❦
ZAKI WUAIKYA ALWAYS WAITED FOR noon, when the sun shone with malice and life forms moved slowly, to go to the quarry where the bush path led to the only hotel in Boager—and there, at the bottom, relieve himself. He took with him his wraps of hemp and smoked them while at it, sweating in the hot sun.
He was full of such eccentricities. Long before he became Zaki, chief, he used to drive a big politician’s madam. The madam fondly ordered her husband around, and some days quarrelled terribly. It was rumoured that it was she, who, when the big politician married her, had brought with her an imborivungu, which her father had bequeathed her, catapulting the man overnight from a struggling young musician to the tables of power in Benue. She did not let any opportunity slide to remind him who’d picked him from the dregs of living and made him who he was, the respect and gratitude she deserved, and this and that.
Things had come to a head when the big politician, having had it up to his neck, decided to openly court and marry a young and vivid Edo princess. People said she was the identical version of the madam in her younger years. The madam was herself a princess from Shitile, and had been a true belle in her youth. But these similarities ended here. While the Edo princess was well-groomed, educated, and carried herself regally, the madam had quite a peculiar history behind her. She was expelled from secondary school in class 3 for an affair with her class teacher, which she became pregnant and delivered a beautiful boy whom she left with him. And much to her own father’s ire, who still loved her despite everything and wanted her back in school, she hung on the side of a gongoro filled with yams from Zaki-Biam, all the way to Benin City where she hooked up with a Lebanese engineer after working a day carrying blocks at a construction site. The Lebanese had said she was too beautiful to work and took her in. She had another child, a baby girl, with him, another child who again she left, this time in a foster home, because she neither loved nor wanted her. And although the father both loved and wanted this daughter, everything scattered when the wife of the house, an Edo woman, mother of the Lebanese’s three children, caught wind of the affair all the way from America, promptly returned.
The madam’s Benin honeymoon was about to be over. Perhaps, the altercation wouldn’t have fireballed the way it did. But as you well know, the right road is never so cruelly plain as after the wrong one has spent its fury. So it happened that when the Lebanese’s wife returned unannounced on an early Sunday morning and met her husband and the madam sitting side-by-side to breakfast in the family kitchen, she rushed in and, amid questions of what madam was doing in her house, struck her hard on the face. Madam went wild and struck the woman back before the Lebanese, who had frozen in shock, spurred back to life, and threw himself between the two women, taking their blows. By the time one of his construction friends, another Lebanese, arrived in the nick of time and tackled madam to the ground, just as she was about to stick a kitchen knife into the Lebanese’s wife, the man was already a sodden heap on the floor.
Madam was only seventeen. But when the wife of the Lebanese got her very influential Edo family involved, madam was arrested and sent to prison, without trial. The Lebanese was helpless on the matter, fearing, among his many other sins, that his children would accuse him of prosecuting their mother. And in the back of his mind, he still loved his wife, still loved his family, and had confessed that whatever happened with madam was the work of the devil. Thus he proclaimed, his hands raised above his head, never again. So it was then, that madam spent her eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth birthdays in prison, rotting, until one day, the Lebanese, thinking about it, decided it’d do the devil no harm to use one illegality to undo another. He paid the guards a huge bribe, and they smuggled madam out of prison. She was transported to Cotonou to get herself back, and from there, the Lebanese sent her off to America with a lump-sum, a prayer, and a timid kiss on the cheek. She’d leaned in and whispered in his ear that she wanted him to take her to a nearby hotel and make love to her one last time, just one more time, for the road. The man’s eyes turned inwards and out, and looking like a spirit passed before him, he gathered his white agbada and hastened out of the airport.
In America, madam bloomed. Probably deciding, at the encouragement of men, that providence had given her too much in the way of beauty, enough to do without talent. She carefully moulded herself into a commodity, which she sold to the right men at the right price, and thus, by this trade, she became rich, and lived the life, travelling the world, wider than an Arctic tern. To Paris, to Rome, to Barcelona, to Ibiza, to the Maldives, to Dubai, Bangkok, and even Moscow, wrapped, like priced apparel, in the arms of men who mattered; such that when her father lay dying on his death bed, the news reached her almost too late. By this time, she’d become, as she called herself, The Tigress, The Rolling Stone, The Woman King, seen it all, done it all; but when her father strained his cataract-dimmed eyes and asked, Is this my daughter?—she only managed a weak “Yes, Papa,” her voice choking with tears. She knew this was the only man who’d ever truly loved her, and now, here he lay dying. The old man said to her not to worry, he was going to leave her a gift that would make bowing to a man not a necessity but a choice, but she must first bow to one man. She must find a husband. Only a husband could protect the gift which he would leave her.
