It wasn’t until after the re-introduction that Abdullah would realise that really no one was able to afford a new model iPhone from riding a bike in the city, that no one started to build a house for their parents from income as an okada man, that no one decided to take a wife at twenty-one when their only source of income was an okada. And so it was that Abdullah Garba became a thief.
It all happened in a time of chaos, a period of turbulent existence in a place named Nigeria by a white man and his lover. In a place where two hundred million people cohabit as the aftermath of great sex. It was a time when criminals and the government negotiated, and the police and the people transacted freedom. The story of our hero restarted on a furiously hot Wednesday after what would have otherwise been an unremarkable school day. The sun had shone with a wicked determination, defying all the rules of the weather that said it was harmattan, when cold winds blew and lips dried up and cracked.
On that Wednesday, everywhere and everything had burned as Abdullah’s life melted away like lit candle wax and took a totally different shape. After school, Abdullah had made his way home to change out of his striped uniform shirt into a plain faded shirt retaining his threadbare plain trouser in a hideous shade of brown, and had headed out to Mama Binta’s stall on the next street. In what had become a routine for the past two months since his mother had been hospitalised, he had bought a bowl of rice and beef stew, without the beef on credit. He had been doing this since his mother’s health started to deteriorate badly along with their family finances. Talatu, one of Mama Binta’s girls, had attended to him with that perpetual sneer she always wore.
“What do you want?”
“Rice.”
“How much own?”
“Two hundred naira.”
“No o. I can only sell hundred naira own for you. Our money don plenty for your hand.”
He couldn’t argue with her when she was right. They were beginning to owe too much here too and he knew it was a matter of time before he ran out of the goodwill that had afforded him the credit in the first place. The only reason he could still get anything on credit from Mama Binta was because before his mother fell ill, he ran errands for her after school.
Abdullah had felt nothing; he felt nothing as he trekked the thirty-minute distance to the hospital. Many people claim they can feel death before it descends; but Abdullah had felt nothing. He had not even expected it. He had not expected it even though his mother was barely a shadow of her former self, even though his mother had been diagnosed with Stage Four cancer four full months ago. It had never occurred to him that she could die, that she could die before he grew up and went to the university and became a lecturer and got married and had kids. How could she die before any of that?
Abdullah arrived at the hospital that day to the nurses leading a newly widowed woman out of the ward. He had watched with pity as the woman who could not have been older than twenty-five repeatedly flung herself at the nurses screaming what he had initially thought to be her husband’s name —Yahya. It took minutes for him to register that what she was doing was calling upon God, questioning him — Ya Allah! Ya Allah!! Ya Allah!!!
“We didn’t agree to this! This was not what we agreed!” she repeatedly screamed as though anyone could agree or disagree with death.
***
Mariam Garba’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer would be the singular event that would alter the balance of lives all the way from Sabon-Gari, Kano to Shasha, Ibadan. When Mariam first fell ill, it felt like the other times she had fallen ill, so she had gone to Musa, the “chemist” who owned a shop on the street and gotten herself the cheapest combination of arthemeter-lumefantrine she could find. She added packets of paracetamol and Vitamin B-complex, just as always.
But, this time, it was different. Mariam had been battling these recurring symptoms, and each time she completed the Nigerian standard of care for any feeling of weakness, fever, and vomiting, that did not involve any trained professional, she felt fine and moved on with her life as a cleaner at the local government office, wife to Sanusi Garba, mother to Abdullah Garba and two others.
Just that this time around, Mariam was not okay after all. She got worse, and it was then they decided on more aggressive treatment plans – stronger antibiotics and pain killers and antacids, but these too failed. Her husband, Sanusi, decided it was time to ditch western medicine: he got her some herbal mixtures that claimed to cure all ailments and spiritual attacks. Mariam forced herself to down the slimy green liquid. She had to drink half a glass of it every morning and the yellow mixture with stalks of so-called secret ingredients and the powdered substance that she had to take with hot akamu. This too failed. As the pain became even more unbearable, they acted out of character and went to the hospital. At the teaching hospital, after a series of tests, tactical extraction of information from Mariam as to her medical history, and with the dogged determination of doctors who were used to the trial-and-error practice of medicine, they found out what was wrong with Mariam. It was bad news: cancer. Even worse news: Stage Four.
