My first glimpse into the horror and beauty that lurk uneasily in the human heart came in the mid 1980s. I was born in 1987 at a time when my natal town- a population of 2 000 000 was in the midst of one the most brutal civil war in the history of the continent.
Thinking back, I am amazed that war’s terrifying images have since taken on a somewhat muted quality. It requires sustained effort to recall the dread, the pangs of hunger, the crackle of gunfire that once made my heart pound. It still at times seems like a threatening fog as we survive daily to patch the pieces of our remains.
As our city hurtled towards war, my parents faced a difficult decision: to flee, or stay put. We lived in a bucolic, a sleepy, dusty town whose streets teemed with Muslims in flowing white babariga gowns. My father was then a postal clerk; my mother an hausa language teacher- My mother tongue. In the end, my father insisted that Mother take us, their four children, and escape to safety about 400km away, my father’s natal town. Mother pleaded with him to come away as well, but he would not budge. He was a federal "civil servant", and the militia government had ordered all its employees to remain at their posts.
My mother didn’t cope well . In the absence of my father, she was a wispy and wilted figure. She despaired of ever seeing her husband alive again. Our relatives made gallant efforts to shield her, but news about the indiscriminate killings in the north still filtered to her. She lost her appetite. Day and night, she lay in bed in a kind of listless, paralyzing grief. She was given to bouts of impulsive, silent weeping.
Then one blazing afternoon, unheralded, my father materialized, stole back into our lives as if from the land of death itself. t first, my mother feared that the returnee was some ghost come to mock her anguish. But, raising her head, she glimpsed a man who—for all the unaccustomed gauntness of his physique—was unquestionably the man she’d married. With a swiftness and energy that belied her enervation, she bolted up and dashed for him.
WHile dad was away, Mother had been indoctrinated, manipulated and recruited to the Watchtower belief system. Later We would learn that my father’s decision to stay nearly cost him his life. He was at work when one day a mob arrived. Armed with cudgels, machetes and guns, they sang songs that curdled the blood. My father and his colleagues—many of them Christians—shut themselves inside the office. Huddled in a corner, they shook uncontrollably, reduced to frenzied prayers. One determined push and their assailants would have breached the barricades, poached and minced them, and made a bonfire of their bodies.
Air raids became a terrifying staple of our lives. military jets stole into our air space, then strafed with abandon. They flew low and at a furious speed. The ramp of their engines shook buildings and made the very earth quake. Cover! Everybody take cover!” the adults shouted and we’d scurry towards a huddle of banana trees or the nearest brush and lay face down.
Sometimes the jets dumped their deadly explosives on markets as surprised buyers and sellers dashed higgledy-piggledy. Sometimes the bombs detonated in houses. Sometimes it was cars trapped in traffic that were sprayed. In the aftermath, the cars became mangled metal, singed beyond recognition, the people in them charred to a horrid blackness. From our hiding spots, frozen with fright, we watched as the bombs tumbled from the sky, hideous metallic eggs shat by mammoth mindless birds.
While my family was constantly beset by hunger, we knew many others who had it worse. Our neighbourhood teemed with malnourished kids afflicted with kwashiorkor that gave them the forlorn air of the walking dead. Their hair was thin and discolored, heads big, eyes sunken, necks thin and scrawny, their skin wrinkly and sallow, stomachs distended, legs spindly.
Like others, we depended on food and medicines donated by such international agencies as Catholic Relief and the Red Cross, and we often accompany mum to the Kingdom hall and on trips to the conventions . At relief centres, The food queues, which snaked for what seemed like miles—a crush of men, women, children—offered less food than frustration as there was never enough to go round. One day, I saw a man crumble to the ground. Other men surrounded his limp body. As they removed him, my parents blocked my sight, an effete attempt to shield me from a tragedy I had already fully witnessed.
Some unscrupulous officers of the beleaguered militias diverted food to their homes. Bags of rice, beans and other foods, marked with a donor agency’s insignia, were not uncommon in markets. The betrayal pained my father. He railed by signing and distributing a petition against the militias who hoarded relief food or sold it for profit.
Despite the hazards, we, the children, daily thronged the food lines. We operated around the edges hoping that our doleful expressions would invite pity. Too young to grasp the bleakness, we did not know that pity, like sympathy, was a scarce commodity when people were famished.
At war’s end, the government offered an equivalent of 20 pounds to each adult. We used part of the sum to pay the fare for our trip home. I was shaken at the sight of our house: The concrete walls stood sturdily, covered with soot, but the collapsed roof left a gaping hole. Blackened zinc lay all about the floor. We squatted for a few days at the makeshift abode of my father’s cousins. Helped by several relatives, my father nailed back some of the zinc over half of the roof. Then we moved in.
No one knew that Mum had joined one of the most aggressive, controversial religious groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses, which became the center of her life. She put aside the supremacy of giving us an education, abandoned her husband and allowed evangelistic activities take priority over all things. I have just recently struggled to complete an high school education amidst the battle between hussling for daily bread, attending the JWs indoctrinating sessions and studying english to pick up a security job at the diplomatic mission. We children soon joined our mum, heeded the JW rules as to choice of friends, marriage mate, who to bring home and et al.
Why would mum agree to allow her life to be so meanly controlled in such an already destitute situation? Not only was I idealistic at that young age, but bored. I was too young to make any valuable contributions to cure the world’s problems, but desperately wanted to, an attitude which left me wide open for accepting a Bible Study . After all, Witnesses said they could explain good and evil and life’s other mysteries. Very soon, I zealously embraced the Witness faith. Young, naïve and gullible, how was I to know my mind was being manipulated—through methods of indoctrination skillfully crafted and honed day-by-day. After three months of Intensive Bible Study, I was happy to go out in the Witness door-to-door preaching activity, and, in nine months, to be baptized along with my younger brother as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
To be continued....