Tarkwa Bay
Beach Lagos
Nigeria
West Africa
03.06.2031
Dear Stranger,
Abiku!!! That's what they call me.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm! Can I be an abiku and not know it?
Calling someone an abiku is like calling someone a witch, but only worse. It is said that an abiku derives pleasure from seeing his or her parents cry by dying.
It is with a heavy heart that I write to you. There is no one that I can talk to that would understand me, and I feel if I don't pour out the heaviness in my heart, I might explode.
Just so you know; this is going to be a long letter. I'm sitting on a beach with an A4 note pad writing really quickly as I do not have a lot of time, but I have a LOT to say, so please bear with me.
OK firstly, let me introduce myself. My name is Ekundayo and it means tears have turned to joy, but I am called Dayo for short. I'm in my early twenties and the only child of a business tycoon. My folks are not 'the Gates', but I can tell you that they have enough money to last even my great-great grandchildren.
I once overheard some busybodies discussing my family and trying to figure out if my dad did money rituals to acquire his wealth.
Money rituals you may wonder . . . is that really a thing?
Yes, it is, however that is not the focus of my story today.
My dad's great-great grand dad was a cocoa farmer and a
shrewd business man, as I was told anyway. He had a few hundred hectares of farmland and passed his business acumen to his sons who passed it on to their sons and from them to their own sons. You get the gist?
Dad doesn't tell people about his family history, so they
make assumptions. Envy is a biatch!
Moving on, my full names are Ekundayo Adelaide
Adeyemi. My mom is German and my dad is Nigerian. According to them, they met and fell in love in London.
As the only son of his family, my dad had to return to
Nigeria after his university degree in London. This is for reasons already described above.
Love was shacking my mom so much, she followed him
to Nigeria. But can you blame her? When a non-Nigerian tastes Nigerian delicacies, why would the person want to give that up? Is it the hand pounded yam that is soooooooooo smooth and stretchy like a baby's bum bum, and slides smoothly down your throat when served with ogbono soup and assorted meat? Or is it the amala and gbegiri? Or even the jollof rice? Don't mind the Ghanaians that delude themselves that their jollof rice is better than the Nigerian one. We all know better.
Please note that the #jollofwars is a real thing. Do not
get between a Nigerian and a Ghanaian in the battle of whose jollof is better. I was told that in 2016, the then
CEO of Facebook sided with the Nigerians and it almost
caused a war between the two countries.
If I am not mistaken, when I was around 7 years old, I
was having an argument with one of the girls in our estate. We were throwing words at each other when she referred to me as an abiku and an evil spirit.
Even though I didn't know what an abiku was at the time,
I beat her black and blue. My mom hadn't enrolled me for martial arts classes for nothing. The last thing I wanted was for people to think that I was an ajebutter, who couldn't defend herself.
At that age, we were gradually establishing our positions
in the food chain in our estate. As my father's only child, I could not afford to be at the bottom of the food chain.
When I got home that day, I asked mom what an abiku
was. Mom tried to brush it off, but I wouldn't let her. Eventually, she gave in and explained it to me. Although a German by birth, mom had spent close to ten years in Nigeria already at the time, so she knew a thing or two about the Yoruba culture and beliefs.
Mom said that abiku translates to one born to die.
Whenever a child is born by a particular woman and dies repeatedly, the child is called an abiku. The child always
has the same sex and looks exactly as the previous lives.
You can say the child is reincarnated.
When a child suspected to be an abiku dies, in other for
the child not to die after being reborn the next time, the child is usually defaced in one way or the other. Mom said that is the reason why I have a scar at the back of my left thigh.
You see, the last child mom had who died before I was
born was given a scar in that exact same place before she was buried. Apparently, that baby looked exactly the same way I did when I was a baby. It was for this reason I
was named Ekundayo.
Coupled with the fact that I am mixed race and by all
accounts very beautiful, people in our estate believe that I am truly an evil spirit.
In a twisted way, it was actually a compliment. Any light
skinned woman with long hair that is remotely beautiful is tagged an ogbanje, a water spirit. Or better yet, you can think of an ogbanje as a mermaid spirit that enters a pregnant woman's body to be born as a child.
Anyhow, let's not get into the implication that dark
skinned women are not beautiful or that you have to be supernatural to be beautiful.
With that said, have you ever seen where a lion gives
birth to a goat? So why would I be anything less than beautiful? My mom was a model for a top magazine before love made her abandon everything she had going on for her and move to Nigeria. Plus my dad is also very handsome . . . or is it his wealth that makes females flock around him? I wonder . . .
Anyhow, just because I am light skinned with really long
natural hair, I have to be an evil spirit sent to the world to lure men to their deaths!