***
The practice of medicine is the sale of hope; hope in bottles of pills; hope in the cutting and sewing back of the body; hope in chemotherapy and radiation, and it is in the pursuit and purchase of this hope that Sanusi’s pockets dried up. His job at the state secretariat did not pay much to begin with, but with the increasing costs of Mariam’s medical treatment it became harder to survive. Soon they could no longer afford food and Sanusi had to take loan upon loan from friends and relatives. Sanusi hated every bit of it, the grovelling before well-to-do relatives, the quiet blackmail of friends to get a loan for his wife’s treatment. But he endured it all. He endured the indignities of his new job as a night guard to augment his income. He hated watching his children go hungry, he hated sending them to school hungry in the hope that they would be fed there by a government he knew better than to trust. He hated the looks of pity that soon turned to hostility from his landlord and neighbours as Mariam’s illness dragged longer. He hated the words of admonition he got from those who thought they were doing him a favour by telling him what they thought he needed to hear. He hated having to sit through the cruelty of their advice as they encouraged him to take his wife out of the hospital and bring her home to be with her family because that might help her recover. What was left unsaid but Sanusi heard nonetheless, was that she was going to die anyway so it was better to save money.
He couldn’t blame them though. They didn’t see her. They didn’t see just how much pain she was in, and they didn’t see what was left of her. They didn’t know her either. They didn’t know just how much she had sacrificed for him but he knew. He knew that if tables were turned, that Mariam would rather die than take him out of the hospital. Yet, something had to give. And something did give: Abdullah’s childhood, his education, his dreams.
***
“Ku kula da kannenku.”
“Take care of your younger ones” would be her last words to him. Although she had said this to him every day since he could remember, it would stick this last time. Taking care of his younger ones would be Abdullah’s singular philosophy for the rest of his life. The Abdullah who would have been considered the poster child for the Nigerian dream—minimum wage parents, two siblings, private primary education, state secondary education, with prospects of public university education, would die and in his stead a new Abdullah would be born.
It was official, they were no longer content, poor Nigerians; they could no longer afford to be that kind of dignified poor. They were now on another level of poverty; the poverty of kwashiorkor and hunger, the kind that defies policies and graphs. It was as though Mariam’s sickness was the first episode of a tragedy series. Soon after her death, they were forcefully ejected from the two rooms that had served as their home for more than a decade. The Garbas had to move into their family house on the outskirts of Kano and maybe they could have made a comeback of some sort, but the universe had its own plans as Sanusi would soon lose his job at the state secretariat. His appointment had been a political one and with the end of the tenure came the end of his employment. With no money, no job and debts way above his annual income for five years combined, there was very little that could be done to save the boy Abdullah was.
***
Ibadan shocked Abdullah, which was strange because Kano was just as big and as dirty and densely populated as Ibadan. However, Ibadan was different, not just because the people spoke in a language so subtle that it was difficult to understand anything without context, or because the people yelled when they were happy, yelled when they were angry and yelled when they gossiped; not just because the women were everywhere and in the markets they shamelessly jostled for things they had no business jostling for, or because hostility was the default mode in Ibadan; not just because the people looked down on him and anyone who looked like him, but because it was Ibadan, the city with the brown roofs, the city where its yellow and wine coloured cabs doubled as a moving theatre show. Ibadan was a city that got lost in itself and slowly, begrudgingly, Abdullah would come to love Ibadan, and it is in this city that his life would reinvent itself, to die, and be reborn, and die again.
