Why was he different? Why didn’t he ever feel the inclination to believe that people could have cetain traits based on tribe or religion? Could it be a delusion of sophistication or superiority? Or was he bent on self-destructing on the altar of excessive trust? But it wasn’t just him! The members of his immediate family were very accommodating and had a foundation of love. Could they all be headed for doom then?
“Oga Junior!”
“Oga Junior!!”
Distressed shouts uncharacteristic of the serene environment filtered in with the cool air through the open louvers of the window in Emeka’s bedroom. The breeze seemed to enjoy teasing the purple blinds embroidered with golden leaf-like designs. It was at least midnight and all godly souls were fast asleep or at the very least, half asleep, like Emeka who retired late after a long session of online games.
“Wayo Allah, Oga Junior abeg open za door!”
At this point, Emeka drowsily rose. He recognised the voice.
Only one person called him “Oga Junior”. He really was nobody’s ”oga”. He was just a twenty-one year old university student who still lived with his parents in their official residential quarters. Emeka was home for his semester break and his parents and only sibling, Amaka, were out of town for a distant cousin’s wedding ceremony. The crickets chirped outside, the stars glowed in the midnight sky and the leaves rustled in reverence to the night breeze.
“Jigawa, why are you shouting like a mad man in the middle of the night?” Emeka asked, more than slightly annoyed.
A distraught Audu crawled out of hiding and made for the back door which was now held open. Audu was no stranger to the Kachi’s kitchen. He had his favourite meals of jollof rice and chicken there on festive days and Mrs. Kachi’s special meal of yam and egg sauce more frequently. The Kachis’ was second home to Jigawa.
At sixteen, Audu had left Jigawa for Enugu to work as a cobbler, one of those ones that went from street to street and announced their presence with the rhythmic sounds of their tool kits. The wooden boxes had metal handles which had flattened bottle caps attached to them. It was these bottle caps that made the sounds when the handles were moved.
There had been many cobblers before and after Audu but somehow the Kachis had taken to him. It wasn’t long before he gained exclusive rights to polish their Sunday shoes or fix Emeka’s school sandals which seemed to have a fresh tear or a buckle missing after each school day. It was Mr. Kachi who started calling him Jigawa after enquiring about his state of origin and the name had stuck.
Even the times when Audu would knock on the gate and if asked who it was, he would say,
“Na Jigawa”.
Emeka’s dad had pulled some strings for Audu to be employed as the official maiguard at the staff quarters, a position that allowed him to do his personal work during the day and a comfortable place of his own to rest his head at night.
Audu curled up in a corner of the kitchen, ignoring the mahogany chairs and table. Emeka picked up his phone and found the reason for Audu’s fright. Social media was on fire with the news trending.
“Retaliation attacks over killings of Igbos in the north.”
He cursed under his breath. Not again!
It all made sense to him now. Audu had escaped an attack.
He kept scrolling and found gory images of people being mobbed, beaten and tortured. There were equally gruesome pictures trending of the killings of Igbos in the north. Mangled bodies, charred body parts, destroyed properties. It was free for all on social media. Comments like, “Spare no one” and “Blood for blood” were being thrown around. Everyone was baying for blood while he had been playing Call of Duty.
Audu was safe for the night. Safe for as long as he remained with the Kachis. But he was worried for his brothers—the other cobblers who lived in the adjoining street, the mallam who had a tuck shop at Chime Bus Stop, and Sani, the mai suya at Lisbon Street.
“Don’t worry about the others, they’ll be fine,” reassured Emeka as if he read his mind.
Emeka didn’t give much thought to the statement though. Even he knew he could be wrong and had no control over the thoughts and actions of the people outside.
It was the same way, a few years back, Aunty Caro had been told that her husband would be fine. Aunty Caro, his mother’s elder sister, was the eldest of six daughters, who went to live in Zaria as a young bride with her husband, Uncle Eva.
Eva was a jolly good fellow who worked with a top agricultural company that produced animal feeds and fertilizers. He was loved by all because of his good nature and generosity. It wasn’t long before he rose to the position of manager.
He led a simple life with his wife and twin daughters, Hassana and Husseina. Simple until the sharia crisis broke out and they had to flee their homes. Sabon Gari was a target for obvious reasons: it was where the “infidels” lived.
Arrangements were made for Aunty Caro and the twins to return to the east in a night bus. Uncle Eva was to join them after tying up a few loose ends at work.
The crisis swung in patterns like a yoyo. Some days it was intense, some days not so much. It began to seem like things were returning to normal and Uncle Eva and others like him chose to stay a little longer, maybe even bring their families back.
