‘We took an oath before God and man. You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Her voice shook, and I wondered once again what had happened to the girl my mother’s brothers often described.
‘Your mother was fire o,’ Uncle Ugochukwu always said, chuckling at the fond memories.
It was why I told my mother repeatedly that I would never get married. ‘I don’t see the point,’ I explained. I didn’t want to say I feared I would become like her one day.
‘What did you say?’ my father asked, his tone portentous. I jumped out of my bed and ran out, aware of what was coming next.
Stop, please, I wanted to say to my mother, the same words she’d said to me earlier. But she’d found her voice and she was not going to back down. ‘I said you should be ashamed of yourself! How old is she? Nineteen? Twenty? That girl is young enough to be your daughte—’
The first blow was so vicious I staggered and stumbled on the staircase, clutching at the rails for balance, even though I wasn’t its recipient. I heard my mother scream, then the sounds of a scuffle.
He was bent over my mother’s body, landing blow after blow, not caring what part of her they connected with, screaming in her bloodied face; deranged. When he was like this, my mother always begged me to hide, to protect myself and my sisters from his feral rage but, this time, I wasn’t going to cower.
I rushed at him from behind, no strategy or plan, just an end goal. He was no small man, but the force and suddenness of my attack was just enough to knock him off balance, giving my mother room to escape.
‘Leave her alone!’ I screamed at my father, and for a moment, he just stared at me, seemingly unable to believe his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever raised my voice at him. Our relationship was one of tacit tolerated co-existence: he funded my school, he made sure I had a roof over my head and enough to eat. He was my father and I was to respect him as such, to never interfere in any other aspect of his life, most especially, his relationship with my mother.
My mother stumbled to her feet, but instead of running, she pulled at my arm. ‘Nwakaego, please go upstairs,’ she begged, tearful.
I pulled my arm from her grasp and faced my father. ‘Have you not done enough? You got another woman pregnant. You should be begging her not to leave.’
My mother burst into tears and moved to put herself between us. ‘Think of your school. Please go upstairs.’
My father, who’d been quiet all along, sneered at my mother. ‘Why are you begging her? See for yourself the kind of mother you are, just look at what you raised. And you’re wondering why I found another woman?’
‘You’re shameless!’ I screamed.
I would think of this moment in the future: the fire and humiliation in my father’s eyes as he rushed at me – I watched the back of my mother’s head connect with the wall as he threw her aside – and did something he’d never done before. The first blow was painless, enveloped by surprise, the sting of the second had barely settled before I felt the third.
When oblivion finally came, I welcomed it, thinking about how my mother had had to endure for too long.
6
Nwakaego
Nwakaego. Child is greater than wealth. When my parents chose my name, they’d had nothing, but they had me. I was a reflection of them: their faith, hope and every desire.
I was rarely referred to by my full name. Instead, I was Ego. Wealth. I was their wealth long before fortune came, turning its wheel and changing their lives. I loved my name and the meaning it carried, and I wore it proudly as an emblem. When strangers asked, I never introduced myself as Ego. Instead, I said, ‘My name is Nwakaego, but you can call me Ego.’
My mother only ever called me by my full name on three distinct occasions: joy, anger and urgency. When she would stand at the bottom of the staircase of my father’s mansion, trying to catch my attention, she would scream ‘Nwakaego’ and I would come running down. Whenever a teacher accused me of bad behaviour, my mother would pull me aside, anger and disappointment etched in her face, and say, ‘Nwakaego, what happened?’ In the face of my father’s rage, her voice would come again, urgent and pleading, ‘Nwakaego, go upstairs with your sisters.’
I grew accustomed to it, that resonant call that demanded my attention and sought to remind me of who I was. I was wealth, my mother’s treasure. But that day, even my mother speaking my name could not wrestle me awake.
Nwakaego. Nwakaego. Please wake up, a bat kol prayed, overarching and omnipresent like the voice of God within this dimensionless universe, but I remained in a loop of unending oblivion. Then the darkness disappeared, replaced by memories long suppressed. There was my father, a newspaper tucked under his arm, and me, screaming as I ran towards him, arms stretched. My father again, running to pick me up after a fall. My father, driving off in a strange van as I stood beside my mother weeping. My father returning home with the blank eyes of a stranger. So it continued, through the years until memories were overtaken by nightmares in this formless world.
Nwakaego, the voice called over and over, but I could not answer.
