to their predicament and also initiate a rescue mission for their sake, there was no response, and all his efforts came to nought. He had called Apapa port for the hundredth time; still, no one answered his radio call. Soon, the crackling sounds that the walkie-talkie kept spurting out damped their spirits as they all thought they would die from hunger, thirst and dehydration. They had been at sea for two days now, floating farther into the deep black sea with no hope of rescue. 

Before the abandonment of their ship, most of the officers of the Nigerian fleet could not effectively explain why, for the last five months, they had been operating in the creeks of Warri and Calabar, battling the Igbo revolutionaries whose mode of operation was similar to that of the guerrillas of Cuba. Now that they were abandoned at sea, my dad and members of his crew believed that the war was a show of egos rather than a need to keep the country together. Why would top officers from both sides not see eye to eye? Whatever would have caused their differences shouldn’t have escalated into this war, so many people were dying and for no fault of theirs. In that moment of hanging between life and death, my dad thought of the war, his lonely death, and a Nigeria that may never be because of irreconcilable differences between Major General Yakubu Gowon and Major General Ojukwu. He was sad that none of the angry Generals thought of the thousands of men and women who must die for no fault of their own.   

As they silently awaited death, the shipwrecked naval officers saw rockets exploding in the sea in daytime. Some were a near miss, and others troubled the sea to such an extent that the waves, foams, and windy air that emanated as a result of the explosion of the bombs almost capsized their boats; at night, when the Biafran side had rested for the day, dangerous man-eating sharks surrounded their boats. They were terrified when they thought that they had escaped death by a whisker, only to die horribly at the jagged teeth of sharks. With this knowledge, my dad and some of the men cried. 

However, even with fear in their hearts, Daddy kept calling base until the walkie-talkie gradually began to blink and beep weakly till it stopped working. All his efforts at getting their SOS through to headquarters had yielded nothing, and they were virtually on the edge of losing their sanity as they listened to the weak crackling sounds of my father’s walkie-talkie. 

The officers were depressed as more and more sharks continued to encircle them. To the men sitting in ten lifeboats, their escape from their sinking ship seemed to have belittled the carefully crafted design and strategy of God to help them escape the torture they would have suffered at the hands of Biafran soldiers. So, as they thought of the gory end that awaited them, they earnestly prayed for divine intervention, which, unknown to them, was already happening.

Unknown to the stranded men at sea, dolphins had surrounded their boats as the sharks swarmed around them. These dolphins were the reason why the lifeboats had not been attacked by the sharks swimming stealthily around them. The dolphins made a ring around each boat, happily swimming and jumping up into the air from time to time, with a strategy to dissuade the terrifying sharks away from the lifeboats. If they sensed any danger to the lifeboats, the dolphins would make clicking sounds to summon all the dolphins to encircle the loose rings they had made around the boats. The dolphins would whistle loudly too, but my dad was unsure which call was a call to fight or a call to play. To their utter amazement, they later discovered that the dolphins had, all along, put up a formidable block against the sharks in order to protect them. 

It was a thing they had never imagined. In the middle of the sea, just as they had given up hope of ever returning home, dolphins would not let sharks kill them. For three days, dolphins bravely fought off ferocious sharks away from their boats until rescue finally came. On the rescue ship, my dad and his friends stood on the deck waving at the happy dolphins. They were mesmerised by the simple fish that saved them all, and they were not known to them. It was really a strange thing for a school of fish to come from nowhere to save men who were sent to kill other men. The irony could not be mistaken, and from that moment on, my dad looked at animals (especially dolphins) differently. 

The dolphins were still not satisfied that the men they had surrounded for three days followed the rescue ship. They swarm around the ship, making clicking sounds as the ship moved towards Lagos – Apapa port. After about thirty minutes of following the ship, the pod of dolphins began to slowly swim away from the rescue ship until they could no longer be seen.

Having successfully disembarked from their rescue ship, my father promised himself that he would learn everything about dolphins and also tell his children about this special fish that sacrificed itself to save more than thirty sailors stranded at sea. He told us about all the good qualities of a dolphin, repeating his miraculous story every time he reminisced about the time he was an ordinary seaman in the Nigerian Navy. 

As my sister and I grew up, there was virtually no month we didn’t hear stories about the most intelligent fish on earth. Daddy would tell us stories about dolphins, weaving magical moments as he explained the habits and life of a dolphin. One day, he returned home from one of his sea travels with a giant book about the animal world. This book was filled with beautiful pictures of different animals; their habits, habitats, and their significance to the world. From colourful, dangerous snakes slithering through hot desert grounds, to white polar bears deep in the cold Arctic. With this book, my sister and I discovered a new world that was solely animal-centred and mesmerising. Our worldview on environmental studies changed, and we began to love and value all types of animals. In fact, our knowledge of the animal world brought a new tradition to us—we began to see animals as copartners in trying to bring harmony to a world that had been devastated by industrialisation and other selfish human activities that fed only the greed of humankind, while the climate and environment suffered. 

With my love for animals, I yearned to keep a dog, but our living quarters were too crowded for a family to keep a dog. We eventually got to keep several dogs that we loved so much after we moved into our fully fenced house, which my dad had built. Daddy had been building a house for years, and when it was finally completed, we moved in. Soon after, we bought a dog named White, after its white coat.

I had several other sisters and brothers, but most of them were not moved by the stories about the civil war, the dolphins and the miraculous rescue; however, a tradition of being responsible for our environment was born, and it stuck with us. Daddy taught us how to properly dispose of trash by taking it only to designated garbage sites. If there were no designated places for refuse, we carefully burned our trash in such a way that the ash was used to plant vegetables and other small plants.

In all the years we grew up, Daddy never told us what he went through during the Nigerian civil war except for that one encounter with dolphins. To him, the war was so devastating that he barely talked about it. When he did talk about the war, he would be deep in thought, telling us that regardless of our beliefs, ideologies, or political affiliations, we should never encourage war or be part of it. Even though he was awarded medals for his bravery in war, he kept them hidden in his cupboard, bringing them out when he remembered the dolphins that had once saved his life.

In my house, I have so many beautiful figurines of dolphins. Dolphins swimming in the sea; dolphins standing with shells of sea fishes and star fishes; dolphins with other sea creatures; and dolphins happily swimming with humans! The colourful display of these figurines always baffled guests whenever they came to my house. Some thought I was in a cult where we worshipped dolphins, but I would smile back at them, happy that my obsession with dolphins could be traced to my dad.

Dad has gone to the world beyond, and I missed him so much. But he had unknowingly sparked a tradition in me, prompting me to love animals, trees, rivers and lands. Because of dad’s stories about animals, I have come to love animals, no matter how dangerous they may be. No wonder,  the brownish colours of wilting leaves, the dark green of mature leaves, the gentle light green colours of sprouting leaves and seedlings, intermixing with colourful wildflowers and animals, tell me that a world that experiences war on its landscape is a world that is on the verge of extinction.

Living in a town close to one of Nigeria’s largest game reserves, the beauty of trees densely populating the landscape of the Kainji Lake National Park is breathtaking and a colourful plea for people living in this area to stop the deforestation of forest lands. Yes, I do get freaked out by slithering snakes and man-eating crocodiles, yet I know I have a responsibility to take care of my environment, especially when animals are concerned. Dad’s rescue by dolphins, his dedication to teach us about a co-partnership with animals, the environment and his aversion to war and all the evils from the Civil War have taught me to love the world with no reserve. As I see the dolphins on my TV stand, I am reminded of a duty to love, not hate; to seek the truth and not believe ideologies that are anti-environmental; and to love, love, love everything on earth and beyond.

---

Linda Jummai Mustafa teaches African American/Caribbean literature at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Niger State. Her debut collection of short stories, titled What If…?, came first runner-up in the ANA prose prize in 2021, and her second book, titled Kande and the Antelope, won the Open Arts Manuscript Publishing Deal for Northern Women Writers (Sponsored by Ford Foundation) in 2024. She is also a poet, and her poems are featured in several local and international anthologies. She is the first female from Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State, Nigeria, to be a published writer. 

Cover credit: Victor Ola-Matthew.

By the time I arrived Tampa, days after the hurricane’s wind and rain had pulled the bay, past its shores, into the streets and, finally, into the houses in my aunt and uncle’s neighbourhood, making them, I imagined, part of the ocean floor for a few hours, most of the heavy lifting was done. Couches, reclining chairs, mattresses, dressers sat outside the house, in the yard in the back, on the lawn in the front. 