Abdullah didn’t care much for Audu, his mother’s nephew who had lived with them till he turned seventeen and decided he had to leave home and start fending for himself. It wasn’t that Audu decided to take responsibility for himself that was the problem. It was that he had put the whole family through hell to do it. Audu had simply left the house and did not return until two years later with a motorcycle and affectations of a far-away land he spoke of with so much disdain, Abdullah wondered why he didn’t just saved them all trouble and returned home to Kano. In the two years that Audu was gone, his mother had stopped speaking to Mariam and had taken to telling anyone who cared to listen that Mariam had “eaten” her son. Mariam would have ended up in jail but for her brother, Audu’s father, who insisted that Mariam could have had nothing to do with their son’s disappearance. After Mariam’s death, Audu returned to bury the woman who had acted as his mother his whole life, and to take her son away to a new life, an unknown life in Ibadan.
In Ibadan the boy grew to become a man, suddenly, swiftly, unexpectedly. Audu would be Abdullah’s guide in Ibadan, showing him the ropes of a criminal life. In all the tales of his adventures in Ibadan, what Audu had conveniently left out was the fact that he was a thief. Everyone had assumed all Audu did was ride his motorcycle commercially. It wasn’t until after the re-introduction that Abdullah would realise that no one was really able to afford a new model iPhone from riding a bike in the city, that no one started to build a house for their parents from income as an okada man, that no one decided to take a wife at twenty-one when their only source of income was an okada. And so it was that Abdullah Garba became a thief.
***
On his day of independence, Abdullah had stressed upon what he vowed would be his last operation. He did not want to steal from people anymore. No matter the justifications Audu always readily provided, he couldn’t keep up with that lifestyle. He wasn’t a thief; it was that simple. So much was riding on this outing: if he did it well, he could get out of that life, leave Audu and find an honest way to make a living. They had gotten the information from one of their friends from Kano who now worked as a gateman for a rich local politician. He had told them that his boss and his family were returning from their vacation that day and there was bound to be a lot of dollars and jewellery.
Each time Abdullah expressed his worry, Audu told him it was the politician’s fault his life turned out the way it did. After all, the politicians were the ones who kept stealing from the people, they were the ones who let his mother die, they were the ones who made his father a debtor, they were the ones who made education unavailable to people like them. The little they took from them was a part of their entitlement that had made its way back into their pockets.
Independence day was the first time Abdullah would go into an operation with a real gun. It was the first time he would be confronting his victims in the two years that he had been in Ibadan. Abdullah, Audu and three other members of their gang had set out that day with different intents but all hopeful that nothing would go wrong. Nothing went wrong, except they got more than they bargained for and Abdullah made a transition from a thief to a rapist and then to a killer and then back to Abdullah Garba, son of Mariam Garba.
***
He joined the numerous northerners who rode motorcycles commercially in the city. The ones who were not scared to go anywhere as long as they knew the place or you knew the place. The ones who played dumb until you tried to cheat them out of their money. The ones who played Temple Run on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, weaving through traffic fearlessly. The ones you have to constantly tell “small-small”, “watch”, “slow down” every few seconds. They would comply, only for them to pick up again at an even higher speed. The ones whose phone numbers you collected and saved as “my bike man” because their names were not too important. The ones you insist on calling “aboki” even when they object or say they are not Hausas, but they are Kanuri or Nupe. Aboki na aboki you say. Abdullah became one of them, struggling, making a living, ignoring his father’s constant complaints that his monthly remittances home had grown considerably smaller.
***
When Shakirat first met Abdullah, it was in front of a client’s house. She had been thrown out of the building around eleven at night because according to the client, she had performed horribly. Shakirat had been a less-than-successful commercial sex worker. She never got the high-end clients that would enable her catch a break from life. She was a Tier C prostitute: she got the occasional ten-thousand-naira-a-night jobs and that was it. She had flagged Abdullah’s bike that night knowing fully well she had no money to pay for the ride, but she needed to get home. On arrival at Shakirat’s house, and it was time to pay, she had invited him into her room to share her bed in exchange for the ride. And thus, an unusual romance was born.