Living under a dictator was like living in a hamlet at the bottom of a mountain with a large boulder at its peak, a boulder with a shaky foundation. Some days, smaller stones crumbled down, hitting your roof and that of your neighbours, tingling the aluminium but causing no real harm. Other days, larger stones slipped through, causing injuries to some but not all. But you all lived in the perpetual fear of that inevitable day when the boulder itself would descend, crushing your very existence into dust. It was how we lived in a military regime and in my father’s house.
There were many before it, but my first memory of a coup d’état was in August ’85, not long after I turned four. My parents sat, anxious, by a small radio in the early hours of the morning as the national anthem came on, followed by the cultured voice of a trained military officer. My father had returned from prison at this point and the cracks in his person had begun to show, but they were united in their hatred of the military government.
The speech was too complex for four-year-old me to follow but I read the meaning from my parents’ sighs and nervous glances. If they felt a modicum of relief that the man who had jailed my father was no longer in charge, it did not show. I would view those same expressions again, in the penultimate month of ’93, but by then they’d grown wary, anaesthetised even to the incompressible turbulence. There’d been a brief moment of hope during the ’93 elections when my mother had hummed the catchy campaign jingles with glee and debated about the candidates with her friends, brimming with excitement at the prospects of a civilian government. On election day, she’d returned late in the evening with a large ink stain on her thumb she flaunted with pride – she’d voted. But it did not take long for the country to descend into the convoluted military maze we could not seem to escape – the cancellation of election results, demolition of democratic systems, crackdown on dissent, the inevitable collapse of the economy and the widespread impoverishment that followed. We were in a lateral world, there was no up or down, only sideways.
‘This country is finished,’ Aunty Ada told my mother.
‘Don’t be so pessimistic,’ my mother chided.
‘Pessimistic? Obianuju, open your eyes and look around you. Where are we headed?’
The end of a dictatorship was sparked by the beginning of another, or in rare circumstance, a grudging acquiescence to international pressure and the democratic will of the people. The coups, however, were not always successful, and when this happened, we were subjected to a gory display of nationalism in the form of radio retellings of bodies bound to wooden stakes decimated by firing squads: a clear warning of the consequences of treason.
Fear. My father always said that only a truly powerful regime was able to install itself in the mind of its people. Fear was the way to control the masses; entrench fear and they would never defy you – they would pray to their gods, begging and pleading for intervention, but never revolt.
By ’94, I’d learnt that fear all too well: to avoid my father’s presence, to speak only when spoken to, to listen for the timbre of his voice and the weight of his footsteps, to see him when he wasn’t there.
There was an audacious, almost daring manner in which this new government went about its brutality. Its omnipresence was alive in the most intimate corridors of our lives, even our classrooms. When we deigned to discuss politics, we said to each other in hushed tones, ‘Do you want them to come and carry you?’ By them, we meant the special forces that had taken to disappearing dissidents, so much so that it became a running joke – Do you want them to come and carry you? – because we feared that we or someone we loved would be the next victims of this cannibalistic government, never to be seen or heard from again.
Proverbs 11:10. It was a scripture we memorised in Sunday school, saying the words over and over again. When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices, when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy. Our teachers told us it was why we were to live righteously; there was no worse conclusion to life than to have your demise cheered by the city as bowed-headed family members followed behind in a procession of shared shame.
It was this manner of jubilation that permeated my new world: screams of joy, strings of festive music. In my universe, I was in an ancient, fortified city, surrounded by a cheering mob as a body wrapped in simple linen passed in a lonely procession in our midst. A troupe played from an exalted position – lyres and trumpets and flutes. I turned to ask the identity of the dead that caused such celebration but the crowd had disappeared. But the music – I could still hear the music and cheers. The strings had begun to sound modern – electric – and the trumpets were joined by saxophones. A baritone voice led the festivities and asked others to join, and I moved towards it. As I did so, the world around me disintegrated. I was blinded by sudden light.
Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’ blasted from a speaker as I opened my eyes, the encouragement to party distracting from the unfamiliarity of the faded yellow walls and the dull ache coursing its way through my skull.
‘It’s a celebration!’ someone shouted.
The head of state was dead.
Nurses gossip – it was how I knew a mother had slapped a paediatrician with the bottom of her shoe, leaving a sole-shaped imprint at the side of his face; the hospital had descended into pandemonium as everyone tried to appease both parties. It was also how I learnt I’d lain unconscious, my mother by my side, the voice I’d heard, for over a week. Their chatter was how I found out that my mother had cried into the telephone at the hospital front desk, her face battered and swollen, as she’d begged my father for the money needed to perform the surgery that saved my life. He’d said no.