Throughout the neighbourhood, it was like this: the things that make a home strewn about, a sink at this lawn, books at that one, clothing at another, chairs, tables, wood—once walls, floors, cabinets?—gathered in haphazard piles, the landscape of the place marked by devastation.

I saw its weight in my aunt’s face, too; her eyes, usually eager to notice some nearby delight, were shrouded by worry; their corners drooped, the wrinkles beneath them seemed deeper, and they had a sheen about them, as though she might cry, though she didn’t. Instead, she assigned me a task that evening: photos, hundreds, maybe thousands of them to sort through. 

We spent hours on the photos, slowly peeling them apart, willing the ink that had come loose in the flood’s moisture to stay in place.  Some came in envelopes, mixed in with papers of varying degrees of importance, a Walmart receipt from 2005, my cousin’s birth certificate,  a long-ago scribble of a bank’s address.  It was among papers like this that my eye caught the curves of my mom’s handwriting. 

It had been years since I’d seen it, I realised: that print that had been such a fixture of my childhood, scattered about the house unremarkably, in the corners of old novels, in pages and pages of notes from her English classes at Ife, in shopping lists written into a jotter gifted at this or that 50th birthday party, or this or that wedding, or this or that retirement. 

The sight of it felt precious to me now, a marker of a time before, when the dailiness of our lives as a family meant a kind of proximity and immediacy, a nearness to each other’s things, which was also a nearness to each other’s being. Adulthood had brought a distance that I did not know to prepare for; now our relationship lived in texts, video calls, and visits that began with a fraught day or two as we learned to be near each other again. 

My mom had written the note, which was folded into neat squares and held together despite the moisture, in the ‘90s; I knew, because it was mainly a retelling of the court proceedings related to her and my father’s divorce. The thing was suffused with her sadness, the fact of which I took in, not as surprise or new information, but as a knowing, almost as old as me. The contours of her sadness, the particular pitch of her sorrow, felt familiar to me, as much a part of me as the shape of my face, the cadence of my voice, the uneven edges of the birthmark on my forehead. 

In the note’s final paragraphs, she’d written, “October 1 is coming, I don’t know what we have to celebrate. Tunji is still in detention.” Here her words felt more universal, like a kind of shared Nigerian inheritance, each of us weighed down by our disappointment over what the country could be, but has repeatedly failed to become. 

The earliest contours of that disaffection in me are this detention of her cousin, my Uncle Tunji, in the Abacha years. I was little at the time, just shy of seven when he died, and even I remember the fear that was rampant among adults, a fear that was also my own. I also remember the completeness of the anxiety he inspired, the sense that a darkness was upon the country, that you could not say anything bad about the government, you could never be sure who was listening, who they might tell, and then you too could be taken away. Uncle Tunji’s detention was the centre of this fear, the frightening thing that everyone was trying to avoid; it had happened to him, and to his family.

Growing up with a large family

Our bond was sealed before any of us came to be, Uncle Tunji’s family and mine. His mother and my grandfather—my mother’s father—were siblings, born to a couple in Okeagbe, a town in Ondo state, near the border with Kogi. Their father died when they were young, and my grandfather, who was the oldest the only son, got the upper hand in education. His sister resented the injustice (into her older years, she spoke of being denied a formal western education), but she made a life for herself, trading kola nut, cocoa, garri and yam between Okeagbe and the East, sometimes stopping in Lagos, where she stayed with my grandfather, whom she loved dearly despite the unevenness of their lives.

Uncle Tunji seemed to inherit his mother’s passion for education, though he had a reputation at school. “We had this English teacher who would come to class and would be reading definitions of words to us from the dictionary; but you are supposed to teach us English!!” he said to me on a recent call, his old frustration leaking from him, making me laugh. “So one day, I said, ‘What is this? You’re supposed to teach us English!’ The guy was angry, and then he said I should leave the class. And I said, ‘Why should I leave the class? My mother paid for this class, why should I leave?’ How I developed the boldness, I cannot explain it. But I could stand up, and I was ready to bear the consequences.” 

When he lived with my mom’s family in the years between secondary school and moving to the U.S. to attend university, his boldness took the form of a willingness to challenge my grandfather. It was during those years, and after, when he moved back home after a decade in the U.S., that he and my mom grew close. They have always felt more like siblings than cousins to me; my mom has a special fondness for him, that seems in part rooted in admiration for his singlemindedness and a genuine delight in his company. The last time we saw him at a family wedding this year, he spontaneously performed a song while giving closing remarks. Later, he singlehandedly turned a quiet get-together into a comical advice session for the groom. Tunji is funny like that, my mom said when I brought up these memories.  

It helped too that they each met and married spouses in the early 80s, and that children arrived in similar order: Funto and Iyiobi, born months apart in ’84; Eyifayo and Moyo, in ’87 and ’88; Titun in ’90, me in ’91; and Iriayo, the youngest of us, in ’94. 

My cousins were the delights of my life. I don’t know how they did it exactly, so it feels almost miraculous how much more lively life felt with them. Ordinary days became full of possibility when they were around; happiness unfurled from otherwise dull conversation and play. To this day, I feel a kind of giddy anticipation at the thought of time spent with an Abayomi. 

Our families spent a lot of time together in the 90s, on road trips to Okeagbe and in their house in Iju, which felt cavernous and, like its inhabitants, full of possibility.

They came to our flat at the College of Medicine in Idi-Araba, too. I remember one school morning, all of us rushing to make it out on time. Between my mom, my siblings and me, our aunts who raised us, and the four Abayomi kids and their mom, there would have been 12 of us, too many to move quickly through the two bathrooms in the house. The Abayomis were especially stressed that day; my siblings and I went to school nearby, but theirs was further away in Akoka, and they were already running late. “We were always late,” Titun told me, her face worn, as we thought back to that time on a recent video call. 

That might have been the morning after they had arrived at their house in Iju late, after they had woven their way through traffic from Idi-Araba, only to find what looked like vehicles from the infamous State Security Service at the gate. Quickly, fearfully, the driver whipped their car around and headed back to us. They made it safely, and, well, there was school the next day, so they got out of their uniforms, washed them, hoped they would be dry by morning, and tried to get whatever sleep they could. 

When I first described work on this essay to Titun, I said something like, “I’m interested in how political repression touches families, how they rearrange themselves.” No, “displacement, disorder,” she said, pushing me toward more precise words. 

F&T

Auntie Foluke was walking from Ojuelegba to Idi-Araba when a brown Volkswagen pulled up by her side. 

“My mind said, ‘Oh, you are in it today,’” she said to me, recalling that day. It was the wiry man she had been avoiding for months. She and Uncle Tunji had met by chance in a banking hall a few months prior, and each time he tried to see her at her residence hall at the nursing school at Lagos University Teaching Hospital, she sent word that she wasn’t available. That wasn’t an option today, so she reluctantly got in his car. He gave her a ride back to campus, and they lingered, talking about all kinds of things. “He was polite, decent, not like many men I had met before. I decided to give him a chance.”

Months in, while at a party for his law school classmate, he left her for a moment to say hello to the host’s parents. He became absorbed in conversation, lost track of time, while Auntie Foluke grew bored, hungry, and anxious about being locked out of her hostel. That night, she ended their relationship.

More than a year later, she was walking on LUTH’s campus when he sped past her in his car, close enough to frighten her. He pulled over to apologize, explaining that he was frantic because his mother was seriously ill. Moved, Auntie Foluke went to visit his mother in the wards. It was his mother who orchestrated their reconciliation, asking to meet Auntie Foluke’s mother, saying she wanted her to marry Uncle Tunji. They eventually married. 

But that motif from early in their relationship, Auntie Foluke, waiting, alone, recurs in her retelling of their marriage.

In the early days, his work was the culprit. He’d been advised to create his own chambers rather than work at an established firm, but the hours were long, and money was scarce. “That journey was very rough, to the extent that my mom started bringing us food stuff—garri, elubo, yam—from Ibadan,” Auntie Foluke told me.  

Things eventually turned, but he only grew busier. 