Madam had then courted and proposed to the big politician. A dashing young man who sang sultry ballads and danced kpingi in the burukutu huts on Zaki-Biam market days, over whom the women fawned. In his mind, this exotic princess, too, who in one of his songs he had confessed was the woman of my dreams, with skin like papaya, and eyes that stopped time, ishan pepe wam, ishima kwe wam, had fallen for his charm. And, as it happened, he fell head-first in love with her. So it had not always been cat and dog. At first, if madam had given it a chance, who knows, they might have made a happy home. But she had not, and then it came to what it was.
Still, Zaki Wuaikya himself said he was surprised at what happened next, that is, after the big politician had made every arrangement to marry the princess from Edo. Nobody had seen it coming. But when, one day, the big politician ended up a dead victim, the only dead victim, of a break-and-enter robbery at their house, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind who was behind it. The man’s family sought revenge, but like madam’s own experience had shown, one could get away with anything in Nigeria with the right amount of money and influence. So the man’s family took their grievance to the spirits. Madam, too, changed her Giorgio Armani heels for a pair of slippers and went from Ute to Nasarawa, to Sokoto, to Kogi, to Abeokuta, to Baracoa, and finally to India, going from Baba to Mama, and then to the two-headed Tantrik at Gujarat, under the 1,000-year-old tree at the eastern end of Ban Ganga, breathing the burning wood of the gods deep in the Sierra del Purial mountains and sewing talismans made of gafa droppings. She was “kaaniyol”—fortifying herself.
Zaki Wuaikya, though, having never set foot outside Nigeria, knew that the talisman his grandmother had given him, which was made with the ashes of his great-great grandfather whom his jealous brother had burnt inside his hut in the middle of the night, was more potent than anything madam had. Principles governed the power of these things. What the Tiv man called chia, a reason for grievance, is first and foremost. The big politician’s family had chia over madam and her family, because she had killed their kin and blood, had taken away what belonged to them without their permission; so they had the right to also take any of madam’s own or madam herself, who, for all her exotic talismans, had no chia.
So, on this day, madam called Zaki Wuaikya to drive her to Enugu. The sun was in its element, and the AC was turned to max, and within minutes, the car cooled. Curiously, madam wound down the window by her side an inch. Zaki knew exactly why she did this. Ever since her return from India, trailing talismans like shadows, she had done this each time they travelled. Zaki had never thought twice about it. He had full trust in his skills as a driver. However, that day, he had a premonition and asked madam to wind down one more inch. Madam said no.
The one-inch gap, Zaki explained, was for exit in the event of an accident. A human being, of course, could not shrink through a one-inch space. But in that moment of transforming oneself, when matter becomes malleable, a single inch is enough—for one human being, though, not two.
It happened around Ekeh-Olengbecho, after Ugbokolo. The road there was not a bad one. That was the thing. It was wide, dry, and familiar. But the premonition had not left Zaki. Ahead, a lorry loaded with planks had stopped suddenly. Zaki braked. The car responded well. But from behind, a smaller vehicle came too fast. Zaki saw it in the rearview mirror, swerving, unable to stop.
There was no time to honk. No time to steer off the narrow shoulder.
The impact was a grating, heavy shove, metal folding into metal, glass exhaling. Zaki re-emerged on the scene from the nearby bush. He had transformed into a tiny bird and flown out of the opened window.
He stood by the roadside, human again, breathing hard. The lorry had driven off. The smaller vehicle that struck them lay overturned in a ditch. Its driver stumbling out, dazed, called out.
Zaki did not answer. He walked to the car.
The passenger door was caved in. He went around to madam’s side and she was slumped against the seatbelt, head tilted toward the broken window, her eyes open.
Zaki reached out. He touched her hand. It was warm. Her lips were slightly parted. He leaned closer. There was no breath. He stepped back. The bush behind him rustled. For a moment, he thought he heard a bird call.
Then silence.
