I have a story
its about Africa,
Nigeria
and its people.

Casualties of Devil's Fraud

Casualties of Devil’s Fraud

Hawkers’ calls, the screeching of brakes, a speaker blaring Davido’s ‘Assurance competing with the sound of a church service in session accompanied by human voices floated into the room through the half-opened window accompanied by the rays of the sun. Akin stirred as the rays hit him on the face, yet he lay there only daring to open his eyes in snatches. He cast off the blanket immediately he glimpsed the wall clock on the opposite wall.
He removed a black trouser hanging by a belt-hole on a nail on the closed door and hurriedly put it on. He rummaged through a half-open trunk lying beside the mattress and brought out a Close-up™ toothpaste and a green toothbrush that its bristles had been flattened by use. He took a blue cup from a shelf overheard a reading table beside the trunk, slipped his feet into a pair of white Dunlop™ slippers with blue straps. He pulled the door to himself, turned the key in the lock twice behind before dropping it into his pocket.
The passageway was dark and lined with doors on both sides; some of the doors were covered with light, dirty and evidently overused blinds that revealed the foot wears piled at their bases each time a breeze rushed in from either door at both ends of the passageway. There were two doors at both ends of the passageway. One of them led to the main road while the other led to the communal backyard. There were stoves and pile of pots beside some of those doors, if one looked carefully, one would see that those parts of the walls behind them were black with soot.
He walked into an open space through the door on the right end of the passage. A woman holding something that looked like a trouser was sitting astride a bowl of cloths already immersed in water.
“Good morning Mama John”, Akin greeted.
“Good morning Bros, did you sleep well?” she replied looking up from her task.
“Thank you ma”.
Mama John had already concentrated on the bowl before her and did not acknowledge the thanks. Akin looked at her with an expression of pity etched on his face. Mama John’s husband died two years before leaving behind a huge debt to a wife and three children. Since then, the lively woman became a recluse and wore a mournful look most of the time. He heard this from erstwhile occupants of the house ,he was also warned in addition that the woman was a witch who had sought to increase her wings in her coven by ‘eating’ her husband but was now looking sullen not because she was sad about the incident but because she was disappointed when her fellow witches had denied her the wings because the man was not killed in the method they had stipulated and so, to save himself from the misfortune as befell the man in question, he should insist the landlord give him any room save for the one beside Mama John’s.
“She is not a witch, she is probably traumatized by her husband’s sudden death”, Akin said after listening to this low-down mouth agape with bewilderment written all over his face. They didn’t reply him but shook their heads the way people do when they see one who is determined to walk into his death despite the warnings being given him.
There were other occupants of the house going about their businesses in the backyard. A boy of about ten was putting clothes on a line suspended between two poles at the farthermost end of the back yard. A woman was sitting on a low stool peeling a tuber of yam while four children of whom the oldest could not be more than eight milled about her crying and whining, not in the way children cry tearfully when they are beaten but in the mischievous dry-eyed and louder-than-usual way they do when they want something they know they shouldn’t have or suspect they wouldn’t be given.
“Mummy, kpuff-kpuff, we want kpuff-kpuff”, they cried stomping their feet.
“Only children of the devil eat in the morning before cleaning their teeth”, the woman said without as much as sparing them a glance. They intensified their cries with renewed vigour.
The woman was Mama Ugo, a woman famed through the length and breadth of the street for her brutality, troublesomeness and her inability to be absent from the scene of any fight. People said that if Mama Ugo tells you to run, you should stand with both legs firmly planted on the ground and if she tells you to wait, you should run as fast as your legs can carry you. Coupled with her trouble making abilities is physical strength. Whenever Akin saw her, her thick arms always reminded of the cartoon character that was Michelin’s symbol .There were speculations that should Papa Ugo exceed his boundary, he would be taught the lesson of his life. Thus, she was rightly called Mouth Engine or One Man Battalion.