“I didn’t have a father who was around all the time,” Eyifayo told me. But when Uncle Tunji was home, he was exacting about school work. “If you missed your multiplication, he would beat you,” Eyifayowa said. He occasionally visited his office too, which had become a small but established firm with a few lawyers on staff. “I understood that his work was important. He was something I wanted to be.”

Uncle Tunji had long been interested in politics and public affairs, and, because of his profession, he came to work on a number of human rights cases. He eventually established Human Rights Africa and set up its offices in Ota, where rent was cheap compared to Lagos. It was around this time that he became a lawyer to former President Obasanjo, who was by then a retired general and former military head of state. One of the lawyers in his chambers learned from a peer that Obasanjo needed a lawyer for a matter: Obasanjo had been pulled over at a police checkpoint and, offended by the audacity of the officer, had him beaten by his orderlies. A human rights case had been brought against him by Chief Gani Fawehinmi. 

Wait, Obasanjo’s actions were illegal, no? I asked as Uncle Tunji shared the details. Yes, he said. Wasn’t there a contradiction then, in representing him in this case? Well, no, not on the letter of the law, he said.

It was inappropriate to frame it as a human rights matter because Obasanjo was not acting as an official of the state. It should have been brought as a civil case. I respect Uncle Tunji’s intellectual manoeuvre, but can’t help thinking about Inspector Ale, the officer at the centre of the case, who never got recourse.

Moreover, that impulse toward a kind of literalism makes Uncle Tunji likely to ruffle some feathers everywhere he goes. “In the human rights movement, many activists thought Tunji was a lone ranger, an eccentric, a difficult person to deal with, a tireless debater who gave no ground, and somebody who would stand alone on any issue if need be,” Abdul Oroh, a veteran journalist, who was detained alongside Uncle Tunji wrote in his recent memoir on the struggle for democracy in Nigeria, humorously named, Demonstration of Craze.

Uncle Tunji was not helped by the fact that Obasanjo was not a popular figure in the human rights community. Yes, he had peacefully and quickly transferred power to a civilian government when he found himself as head of state in the 70s. But, as this case with Inspector Ale illustrated, he still had the excesses of a military man. 

In the chaos of the Abacha era, however, new allegiances formed. 

Junta to Junta

There were many military dictators before Abacha—Decree No. 2 under which Uncle Tunji and others were held was made law under Buhari’s regime in the 80s—but his regime’s cruelty, the violent lengths to which it went to clamp down on its opposition, real and perceived, was unlike others. 

Abacha came to power on the heels of the annulled June 12, 1993 election, an election that Nigerians had agitated for over the eight-year rule of Ibrahim Babangida. Across the country, people had come out to vote for Moshood Abiola, the wealthy businessman who had galvanised energy around a campaign message of hope, with the tagline “Farewell to Poverty.”

Nigerians had waited for a return to democracy for nearly a decade through military rule at that point, and there was forceful pushback against the annulment. Civil society organisations organised multiple protests. A strike by NUPENG, the union representing petroleum workers, brought the economy to a halt. 

Initially appointed as Chief Security Officer of the transitional government, Abacha seized power in November of that year, laser-focused on crushing this public will. 

“A reign of terror, impunity, and ‘anything goes’ had enveloped the nation,” Abdul Oroh writes of the Abacha years in Demonstration of Craze.

Abiola was arrested in 1994 for declaring himself the winner of the election. Politicians and activists were being rounded up. Many of them fled the country through Benin Republic with the support of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), a coalition of organisations that formed to advocate for the legitimacy of the annulled elections. Alfred Rewane, the businessman who provided much of its funding, was assassinated in 1995. Kudirat, Abiola’s wife, who was also an advocate for her husband’s release and the reinstatement of the results, would be assassinated in 1996. 

Then there was the “phantom coup” plot. 

Enemies of the State

It was well known that military juntas used coup accusations to neutralise their opposition. Abacha rounded up a disparate cross-section of his opposition, accusing them of orchestrating or serving as accessories to a coup plot, including Obasanjo, Shehu Yar’Adua, who was Obasanjo’s deputy when he was military head of state, Beko Ransome Kuti, of the Campaign for Democracy, and Chris Anyanwu, a renowned journalist. They were tried and found guilty by secret military tribunals. Many were sentenced to decades in prison, and others to death.

At a press conference following the trials, Uncle Tunji called for the release of Obasanjo and others: “If critical comments against General Abacha’s regime can be maliciously catapulted into a coup d’etat and citizens can be subjected to ultimate jeopardy, all Nigerians become immediately unsafe under the present regime,” he said.

Forty minutes into the press conference, eight armed men arrived, forced all attendees into a small room, seized cameras, notes, press releases, recorders, and demanded that Uncle Tunji and two journalists accompany them to the SSS offices. The two journalists were released, and as they left, he pressed a note into one of their hands. “Dear Foluke,” it read:

In case I am not home tonight

I am at SSS offices at the Toll Gate. Now, you should have no worries AT ALL as I am completely in control of myself and clearly not subdued. I emphasise this to you ….

Assure the children.   

---

Word of the detention came to the family in fragments. “I remember so much fear and anxiety,” Iyiobi tells me. The oldest of the children, he was 11 when his dad was detained, just old enough to have a sense of responsibility, and to understand that a person can act on the world, bend it to their will, yet still too young to do so himself. Perhaps, because of the impossibility of this position, he seems to remember the family’s life during the Abacha years with the greatest specificity. 

He tells me about the first few hours after his dad was detained, the confusion that ensued, because information about where he had been taken was sparse. Then a rumour about a detention centre, somewhere in Ikoyi. There, he and his mom meet gruff officers, who send them off, saying there was no one by the name of Tunji Abayomi there. “People warned her to keep going back; if she stopped going, we may never have heard from him again.” 

This was the character of detention under Decree 2; everything was shrouded in mystery, hearsay and partial information ruled the day, making it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, and creating a kind of psychological torture.

For the length of the detention, the SSS prevented each detainee from seeing their loved ones. For Abdul Oroh, this also meant missing the birth and naming of his second child, a girl he named Itsema Raheemat.

Only Iyiobi saw his dad once: seizing a moment when there was no guard nearby, he ran toward the window of his cell at the detention centre and spoke to his father briefly.  “Here was my 11-year-old son, clearly scared, holding his chest, yet determined to talk to me,” Uncle Tunji wrote in his journal that night.

---

Food became the language of Uncle Tunji and Auntie Foluke’s relationship during detention. Each day, Auntie Foluke got up, got the children ready for school in Akoka and went to work her nursing job at LUTH.

After, she went to Auntie Temilola, another cousin of Uncle Tunji’s, to put a dinnertime meal together, often some fruit, a swallow, and a soup. (Oseme Oroh, the wife of Abdul Oroh, covered their morning meal.) 

Sometimes Auntie Foluke wrote notes on small scraps of paper, wrapped them in plastic, and included updates on the children and the family, as well as desperate notes about not knowing where to find money for school fees. I have a vague memory of one time, seeing Auntie Foluke by the kitchen counter in our flat in LUTH, silhouetted by late afternoon light, concern lining her face. Someone nearby must have said, they couldn’t bring Uncle Tunji his food because I don’t have a memory of her saying it, but I do remember being plagued by the thought of Uncle Tunji’s hunger, the idea that he would have to go who knows how long without food. 

This was probably when one of Auntie Foluke’s notes was found by a guard, and their meal arrangement was temporarily halted. Inside, Uncle Tunji, Abdul Oroh, and Chima Ubani organised themselves, putting pressure on the administration, insisting that the absurdity of their situation necessitated the secret passing of notes. It worked. It was a relief to get to bring food again, I imagine, to feel like, at least that was one thing they could do to sustain a loved one.

I only learned from my interviews with them that Auntie Foluke and the children were themselves barely getting by. Her sole income was not enough to cover food and school fees. “I once sent Iyiobi to a neighbour who had a party, to see if they had left overs they could share,” she told me. Family and her church, Deeper Life, helped, but the situation, the long days, and the illogic of the detention all wore on her. 

“Mommy lost so much weight,” Iyiobi said.

---

“Detention is terrible,” Uncle Tunji says. A silence passes between us, brief, laden with what is unsaid. In his journals, written on scraps of paper he collected while imprisoned and assembled into a book entitled Cell 26, there are bouts of despair and moments of indignation. 