The sex that night had been phenomenal. Shakirat had helped Abdullah shed all the layers that overshadowed the man and as she had taken him into her mouth, so had she taken away the footprints of a boy that was once a thief. With the birth of this romance, Abdullah would start to frequent Shasha market more just so he could catch a glimpse of Shakirat in her mother’s stall. Shakirat’s mother who had never expressed any opinion over her daughter’s line of business and maintained a rather disconcerting silence the entire time, suddenly felt the need to say something.
“O ti e loju ti”. You have no shame.
“Aboki olokada lo tun kan bayi”. It is now the turn of the Hausa okada rider.
Abdullah had two major things going against him. He was Hausa and he was that kind of Hausa, aboki. Yet, against all odds, their love thrived. At the core of it was a connection that was deep, a struggle against conscience and self. Of course, it helped that Abdullah was good looking in a way only Hausa men are. It helped that he was gentle and not aggressive in the way bike riders were thought to be. It helped that he was a generous lover who gave in bed just as much as he gave in presents.
At the core of their romance was a connection that was deeply rooted in ambition the rest of the world couldn’t possibly understand. His ambition to continue to work hard until he saved enough money to afford a truck. He wanted to get into the business of transporting farm produce from the north to Ibadan. Her ambition to continue to sell sex until she could finally set up a wine business. It didn’t help that her customers were all low-paying market traders and bike riders. It just meant it would take longer to put the change together while in an unending race against inflation.
***
Ijebu-Ibadan was a short man who talked fast, loud, and was popular in the neighbourhood. He was a landlord, one of those who went from building to building to remind people to pay their security and developmental levies, and money for transformer and money for cables and money for this and that. He owned the ten-room building which Abdullah lived in.
“I don’t accept Hausa people into my homes usually. You people are dirty and una too like wahala. Small trouble with another tenant you will bring knife and I don’t want trouble,” Ijebu-Ibadan had said the first time he met Abdullah. It was not the first time Abdullah would hear this. Since he could afford to get his own place, it had been a struggle to find a decent place that he could afford and, when he did, the landlords refused to rent to a Hausa commercial bike rider. Abdullah was visibly a northerner and, though he now spoke fluent Yoruba, he could never pass off as a Yoruba man.
He would eventually get a room in Ijebu-Ibadan’s house, the only room that had remained unrented in that house for the past three years, and it was no accident. The room held bad news and everybody avoided it. The stories were numerous; the last person who had lived there, a former youth corp member, could not secure a job four years after his NYSC because he had remained in that room; the person who had lived there before him, a young bachelor, had continuous bike accidents after he bought his motorcycle and started riding without instruction; and there was the young mother before him whose kids developed sickle cell anaemia when they started living in that room and the person who had lived there before her did not get a promotion in the three years that he lived there, and so the stories went. That room was bad news.
Ijebu-Ibadan and Abdullah soon developed a relationship. In no time, he became his landlord’s official bike man. In no time, Abdullah was getting home-cooked meals from Ijebu-Ibadan’s wife in appreciation for all the free rides she and her kids got to the market. In no time, Abdullah’s radio was what they all listened to and, Rahmat, Ijebu-Ibadan’s youngest daughter, had begun to pick up some lyrics of the songs Abdullah played: idanaja anobi ba dikir gabashiri ataida rosulu naisuneke a zombo dadada. Life for Abdullah was smooth with no rough edges sticking out until that fateful Friday.
***
At another end of Ibadan, on a perfectly still Friday morning, one of those mornings that held the promise of furious sunshine, a woman called Abimbola was getting tongue lashed by her husband. That morning should have been unremarkable and fleeted away, and Abdullah would have stayed alive if Abimbola’s husband had not fought her, if he had not called her a wasteful wife with zero ambition. If Abimbola’s husband had simply realised that this country was a fragile thing and words like that could spark a killing rampage. If he had known that his words would put his wife in a foul mood and cause her to transfer her aggression to Aliyu. But he fought her and she fought with Aliyu and Aliyu would fight her back and blood would flow in Shasha.