“Well,” I began, confused . . . “Did she die?”
“Died and buried three years ago,” Zaki said, puffing hemp.
“All the talismans did not save her?”
“The space she left in the window was for one person. My talisman was more potent, so I got out first. Before she could, it was too late. If only she’d listened to me and wound the window an inch lower . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head.
We were sitting on the fence of the only hotel in Boager, throwing stones into the future, the night Zaki Wuaikya told me this story. That time when he stayed at the hotel, we talked a lot. Once, he inadvertently told me why he usually went to relieve himself at the bottom of the quarry at noon, and I realised finally, why at the young age of 28, he had become a chief.
* * *
The next day, I travelled to Makurdi to accompany my grandmother to her routine medical check-up, then returned that same day to Boager. I was enjoying the place. It had been a long, rough year—the second of the Tinubu years. I had just turned 22, had graduated university a year ago, and three weeks after completing my NYSC service year, I suddenly found myself looking at life with the nonplussed wonder of someone who had come in the way of a charging mother warthog defending her piglets.
Boager was neither town nor village; neither quiet nor fast life. The folks, however, were always celebrating something. Despite the bite of hardship, every day had a great character of excitement in it, and young girls in Aba-made designer clothes and cheap perfume would gallop up and down, like gazelles in the Serengeti, as men, young and old, chased after them. Coming from the city where life was pitiably desperate, I found it all rather strange and exotic.
On this very day I slept late into the morning, my friend Ikpuurkon, with whom I was staying, came back from the junction with pap and kwese wrapped in newspaper. The shuffling of his fumbling fingers, together with the heavenly aroma, called out to my senses, and I roused myself. We sat on empty beer crates behind the house with Zaki Wuaikya, with whom Ikpuurkon had gone to the junction, and spread the breakfast before us. Ikpuurkon had also bought bread. We broke it in half, stuffed the oily kwese inside and squeezed it into a sandwich.
“Orne, you are not going to believe what I’m about to tell you,” Ikpuurkon said, bread and kwese in his mouth.
“Well, why? Tell me.”
Ikpuurkon nodded slowly, licked his spoon of dripping pap, gave a snort, and shook his head again. Repeating this sequence of movement, he told me that Tswargbev, the cripple whom we gave alms each time we passed the bend in the road on our way to the junction, had apparently saved all the money he’d been getting, so that it was up to 200,000 naira, and had paid all of it to a spiritualist who was known to possess, among other weapons, gbunka u tugh, lightning and thunder gun fired in rain, to execute his uncle at the right time, when the wet season came.
Zaki Wuaikya had caught wind of the plan yesterday and had called the spiritualist to attention. He warned him of the wrath of the ityô, which would befall him should he go ahead to sell Tswargbev the gun. This, as it turned out, caught the cripple’s ire so terribly that, as Ikpuurkon described it, he hailed down Zaki Wuaikya on his old Jincheng as they passed by the bend that morning, and hauled insults at him, even threatening Zaki’s life.
“This same cripple who sleeps in that tent?” I asked, pointing northwards. Ikpuurkon swallowed pap and nodded his head.
“Chai. I cannot believe this. Has he had enough food to eat that his mission now is to hurt other people?”
“Does he need to have enough to eat before he conceives evil in his heart? Do you think everybody who goes around doing evil has had enough food to eat?” Ikpuurkon asked, chewing the kwese as though he was a horse in a field of reeds. His flat, heavy nose did nothing to assuage the picture. I looked from him, with mild amusement, to Zaki Wuaikya, with incredulity. A mind bent on wickedness is like a man whose own roof leaks, yet instead of mending it, he steals out at night with a ladder to tear a hole in his neighbour’s thatch. For what? Some twisted kind of satisfaction?
Tswargbev the cripple, as the story goes—which I got from gossiping old women at Boager’s market, who tied wrappers to their chests and sold dry fish—had been a hardworking young man back when he had the use of his legs. He worked for a sugar factory in Lagos. And though they didn’t know exactly what happened, one thing surely led to another when he was unloading bags of sugar from the conveyor belt, and slipped. He had been standing on a high stool and fractured his spinal cord. Uwe! Somebody in his village had bewitched him. How can a young man just fall like that?
Ehen! What did you think would be the cause before? These things don’t happen just like that o.