That night at the bus park was the last time Aunty Caro set her eyes on her husband.
EV, as she called him, was the husband of her youth. The only man she ever loved. It had been many years and her daughters had become teenagers yet she refused to remarry. The incident turned her into a grumpy, bitter woman who never wanted anything to do with a northener ever again.
Whenever she visited the Kachis, she always warned her sister about their closeness to Audu.
“These people are evil. When their madness hits, they won’t remember a single kind deed you did for them,” she would say.
Stories had it that Uncle Eva was killed on his way back from work one evening. He had tried to separate a group of young boys who were fighting over the contents of a bottle concealed in a black polythene bag.
As he tried to pull the boy hunched over the other on the ground, another boy, no older than fifteen, had forcefully dragged him off and threw him to the side of the road. He hit his head on the kerb and soon grew dizzy from a huge gash by his right eye. They didn’t bother to help him. The last words he heard as he gave up the ghost was “nyamiri”. By the time he was found and taken to hospital, it was too little, too late.
As thoughts of Aunty Caro raced through Emeka’s mind, he felt a renewed sense of pity for her. Pity for the once bubbly woman who had become a shadow of what she was in the photographs in his mother’s photo album. A woman who had lost every desire to live or love but just existed for the sake of her daughters.
His cousins… he felt worse for those girls. It could have been him. Emeka had a strong attachment to his father and couldn’t imagine what life would be without him, especially if his life were cut short as callously as Uncle Eva’s had been. That’s what he thought it was. Callous. Because only a callous and stupid person would pay for one life with another life.
He cast a side glance at Audu as if scanning him to find traces of truth to Aunty Caro’s claims.
His jalabiya gown was wet with sweat, his heart obviously racing. His bama clutched tightly in his left palm as a child would hold on to a teddy bear for comfort. It occurred to Emeka that it was the first time he was seeing Audu’s hair, a luxurious, wavy shade of black.
After the long farming holidays, Audu always returned bearing bags of beans, large portions of tiger nuts and dates for the Kachis.
The first time he returned with such gifts had coincided with one of Aunty Caro’s visits. She warned her sister against eating or cooking them for the family.
“Those items could have been poisoned,” she said.
“That boy eats the food from my kitchen without as much as a thought, Sister Caro!”
“These people cannot be trusted. I won’t say more.”
But she always said more. So much more that Emeka was caught between compassion for Aunty Caro’s pains and empathy for a good man who was being targeted for an act he had nothing to do with.
Emeka looked at Jigawa again. He was still tense but a bit more at ease now. Emeka made to get him a glass of water but changed his mind and reached for a cold bottle of Fanta. When Audu ate at the Kachis, Fanta was always his favourite accompaniment.
He took a gulp and it seemed to do the magic. He seemed to come alive and sat up. He took a deep breath, sighed and said,
“Thank you Oga Junior, you save my life. Alhamdulillah.”
“Ok,” was the absentminded reply.
Emeka’s mind wandered off again.
Why was he different? Why didn’t he ever feel the inclination to believe that people could have certain traits based on tribe or religion? Could it be a delusion of sophistication or superiority? Or was he bent on self-destructing on the altar of excessive trust?
But it wasn’t just him! The members of his immediate family were very accommodating and had a foundation of love. Could they all be headed for doom?
From his days in nursery school, Emeka had mixed with other children from diverse backgrounds. He had Braimohs, Bellos, Okekes and Ogundipes as classmates. The military schools were amongst the best during his primary school days and he had no issues making friends with other children regardless of their ethnicities. By the time he was set for his secondary education, the school of choice was a unity college and as he was the best in his Common Entrance Examination there would be no hindrance to that dream.
The words of his Social Studies teacher, Mr. Femi, flashed through his mind.
“Hate is a learned behavior. People are not born into the world knowing how to hate.”
By the time Emeka’s eyes went in Audu’s direction again, he was sound asleep without a care in the world.
Emeka felt even more pity for him and a bit proud of himself. Then he realised that it was undignifying to regard Audu as an object of pity. He was a good man. Jigawa had once saved his life too.
It was a cold, windy morning and Emeka had woken up a bit more excited than usual. It must have been the adrenaline rush from what he planned to do that day. His father was away on an official assignment and his mum had gone to visit a friend who just put to bed. It was part of Emeka’s chores to wash both cars, a job Audu was always happy to help with. In return, Emeka would let him listen to BBC Hausa on the car radio for as long as the washing lasted.
Mr. Kachi had insisted that Emeka turn eighteen before he could start driving lessons but didn’t know that his son watched him closely anytime he was driving and that he moved the car a little farther each time he washed it.