Personally, Akin was of the opinion that the reason why these people engaged in such squabbles, looking for who was a witch and who was not was as a result of not having enough to do. Mama Ugo for example, fried akara for sale and she was only patronised by children when they were going to school and when they were coming back home in the afternoon, what would she then do during the school hours when sales were scanty but set the neighbourhood on fire and do some exploit people would talk about over the evening meal?
A man was fiddling with an I-better-pass-my-neighbour generator set. He put his right foot on the tank and tugged at it with vigour. The generator gave out a low rumble accompanied by thick dark smoke and then went off abruptly. He straightened up when he looked up and saw Akin staring at him.
“Bros, good morning oh”
“Papa Ugo, good morning sir”
“You dey look at me and this gen, the thing no wan work and I jus’ service am las’ week. Dem they try in vain, them dey jealous us because na only we dey use gen for this house but na we go win them”
Akin nodded his head in a hurry as if he understood the whole thing about the ‘them’ that were making Papa Ugo’s gen cough out poisonous carbon monoxide and carefully avoided looking in Mama John’s direction.
Akin walked to a tap, it hissed as water flowed from it into the cup he held. He walked to a drain beside the wall but before he could put the brush to his teeth, he was interrupted by a noise that was coming from the passage into the backyard.
A woman walked into the open space holding a girl of about eighteen roughly by the dress.
“Tell me who is responsible”, the woman said, her free palm descending on the girl’s cheek drawing from her a cry of pain.
“Mummy, I am sorry”, the girl said holding both cheeks with her palms to prevent a repeat performance.
“Sorry for yourself, you idiot”, the woman replied using her knuckles on the girl’s head, drawing cries of pain and ‘Mummy, please’.
By this time, Akin had walked to the duo after placing his brush and cup of water on an old out-of-use fridge, Papa Ugo had left his gen and Mama John had begun to wipe her hands on her horse-patterned Ankara wrapper. Mama Ugo looked up briefly and continued her task of peeling yam.
The noise had also drawn the occupants of other rooms that were not in the backyard. Sister Ruth, a young woman with a holier-than-thou attitude and was a devout member of one of the many Pentecostal churches that sprung up everywhere like mushrooms. Akin recalled that they had been on good terms when he first moved into the house, but their relationship had gone frosty when he failed to attend a ‘three-day power-packed crusade’ she invited him to, then she started giving him the look of one doomed to suffer eternal damnation since a female classmate came to visit him.
“Mummy Alice, take it easy”, it was Mr. Richard, a taciturn and reserved middle-aged man who was a school teacher in the Grammar School.
“Take it easy for what?” asked the woman called Mummy Alice hotly.
“Explain what happened ma, even if we can’t do something, nothing is too impossible for Jesus to do for he asked us to cast our care on him for his yoke is easy and his burden is light”, Sister Ruth said with the dignified and impressed look of a child who had just discovered she was the only one with a raised hand in the class.
Mummy Alice turned around slowly to see the face of the speaker and when her eyes fell on who it was, her hold on the girl loosened, she looked at Sister Ruth as if she would shoot her if she had a gun and said with a knowing and disgusted look, “You had better shut up if you know what is good for you, you hypocrite. Do you want me to tell them what you have been doing or you think I don’t know?”
Sister Ruth face fell and surprise was etched on it in clear lines, then she regained her composure and said feebly, “Get behind me, you Satan” but Mummy Alice gave her silent look that seemed to say “I have warned you”. The other occupants looked from the face of the former to the latter with a bemused expression plastered on their faces.
“Mummy Alice, explain what happened, there is no matter so serious that we will bring it out without a fork, it will have to be spoken with the mouth”, Akin said, surprised that the words came out of him.
“Thank you, my brother”, Mummy Alice said turning to face Akin, the look on her face was one of a traveller who just stumbled on an oasis in the heart of the Sahara. Akin noticed the girl was terrified and sniffing silently.
“Five days ago, Joshua told me that Alice vomited in the washbasin when she was bathing him for school. I dismissed it as one of Joshua’s childish nonsense, you know these children say some things at times…then, on Wednesday, I noticed she did not eat throughout and I noticed she couldn’t stand properly. I was worried and I asked her what was wrong, she said it was malaria. When the same thing happened on Thursday, I suspected the worst and I took her to the clinic for a pregnancy test, those ones asked us to come on Friday but I couldn’t go due to some engagements. I just branched there when I was coming from the market this morning and lo and behold, they said Alice is one month pregnant. Alice, why? Why have you done this to me? Why….