And he was such a handsome young man. I knew his mother, Hembadoon. She used to bring him to our meetings. He was a healthy, happy child.
Now look at what has become of him. If Hembadoon was alive, no one would have dared hurt her child like that. But she died mysteriously herself.
It was that her husband’s older brother, Uma, that killed her. After that, he killed Hembadoon’s husband too. That man is very evil. I’m certain he’s the one who did that thing to Tswargbev too.
You know, it is because of him that Tswargbev ran away to Lagos in the first place. You know . . .
They went on, and on, and on. The woman I was buying fish from had bloodshot eyes, heavy brows, and strands of grey hair under her chin. She would flash those red eyes at me and say, adjusting her wrapper, that the small heaps cost 1,000 naira each; how many heaps do you want, my child? Then she’d go back to the gossip. She did this three times. But how was I to run out of patience and complain when I was interested in the yarn myself? To conceal this, I contorted my forehead into ridges, looked the other way, my ears in my mind unfurling wider than a rabbit’s. This way, I learned that the company had offered to give Tswargbev the best medical treatment, which, as it was, was vouchered for five million naira. When Tswargbev’s brothers found this out, they took the night bus to Lagos. They told the company that Tswargbev’s problem was spiritual and could only be solved in the village by a healer, not by any medical doctor in the world nor orthodox medicine, which, by the way, was not only exorbitant but ineffective, but—very tactfully—could they have half of the five million to take care of travelling costs, feeding, and miscellaneous? The company gave them three million naira, gave Tswargbev a pat on the shoulder, and washed their hands off him. The oldest brother took 1.5 million; the other folded one million; they left Tswargbev with 500,000 to take care of himself, claiming to have gone to the forest, the one on the border of Cameroon, to consult the healer who would treat him. Now, it was eight planks of wood, four upright and four across. Nails bent under impatient hammers. Rusty zinc sheets wobbled upright, a rattling, silver coffin against the coming dark. A home. And there, by the bend in the road, in the middle of nowhere, Tswargbev would sleep in that thing in the searing sun and merciless heat of Benue. Two years now and his brothers never returned. Each time we passed by the place, Ikpuurkon and I would drop naira notes, anything we had, in his bucket.
“Is that uncle not the same one who killed his mother and father?” I asked, recalling the story I heard in the market. “So, surely Tswargbev has the chia to kill him, doesn’t he?”
“Who told you that?” scoffed Zaki Wuaikya. “That story is rumour. It was the ityô themselves who killed Tswargbev’s father. The man was committing too many atrocities. After killing all his younger siblings, he wanted to kill his older brother too. Ityô had had enough. So they killed him.”
“Then who turned Tswargbev into a cripple?”
“Tswargbev suffers for his father’s sins.”
“Why? Is it fair that a man should suffer for the sins of another?”
“No. You don’t understand,” said Zaki Wuaikya. “What I mean by that is that when Tswargbev’s father was dying, he said to Tswargbev it was his brother who was responsible for his death, which was a lie by the way. And he should avenge him by killing his uncle by whatever means necessary. The young man now carries in his heart the weight of a feud he knows nothing about. Is that not suffering?”
“It is. But,” I pressed, “who caused Tswargbev to fall off the stool in Lagos and fracture his spine?”
“It’s a curse. The ityô protects Tswargbev’s uncle. He is a harmless man. He is clean. A simple man who seeks nothing but the development of his community. The ityô curses whoever curses him. I have tried so many times to let Tswargbev know this. If he lets the feud go, all his problems will leave him.”
“Hmm. I understand now. But what if Tswargbev genuinely believes what his father told him and doesn’t know the truth as it is?”
“I have told him this truth many times. Other elders, at different times, have also told him several times. The young man’s mind is set on evil.”
“But . . .”
“Orne,” Ikpuurkon cut in, “you are trying too hard to rationalise wickedness in people. Some human beings, e just dey their body to be wicked. No be say grass cut for their eye. No be say you collect their girlfriend. No be say you owe them two thousand naira since last year. Nothing. The wickedness just dey flow for their vein like generator fuel. If dem no do somebody bad, dem no go fit sleep for night.” Ikpuurkon put the last morsel of bread in his mouth and chewed hurriedly. We waited.
