Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on her father's kidnapping 'If
you don’t give us what we want,you will never see his dead
body,”the voice said. What she wrote on New York Times
Opinion below...
My father was kidnapped in Nigeria on a Saturday
morning in early May. My brother called to tell me,
and suddenly there was not enough breathable air in
the world. My father is 83 years old. A small, calm,
contented man, with a quietly mischievous humor
and a luminous faith in God, his beautiful dark skin
unlined, his hair in sparse silvery tufts, his life
shaped by that stoic, dignified responsibility of being
an Igbo first son.
He got his doctoral degree at Berkeley in the 1960s, on a
scholarship from the United States Agency for International
Development; became Nigeria’s first professor of statistics;
raised six children and many relatives; and taught at the
University of Nigeria for 50 years. Now he makes fun of
himself, at how slowly he climbs the stairs, how he forgets
his cellphone. He talks often of his childhood, endearing and
rambling stories, his words tender with wisdom.
Sometimes I record his Igbo proverbs, his turns of phrase.
A disciplined diabetic, he takes daily walks and is to be
found, after each meal, meticulously recording his
carbohydrate grams in a notebook. He spends hours bent
over Sudoku. He swallows a handful of pills everyday. His
is a generation at dusk.
On the morning he was kidnapped, he had a bag of okpa,
apples and bottled water that my mother had packed for
him. He was in the back seat of his car, his driver at the
wheel, on a lonely stretch between Nsukka, the university
town where he lives, and Abba, our ancestral hometown. He
was going to attend a traditional meeting of men from his
age group. A two-hour drive. My mother was planning their
late lunch upon his return: pounded yam and a fresh soup.
They always called each other when either traveled alone.
This time, he didn’t call. She called him and his phone was
switched off. They never switched off their phones. Hour
after hour, she called and it remained off. Later, her phone
rang, and although it was my father’s number calling, a
stranger said, “We have your husband.”
Kidnappings are not uncommon in southeastern Nigeria
and, unlike similar incidents in the Niger Delta, where
foreigners are targeted, here it is wealthy or prominent local
residents. Still, the number of abductions has declined in
the past few years, which perhaps is why my reaction, in
the aftermath of my shock, was surprise.
My close-knit family banded together more tightly and held
vigil by our phones. The kidnappers said they would call
back, but they did not. We waited. The desire to urge time
forward numbed and ate my soul. My mother took her
phone with her everywhere, and she heard it ringing when it
wasn’t. The waiting was unbearable. I imagined my father
in a diabetic coma. I imagined his octogenarian heart
collapsing.
“How can they do this violence to a man who would not kill
an ant?” my mother lamented. My sister said, “Daddy will
be fine because he is a righteous man.” Ordinarily, I would
never use “righteous” in a non-pejorative way. But
something shifted in my perception of language. The veneer
of irony fell away. It felt true. Later, I repeated it to myself.
My father would be fine because he was a “righteous man.”
I understood then the hush that surrounds kidnappings in
Nigeria, why families often said little even after it was over.
We felt paranoid. We did not know if going public would
jeopardize my father’s life, if the neighbors were complicit,
if another member of the family might be kidnapped as
well.
“Is my husband alive?” my mother asked, when the
kidnappers finally called back, and her voice broke. “Shut
up!” the male voice said. My mother called him “my son.”
Sometimes, she said “sir.” Anything not to antagonize him
while she begged and pleaded, about my father being ill,
about the ransom being too high. How do you bargain for
the life of your husband? How do you speak of your life
partner in the deadened tone of a business transaction?
“If you don’t give us what we want, you will never see his
dead body,” the voice said.
My paternal grandfather died in a refugee camp during the
Nigeria-Biafra war and his anonymous death, his unknown
grave, has haunted my father’s life. Those words — “You
will never see his dead body” — s hook us all.
Kidnapping’s ugly psychological melodrama works because
it trades on the most precious of human emotions: love.
They put my father on the phone, and his voice was a low
shadow of itself. “Give them what they want,” he said. “I
will not survive if I stay here longer.” My stoic father. It had
been three days but it felt like weeks.
Friends called to ask for bank-account details so they could
donate toward the ransom. It felt surreal. Did it ever feel
real to anybody in such a situation, I wondered? The
scramble to raise the money in one day. The menacingly
heavy bag of cash. My brother dropping it off, through a
circuitous route, in a wooded area.
Late that night, my father was taken to a clearing and set
free.
While his blood sugar and pressure were checked, my
father kept reassuring us that he was fine, thanking us over
and over for doing all we could. This is what he knows how
to be — the protector, the father — and he slipped into his
role almost as a defense. But there were cracks in his spirit.
A drag in his gait. A bruise on his back.
“They asked me to climb into the boot of their car,” he said.
“I was going to do so, but one of them picked me up and
threw me inside. Threw. The boot was full of things and I hit
my head on something. They drove fast. The road was very
bumpy.”
I imagined this grace-filled man crumpled inside the rear of
a rusty car. My rage overwhelmed my relief — that he
suffered such an indignity to his body and mind.
And yet he engaged them in conversation. “I tried to reach
their human side,” he said. “I told them I was worried about
my wife.”
The next day, my parents were on a flight to the United
States, away from the tainted blur that Nigeria had become.
With my father’s release, we all cried, as though it was
over. But one thing had ended and another begun. I
constantly straddled panic; I was sleepless, unfocused,
jumpy, fearful that something else had gone wrong. And
there was my own sad guilt: He was targeted because of
me. “Ask your daughter the writer to bring the money,” the
kidnappers told him, because to appear in newspapers in
Nigeria, to be known, is to be assumed wealthy. The image
of my father shut away in the rough darkness of a car boot
haunted me. Who had done this? I needed to know.
But ours was a dance of disappointment with the
authorities. We had reported the kidnapping immediately,
and the first shock soon followed: State security officials
asked us to pay for anti-kidnap tracking equipment, a large
amount, enough to rent a two-bedroom flat in Lagos for a
year. This, despite my being privileged enough to get
personal reassurances from officials at the highest levels.
How, I wondered, did other families in similar situations
cope? Federal authorities told us they needed authorization
from the capital, Abuja, which was our responsibility to get.
We made endless phone calls, helpless and frustrated. It
was as though with my father’s ransomed release, the
crime itself had disappeared. To encounter that underbelly,
to discover the hollowness beneath government
proclamations of security, was jarring.
Now my father smiles and jokes, even of the kidnapping.
But he jerks awake from his naps at the sound of a blender
or a lawn mower, his eyes darting about. He recounts, in the
middle of a meal, apropos of nothing, a detail about the
mosquito-filled room where he was kept or the rough feel of
the blindfold around his eyes. My greatest sadness is that
he will never forget.

Wchich department he de teach 4 UNN abeg

Someone should summarize it for me

Shortyy:
Someone should summarize it for me

you are very pretty sweetie