On December 6, 1995, he wrote, “In detention, the emotional spiritual weariness foisted by the restraints is often much more grievous than the physical weariness. Sometimes, like today, I feel somewhat depressed by my helplessness. Why should any human being, for any reason, simply just arrest me and store me away?”

In the pages, too, is the voice of a man who longs for his family. 

From December 19: “I rose up, held the pictures of my children. I have seen these pictures many many times but now I make a study of them. As I study the leadership and courage of my first son, Iyiobi, the strength and vision of my second son, Eyinfunayowa, the beauty and tenacious confidence of my daughter, Iyintitun and the explorative curiosity of the last one, Iriayo, an accidental joy came over me briefly.”

Somehow, Uncle Tunji became obsessed with the notion, after October 1—the same October 1 my mom wrote about in that note—passed with no release, that he would go home for Christmas. It’s not hard to see why. There was no recognisable logic to the detention, no case to answer. Perhaps some largesse would touch the heart of the dictator or his cronies, he seemed to think, and they would free him and his co-detainees. It was the season of celebration after all. 

This did not happen. Instead, January arrived without change. The detention wore on for months after—his journals trail off here, his papers got lost in the time after—and then, one day in July 1996, 11 months after he was first detained, he was released. No explanation given.

---

I wish I could say this was the end, that Uncle Tunji went home and was free from then. Alas, it is not. Miraculously, his courage did not flag despite his experience. Instead, he became, maybe even more, dogged about his opposition to military rule, so he remained a target. He was detained two more times, shorter detentions of a few days each, but frightening too, in their own right.

The family too, continued to live in upheaval. One evening, they came home, and “there was a fracas in the neighbourhood,” Eyifayowa told me. It turned out there had been an unusual robbery. The story goes that the thieves asked a child on the street to point out the home of “Doctor.” The child pointed to the home of a medical doctor, which they entered. They shot the man and left. Neighbours were sure that Uncle Tunji, who used the honorific “doctor” because his law degree, earned in the U.S., was a “Juris Doctor”, was the real target. 

Every member of the family I spoke to, Titun, Iyiobi, Eyifayo, Auntie Foluke, Uncle Tunji himself, retells the story with a palpable terror. They drove into the compound in a panic, but, too frightened to enter the main house because the “thieves” might return, they hid in the back of the compound, in an outdoor shed. All the lights stayed off, so it would appear that no one was home. Eyifayo remembers peeing on himself. Iyiobi remembers his dad jumping over the fence and walking for a long time, first to a police station, then to a relative’s home.  

After this incident, the family left Iju altogether—it was too dangerous, and it was too clearly known to the SSS. They moved to a house in Ota, the town where it all began. Or maybe, we can say it began in Abuja, from where Abacha held tightly to every tentacle of state power. Or in Dodan Barracks, where young men had seized power, coup after coup, for 30 years. Or in Okeagbe’s classrooms, where Uncle Tunji’s dogged will first showed itself.

---

It didn’t end until Abacha’s death, swift, sudden, on June 8, 1998. 

Everyone who was around in the 90s has a story of that day, the spontaneous outpouring of joy on the street, parties, complete with rice and Coke and Fanta, randomly kicking off throughout neighbourhoods in Lagos. “Abacha has paid for his sins: Nigerians jubilate over Abacha’s death,” read the headlines on PM News the next day. And yet, one wonders, do these things ever end so simply?

“You never know how things impact you,” Eyifayo said to me. Iyiobi refuses to speak publicly about politics. Speaking of that time, he and Titun each said to me separately, “I wouldn’t wish it on my enemy.”

---

Modupeola Oyebolu is a Nigerian writer who lives in New York.

Cover credit: Victor Ola-Matthew.

The war came because the white freebooters had neglected the divisive fissures between the North and the South. They had come like a thief in the dead of the night and hauled people diametrically different from each other into one scanty space and slapped a name and a language on them. Then they incinerated the cultures of the people and planted compradors in each division hurriedly drawn by them. They didn’t know the country would one day be caught up in the web of Sophie’s choice. Perhaps they knew but didn’t care a bit. After all, Nigeria was a mine, and its collapse would not be that of London. So, when the war began, the remaining colonial masters left as they had come, and stayed afar to watch as their former vassals would do it.

At the beginning of the war, Uzor left Onitsha for Asaba, his hometown. It was better to die in one’s land than in what seemed like a borrowed home. For him, the colonial masters had shaken the jar and run away just the way he always felt God had created the world and left humanity to handle its troubles incommunicado.

“The MacPherson Constitution started this very mess,” he said to himself, packing his travel bag.

He had to leave because people were leaving, and his family—especially his seventy-year-old father—was on his neck. Also, his business partner, Okpara, had moved with his family into Dahomey the previous day. 

Before Uzor left, he went to their electronic shop to properly close the windows and spread sheets on goods that needed protection against dust. The uproar would not be that long; they would come back and continue as soon as Ojukwu had come to terms with the federal side. After all, there were speculations that more post-Aburi peace talks were underway. The fire was definitely going to kiss the waters of genuine reconciliation.

Outside, he looked at the shingle and lipped the inscription: O & U Electronic Shop. Then he sighed and entered into his Volkswagen Beetle and hit the road to Asaba. Close to the Niger Bridge, he picked a family of four. They were also leaving for Asaba. Tensions were high and people were at their wits to avoid sorry stories. It was good to be optimistic as much as it was to be pessimistic. Ojukwu had already declared war, and anything was possible at this point.

“You are leaving without your family,” the man asked Uzor.

“Yes.” 

“Why?”

“Well, I have no family here. My only family here is my business.” He watched the children in the rear mirror. The boy was still while the little girl hummed a song.

“Better. I know that things will be fine soon. But it is more appropriate to be cautious.”

“Exactly,” Uzor said, staring at the vast spread of the River Niger. “None of us has the eyes to see tomorrow, so we can only employ care when we do not feel safe.”

The man, sitting in front of the car with the seatbelt on, agreed with Uzor. They drove in half-silence while the little girl kept hushing the soothing but unrealistic lyrics of Nigeria We Hail Thee. Her voice was faint, but the lines filled the car, flying out of the open windows, onto the wings of the wind, and into the indifferent river. That was the destiny of the country peeling off. The words pierced the hearts of the adults in the car. When her father told her to stop singing, she bit her nails and began to cry.

“Don’t cry, beautiful girl.” Uzor was now halfway on the bridge. “What is your name?” He changed gear, making the car jerk.

“Elizabeth.” She didn’t look up.

“Can you sing for me, Queen Elizabeth?”

She beamed, and then looked from her father to her mother and began to sing the stanza she knew best:

Nigeria, we hail thee,

Our own dear native land,

Though tribe and tongue may differ,

In brotherhood we stand

Nigerians all, are proud to serve our sovereign Motherland

Uzor had known a day like this would come; it was just a matter of time. During his stint in Kano as a child, where he was born and raised, he saw the squalid face of segregation. Even as a boy, the streaks of hostility were evident for him to notice. His parents lived there for over two decades. Since his father was one of the few educated Westerners at the time, he had moved to the North to work as a waterworks superintendent. There were many job opportunities in the North because there had been a strong aversion to formal education. But the people’s implicit obedience to the shenanigans of the white man would cause the colonial masters to focus their developmental strides there. They had few schools but many factories and companies that depended on workers from outside the community to thrive. In other words, the North was more or less the “greener pasture” of the Nigerian nation-space. The only issue with it was the problem of assimilation. First, the North was not in support of the welding—not wedding—of 1914. They wanted to be alone and free. But since it was easier to rule the people as a unit, the white man defied all odds and turned the country into a motley amalgam. Things became challenging for the unhappy couple. There was a climate of hate and fear. In the Western region, Easterners had fully integrated into society. They lived alongside the Yoruba, participated in social events together, and their children attended the same schools. However, in the North, under the influence of local rulers—and with no objection from the British—Southerners from both East and West were confined to Sabon Garis, which were considered special settlements for strangers and were located outside the main city walls. The plain name for these so-called “special settlements” was ghetto (the den of kafirs). Life within these ghettos was vibrant and full of energy, but interaction with the Hausa population was limited, as the Hausa preferred to keep their distance. Education and religion were separated by group, and the two distinct communities—like negros and whites—existed side by side with no British effort to promote unity or integration.