“I’ve seen this kind of thing with my own eyes,” he continued, clapping bread crumps off his hands. He gulped down a cup of water. Pause. “So I know what I speak of. Udzer gbem yô, let me tell you this story”—
In those early years of my childhood, when my father first bought his white Toyota Tacoma, my uncles never missed a chance to spend a night at our house. Then, we lived in Taraba, in Wukari, where my illiterate father and mother made their bones as farmers. It was miles, miles away from our village in Gambe-Tiev, in Logo, but somehow these uncles always had one business or another in Jalingo. It so happened that their transport money, which got them all the way from Gambe-Tiev, past Anyiin and Ugba, past Zaki-Biam, Sankera, and Takum, all very suddenly finished at Wukari, just before our house.
After three months, my father’s car broke down. He thought it was the man who drove it, our neighbour, Mr. Sambo, who mishandled it. Although my father was a skilled driver himself, he preferred to work with my mother on the farm, which, by the way, was flourishing. It was the year 2000, the new millennium, and crops had begun to command respectable prices in the market. After a rumour swept through the country of the second coming of Jesus Christ on a particular Sunday in February, people sold all their food and belongings, some even their houses, and slept in churches, fasting and praying and yearning for heaven. When the day came, meeting people in haggard clothes, who moved solemnly, afraid they might commit a sin in the nick of time just at the sound of the trumpet without any allowance to seek forgiveness, time itself slowing to a crawl, the sun rose as usual and set on its luxurious course towards the west. People looked at each other questioningly—and with hunger and mental exhaustion taking its toll, they called the ruse what it was. Slowly, they returned to their homes. The demand for food was high. My father, though, who never went to church, had two big barns full of yams, and 100 bags of dried cassava. He not only bought the Toyota Tacoma from selling this food, he built a big house too, and, as if standing on a hill, we could suddenly see the future in front of us. But all went downhill from there, and had everything to do with the Toyota Tacoma. It brought in a lot of money at first, then my uncles started to visit. So, in truth, it all had to do with my uncles’ visits.
At first, my mother raised questions. She said to my father, concern in her voice. They never liked you, and suddenly they cannot go a day without seeing you? My father was adamant. We have to share what we have with them, he said. They are family.
My mother was talking about something different, something my father failed to consider. He was a simple-minded man, and stubbornly believed that the world, too, worked in simple-minded ways. If he didn’t seek anybody’s downfall, why should anyone seek his? My mother, however, had vanger, which she’d inherited from her mother, the politically-savvy matriarch who held the influential family of Nombagu-Dem together. I had that vanger too when I was a child. But an old kwasembatsav in Konshisha disarmed it when my mother took me there to stay with her sister’s husband, when Fulani herdsmen were slaughtering farmers, mostly Tiv, in Wukari, and we had to sleep with our eyes open. The old kwasembatsav had been tormenting my mother’s in-law for years, turning him at night into a stallion, which she rode from Konshisha all the way to Jato-Aka, to visit her friend, another terrible witch, after which, by false dawn, she turned him human again. My mother’s in-law was a giant of a man, or kuhe môm, who possessed immense physical strength, which he put to good use on his farm, prospering enormously, until the old witch began turning him into a stallion every night. At first, it was a white one with an abundant mane and fierce, wise eyes. When she signed up with it for their mbatsav horse race season that year in Benue, she was unbeatable. She earned the highly coveted sobriquet Captain, which brought her to notice in the State’s cult, where she rose through the ranks, and was then the State’s Butcher, responsible for overseeing their abattoir where meat of the exhumed dead was sold. Of course, I did not know all of this, how powerful she was, at the time. If I did, I wouldn’t have dared utter a word. But I did, after that first night seeing her take my mother’s in-law out as a stallion for a ride. It was a grave mistake. She came for me the next night with her assistants, young girls with super masculine strength in their tattooed limbs. They were four, and each pinned one of my limbs so that try though as I did, I couldn’t move a single part of myself. She pressed both of her thumbs on my forehead, and as she slowly massaged it, some kind of electric current surged violently through me. When I opened my mouth to scream, she dropped something from her mouth into mine. The current died. My muscles went limp. It is finished, I heard her say to her girls. His vanger was so strong; he’d have become a dangerous man, she added. Thus, I lost my ability to espy the shadowy world of mbatsav and other phantoms of the spirit realm.
This was, of course, after I had witnessed the mischief of my visiting evil uncles.
