The Hands That Moulded Me

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018, the residents of Ologbo a community in Edo state in Nigeria were hit with the story that defined debauchery in a way that made them questioned what the lowest depth of moral depravity could possibly be. Akpobome, 18 years, greedy and unkept with tangling hair receding from his forehead, baldness caused by malnutrition has just committed a crime that equates viciousness in the negative extreme. He woke up early that morning with one single ambition – the readiness to obey the instructions of a native doctor, an herbalist he visited few days prior, instructions packed in perversion. He wanted to be wealthy. In Nigeria like many other parts of the world where the poverty gap is so wide, the value attached to money could be higher than life. He painted that morning with gloom with the blood of his mother by taking her life and doing to her corpse something unthinkable. His grandmother found out when she came visiting. Here him out,

“The native doctor told me to kill my mother and sleep with her corpse but he did not tell me the number of days to sleep with her. I only slept with her once. He told me to keep her dead body inside the room for two days but I was caught when I could no longer keep it. My mother did not offend me. I killed her and slept with her body as part of the ritual I needed to complete so I could become rich”.

Reading this story traumatized me for more than two weeks. How could someone kill his mother and rape her corpse?

You might be wondering why I am starting the story of how my mother impacted my life with this graphical horror. I did it to call your attention to the kind of society I grew up in. A place where children could beat up their mothers. As horrendous as this may seem to some of you, it is a common sight and I still cannot fathom what could be the reason for this savagery. I have a half-brother – the son of my father from a different woman who lives in the same neighborhood with the mother. Whenever I asked him,

“Bros, what is up with your mama?”

“Please stop talking to me about that witch”. Would be his usual response.

You might be familiar with kids not getting along with their parents, especially teenagers. I am talking about something deeper than that. A kind of acrimony that approximates darkness itself. Growing at the feet of the finest woman in the world, I still cannot imagine why someone cannot get along with his mother let alone hate her to the point of rejection and homicide.

I am the last of seven children. Five guys who are as tough as nails and two sisters who would not let me go if I cross their necessary boundaries. In the village where I spent my childhood, there were no laws against child abuse. In fact, the term child abuse had no part in our daily conversations. They said it takes a village to raise a child, that was very true, but in my case as the last born, the spirit of that saying is a kaleidoscope of tears and smiles. Slaps from older siblings, whips from uncles and verbal and emotional abuses from aunties, occasional spanking from neighbors, and rare communal applauses. Woe betides you in the midst of these if you were as headstrong as I was in my childhood. In trying to stand up against the accepted systemic abuse, it fought back so hard to keep me subjected. My father was never there. The only place of succor was my mother’s embrace. Legend had it that my mother was still breastfeeding me even when I was far past normal weaning age. And that I would usually tell her whenever she returned from the farm while giving her a seat,

“Mama sit down and breastfeed me”.

This created a very strong bond between us that she became my safe haven against the storms of the world. And whenever she was traveling, no matter the distance, she would go with me not minding that there were many people who could babysit me while she was away. No babysitter was good enough for her lastborn-never. Her reason;

“A child given to another to care for suffers lack of care”.

By this, she taught me that we should shield the frail from the strong. Given a situation in which there is the-strongest, the-strong, and the not-so-strong, the-strongest should use his strength to maintain amity in this triangle. He shouldn’t oppress anyone and he shouldn’t allow the-strong to oppress the not-so-strong. This she did by protecting me from being eaten up by the systemic abuse prevalent around me while growing up. That I am whole and passionate today against unfairness is because of my fair-minded mother.

There were emotional diffusions between my mother and me for the most part of my boyhood. And to say she taught me lessons is to mechanize that flow and reduce its impacts to that of mere classroom tutorials. Those subconscious fusions while sitting on her laps as a boy were the very extensions of something spiritual. In the year 1993, my village, Gbaregolor was embroiled in a land dispute with a neighboring village, Esanma. Like my village, Esanma is a population of about 800 thousand people along a tributary of the River Niger in Nigeria. We shared the same culture; food, occupation, clothing, festivals, and other stuff that responds to the call of existential necessities. Our difference was the language and maybe their tendency to make trouble. Esanma speaks Ijaw and we speak Urhobo. The dispute decayed into a full-fledged war that claimed the lives of friends and family members. I woke up to the sound of the bell of the village town-crier almost every morning, “gbanga!, gbanga!!, gbanga!!!,”

“Today, group A members should pick up their sticks and assemble at the field!” He would shout into breaking day.

