A friend
of mine, Lara Nike Onasanya-Tofowomo, mailed this strange story culled from Nigerian
tribune to me, I take my time to read through, its look as if am
watching late Kola Olawuyi;s ‘Nkan Mbe’ video ! The story may look like fairy tales
but with the way this young lady narrated her story, it deserves a second look.
However, is this fiction, hallucination or
fabrication?
Taiyelolu Abdulrahman,20, whose father, died almost 20 years
ago, nurtured her till she was married
to another dead or “ghost” husband, one thing leads to another ,below is Taiyelolu’s story:
‘’She
and her twin brother, Kehinde, grew up with their father in a flat at the Ajah
area of Lagos. They led a relatively comfortable life in the house where they
only depended on generator as the only source of electricity. Although their
father was not engaged in any kind of work, he provided for them.
“My father was not working. He never left the house except on a
few occasions at night. But if I asked for N50, 000, he gave it to me. We had
no visitors and we visited nobody,” she said.
All they had to do were sleep, eat and watch home videos.
Asked about her mother, she said she and her twin brother grew
up to know only their father. They did not see any woman with him. To go out of
the house, their father gave the twins a small gourd each which they simply
clasped to their palms and then they burst out on the road and board vehicles
to the market to purchase food items like wheat, semovita, macaroni, spaghetti
and rice. They never consumed amala (yam flour meal).
On a particular day, however, Taiyelolu forgot to take her gourd
and as she stepped out of the house, what confronted her was a cemetery with a
lot of vaults and a bushy environment.
She screamed and dashed back inside. Then, her father told her
to pick the gourd, atona (guide) as it was called. As she clasped the object to
her palm and then ventured out, this time, she found herself on a busy tarred
road.
Another incident which frightened her happened in the night. “My
father went out whenever he wanted but it was always around 10.00 or 11.00 p.m.
He would not take anyone along with him. But there was a day I begged him to
take me out to where he usually went and he obliged. When we got there,
something strange and fearful happened. It was like a canteen and there, I saw
a small cooking stand with a big pot on it without firewood or fire and the
food was boiling. I asked my father how it was possible for food to cook
without firewood and fire and the woman selling the food became angry and
slapped me. She asked my father who I was; that I was not part of them but only
wanted to expose their secrets. My father begged her and we left the place,”
she remarked.
After the incident, her father refused to take her out again so
that she would not be privy to the secrets and circumstances surrounding their
true identities. Since then, she refused to take food from her father, but only
cooked her own food.
By the time Taiyelolu came of age, her father did not
allow her the choice of a husband, but asked her to marry someone identified as
Abdulazeez. The man moved in with them and behaved like her father.
Soon, she got pregnant. And when she eventually went into
labour, she said her father went out, brought back a particular kind of leaf
which he applied on her navel and she was delivered of a baby boy without any
complication. Her father, who acted as the midwife, took care of the placenta.
She bore her two other boys in the same manner. Her children were named Abdul
Qayum (now eight years old), ‘Rokeeb (four) and Jamiu (two and a half).
But what revealed the true identities of her father and husband?
She disclosed that all the jealously guarded secrets began to come to the open
when Kehinde declined to marry a lady recommended by their father.
They continued their routine life until their father considered
Kehinde mature enough to get married and brought a lady home for him. But
Kehinde was said to have refused outright to marry “one of them.” Taiyelolu
said she asked him what he meant by “one of them” but he told her not to bother
as she was only a woman who was oblivious of what was happening.
“One day, Kehinde was eating and he suddenly coughed, slumped
and died. My father did not feel any sorrow as a result of this. He buried my
brother in an unknown place. When I asked him about where he buried him, he
said some Muslim clerics had come to pray over his body and he had buried it.
Not convinced by his response, I said to him: “When I had my babies, no clerics
came for the naming, but they came for the burial of my brother?’”
Disturbed by the shocking death of her brother, Taiyelolu
confronted her father that she wanted to know his family. That decision marked
the beginning of her journey into a new world.
“Eventually, my father agreed to take me and the children to his
hometown, Offa, Kwara State. He said he was from the imam’s family. When we
almost got to his family house, he said he wanted to check on someone close by
and pointed the house to us. He asked us to ask for Alhaji Hussein Salmoni, his
uncle. When we met his uncle and explained ourselves to him, he was taken
aback. He eventually showed us his grave. He said my father died over 20 years
ago,” she said.
Amid bewilderment, Taiyelolu left for the only place she knew as
home, Ajah, Lagos, but could not locate their house again. What worsened her
situation was the mysterious disappearance of the gourd which her father had
given her and could have guided her back to the house.
