‘My daddy is not a liar!’ he screamed before shoving me so hard I toppled into the sand, tasting dust in the space between my teeth.
I told my mother about Chidiadi in the afternoon, showing her the fawn-hued sand stains on my uniform and white socks. She listened patiently, then she slowly unbuttoned my dress and pulled off my socks, her face expressionless. When she was done, she dropped to her haunches, grabbed my shoulders and held my eyes.
‘Ego, there are some people that believe that, but they’re wrong. Very wrong. Don’t listen to them. You will show them that you’re better than them,’ she said.
My mother had lost babies before my sisters, frail foetuses she never spoke of. My grandmother insisted that they’d been sons, the miscarriages an extension of her own eternal punishment for fusing what should never meet. She invited my mother for church prayer meetings and gathered prayer warriors in our home, screaming and shouting to cleanse the walls of evil spirits killing the unborn babies. When my sisters finally came in ’85, she clucked her tongue in disappointment, patted my mother on the shoulders and said, ‘God will give you more.’ In defiance, my mother chose the names Nkechinyere (whichever God gives) and Nwamaka (child is beautiful).
My father did not seem bothered at first – he had more important things to worry about then, like our almost abject poverty, until the elusive wealth he sought found its way to us and he was comfortable enough to insist we visit his village for the Christmas holidays, ready to remind those who’d looked down on him of the song ‘Nobody Knows Tomorrow’.
It was after the new year service in ’88. A woman in our village named Chinwe, whose husband Okpara owned a large supermarket in Enugu, had given birth to her second child and everyone was talking about it. It had been a mostly restful holiday spent eating roasted yam and ofe akwu, attending weddings and parties; even my father didn’t scream as usual, too busy plopping his wealth on display.
‘God is good! I’m so happy for her,’ the women gossiped outside the church building.
‘Congratulations!’ men and women greeted Amaechi Okpara as he stepped out of the church.
‘Okpara! Okpara!’ the influential men’s group cheered their friend, my father at their centre.
‘My brother we hear congratulations are in order,’ my father said and Okpara laughed from his belly like the big man he was.
‘Congratulations, my brother. A son! You are now a man!’ another man boomed, pumping Okpara’s hand and grinning from ear to ear.
I watched my father’s face change, the smug satisfaction disappearing from his eyes, replaced by a new realisation. He turned his head to stare meaningfully at my mother.
My mother cried more and ate less after that; she lost so much weight the hollows at the bottom of her neck looked like water-fetching bowls. At night she wept, heartwrenching sobs that shook her body where she knelt in front of the living-room couch in prayer. When the weather was hot, sweat ran down the back of her neck, and mosquitoes sang in the dark, but she seemed not to notice.
‘God! Goooddd!’ she begged each time, oblivious to my silent presence, her voice hoarse with anguish.
My grandmother invited a special prophet to bless our home. His oversized white gown dragged on the floors as he went from room to room spraying holy water and anointing oil and reciting incantations. My mother and grandmother followed behind him shouting ‘Amen,’ even though I was not sure they understood all he said.
When he was finished, he raised a battered wooden cross and smiled. ‘It is done.’
Familiar black wrought-iron gates were waiting for me when I arrived home in May ’98, high and forbidding and topped with electric wiring. A ‘BEWARE OF DOGS’ sign warned robbers away even though we lived in one of the most secure estates in the country, and there were no dogs because my mother was frightened of them then, and she had told my father he would have to find another house if he ever brought one home.
I pressed the bell and waited for our gateman, Usman.
‘Ah Aunty! Long time! Welcome back!’ he shouted through the peephole then quickly pulled back the bolt keeping the pedestrian gate locked. He reached for my duffel bag, and when I pulled it away, for the backpack on my shoulders.
‘It’s not heavy,’ I insisted, removing his hands from my shoulders. I wondered if it was an innate reflex and that was all he knew how to do – serve.
I took in the expansive compound: freshly trimmed hedgerows, the imposing three-floor edifice with its concrete pillars and wide white-painted windowsills, the alabaster winged angel fountain at the centre of the courtyard gushing crystal water, the open garage housing my father’s numerous cars.