The stick being their rifles, bazooka, and other weapons of death and the gathering of group A was an invitation to the front line of the war. This was the special squad. They usually gathered by 5 am and by 2 pm you could already hear the sounds of the gunshot coming from the other side of the river, from a place the locals called Aputu, the very heart of the battle. And by 6 pm, the story of loved ones and heroes who had fallen in the frontline would have been circulating with crowds wailing on their way to where the decease would be thrown into the river or buried in a forest far from the village because according to the elders,

“The land is desecrated when people who died in battle are buried in the village”.

It is as I write now that I am beginning to appreciate the depth of the absurdity of that belief and argument.

“How could the body of the man who loves the land enough to fight to the death for it desecrate it when he is buried in it?”. I wanted to ask their imprudent brains.

The graves of these heroes would have been our constant reminder of the witlessness of war especially those between neighbors because of land disputes that sedulous dialogues could have civilly resolved.

These deaths, wailing, gunshots, and bullets which often flew over our heads as red-hot pieces of metals whizzing through the air created fear and distress in the heart of a four-years-old-me. On more than three occasions we saw people running from the far end of the village towards our compound. They were running away because it had been rumored that Esanma had hired their friends and invaded the village with more sophisticated weapons to set it on fire. As in the manner of wars, this would involve killings, raping, maiming, and looting. These rumors were always seasoned with gunshots from real guns that you mostly hear today in computer games or action movies. I witnessed these real gunshots live before I watched them in movies. The live-ones were no fun at all. They were traumatizing. Whenever this was happening, my siblings and I would run to my mother, clung to her legs with horror written in our faces, and plead,

“Mama let’s run. Can’t you see that everyone else is running?”

With that usual expression of calmness that approaches indifference to fear, but wrapped up in care and concern, she would respond; “Where do you think we will run to? And besides, there are a lot of you, how do I carry you all?”

And then she would soot us with such unruffled love that only a decent mother possesses; “Don’t worry, the Esanma people will not enter the village and let alone come close to our home. Go and continue with whatever you were doing”.

“How could she be that unbothered?” I would think looking into her serene face and thinking about all the gunshots I was hearing and the noise of people scampering into the nearby forest for safety.

There at my mother’s feet, I would seat until all the pandemonium was gone and always, she would be right. In her presence, I found peace, safety, and reassurance that everything will be just fine and that the raging war no matter how furious will not take me under no matter how close it gets. And now I am a grown man working on taking the world on my shoulders and making it a better place. I have had my own wars and a lot of them ever since then and almost in all I could see my mother’s face painted in equanimity, calmly saying,

“Son, go ahead, hold your head high and keep your right conviction no matter how hard and close the life punches and bullets may seem. We have been through this before. It won’t come too close and it won’t take you under. So, you don’t have to run away”.

In other words, she is always telling me to keep fighting for what is right and just and that is what I will do.

Today May 22, 2021, at about 3 pm I took a short break from my writing to reflect on some of the moments I have had with her. Few minutes into it, my eyes welled up and flowed over. It has been a long time I left her and I missed her like heaven. When I waved my mother goodbye, that type of goodbye that says, "I have packed my bags, I am going to be a man in the world in the absence of your physical presence, but you will always be with me”. That was about seventeen years ago. I only squeeze some time to go home to see her whenever I am able from any part of the world that life took. I do not have the financial resources to sustain myself and her just yet otherwise I would have brought her to be with me. But knowing the kind of person she is, I know she would object. She would never burden anyone, not her lastborn. This reflection reminded me of one of the occasions that significantly fashioned the person I have become. I was less than ten years old then. That afternoon I came back from school and she handed me a piece of paper on which I have solved some math’s problems the previous night and said,

“I saw this on the floor while sweeping this morning and because I did not know what is written on it, I decided to keep it until you return. I do not know if what is written on it is important”. I cannot say if I was shocked back then but I do know that that became the practice. My mother never threw away any piece of paper until I or any of my siblings certified it useless. This touched and stayed with me and I began thinking about it seriously. So, I asked her one day,

“Mama, why do you continue to keep our papers for us no matter how bad they look on the floor when you could have just thrown them away?”

Her response was; “You know I cannot read and write?”

I nodded in the affirmative. And then asked her; “Why is that?”

She began the story of pain that created in my heart a kind of disappointment in an unprogressive culture that preserves a crude gender inequality.

“I was in primary six”. She began.

“My father called me one day and told me he had seen a good man who would marry me”.

By then I could see the pains in her eyes and hear the cheerlessness in her voice.