That day, my father’s youngest brother, who had never come to our house before, visited in the evening, telling the same tale they all told—that he was on his way to Jalingo to see an old friend, you see, but he’d taken off late and, you know how the road is these days, so wasn’t it wise to spend the night with his brother and continue on tomorrow, than to ply the road, this dangerous road, at night? Besides, it’s been such a long time since I’ve last seen my brother, that if I pass by these parts and not come here, he must think I hate him. And that would be a complete untruth, wouldn’t it? But it’d be none of his fault.
Amongst my uncles, this was the wickedest. And it’d be years later we’d find out exactly why he had come to our house that evening, by which time we could only bite our fingers and shake our heads, remembering the big rooster my mother slaughtered for him, how graciously she had prepared a bed for him, and how I ran barefooted singing “uncle, uncle, uncle” to welcome him.
He and my father stayed up talking until midnight when my father retired to bed. My uncle apparently did not. I’d been ordered early to bed, despite my protest, so that I stirred awake just a little past midnight, and immediately felt a wrongness in the mood of the house. I tip-toed to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and peeped outside. The moon shone like fluorescent and I glimpsed shadows moving about in the light. They had made a miniature car out of cardboard paper and put it where my father’s Toyota Tacoma should’ve been. I looked farther to the road in front of the house, behind the small hut and the yam barn, where the small forest of gmelina trees began, where my friends and I played in the afternoons. There, was my father’s car. My uncle was driving. And in the passenger seat was the catechist of our parish, Brother James, who called my mother “ingyôr yam,” sister, because they came from the same village, and which because of this, my mother sent me every Sunday afternoon with a tray of expensive china on my head containing pounded yam and bush meat, to his house behind the church’s bell tower.
The headlights swung wild, left to right, like the eyes of a drunk man searching for his footing. The engine whined high and ugly, and the truck lurched off the dirt path and plunged into the trees. The passenger-side mirror snapped clean against a gmelina trunk, silver glass scattering into the underbrush. Brother James’s arm hung out the window, and he was laughing, his free hand slapping the roof of the cab, as my uncle wrestled the wheel. A circus. They swerved again. The rear bumper kissed a sapling and the young tree bent double, then sprang back, shaking its leaves in protest. The tires spat mud and dead leaves. The truck hit a ditch and the whole chassis jumped. The car itself bounced like a toy. The undercarriage scraped over a root, a sound like a giant clearing its throat of gravel. And farther into the gmelina trees, they rode the truck like this until 3am, by which time Brother James and my uncle dispersed and I lay back on my bed, pretending to be asleep as my mother shuffled into my room to check up on me.
She and my father had slept soundly through it all because my father, like I already said, was a simple-minded man, and my mother’s vanger was a weak one. I was very scared and did not say a single word about what I witnessed that night to my parents. As a child, I also did not understand it completely. So that it was many years later when my father’s younger brother lay dying on his sick bed and confessed to my parents, that he and the other siblings had grown jealous of my father’s success, especially of the truck, and had made it their mission to destroy it by whatever means necessary, did it all come together. That was why they visited the house often, to ride the car in the ways of mbatsav and wear out the engine. They had, as it happened, but were only unable to wear it out as soon as they’d hoped. That was why the youngest sibling, whose tsav was stronger, had to visit at last. He was a master in casting adzôv to create mirages and throw people into deep slumber, and had mastered all the three kinds of adzôv—the red, white, and black, the black being the most mischievous.
“That’s true, of course,” Zaki Wuaikya cut in. “The black adzôv are diabolical. You are going, say, to the market. They can hex you to go past the market several miles before you recollect yourself and turn back.”
“Are adzôv the same as mbataregh?” I asked.
“Yes, they are one and the same,” answered Ikpuurkon. “It is mbataregh who manifest themselves in the form of adzôv.”
“But while mbataregh exist naturally, as in owners of the land, ancestral spirits who once in a while interfere in our physical realm, adzôv are the shapes and forms they take,” Zaki Wuaikya said. “Though, mbatsav can make miniatures of these adzôv and invoke them for their own diabolical plots.”
“But, Zaki, are these things real?” I asked.
“What do you mean? They are as real as the back of my hand. As a matter of fact, we have adzôv, the red ones, here too.”
“Where?” I asked, looking about.
