Part One: The Weight of Expectation
Josephat Chijioke sat on the edge of his bed, staring blankly at the neatly framed certificate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) hanging on his bedroom wall.
A First-Class Degree in History and International Relations. Four years of sleepless nights, endless exams, research papers dissecting colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the resistance movements of Africa.
He had done everything right.
Followed the carefully laid-out script, the sacred doctrine of the average Nigerian youth:
Go to school. Get good grades. Enter a good university. Graduate with honors. Get a well-paying job.
It was a promise.
A lie.
Because here he was, twenty-two years old, sitting in his parents' small bungalow in Nsukka—unemployed, frustrated, and drowning in the echoes of unfulfilled expectations.
The small sitting room was cramped with old furniture his mother had stubbornly refused to replace. A standing fan groaned as it turned sluggishly from side to side, barely pushing the heavy afternoon heat around.
From the kitchen, his mother's voice floated in, scolding his younger brother, Ebuka, for stealing a piece of fried meat before lunch. The scent of palm oil and sizzling onions filled the house, a reminder of normalcy.
Chijioke used to love this house—the warmth, the security it offered.
Now, it felt like a prison.
A place where dreams suffocated.
He sighed, rubbing his hands over his face. His father, a retired civil servant, had done his best to ensure his children had an education, but there were limits to what love and hard work could provide in a country where success often depended on connections, not merit.
For months after his graduation, he had sent out countless applications, attended multiple interviews—only to be met with silence or polite rejections.
One employer had laughed in his face, saying, "History? What will you do with that? We need engineers, doctors, and accountants. Not historians."
It stung.
He had chosen history because he wanted to understand the past, to learn from it, to teach others. But in a society that valued survival over knowledge, his passion was nothing more than a wasted effort.
His mother had tried to be supportive at first, but the weight of their financial struggles soon crushed that patience.
"Chijioke, why don't you just apply for any job? Even if it's banking or teaching? Just do something!" she had said one evening, frustration thick in her voice.
"I studied history, Mama. I don't want to waste that."
"Are you the first to study history? Do you think hunger knows a degree?"
His father had simply shaken his head and muttered, "This boy thinks life is fair."
Then there were the whispers.
Relatives who once praised him for his intelligence now saw him as a burden.
"First-class graduate, yet he's still at home. What was the point?"
"At least if he studied Law, he could have been useful."
The pressure was suffocating.
And yet, it wasn't just about him.
It was about his people.
Whenever he had free time, his mind drifted—not to his personal failures, but to history.
Not the one he was taught in school—the sanitized, edited version—but the real history he had uncovered in the dusty corners of the university library.
Africa had been great once. Not just in scattered empires but as a continent rich in knowledge, commerce, and self-sufficiency. The Mali Empire, the Benin Kingdom, the Ashanti, the Zulu, the Kongo. Civilizations that thrived long before European ships appeared on their shores.
Then came colonization.
The Europeans did not "discover" Africa. It had always been there, full of life and culture.
But greed, driven by the hunger for resources and wealth, turned Africa into a hunting ground.
The first European ships to land on African shores did so during the Age of Exploration (15th century), when the Portuguese, led by explorers like Prince Henry the Navigator, Diogo Cão, and Bartolomeu Dias, began exploring and arriving along the Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea coasts in the early 1400s.
They traded textiles, firearms, beads, and metal goods for gold, ivory, pepper, and enslaved people.
At first, the trade was mostly peaceful, as African coastal rulers saw the Europeans as just another group of traders and controlled the interactions.
The Portuguese built forts and trading posts, such as Elmina Castle (Ghana, 1482), to control trade routes.
These forts that would later became key points for the Atlantic slave trade.
Other European nations (Dutch, British, French, Spanish) followed, setting up their own trade posts along the coast.
Initially, European traders bought enslaved people from African rulers who had captured them through local wars or raids.
As demand grew, Europeans began instigating conflicts and allying with certain African factions to ensure a steady supply of captives.
The Middle Passage became a horrific part of the transatlantic slave trade, where millions of Africans were forcibly taken to the Americas.
The buying and selling of human beings like cattle, breaking families apart, destroying communities. African rulers, some out of desperation, others out of ambition, became middlemen in this tragedy, selling their own people in exchange for guns and manufactured goods.
Then there was the European missionaries, mostly Portuguese and later Spanish and British who tried to and succeeded in converting African rulers and communities to Christianity.
Some African kings, like Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I) of Kongo, converted and even adopted European customs.
However, many resisted, seeing Christianity as a way for Europeans to gain political control.
While Europeans initially respected local rulers, they soon began using military force to secure control over trade routes.
The British and French began colonizing parts of West Africa in the 1800s.
African states like Benin, Dahomey, and the Ashanti Empire resisted European influence but had to engage in trade and were thus subdued.
Then, the Scramble for Africa.
By the late 19th century, European nations had carved up the continent like a feast, drawing borders that made no sense, forcing different ethnic groups to share nations, planting seeds of division that would later erupt into civil wars and conflicts.
And the Igbo people—his people—had fought back.
They had resisted, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. But the question that had haunted Chijioke for years remained:
"Why didn't we unite earlier? Why did we let ourselves be divided, weakened, manipulated?"
It was a question that burned inside him, one that no textbook had ever been able to answer fully.
If he had been there…
If he had lived in that time…
He would not have allowed it.
"Heh. Who am I kidding?" He chuckled to himself. He had been an academic but the belief system he grew up with prevented him from ever wanting to stand out, so while he was quite intelligent, he was never charismatic enough to want to hold a post.
It was only in his final year that he discovered that ninety percent of how people perceive you stems from how you perceived yourself.
A lesson he learned late, but earlier than most unfortunate youths who still lived under the shadows of their parents and the belief system drilled into them as early as they could comprehend thought.
Now though, these were all wishful thoughts.
The kind that flickered in his mind when frustration gnawed at him, when reality pressed too hard against his chest, suffocating him with its indifference.
The past was set in stone.
History had already been written.
He was nothing more than a powerless observer, reading about the failures of men who had come before him, raging against choices he never had the power to change.
And yet…
The weight of it all felt personal.
Like a wound inherited from ancestors long buried, their struggles pulsing in his blood, whispering in the quiet moments when his mind refused to rest.
He wished he could have stood among them.
He wished he could have shouted at them to see reason, to unite before it was too late, to push back against the tide before they were swallowed whole.
But what could he do now?
Nothing.
Absolutely Nothing.
His breath hitched.
A strange sensation crawled over his skin, like the air around him had suddenly thickened, charged with something unseen.
The world around him seemed to slow—not in a metaphorical sense, but literally.
The rustling of leaves outside became muffled.
The distant honking of a keke napep stretched unnaturally.
The very air felt… off.
Chijioke's pulse quickened.
Then—
He closed his eyes, exhaustion and frustration pressing down on him like a weight.
"If only I was there..." he whispered to himself.
Then, darkness.