*****
Abimbola finished her shopping in the market. She did not usually come here to buy things. It was quite a distance from her house, but she had come to this market because her friend, Funke, had convinced her that the commute would be worth it at the prices she would be getting pepper and tomatoes. She was not sure it was worth it. The sun was unbearably hot; the prices of other food items had increased from last week but the allowance her husband gave her for food had not. She knew he was sure to complain about the number of days their pot of stew would last.
“When you are always at home, why won’t you feel like eating all the time? That’s why nothing ever lasts in this house,” he had said to her the previous day when she told him they had run out of foodstuff.
When they were dating and she had said things like “I just want to relax and be taken care of” he had thought it was all just cruise. He actually thought she would have wanted to build a career. She definitely had what it took. She had bagged a second-class upper degree in software programming from a first-generation university. She had participated in various extra-curricular activities and volunteering while in school. He had taken this as a sign of a CV-led life. So even though she always said she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, he thought it was only a matter of time before she got bored and found a job. She did get bored but not enough to actually send out her resume or go job hunting. She just didn’t want it. So, he cut her allowance, hoping necessity would unearth the ambition in her. But he would soon realise that ambition is a chameleon. It shape-shifts. Necessity did fuel her to do something: it made her start volunteering again. So, she stopped staying at home to think about what next to buy and started spending time at the orphanage around their neighbourhood. She started helping the older people who lived alone with their cleaning and laundry. She started sitting with Mr Adeleke down the street, who had been sentenced to a life of immobility after a fatal car accident and was often home alone because his wife had to make money for their family, and the kids and their domestic help were away at school. She began to provide human solace for him. And so she was to Mrs Ajani, a full-time housewife who was miserable and desperately wanted to start a business and couldn’t stop talking about the things she wanted to do but her husband would not let her. Mrs Ajani particularly loved Abimbola not just because she did not tell her she should take control of her life and stop living in the shadow of a man as though it were that simple, but also because she had a very dark sense of humour and genuine warmth. So she was also for Malik, their neighbour’s gatekeeper whose tales about his hometown she listened to with an amused indulgence even though she knew they were exaggerated and oft repeated. Of course, her husband took her new efforts as a form of shameless busy-bodying. But it didn’t matter, she enjoyed it. She was living the life. She started running again and started reading again and started writing again but she wasn’t making any money.
After shopping, Abimbola had looked around her for a wheelbarrow pusher to help her move the things she had bought to the car park. She spotted one. She preferred kids because they seemed to be happy doing the work, the adult porters always tattooed their frustrations on themselves. There was no one else around who was idle, so she beckoned to him.
“How much?”
“Aunty, bring six hundred.”
“Ahn ahn! For wetin?”
“Madam, see all the plenty things wey you wan carry.”
“I go give you two hundred and fifty naira.”
“E no gree.”
“Three hundred nko?”
“Pay four hundred make I help you.”
“I go give you three hundred and fifty naira.”
“Na because say you carry belle o.”
“Thank you.”
Aliyu, the chosen porter, helped Abimbola carry her load. When they arrived at the car park, she handed him one two hundred naira note and one one hundred naira note.
“Aunty wetin be dis? My money na three-fifty na.”
‘Wetin? I don tell you be say na three hundred naira I get. Oga abeg take, gimme my load. See the small thing you wan collect three-fifty for. Ole.”
A struggle ensued and in no time a crowd had gathered as though they had been waiting for it. It all happened so fast; Aliyu raising his fist and striking Abimbola, Abimbola falling and not moving, just lying there in the dust, the garage boys crawling out of their holes, the tyres burning and the flesh burning alongside it. In less than sixty minutes, the air was thick with acrid smoke. Shasha burned as did other parts of Ibadan. Hausas everywhere in the city became targets. Their kinsman had killed a sister, a pregnant sister, so they all had to pay. Shops would burn, houses would burn and then people would follow.