She went to Ilorin in an effort to locate her mother’s family
house which her father told her was Isale Koto. She managed to strike up
conversations with some people who introduced her to a radio presenter who
narrated her story on air. She also met a lady who she followed to Ede, Osun
State, and stayed with for about a month. It was while in that city that she
traced her husband’s parents.
She claimed that she was walking by the road one day when a car
parked by her side and the driver told her that it was her birthday and in
order to felicitate with her, gave her a handset with a SIM card. Taiyelolu is
uncertain of her age, but assumed that she could be more than 20.
“It was when I got to ‘this world’ that I realised that I am too
young to have given birth to three children with the fourth on the way. Also, I
did not know that there is a place where people struggled to earn a living
until I got here. It saddens me that I now wake up every day with no money.”
She said she never attended a school, but that her father had
the knowledge of the Qur’an and had western education. According to her, her
father was the one who taught her and her brother Arabic and a bit of western
education,” she said. It is obvious that Taiyelolu is truly versed in the
recitation of the Qur’an. Her children now attend a primary school in the
village.
On how she got to Tonkere, she said she went to observe the
evening prayer at a mosque in Ede when, after prayers, she was chatting with
the imam and an old man appeared and told her in clear terms that she was
suffering.
The man then asked her why she was obstinate about returning the
children with her to Tonkere, her husband’s place of birth. The man said if she
refused to do so within three days, something unpleasant would become of the
children and the man disappeared.
Then she asked the imam if he saw the old man who just
interrupted their conversation, but the imam said no. She then collected N200
from the cleric, fetched her children and the four of them, at about after 8.00
p.m., boarded a motorcycle to Akoda junction for N50.
At the junction, she asked another cyclist to take her to
Tonkere but the man, because of the fact that it was late in the day, charged
her N1000, whereas she only had N150. But it was necessary that the children
got to Tonkere that night because their father, who was deceased, demanded that
she took them to his people.
As she pleaded with the cyclist, a car parked by them and
mediated in the matter. The driver asked the cyclist to convey the woman and
her children to their destination for N500, which was the usual fare. The man
gave the cyclist the N500, wrote down the motorcycle’s number and warned the
cyclist to take the passengers to no place but the mosque at Tonkere.
As they alighted from the motocycle at Tonkere, Taiyelolu said
her husband appeared to her physically.
She said he pointed to the shop opposite the mosque as his
mother’s and the third building to the shop as his father’s house, saying “I
should ask for his father, Pa Gbadamosi. As they conversed, her husband said a
lady who was passing by, Tosin, was his sister and he called her.” Between the
time Taiyelolu looked in the direction of the lady and looked back in her
husband’s direction, he had disappeared.
The lady is with her husband’s people now, but they did not
receive her with open arms because the aged parents of Abdulazeez were confused
about how their first son, who died at a tender age, could have fathered three
children. They are suspicious of their supposed daughter-in-law and are acting
cautiously around her. But she dismissed any suspicious of band motives asking
why she would want to lie herself into a poor home.
Also, Taiyelolu’s mother-in-law, the Iyalode of Tonkere, had
been down with stroke and the father-in-law is a farmer. Financially, they are
not capable of supporting Taiyelolu and her children.
The lady, who said the clothes she uses now were given to her,
added that they were rags, compared to the ones she wore in her father’s house.
What pointed to the fact that she could truly be from another world was the way
she was lamenting openly about the treatment meted out to her by her in-laws.
She said if she had made up her story, rather than bringing her children to the
old mud house, she would have taken them to the governor’s house. The mud
house, she said, did not compare with her father’s house in “the other world.”
She said she only left her father’s house with a black bag and a Qur’an, which
are still in her possession.
She also claimed to have dreamt of her father once, who was all
tears, lamenting with his finger in his mouth that he warned his daughter not
to embark on this journey. She said her husband pleaded with her in her dreams
each time his people offended her. She said her husband said the reason he
insisted she took his children to his parents was for his parents to have the
joy of raising his children as they did not have such opportunity with him even
as a first child.
The parents said they could not remember where they buried
Abdulazeez.
The survival of heavily pregnant Taiyelolu and the future
of her three children pose a challenge to her. She said the aged parents of her
“ghost” husband could no longer work, hence, the fate of her children hung in
the balance.
When she called our reporter last Monday, she said she was
having signs that she would soon put to bed. She, therefore, appealed to the
Osun State governor, Mr Rauf Aregbesola; his wife, Alhaja Sherifat, other
well-meaning Nigerians, including corporate organisations and non-governmental
organisations to come to her aid by empowering her so that her future and that
of her three children abandoned could be secure.
What about her husband? She says he these days appears only in
her dream’’
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