In 1959, the last year of explicit colonialism in Nigeria, Uzor’s father lost his sight and decided to move back to Asaba with his family. At this time, Uzor was around nineteen years old, and his kid sister was fourteen. Since he was already done with secondary, he went ahead to join the pioneer set of UNN and study engineering. It was at this time that he met Okpara (not Michael Okpara), and together they started their Electronic Shop business. The growth of the business was slow, but they kept the embers alive (even when Okpara put a lady in the family way in his final year) and finally graduated to the excitement of their families.

---

Uzor arrived early but was held down by his village acquaintances in a mum-and-pop palm wine shanty close to his father’s house in Asaba. These were his new companions since he had parted ways with the family he had given a lift to at Onitsha.

“Uzor, Uzor,” Okpeheye, the revered grammatical drunkard in the neighbourhood, hailed Uzor, almost falling as he spoke. “The war has brought you home, abi?” He sputtered. “Should I say war is good? Yes—oh yes, war, in parts, is good. If not for it, I wouldn’t have seen you this time.”

Uzor laughed and patted the bench for him to sit and share his wine and bush meat.

“This is a complete you, Uzor,” the drunkard continued. “Last year, there was a massive exodus of Southerners from the North. They couldn’t stand the massacre. There were nonsensical killings of people, and they had to leave. Some came back without legs. Some didn’t make it home. Some were brought back without heads. I even know of one traumatised mother who returned with just a bowl in her lap, containing the head of her child, which had been chopped off in her presence. I praise God that Uzor, even though not returning from the North,”—he snapped his fingers to emphasise distance—“has come back whole and healthy.” 

“God is great,” Uzor said.

“When did you come?”

“I just arrived.”

“That is good.” He sputtered again. “I will not touch your wine nor your meat. It is this thing that is bringing issues in Nigeria.”

The people around laughed.

“Who is there?” Okpeheye asked, turning his head round. “Bring a keg of palm wine and the waist of that your male grasscutter. Uzor will pay. You don’t know him? He is an exporter and importer of all kinds of electronic contraptions.”

“You cannot be eating that much when war is coming,” someone said.

“Who is speaking?” Okpeheye snapped. “Are you here to fetch water? Nooooo. You are here to eat and drink. Are you not aware of the imminent war? Now, let me tell you, boy.” He coughed and patted his chest as though something was burning there. “As far as hunger is not a respecter of the mood of the nation, the hungry one must keep eating and drinking. Is that clear?”

“It is clear,” the scrum in the shanty shouted in agreement.

At last, Uzor was free from the grip of the shanty. He drove home and met his parents in the house. His mother was happy to see him. She danced in circles and went into the kitchen to make his favourite dish. By evening, they had dinner and plunged into a night of lamentations. The condition of the country worried Pa Uzor. He had wanted his daughter to come home, but she insisted the atmosphere in Lagos, unlike in the Eastern Region, was sober. All seemed to be well.

“She will be fine,” Uzor assured his father. 

“Amen oo,” the mother punctuated.

“Ojukwu shouldn’t have made the pronouncement. He ought to have waited for a while.”

“You may be right, Papa. But the fact is that Ojukwu did what was right for the moment. When a people cannot get safety from a place that is supposed to be home, then they shouldn’t be blamed for leaving. It is better to leave where living is only a bequest for a particular section of the country.”Pa Uzor actually saw the point. Secession was the necessary evil the Easterners needed. The piquant anti-Igbo pogrom of 1966 was still fresh in the hearts of the people. Many graves were still yet to bear grass.  The Easterners had endured the pains over time and, through Ojukwu, made their voices clear in all peace confabs, especially the two-day accord in Aburi, Ghana. The welding the British government did had failed and snapped open at the same place where the wires were hurriedly joined. What remained was for the threads to shrink. The Eastern end—much more vulnerable—shrank into the cosy acropolis of what it named Biafra. Then, as if a proxy of the gone colonial government, Yakubu Gowon rushed in with a Bible and a Quran to renew the vows of an ill marriage. We are one Nigeria. Let’s not dash our wedding rings into the receptacle of history. This was the voice of the priest behind the federal pulpit. But enough seemed to be enough for the abused partner.

---

Uzor arrived in Asaba on May 30, 1967, the day Ojukwu had made a grand pronouncement on the status of Biafra. And since he arrived, each passing day seemed to be more glorious than the present one. The possibility of peace was diminishing at a neck-breaking speed. Between July and August, the infant of the national discord had metamorphosed into a full-fledged war. The most horrible news that got to Uzor—in the months the federal side had not started launching full-scale offensives—was that his shop in Onitsha had become a makeshift prison for sabos (a corruption for saboteurs), and it was actually there that, according to his source, Wole Soyinka was detained for hours before he finally had access to the Biafran warlord. Wole Soyinka? he had thought. He knew him. That slim intellectual with a voluminous afro hairdo needed no introduction. Uzor, though an engineer by training, had read Wole’s books, notably A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and the Jewel. In the former book, the prophetic sabo did warn against all that was happening at the moment.

“Things are getting disastrous by the day,” Uzor told his father when he finally had his audience later in the evening of the day the shop news reached him.

By August, the Biafran side had taken over more or less the whole of the Midwest Region. They flooded Benin City and stayed in control until the federal troops came and started to repel them. At last, the Biafran side was pushed back to the shores of the Niger. To be safe, the Biafrans severed their end of the Niger Bridge to hamper the federal troops from infiltrating Onitsha, which at the time was the heartbeat of the Biafran cause. To be sure the enemies were flushed, the federal troops trailed the Biafrans into Asaba. They got to Asaba on August 5. Unable to cross the broken bridge, the Nigerian army decided to vent its anger on the innocent dwellers of Asaba. First, they accused the people of siding with the Biafrans. Second, they said the residents were harbouring the enemies of the country. Upon these premises, the abuse of human rights began. They went about sacking houses, beating people, raping women, and shooting whatever they wanted. Residential buildings and trader shops were raided. What happened to a resident depended on the mood of the trigger-happy killers in uniform. If you were Igbo, death was certain. To be Igbo was to be Biafran. And to be Biafran was to live under the threat of torture and death.

The soldiers operated into the night and resumed the next day. On this very day, Pa Uzor’s house was also stormed. One lanky soldier slapped Pa Uzor across the face. How dare the old man stare at him while he was talking? That was a blind man, old enough to be the father of the abusive soldier.

“His eyes may seem intact, but he doesn’t see. Why slap him?” Uzor spoke from where he was forced to kneel with his mother.

“Shut up,” one of the soldiers commanded. “No be us be the cause of im bad sight.”

The lanky soldier cocked his gun. “You dey speak turanci.”

“Neither is my father the cause of the palaver in Nigeria.” Uzor rose to his feet and started working towards his father, who was now lying supine on the veranda.

“Get down or I shoot you.”

Those were the last words Uzor heard and could remember when he finally woke from his trance. The lanky soldier had cracked Uzor’s head with the butt of his gun. The throbbing headache would not leave him. His parents were also recovering from the horror of the previous afternoon. The next morning, Uzor heard the residents of Asaba were going out for a peaceful march against the uncalled-for brutality of the Nigerian army on innocent citizens. Even in his condition, he tagged along, literally walking turkey. The Peace March was a just cause. To miss it was a shameful thing to do.

The streets were filled with people dressed in white, singing One Nigeria at the top of their lungs. Uzor was in his white three-piece flannel suit, chanting and calling for the termination of the army’s untoward operations in Asaba. At one particular junction, they encountered a group of soldiers. But the stream of demonstrators continued with the march and the peaceful call for peace in their town. One Nigeria. One Nigeria. They thought this would calm the federal troops. It boomerang instead. The soldiers hijacked the crowd and started to divvy them into groups of ten or twenty people, especially men and boys, who were then shot and killed in the open glare of the rest of the people. The soldiers were heard mocking the civilians. Some threw the mockery jibes at the people in Hausa. Dan banza. Uzor heard all of it because he had lived in the North.

“Please, we do not want the war,” one boy in the crowd said.

“Who just talk now now?” one soldier asked.

“Una no go talk?” another one asked, cocking his gun.

The crowd had to push the boy to the front.

“Na you no wan war, abi?”

He nodded, his body shaking.

“What do you want?”

“Peace,” he answered.

He was indeed given permanent peace.