On that day, Emeka had tried to persuade Audu to join him in a drive within the estate. His parents weren’t around and the neighbours were unlikely to tell his parents as they kept to themselves. Audu tried to dissuade Emeka and thought he had talked him out of it but he was mistaken.
Emeka drove his father’s car and it felt good. In the estate was a straight road leading to the gate. He had just left the gate and was about to negotiate a bend when he ran into an unsuspecting bike rider.
The man was conscious but in severe pain. He had a fractured finger. Emeka didn’t know who to go to.
By the stroke of luck, Audu was nearby and helped him get the man to a nearby clinic. Audu settled the bills with his savings from his business but it didn’t end there. The rider was a Hausa man who had recently lost his brother to a car accident. The driver who knocked his brother down, disappeared from the scene and never showed up. So when the bike rider’s relatives got wind of another accident involving their own, they were furious and almost mobbed Emeka. It was Audu who spoke Hausa to them and pacified them.
The birds were chirping outside, the stars glowed in the midnight sky and the leaves rustled in celebration of two young men from different worlds who at one point had been a saviour to each other. They had both escaped senseless death by whiskers. In the silence that existed between them, there was an abundance of love, appreciation and brotherhood which was possible only because they allowed it.
Emeka was numb. He had to tune off. If he continued thinking, he would run mad from all he was trying to make sense of.
Who introduced hate to the world? Perhaps the next time Aunty Caro visited, he would try to have a sincere talk with her to understand and acknowledge her pain. Perhaps he should start up an NGO with the sole purpose of advocating peaceful coexistence? Maybe just like his parents, more people could send their children to schools with people from diverse backgrounds.
Soon he would be going for his National Youth Service programme and it would present a good opportunity for him to make an impact but that was still some way off. He figured that the best option was to write to the state government. He opened the Notes folder on his phone and started a draft:
Your Excellency, Sir, My name is Emeka Kachi Jr. And I am first a son of Enugu State and a citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is with great respect for your person and position, and admiration for your administration's giant strides that I write. I also write out of utmost concern about the recent happenings in our land regarding the retaliatory attacks on our brothers of northern extraction who have sought greener pastures in our state. Many people can attest to your outstanding leadership which is rooted in peace, inclusivity, security and accountability. I also applaud your sense of hospitality which goes further to showcase us as warm people with arms ever ready to welcome all that come to us. The thriving Hausa community on Owerri Road and other parts of the state prove that indeed we are a peace-loving and welcoming people. It is on this note that I hope we continue to play the lead role in holding together the already shaky bridge between the northern and eastern parts of this great nation. It is no news that our brothers and sisters in the north have been forced to leave their daily lives and flee for safety. In many cases, our daughters, sisters and mothers have been raped and killed while our sons, brothers and fathers are tortured, maimed and killed. Just as worrisome are the attacks on the people of northern extraction in our own land and other surrounding states. My dear governor, on behalf of every young person in the state and indeed every concerned citizen (as we all should be), I pray that you intervene and put a stop to these killings immediately. Most victims of these retaliation attacks are not in any way part of the problem. They are also innocent like our sisters and brothers in the north. They are only victims of circumstance. I would suggest a “soft approach” where through dialogue and continuous talks, radio jingles and programmes and other means, people are made to understand the consequences of these dastardly acts. Nobody ever quenched fire with fire. This is not to say that unruly acts by visitors should be encouraged. I also believe that you and your counterparts from the northern states and indeed every state in the country should dialogue to arrive at a favourable means of peaceful coexistence. It is also pertinent that the older generation do away with whatever stereotypes and biases they might have about any tribe or religion to save the younger generation from such poisoning. The part that peaceful coexistence plays in the development of any community or nation cannot be downplayed. How do we move forward as a people when we are always at war with each other? War leaves no one untouched; neither the victor nor vanquished. If only we would embrace unity, peaceful coexistence and harmonious living, we would soon begin to reap the bountiful harvest our diversity offers…
His battery was low and power had gone off. He closed the phone application and made a mental note to finish the draft and post it on Facebook the following day. He was going to make copies and send to other governors too.
He looked at Audu who was now snoring softly. The cap had dropped from his hand, his breath a lot more even. Emeka went to his room and got a blanket and pillow. He threw the blanket over Audu and placed the pillow under his head.
Outside, insects chirped, the stars glowed in the sky, and the leaves rustled in hope of the peace tomorrow would bring.
THE END
- By a Whisker || Janet Nnenna Anosike - February 12, 2022
Captivating till the very end!