*****
Hate is like party jollof, everyone gets a taste. If you don’t get to eat at this party, you’d get at the next. It was the year 2001, right in front of the house in which he stood now, Ijebu-Ibadan’s brother’s mangled form was dropped by brave friends who had risked all to get the body before fleeing the north, leaving behind all they had spent decades of their lives working for after a riot had broken out. His brother’s wife and children could not be located and that was the last ever heard of them. And right in front of the spot where his brother had lain, stiff, limbs missing, eyes wide and accusing, stinking, there was Abdullah, pleading with him to let him into the house, to protect him from the hands of death that were reaching for him. No one showed Ijebu-Ibadan’s brother mercy. No one showed his wife and children mercy. No one even cared enough to bury their little bodies. Yet, here was this aboki asking for protection. In that moment, all memories faded and hate blurred whatever affection Ijebu-Ibadan had for Abdullah. In that moment, he forgot how Abdullah, unasked, tended his goats and cleaned his gutters and played with his children and brought them suya at night. In that moment, only one emotion was alive and present: hate.
It would take a while before Abdullah would realise Ijebu-Ibadan would not let him in. He had to run, and run he did. He sought the protection of love, certain that love conquers all. But on this day, love was missing in action. Anger and hate were more convincing and had conquered all, including love. And so it was that Shakirat turned him away. How could “they” kill a pregnant woman? Hausa people were indeed no different from the animals they tended. And before he could think to run, death caught up with him. The rush of feet, the shouts of his would-be killers, “E mu! E mu! Omo ale aboki!” Get him, get him, that bastard Hausa man!
Abdullah saw the hate, felt the touch of the anger, heard the thrust of the weapon and then felt the pain. As Abdullah looked into the eyes of the man who had stabbed him, he saw his own fear reflected in his killer. He saw the eyes of the politician’s daughter from his independence day operation, pleading as he had thrust his manhood into what was left of her after the rest of the gang had had their way with her. He saw her blood mingle with his.
In his last moments, he wondered where Audu was. He wondered about that girl from independence day as he wondered about his father and brothers. Ku kula da kannenku. He knew he had failed. What would become of his father and brothers? Would they ever find out about him? Would they ever realise he had turned into something they could not recognise even if briefly? He feared that there was only one way left for them to go. He feared they would find a home on the streets, that they would find solace in wi-wi. And as he lay there losing blood fast, dying slow, the house of Ijebu-Ibadan was on fire, burning, and so was he along with his wife and children and neighbours. And so it was that a city burned and a people self-destroyed.
THE END
I also happen to believe Chimamanda's writing is the next best thing after Spaghetti.
- Hate Is Like Party Jollof || Bọ́ládalẹ́ Tèmítọ́pẹ́ Maryam - February 12, 2022
This is such an awesome read. The emotions are soo raw and gut wrenching. The way the words were beautifully weaved transported me to a world of Abdullahs.
Temitope is indeed a talented writer. I am a fan on Instagram @hungrywriters and I must say She leaves me in awe of her talent every time.
Keep it up
Kudos! Keep up the good work 🙌❣️
Every word was worth reading. A real tragedy yet I couldn’t take my eyes off till the end.
Omg!!! My Temitope
This story left me breathless. From the title, to the choice of words and even the pent out of emotion. I love it all. Well-done and I hope to read more of this.. you’re a talented writer sis.. kudos!!!
How can hatred be as sweet as party jollof! Just wondering…
You write beautifully and I can’t help but crave more
Na everybody go share for this suffer in Nigeria?
Wow! I single out this being the best i have read so far this year, so awesome and fantastic. You got me so emotional. Ride on Amal! Looking forward to more from you…
Nice one sis.. 👏.
What a beautiful read!
I love the way you keep your readers engaged.
This is beautifully written.
I love the build up and definitely the foreshadowing.
Great job!
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