The massacre peaked at the Ogbe-Osowa Square, where the federal troops decided to mount a machine gun in an open-back truck. Dissolving the crowd was a waste of time, so they preferred mass shooting. At the nod of the military potentates, fire was opened on the civilians. There was commotion. About ten bullets or so were lodged into Uzor’s left thigh. Due to his state of health and the new bullet wounds, he was trampled upon in the crowd and was trapped beneath the corpses of fallen civilians. The square was littered with corpses and bullet shells. Some people died with their eyes still open. Close to where Uzor lay, there was the corpse of a young girl. She looked like Elizabeth. Even in death, there was a smile on her face, which faded as quickly as the consciousness of Uzor.After four days in a coma, he regained consciousness in a dingy hospital room. His head was pounding and his vision was blurry. He could see, not too far from his sickbed,  his kid sister talking to a man in white scrubs, a stethoscope dangling from his left hand. They were talking about him, but in low tones. From where he lay, he could hear words like serious and amputation. Uzor rubbed his eyes and looked at his bandaged thigh—numb and bloodied. It wasn’t just him, but Nigeria, too, needed an amputation.

---

Ornguze Nashima Nathaniel is a Nigerian writer and editor. He is a major in mathematics and loves writing speculative fiction through “Acheyinka,” his coined literary style that blends the clarity of Achebe and Wole Soyinka’s lyrical, strange ways of depiction. 

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

Lagos, Nigeria.

This morning, just after Salat Fajr, the first prayer of the day, they took my bones out of the place they had lain for the last forty years. The white cloth I’d been shrouded in was still intact, although no longer white. I am now free from the unmediated darkness. I am among breathing bodies, beating hearts, and new smells. I can hear my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and random people, planning what to do after this uncommon spectacle.  I can see three bare-backed diggers, their T-shirts tied around their surgical face masks as the stench of rotting wood fills the air. They pulled out the two planks of decayed wood that once covered my body and tossed my remains on them as if I wasn’t once a person.

Ayaan, my eldest daughter, jumps forward, nearly tripping over her Ankara wrapper. “Oga, I beg o, softly now…” For a moment, I hover above the scent of sour earth, watching wood lice scatter into the red soil as if they’d been called to tell my secrets. Secrets now rising with the disturbed soil.

 “Do you want my father to haunt you, or are we not paying for your service?” she says in between retying her wrapper and covering her face.

“Sorry o, but Madam, we know what we’re doing,” replies one of the diggers, his voice muffled beneath the blue surgical face mask.

What has happened to my country, to my children? Did I not do enough by them to warrant myself a peaceful resting place? Are they desperate for money, or do they just want rid of me?  

The stench of decaying leaves and cashew fruit hangs low in the air. My cashew trees are in full bloom. Their yellow and orange fruits dot the ground like forgotten dreams. There is a faint sound of a woman crying, but no one seems concerned. My three girls sit on white plastic chairs, thumbing their prayer beads. Their faces are lined and their steps are slow. They murmur verses from the Quran and caress their tasbih like they’re repeating an unholy incantation. I can see my son, Santos, roaming amongst the small gathering of onlookers. He looks like he did on the day he passed. Tall with his head and shoulders bent forward. His fair skin, dry and ashy; he was never one for moisturiser. He moves with the nervous energy of a bee drunk on palm wine, peering into his sisters’ faces.

“Do you people not have places to go?” says Ayaan.

“People will always poke-nose,” replies Nofissatou, the youngest. She rearranges her scarf around her mouth and nose and continues thumbing her tasbih. Feet shuffle; people look at the slim rectangular blocks in their hands but make no attempt to leave. They all have what I think is a walkie-talkie device. Times have changed. Can they not hear the crying woman? The diggers are shouting and waving at the only man with a clean shirt and a clipboard. They’ve found something. Suddenly, one of the diggers shouts, holding up a dirt-caked ring on what must have once been a finger. The man in the clean shirt steps forward, his face alight like he’s discovered gold.

“How many graves are there?” he asks.

Ayaan, her voice flat, doesn’t look up. “My father, his father, and our brother. Three.”

“We have found another grave. This is now a crime scene,” the man announces.

Someone snorts. Someone else asks if the family will still serve food after the prayers.

“Are you for real? See me see trouble. Have you been watching Netflix?” says Nofissatou.

The man in charge taps his device and shouts into the static. Uncertainty creeps around the gathering. I see heads turn away from the graves, devices held aloft; everyone is waiting.

The woman’s cries get louder.  I can see my father stumbling near the dry well. I must talk to him. The dead only talk to each other when they’re amongst the living.

“I told you there’d be others buried here,” says a man in the crowd to his friend. “I guess they will not be serving food”

I hover around the group of people listening to what they’re saying, looking at their devices. I move back to the graves and back to where my daughters sit. They look well. Their eyes are not rheumy and tinged with blue like their mother’s. The woman’s cries are drifting through the yard, getting louder with each minute. I don’t think the people can hear her. They have found another grave, but not the letters and emblems of a war I had no business being in. 

---

I bought the land in October 1945. A month after I returned home to Lagos with dreams sewn into the waistband of my trousers. I promised myself I’d do two things if I ever made it out of Burma.

Build a house.

Start my own commonwealth.

“The empire needs you. Come sign up, come fight for the empire,” the army recruiters would shout as you boarded a Zarpas bus at Idi-Oro motor park, as if the oppressors were in our backyard. If you were unlucky enough to go to court, instead of paying a fine, you’d be enlisted by force. I never understood why we Nigerians had to fight a war with people who didn’t wrong us. I thought myself lucky when, at age 28, they first said I was too old to fight. 

All that changed when my father introduced me to Ramota, the one-eyed daughter of his best friend. Ramota was a Saro girl. A descendant of slaves repatriated from Brazil. When we got married in 1943, food and basic stuff were four times the price they had been. The colonial government issued ration cards, and people had to queue for hours to buy common Garri. 

My Father and I would set traps to catch wild guinea fowl and antelopes in Oke-Arin forest. We made good money, and the price of bushmeat was not regulated like palm oil and other foodstuffs. And then I severed three fingers of my left hand while tending a trap. “At least you can’t be forced to fight now,” said my father as he freed the rest of my hand and the exhausted pangolin.

Ramota and I had twins within the first year of marriage, a boy and a girl. Taiwo, our tiny daughter, came out first. My reluctant son, Kehinde, was born three hours later as Ramota lay spent and anaemic on a mat in our room. Seven days later, Taiwo stopped breathing. It was the afternoon of their naming ceremony. As soon as the guests left, Ramota put her tiny body in an old tobacco tin and pushed it under the bed. She put lemon grass and wild basil in the box and screamed at anyone who tried to take it from her. At night, she’d rock the box as if our baby girl were asleep. One night as she bathed our son, I took the box to my father. My father buried Taiwo in the forest as Ramota’s cries echoed through the darkness. I wiped her face with a wet handkerchief and wondered how tears could fall from her eyeless socket. Today, people would say that the incident traumatised her.

Harmattan season, 1944. The war raged in places far away from home. Food got more expensive, and more young people were forced to sign up to fight. The red sand from the north coated everything like a second skin, and people’s lips and skin would crack like fragile Chinese porcelain.  Even the dew on the grass was red. Maybe it was hunger, the dry air or grief, but Ramota lost her senses that week. She called me a murderer. She told anyone who’d listen that I sacrificed her baby because she was a girl. She said I was so useless that even the army didn’t want me. She spat in my face and threw a clay pot at my head. My fists took on a life of their own, fuelled by hunger and anger. I didn’t stop hitting her until she lay on the ground covered in dirt. Blood pooled around her head, turning the red earth burgundy. I stopped when my father threw a bucket of water over me just as the police arrived.

They put me in a cell at Mushin police station with five other men caught wandering after the wartime curfew. We stayed there for two nights. In exchange for food, we swept the police compound and picked up litter, chained to each other like slaves. On the third night, I found myself at Apapa seaport along with other misfits, ex-prisoners and recruits. Instead of prison, they drafted me into the 82nd West African army division. They said we had to defend the King and the Commonwealth. I couldn’t look back. I thought we’d see parts of the world I only saw in the newspaper, but little did I know that the things I saw would visit me in my quiet moments. They don’t tell you that about war. 