“In that quarry. Why do you think I go there every top of the afternoon? Even before I became chief, I consulted them on issues.”
“If that’s true, I think I had an encounter with them,” I said solemnly.
“Hmm? How so?” Zaki Wuaikya’s eyes glistened.
“Well, it’s a little embarrassing. When I was coming back from Makurdi yesterday, a strange thing happened to me. But I didn’t know what to make of it, so I didn’t tell any of you.”
“Well, what was it?”
Perhaps, it was the puzzled look on my face, but Zaki Wuaikya and Ikpuurkon were already laughing.
* * *
I had paid the keke man and checked the time on my phone. 08:17pm. It seemed later than it was. Electricity was out, so the place was eerily dark and quiet. The ambience suited me perfectly. I crossed the road. A hundred metres or so ahead, I could see the lone light from the hotel’s solar-powered neon signpost. I opened my YouTube Music app and started my “relax” playlist. Burna Boy’s “Common Person” came on, and in the damp, heavy air, his baritone wrapped thickly around me like a blanket of dew; and the soft flute danced ahead, teasing the shadows. I felt my shoulders drop, a tension I hadn’t known I was holding, slipping into the warm night. I knew all the songs in the playlist. Ten of them; 34 minutes in all. And it was this numbing familiarity, ironically, which pulled me back to attention, when I heard Burna Boy’s baritone for the third time. There was only one Burna Boy song, which irrevocably meant one thing, my mind outrageously registered—that the playlist had played to the end and started over for the third time! I suddenly became aware of my strange surroundings. Looking about me, I saw a signpost at the other side of the road. I went over and read it: St. Christopher’s Parish, Tomahar.
“Is that not the church before that farm by your left when you are going to Makurdi?” Zaki Wuaikya asked.
“It is the same one,” I said.
“So, tile yô, me ga, let me get this straight,” Ikpuurkon began, laughing. “You dropped from the keke at the roadside here, and instead of coming straight to the hotel, you were walking back, about four kilometres, to Makurdi? Were you drunk?”
“No. I wasn’t. You know I do not drink. Come on!”
“Well, sounds like only what a person under the influence of alcohol would do.”
“It was the adzôv,” Zaki Wuaikya said. “They were playing with you.”
“I think so,” I said, puzzled.
Ikpuurkon and Zaki Wuaikya laughed and threw back their heads.
“And that wasn’t even all of it.”
“Wait first,” Ikpuurkon cut in again. “How did you manage to come back? That church dey far, o.”
“I trekked.”
“All the way back here? Nawa, o!”
“Ikpuurkon, you have to let him tell us this story to the end,” Zaki Wuaikya said.
“Well, I did some hiking on my way back,” I continued. “I had no choice. I listened to music on my phone. You know it was past 10:00pm. The road was quiet, there was no keke, no motorcycle.”
“You know, Zaki,” Ikpuurkon said. “I am only now understanding why this man slept late into the morning today. He must have been very tired from the walking yesterday.”
Zaki Wuaikya burst out laughing again. Ikpuurkon joined him.
“You know, this is why I never wanted to tell you both this story.”
“No. No. Please, go on,” said Zaki Wuaikya.
So I told them the whole story—how after an hour or so, my shirt wet with perspiration, I arrived at the quarry to find the laterite road leading to the hotel simply gone. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and searched, back and forth, round and round, tracing circles like a man trying to remember a dream. So that I had to take off my shoes and walk gingerly along the cliff of the quarry, up the mountain of quartzite, and finally, at about 12:00 midnight, arrived at the hotel with my shoes in hand and my heart in my stomach. Ikpuurkon was having a laughing feast, and Zaki Wuaikya said the adzôv had folded the road and taken it away. With a soft scolding of myself, I confessed that until yesterday I had counted such things as nothing but idle tales. Indeed, Zaki said, nothing becomes sacred until you’ve walked shoeless through the dark to find it.♦
Edited by
Edited by Carl Terver, with input and clarifications on Tiv spellings by Abayol Iorember.
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Kenneth Kumater Katsina was born and raised in Benue. He is deeply fascinated by the sophisticated mystical framework of Tiv culture. A self-proclaimed revolutionary, he was at work on his first novel when he paused to write “Séance,” his first short story and foray into Nigeria’s literary scene. 𝕏