‘Oga is not around?’ I asked Usman, noticing an empty spot. My father owned several cars but he only ever travelled in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, with its customised plate ‘Akajiugo’.
The hand that holds the eagle – one of the names he’d assumed when he’d acquired the ozo title.
‘He travel go village, some days now,’ Usman confirmed. I nodded, relieved, and my steps quickened as I moved towards the front door.
My mother always kept a key hidden for me under one of the potted plants by the door, even though I almost never came home. Some days, she drove by my hostel and when I came down to see her, pulled me into a tight embrace, saying, ‘I just wanted to see your face.’ But even her coming was a reminder of what I was running from, and for the wariness I felt, guilt ate at my conscience.
Nothing had changed in my months away, yet something seemed different. I stared at the picture of Uncle Ikenna in its usual position and wondered if there had been any new word. Every couple of years, something arrived – a letter, a picture, a sighting claim – and my grandmother and mother would journey for days to seek answers to their decades of questions only to return with even more. Eager to keep my grandmother – his number one ally – in his good books, my father kept the ads running in the newspapers even though they’d all silently acquiesced that it was at most a futile effort.
‘Mummy! I’m around,’ I screamed and waited for my voice to carry to her. Her response came, a tinkling laugh of joy so clear it sounded spectral.
‘This one that you came to visit us today, I hope we’re not owing your pocket money for the month. Or did you forget something at home?’ she joked as she hurried down the staircase.
I laughed, feeling her joy. ‘We finished our tests for the semester, we have a short holiday before classes start again. Where’s everyone?’
‘Your father travelled to the village and your sisters are with Mama for the weekend, you know she likes to spoil them,’ she replied, pulling me quickly into an embrace. For the first time in weeks, I felt at peace.
‘I missed your trouble,’ she said into my hair before letting me go to grip my shoulders with a smile.
I laughed again, opening my mouth to respond. That was when I saw her eyes.
My mother touched her face. ‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘What did he do this time?’
I’d loved my father once – my tall handsome daddy with the voice that opened up the heavens and made angels prostrate fall. My first memories were of him swaggering into our small apartment at the end of the day, newspaper tucked in his armpit, a satisfied smile on his face as I ran into his arms screaming, ‘Daddy Daddy’.
With time, the memories grew darker: tears, blood, Mummy spending days at the hospital, the long holiday with Grandma and Grandpa. When we were asked to draw crayon pictures of our families in primary school, my drawing made my teacher ask my mother, ‘Is everything okay at home?’ With age came understanding, and with understanding came the knowledge that my father was far from the paragon of perfection I thought him to be.
Yet the image of him with his newspaper under his arm remained in my mind, a cenotaph of better days. He’d been a simpler man then, an assistant editor at a local newspaper known as The People’s Voice. He’d been determined to be just that when the military government took over on the very last day of ’83, penning scorching critiques of the government’s abuse of human rights and corruption scandals, refusing to be silenced until they came for him one afternoon. Even behind bars, he’d continued to protest.
In prison, my father was remade, scored of his humanity. I always blamed Nigeria for the man he became, whether it was because I had no one else to blame or that I wanted to believe that the nonpareil with the newspaper was who he was somewhere deep inside, I was not sure.
Our visits to the prison were drawn out and hollow, with him seated in silence, rotating jaundiced eyeballs here and there, staring but not seeing, as my mother spoke of false positives –the new provisions shop, how church members were organising weekly prayers on his behalf, her father’s cousin that knew someone high up in the army – with forced cheer. And when I called, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ he did not respond with a smile or his usual acclamation of ‘My girl!’ The only sound he let himself make were the munching noises as he stuffed his mouth with spoonfuls of the bowl of rice my mother always brought along, because if there was one thing he’d been running from all his life, it was hunger.
My father had been born into poverty – shameless poverty, he called it; the kind that couldn’t be hidden. His mother’s children had died in infancy, succumbing to illnesses, some said it was because she was cursed, others said my grandfather had spent too much time away from his people, trading in the middle belt of the country and the spirits no longer recognised his kin and couldn’t offer protection. My father had been the one to remain, coincidentally, the very year the pipes were laid for clean water to come to their town, and his survival had inspired the ones after him to stay as well – even the spirits answered to clean water.
