ALOAGOA, MY FRIEND, WAS A GREAT MAN.

Sometime in April, 2001, around somewhere in west Africa I met a man.

In African village, anything can happen just as you have anticipated. Well, this is how my story began. Long ago when tigers used to smoke, I took an oath with an old man in the dead of night. This creature, whom I have not seen till date since both of us went on our separate ways after we undertook an oath of secrecy. The oath began with red liquid; a sacrifice so to speak. Listen, I have watched a man before dug his own grave in a forest of thousand demons. But the man in question told me he had buried ten offspring of his and none left to bury his carcass. I am the only poet of a dramatic madness left in my kind; others died by claiming too-know-attitude. A goat had one time in past sued my uncle for a sheer comparison: “Philip, you are as stubborn as a goat” I slapped my first teacher at the age of 5. When I got to 15, I collected my teacher's lady. But Aloagoa my friend was a great man. He told me, under a willows tree, that he would love to become a literature writer, so that he could right the wrong in the society. But his demented father killed him at the age of 16. (Your passion, your profession.)
Then, eventually, I saw I Aloagoa again under the same willows tree a decade later, crying out like a prophet in the wilderness: “Eli, EIi, Lama Sabachthani.” Without mincing words. Aloagoa was trying to fight his demon. It was obvious to the blind and audible to the deaf that the handwriting on king Belshazzar’s wall: “mene mene tekel upharsin” needed no further explanation.

History doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes it just shouts: “why can’t you just listen to me.”

But Aloagoa my friend had become a shadow of himself; he looked haggard, wore two shoes that were not fellows, then managed to uttered some incoherent words that had bottled up in his heart for far too long amidst of tears that brimmed in his eyes. He said, “I had, but tailed a dirge singer who concealed the gulf between world of the dead and the living. I have become a killing mechine from the day an owl killed my vulture.”

The night is nobody's friend. He ended up lamenting profusely amidst the following words: “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

The oath. We live in a fast-fading world. There is nothing in this life that is worth dying for, and none is worth living for but the good deed of man.
In fact, we live in a cruel world; and we are in a fast lane. as unbelievable as it sounds. And this is not the actual world where you do the right thing, act the right way, pour your heart and soul to help other in need and expect the same in return. In fact, you may not get nothing good, whatsoever, but getting hurt in the long run by setting your expectations so high in futility is inevitable.

So, in African forest: either you kill, or you are being killed. So, choose one!

My friend, Aloagoa, had a son whom I don’t want to talk about. At that age? And so what! No man has fought his community and won. The society made you... fool!

Yes. The old man entered an oath with me, that in my entire life I should not tell anyboby(not even Aloagoa's son), the secret he had told me that fateful night. But the Achiles' heel.

I had slaughtered alot of red head-chickens , at feast and festival with my grand-mother's knives. But nothing else shall remind me of bloodshed than that. Please do not kill a man who has not said anything from his mouth to fault you.

Remember that in every family, there is a witch, or a bad blood. Amongst twelve, Jesus had Judas— his disciple.

The oath I kept for a very long time. But who among you don’t know that “patience” has an expiration date?

“Life is a tale told by two idiots,” I said to the old man. “Watch your tongue boy, ” he cautioned. But I continued anyway without minding if his cow was gored. “Sir, we live in a world where morons are barons; a world where thieves are chiefs. In fact, it makes one to ponder and ask: ‘What is the meaning of this life?’ You came into this world naked, crying that you don’t have anything. Then you began to labour effortlessly to acquire as much as you can either by hook means, or by crook means, and but only to leave this world empty without any of the things you have gotten. It makes no sense!”

The old man slit Aloagoa's throat because... the oath. Yes the oath.

Let me school your kindergarten mind.

Take a picture of a hanging rabbit before you join a killer squard or a suicide bomber. Well, one day for the debtor, so many days for the creditor.

Aloagoa was killed because his father caught him where he was...

The oath!