She couldn’t complete her statement as her voice trailed off in tears. She fell to the ground and tears flowed down her face in torrents as loud sobs escaped her while Mama John consoled her in low tones. None of the listeners could talk; it took a while before the import of the message sank in. Mama Ugo beheld the spectacle for some seconds with an ‘is-that-all?’ look, Mr. Richard looked at the now crying Alice with surprise and bewilderment while Sister Ruth looked at Alice with disgust written on her face, snapped her finger backwards over her head in the traditional way of rejecting bad luck and muttered something about the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. Akin could only look lamely at Alice and ponder on what he had just heard. “Alice, shy Alice, pure and innocent Alice who can’t even look at you in the face when you are speaking to her”, the thought echoed around faintly in his head as he remembered his first weekend in the house that he asked her where the clothes line was and she replied him gazing at the plastic flowers on her slippers as if she were seeing them for the first time.
“The children of these days, I no know wetin wrong with them, them thin’ say they wise well well pass person wey born them. For our own time, parent go tell pikin say make e no do sontin, he go come do am? Who born monkey? Alice, see the thing wey you don do your mama now, you can give her haptenshun, ehn? And you know say your papa no dey. Na bad thing you, make I no lie to you, the…”
Papa Ugo’s berating speech was cut short by Alice’s sudden cry. Her mother had freed herself from Mama John’s hold and lunged at her with renewed fierceness and grabbed her by the neckline of her gown. It was a miracle that Alice was not knocked off her feet by the impact.
“Tell me the bastard who did this, you harlot”, she screamed with her hands wrapped tightly around Alice’s throat. Alice screamed and tried futilely to free herself from her mother’s grasp. Her mother had managed to get hold of a stick that Joshua and Mama Ugo’s children had left lying around after playing hockey the day before.
She pushed Alice to the ground, raised the stick and brought it with so great a force on her shin that it snapped cleanly into two unequal halves, the other half that wasn’t in her hand travelled far in a wide arc and hit the wall at the other end of the yard. Mama John and Mr. Richard who had been watching the unexpected turn of events with surprise suddenly bolted at the same time towards Mummy Alice from continuing work with the half left in her hand. She was shouting and crying simultaneously, “You ingrate, you ingrate”.
Mr. Richard tried to stop the flow of blood from Alice’s leg with a strip of clothing while Mama John held her firmly. She struggled in vain, and then became calm and quiet. “Leave me alone and I won’t touch her, I have left her to God”, she said quietly.
“Mama John, leave her”, Akin said weakly. Mama John loosened her hold on Mummy Alice slowly the way a child would set down a grasshopper he had just pounced upon, unsure whether it was bruised or crushed enough to be immobile or it was still whole enough to escape captivity. Mr. Richard looked up slowly from his task expecting her to pounce at any moment but instead, she sat down slowly on the low stool Mama John placed under her. Tears trickled down Alice’s face when she saw her mother sit for she had been expected her to lunge herself at her but she didn’t. Akin felt sorry for she and her mother as he looked at them both and saw the blood trickling down her shin and the front of her mother’s blouse that was wet with tears.
Papa Ugo was still on with his speech about children who disobeyed their parents and ended up bringing problems to them but no one paid him any notice. “Alice, tell me who did this, please, Alice”, Mummy Alice said in a surprisingly calm and tearless voice. “Is it that boy from your secondary school that comes here?” she asked again.
Alice was quiet as all eyes turned to her, Mama Ugo who had deliberately taken time peeling the yam in order to make sure no part of the show escaped her beheld the scene with her knife mid-air, with the look of a mouse frozen on a spot because it was not sure it had just heard human footsteps and was poised to bolt if as much as a rustle confirmed its fears.
Sister Ruth looked at Alice as if she was about to divulge the location of the devil, so she should go and vanquish him. “Alice, say the truth and let the devil be ashamed”, she said in a whisper.
Akin was peering into Alice’s face waiting to hear who had done this. Who committed this theft, for that was how he saw it, a cruel theft. Deep down in him, he felt violated and hurt.
“Alice, is it that boy? Tell me”
“Mummy, no, it is not him”
“Then, who is it?”
“It is Papa Ugo”

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To be continued.....

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