We went by sea to India. A place called Pune, where people spoke many different languages, women wore rings in their noses, and some men wore long scarves on their heads. The captain of my unit named me Edi. His English tongue could not pronounce Ahmed. In Pune, they taught us how to fire artillery, how to fight, hand-to-hand combat—jungle training, they called it. The elephant grass in the bush went past my waist, and the sun beat down on our heads and punished us for being in someone else’s war. After our first month of training, we were sent to Burma and plunged into combat.

In Burma, they gave us weekly injections for malaria. If the bullets didn’t kill you, then dysentery or typhoid would ravage you. We cut grass, felled trees, played cards and carried guns.  Not the type that my father used to take hunting for wild boar in the forests of Ibadan; they were big ones that we fed necklaces of bullets. The noise they made worked its way into our bellies, along with the sickly smell of bodies buried in haste. And we’d hear the repeating sounds in the dark of night when we slept with one eye open, cradling our weapons like our beloved. I would talk to people one day, and the next day, I’d see them floating down the Irrawaddy River. When the food ran out, we’d eat grasshoppers, crickets and bush rats until a parachute dropped a parcel of food and ammunition, then we’d have Spam and dried potato flakes. I would have given anything for some of Ramota’s slow-cooked beans and hot pepper sauce.

When the war was over, they gave us medals and money with promises of more. Pension, they called it. I was nearly 31 with a mangled right hand, a knack for picking up languages spoken far away from home and good at card games. They put us on a ship back home, and within six weeks, we landed at Apapa port and received a hero’s welcome. I came back broken. I’d seen things that no one needed to see in a lifetime. Nobody knew where my wife was. 

I met and married Zafiya and had three more children. Zafiya was an older woman who’d lost her husband in the war. She wore plum red lipstick and dyed her hair with henna and the indigo leaves she plucked from the backyard. She said we should rename Kehinde so people wouldn’t ask about his twin, so we called him Santos. I built this house with the money I’d won in a card game with a lieutenant of our division, a sum of four hundred pounds, which was a lot of money back then. I planted cashew, lime, and orange trees. Their vibrant colours and fragrant blossoms added beauty to our surroundings. There was no time to think about what went before. This was my commonwealth. 

My medals were kept in a box under my bed, along with items I had collected and the letters I had been asked to deliver. Letters that were dictated to me in the early hours of the morning, when the mosquitoes would ‘sleep’ their insides full of their last feed. When the camp was quiet and the men posted on lookout were nodding off with one eye open and slack grips on their rifles. The addresses on some of the letters faded with time. With the letters were playing cards; my lucky card with a slight dent on the edge. There were also cuttings I promised to plant one day, and an empty sandalwood perfume bottle that an Indian woman gave me to remember her by. There is probably an Edi junior somewhere in Pune, who grew up wondering why he looked different to everyone else. A part of my commonwealth, a seed that should not have been sown.

I went to Accra on the Gold Coast. To Yaoundé in the Cameroons, where they spoke French on one side of the street and English on the other. After five such visits, I no longer wanted to be the bearer of bad news. People wanted to know if their loved one suffered.

“Did he die quickly?” they asked.

“Did someone pray over him?”

“Our son was Muslim. Did they wash his body before burial?”

“Yes,” I answered, just as I would have wanted someone to do for me if the roles were reversed. I delivered those that I could and asked for forgiveness for those I couldn’t deliver.

I’d been gone a long time. Too much sugar in the blood, the doctor said, eat less, move more. He’d probably never been hungry in his life. Never had to carry rucksacks that were four times his body weight when the sun was at its highest, bullets zig-zagging through the air while a Japanese soldier was hiding in the tree above your head. At a certain age, you earn the right not to move as much as before. I went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. They buried me near the cashew trees in my yard, where the bats picked the fruit and dropped the stalks. 

---

My father’s ghost floats away as soon as I get near him. For someone so old, he moves pretty fast. The man in charge has ordered the diggers to line up all the remains in four separate coffins. In his breast pocket is a brown envelope with crisp Naira notes. I could steal it, but that will only delay them putting me in my second final resting place. My fragile mind is exhausted and ready for rest. The crying woman must be Ramota, but I cannot see her.

The house will be demolished; the land is prime real estate now, and I hear my children argue about who gets what. They finally have their commonwealth, generational wealth, as I heard one of the onlookers say. A pity the boy didn’t stay long enough to get his share.

They found my box beneath the wood that lined my grave.  I can hear the grandchildren debating whether my bones are still held together by cartilage and why they never knew that I was in the army. Do I care what my children and grandchildren think about the medals won in someone else’s war? Some of the letters disintegrate as soon as they touch them

“Stick the pieces together,” says one.

“It’s probably love letters from an old flame. There’s a map. Maybe there is buried treasure?”

“Who was Taiwo? Did we have twins in the family?” asks one of the girls as she puts the yellowed paper pieces together. 

“Maybe the medals should go to a museum,” says one of the older ones. This must be Santos’s son. His dreadlocked hair is flecked with grey, and he walks with a slight stoop just like his father.

“My father used to say he had a twin. I never believed him. Why was he called Santos?”

Santos whispers in my ear.

“Aren’t you afraid that my sister will be left here?”

“I don’t know where he put her.”  

He floats off, his bony shoulders shaking. Is he laughing or crying?

The bats have gone, but the cashew trees shed their fruit in the gentle breeze. I can still hear Ramota’s cries as they load us into the back of a rusty station wagon. The cattle egrets on their way back from the abattoir partly mask her cries. I didn’t find Taiwo’s resting place.

---

Aby Ola is an IT product manager who loves reading and writing short stories, especially anything with a historical context that leaves her scratching her head and thinking, did this really happen?

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

HE ASKED YOU to jump. Your heels throbbed, and you hadn’t been able to feel your scrunched toes in the last thirty minutes, yet you crouched and launched yourself into the air. You did it because it was Tayo; your tongue always forgot the route to the roof of your mouth whenever Tayo asked for something. 

Your too-small flats popped off your feet first, freed by the force of your stretched body from the pressure it had suffered all morning, and when your now bare feet found earth again, you lost your balance in exchange, landing on the burning asphalt. At least, now, the cap was in your hand. The cap that had gotten stuck to a branch of the gmelina tree when Tayo played his game of throw and catch as you both walked to class. The cap was not even yours, but you skinned your knee—slightly—to get it back. 

Tayo snatched it right out of your hand, not one second later, and you picked yourself up off the ground. He did not thank you, and it did not matter to your love-fogged brain. 

The first time you petted a puppy, your heart lurched in your chest, and your stomach tightened until you feared something would rupture in there, but your hands remained steady as you sank your fingers into the blanket of fur that felt very much like your aunt Niyi’s couch fabric. 

You forced your lips to let out cooing sounds you prayed Tayo would mistake for genuine admiration instead of the fear that bubbled within your chest. 

You did this because of Tayo who had said he couldn’t stand people who didn’t like dogs, and even worse, feared them. You did not care for the origin of his stance. Instead, you forced yourself to get over your sixteen-year-long phobia within the seconds it took you to crouch down at Tayo’s backyard. 

Because it was Tayo.

---

ON ONE THURSDAY evening, as you washed dishes with the vigour of one expecting payment. It would have been obvious to anyone who watched you that Tayo was woven into the very act somehow. Luckily, no one was watching. You were home alone. Your father was on an out-of-state trip, and your mother went for a church fellowship you would also have been at had you not squeezed your face like one withholding lime juice in their cheeks. You lied to your mother that your stomach ulcer was at it again. 

“Take your medicine and drink lots of water, Nne. If you feel better before I get back, do the dishes”, she said. You almost blew your cover as excitement sprang up from your gut. You bit back the squeal it travelled on. 

You would have done the dishes anyway. Out of guilt, and as a precaution. If you stayed out with Tayo, late enough for your mother to return from the fellowship to a house empty of you, the ulcer patient, and untidy at the same time, your punishment would be a lot heavier.

You still felt guilty after doing the dishes, so you swept the living room—lifting chairs, tables, and whatever else harboured dirt—and into the corridor. Everywhere gleamed when you got into your bathroom and scrubbed the dirt and sweat away, giving special attention to your underarms. You wanted to smell heavenly when you met up with Tayo and your citrusy bath gel took care of that. You slathered on the baby lotion Tayo liked to smell on you—he’d once said it reminded him of when his younger brother was a baby, the only time he’d had peace at home. You added deodorant and hoped your sweat glands would behave themselves. Just for the evening. 

