The Midnight Escape from Edo State

By Justin Irabor

11 July 2016

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We fled Benin City by midnight. 

The signs were there long before we made our move. One morning, I had woken before the rest of the house, planning to go behind the mango tree that stood beside our low-hanging walls to take a piss on the soldier ants that made their winded path along the sturdy trunk. My routine was simple: I would let out a stream of urine before chasing the occasional squirrel running along the wall. I would pluck leaves from the shrubs that lined our house, and sing under my breath ‘are you a Jesus baby? Yes I am. I am a Jesus baby every day,’ then throw the leaves in the air, watching them fall slowly to the earth, imagining them to be several pieces of money. It was no worry to me, the mess that I was making; it was the duty of my aunts to sweep the compound every morning. I was only making the task worth their while. 

On this day, however, I stepped out and kicked over a calabash lying on the verandah, the horrifying contents spilling all over the floor. I gingerly retraced my steps indoors, returned to bed and pretended to never have left. The family awoke a few minutes later and I heard my father curse loudly and my mother weep. My father was furious — his natural reaction whenever he was afraid. My mother said someone wanted us dead, and they were now planting juju by our doorsteps to cripple the legs of anyone who would accidentally step in the calabash. My uncle took inventory of the contents of the calabash: blood from an unidentifiable mammal, three guinea fowl eggs, a red length of cloth tied around the calabash, some chalk and some palm oil. A few feathers were stuck around the calabash’s lip by the red cloth, the clay of which was cracked in some places from when I turned it over. 

My mother wondered, petrified, who had tipped the calabash over, but my father said it was probably one of the dogs around the house. My heart thudded painfully in my rib cage as I examined my leg with a mirror. It did appear to have swollen a little bit on the foot that kicked over the diabolical receptacle. I thought I saw a bit of discoloration…

night bus from Benin City

In school, I listened to ignorant pupils discuss, reporting what their parents had told them the night before. The general was gone. General Sani Abacha, He Who Should Not Be Named Unless In A Positive Light Because Nobody Knew Who Was A Member Of The General’s League Of Spies, the man who had an eponymous stove — the Abacha Stove — connected eternally to his regime had died, and the world had taken to the streets to cheer. 

What killed him, I asked. I was interested despite myself. An apple, said one of the boys. Oyas was what we called him. Thinking back, that was probably short for Oyakhilome. I am not sure. His face was shiny as he told the story. To be fair, his face was always shiny, the fat pig. He loved to beg for my biscuits and when I refused him, it was always amusing to watch him threaten me by saying ‘one day I will do my own back — I will not share my own things with you. Bet.’ Hilarious. He could never have anything I desired. 

‘Apple,’ he said. ‘One of his prostitutes poisoned an apple and gave him to eat.

‘Then he died,’ he finished solemnly.

Sophia gasped. ‘You said prostitute! I am telling Aunty Rachel!’ and off she was running, followed by frantic pants coming from the flared nostrils of Oyas. 

I returned home to find the windows drawn shut as everyone sat in the living room. My mother had driven us back to the house noncommittally — we had not even stopped by Leventis or Frankie’s for ice cream or sausages as was our little bonding ritual. My brother was chatty as always, but I was affected by insinuations in the air and my mood was dour. 

My father was home. He was never home by 3:45pm. There was a small glass of wine on the table in front of him as he stared, squinting in the near-darkness at a notepad in his hand. 

‘Lightning struck several times today,’ my mother was saying, her voice sounding funny, like it was coming from another source, like some ventriloquist was performing to a stunned audience. ‘Inside this house.’

My mother described it. It wasn’t quite the rain, not really. Only a light shower, but when the lightning broke, it broke in the house. Four or five times, we were suffused by the white, blinding light. 

My uncle was in a corner chocking his nose full of a stash of snuff. He harrumphed, his eyes reddening and squirting tears. His bulbous nose and crooked lips made him look like a happy drunk. He was a happy drunk. 

My father spoke very little, his small wrists dancing excitedly on the notepad. 

A rough hand shook me awake by midnight. It was my other uncle, the one with the armpit hair. 

‘Broda says you need to dress up.’

‘Broda’ was the name he called my father. No surprises; my father was his older brother. 

When I came to the living room, I saw the family rolling up the carpet and loading the rug into a waiting van with its lights turned off. On the floor was fine dust, the result of dirt being filtered through the fine mesh of our carpet. My brother and I wasted no time gathering some of these into small cellophane bags and passed them off as supplies of snuff to my bulb-nosed uncle. 

He sneezed harshly and cried even more. We huddled together and laughed. 

We were on the road shortly after. I recognized Akpapava, Ring Road, Uselu, Isihor, and soon we were out of Benin and hurtling towards Lagos state.

My father did not accompany us. I was too sleepy to ask my mother at the time, but later she told me he left the country altogether — through Guinea Republic to Austria. 

In the morning when I woke up in Maryland, Lagos, I stared into the wrinkled face of someone who claimed to be an aunt from my mother’s side, and she scolded my mother, the vicarious victim, for my father’s affiliations with a political campaign that sought to make General Sani Abacha Nigeria’s first democratic president.

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