It was not exactly a date you prepared for. Not realistically. Tayo did not have eyes for you in that manner, and going to a football viewing centre hardly counted as a date. But your head was in the clouds, and you let yourself sink fully into the delusion. 

You imagined Tayo hugging you in the height of excitement when his team scored a goal or won the game. You imagined the excitement taking a more interesting turn, the hug turning into a kiss—not the innocent touching of lips that happened as a mistake the day his dad got him a blackberry. He was going for your cheek and you’d been oblivious, turning just in the nick of time to have his lips meet yours. Now, you imagined a different type of kiss. With dancing tongues and butterflies, mad with desire. 

You sighed dreamily as you locked the front door and made your way to the next street.

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YOU WERE A Manchester United fan because Tayo was, and whenever he would talk about football and how good “the boys” had played in their last game, you agreed as if you knew a thing about it. At least you knew who was playing who that evening. You’d googled it, then googled pictures of the team. You’d spent hours matching names to faces over and over, like you had an exam to write on them. You had never studied that hard for an exam. 

Now, you recited the names. Wayne Rooney. Something Bailly. There was a Mourinho, but you weren’t sure if he was a player or a coach, and Tayo’s favourite, Paul Pogba. You’d heard that name so often, you didn’t need to recite it to remember.

Your lips split into an easy smile when you spotted Tayo waiting impatiently at the mouth of the zinc-constructed shack. You’d only ever seen it in passing, and normally, you would have squirmed at the thought of sitting in there for ninety minutes, but there was Tayo. 

When the game started, you found yourself staring at the players in motion, whose names you had not an iota of recollection. You prayed that Tayo would not ask anything that would unveil your ignorance. You watched the camera pan out to get a full view of the field, your confusion compounded. Now, there were just a bunch of little men chasing a ball in what looked like a chaotic race to you. 

You let your eyes unfocus and allowed your mind to roam. It was a gift you’d always had—the ability to disconnect and hide out in some part of your mind that was memory, imagination, and sometimes, both. You could sit in a hall packed tight with out-of-control monkeys, and you would not even notice the moment you disconnected. You were grateful for the gift, and where you retreated to was entirely constructed from wish-fueled imagination. 

When the first roar of excitement came, like a wave in a previously not-so-quiet ocean, you snapped out of your reverie and prepared to shout too, but it quickly lost its strength and went out sad. You partly listened to Tayo complain to the burly man, nearly the same age as your father, who sat to his left on the crude wooden bench you all perched on like pupils of an unmaintained public primary school. The world you’d built up in your head called out to you and scrambled its words like your disrupted satellite television on a rainy day. You were back on the grounds of the University of Calabar, walking hand-in-hand with Tayo and hearing him say he’d always loved you. Stuck in your cloud castle, you knew there would be a sheepish smile smudged all over your face in real time because even though you could shut the world out, you knew nothing about stopping your face from betraying your thoughts. It was a good thing the game held the attention of all around you hostage,  and it was not long before another wave washed over you. This one was stronger and did not break in seconds. You darted your eyes quickly to Tayo to confirm the look of excitement on his face. Established, you joined in the celebration, getting up from the bench, hurt from sitting on it, and jumped with your fists pumped in the air. Tayo only spared you a few seconds of shared excitement before turning his attention back to the screen. The replay was over and the game continued. No hug. No kiss. 

You sat back down awkwardly. Heated conversations flowed around you. Arguments about who should have done what, who needed to get off the field, who was most knowledgeable about the game and who was “an absolute dunce”. You thought of your mother who could possibly be home now, her tiny lips would be pursed in annoyance, making them even tinier. She’d walk from room to room twice, to confirm that her eyes were not playing tricks; to confirm that you and your stomach ulcer were indeed not at home. Then she’d sit on her favourite armchair, her feet tapping to the angry beat within her. 

You would probably receive welcoming slaps as soon as you got through the door. Two, in quick succession, on either cheek, as was your mother’s favourite style, but after that, it would be a long lecture that would go into every part of you, causing you to bloat all over. Your cheeks would swell. Your chest too. Your stomach would not even dare think of food. You’d go to bed and wake up extremely sad, and it would only get worse when your mother revealed the punishment she’d come up with at night. Whether she dreamed it up or consulted with her husband while you slept, you could never tell, but it would be strong enough to cast a cloud over your whole day—or week. 

Suddenly, you wanted to be on the way home. You wanted to hear only the flip-flop of your rubber slippers slapping the ground as you hurried home. You began to wonder why you’d believed it was a good idea in the first place. You could no longer stay in your thoughts. They were full of your mother’s angry face, and you couldn’t stay in the room either. It was too hot, too loud,  and too draining. You started to squirm in your seat. Then, like a sign from heaven, there was a loud explosion, and you immediately were on your feet and struggling with as many wanting to leave the shack. Some wanted to find where the sound had come from, but you wanted to head home straight.

You grazed your arm on something. It stung. Your ears tingled from the explosion and your heart went mad in your chest. Your feet were weak, but they moved. It was only when you were out in the night sky that you allowed yourself to breathe. You remembered Tayo. You looked around for him and saw him after a few frantic seconds. 

“What was that?” You asked, as if he were not beside you when the sound went off. 

“Transformer. That’s what these guys outside said.” He didn’t seem shaken like you. It was not unusual for pole-mounted transformers to malfunction. 

“Tayo, I want to go home.” 

“Relax nau. The game will soon be over, and I’ll walk you home.” 

No, he’d walk you halfway, because his house was closer than yours. 

“I want to go now.” 

“Because of the transformer that has already stabilised? You fear too much.” 

“I don’t care. I’m leaving.” 

You thought being firm would make him change his mind and follow you; that perhaps he would run after you and beg you not to leave, at least. He did not.

“Fine. See you tomorrow,” he said. He left you and headed back into the viewing centre. 

You were annoyed and a little scared. You never walked alone at night, and your mother’s rule was always to be home before you needed to use a torch. Yet, here you were. You were more afraid, though, of returning to Tayo and staying out even longer. So, you started your walk home, and just when you were about to turn onto your street when you heard the next explosion. You turned in time to watch a live wire drop on the zinc construction; the same one you’d been inside just watching a sport you did not enjoy. Something happened to you that hadn’t happened before. You could not describe it. Your stomach churned; you rejected what your eyes saw. You turned around and forced your feet to keep walking until you got home. 

Your mother did not welcome you home with slaps or even a tirade. She was observant, and by your countenance, anger took a backseat, fear springing up within her. 

“What is it?” She asked blankly. “Where were you?” Worry coated her voice with each question.. 

“Football. Tayo.” You breathed the words out and resumed your walk straight to your room. You dropped into your bed fully clothed, your flip flops touching your bedsheet for the first time.

You didn’t wake up around six for morning devotion or eight thirty, like you would after catching a post-devotion nap. Your mother did not bother you either. Your body and mind kept you locked in seemingly endless rounds of sleep, providing dreams you forgot as soon as the next one began. The dreams themselves did not even make sense, but your unconscious was determined to keep you from waking up. 

Eventually, you awoke around noon. There was no punishment. No quarrel. Your mother only asked you to come eat something, but your stomach felt full, and your body, limp from excess sleep.  Thoughts from the previous night hovered on the fringe of your mind; too quick for you to grasp, yet returning. You kept reaching and reaching, but your mind would not think.

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TWO DAYS LATER, you held the Vanguard reading the report. There were about thirty casualties, some dead, at the football viewing centre; the same one you had been to that night in April, desiring to be looked upon. The transformer had exploded twice, dropping that high-tension wire on the zinc construction the second time, electrocuting the victims. The victims, you thought. Tayo was a victim, and you’d watched him be one. You read on Linda Ikeji that his favourite club, the one you’d tried to learn their names, decided to wear black armbands for their next game to honour the victims.  You knew there were only eleven players, and even with the substitutes, they could not represent all of the victims. There were enough armbands but not enough people, and you wanted Tayo to be an armband too. You willed him to be the one on the arm of his favourite player, even though you would never see it because you never again watched a football game. But maybe it would be a small, very small, consolation to Tayo, the boy who never kissed you.

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Henrietta Lehi is a Nigerian creative writer on days when she is not playing around with other forms of art. 

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.