“I told him, no! and that I want to continue with my studies. He would not take any of that. He connived with my mother who decided to chase me all over the village and many a time with a very big stick.

“Once she pushed me into the river and threatened to cause me serious harm if I refuse to get married”. She continued.

“I had no choice but to give in”.

And then she lifted her eyes and looked into the distance and exclaimed; “Ah! my father, he is not the best of fathers. He was always going all over the village telling any young man he saw fit for an in-law; ‘I have a she-kid, she would do well for a wife’. That was how he married all of us his daughters out against our wish”.

“Why didn’t you run away”? I asked her.

“I had nowhere to go”. Was her response.

She told me this story with that soreness caused by the irreversibility of time. I knew then that if she could she would go back in time and read all the books she could and study as much as she could. This is how my mother planted the seed of books in me. When other parents were dragging their children to the farm in the village, my mother would rather let me and my siblings go to school. The only thing she would do was to either tell us to join her later that afternoon on the farm after school. Otherwise, she would leave some chores for us at home. I remembered one occasion in which I was so rude to her because of the drudgery of farm labor. That day we had walked very far into the heart of the Nigeria rainforest on a slippery road with mud and puddles of water into which one could sink to his knee in the rainy season. That day I was aching with the oppressive weight of the fruits of the bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis - a fruit tree which is one of the sources of income for people in my village during its fruiting season usually from April to July and from September to October) I was carrying a sack full of them on my head while walking barefooted on the slippery and muddy road. When I could not take it anymore, I threw it away.

Then I shouted at her in protest when she asked me to pick it; “I was not born for this kind of useless labor”.

It was child labor the definition of The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But my mother did not know that and she was not doing that with the intention to oppress her beloved child. She just wanted me to learn the act of hard work and contribute the little I could to our survival. I would not take it and my mother did not insist. She let me have my way that day. She told the story to my father with a big laugh a few days later. His response was,

“You should have said, Amen!”

In March 2021, my cousin who was with us that day reminded me of that statement I made twenty years ago and I remembered how far I have come. I knew at that tender age from my mother’s story that if I do not want to end up like her with regret, I would have to throw down any weight that is not related to books. And she gave me all the assistance I needed from encouraging me to read anything and everything, even pieces of papers she picked from the floor to insisting that she would not give me any money to bribe teachers to give me answers to examination questions when other parents were doing it.

Her protest was; “I have seen you read all night, if you cannot write the exam by yourself without being assisted, then you are helpless indeed".

I heard her loud and clear. I knew then that her word is firmer than a flint. I wrote by myself when others were copying answers from the teachers. Those pieces of paper have become textbooks, biographies, and memos of world leaders. They cost me a lot in payment for flight-extra-luggage and I am paying gladly. They have been my companions and they make me the man I am. Currently, I am studying for my doctorate at the Universite de Montpellier in the South of France researching the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in the measurement of water flux, transpiration, and carbon allocation in plants. This involves a lot of readings across different disciplines; ecophysiology, plant biology, electromagnetism, physics, and electronics. These are difficult areas especially if your background is in the biological sciences. My mother had taught me to fight and to value the pieces of paper even though she could not read nor write. I am enjoying what I am doing and reading has intertwined itself with my life. Thank you, mom, for those pieces of paper.

One of the challenges I had like every other child growing up was keeping my mouth out of trouble. I do not know why I talked so much as a kid and very often talked myself into problems. I remembered verbally assaulting one of my sisters. I vilified every part of her body, from her nose to her legs. My sisters are some of the most gorgeous people I know today. But because I was young, unwise, rude, and lazy by the measure of the muscle, the only strength I had then was that of my mouth. And it did get me into a lot of pain. After disparaging her, I ran away from home that afternoon and waited for my mom to come from the farm before returning saying to myself,

“She will protect me”.

But when she returned and heard what I had done to my sister her daughter, she allowed her to deal with me a little. And I was so beaten up that I thought I was going to faint. My family does not take trash. If you misbehave, they put you back in line. No sacred cow. Mother is just, democratic and fair. It was a very good practical lesson for mouth control. Few days later, mom asked me to sit down and told me,

“You cannot just open your mouth and make statements as you wish. You do not just say things the way you want. As for questions, you can ask as many as you wish. You are very free to be careless with questions because people do not get sanctioned by asking questions but be careful of the statements you make”.

That has guided me in my conversations. And many a time I have caused myself a lot neglecting that injunction. I took it to my studies also and I ask as many questions as possible. It helps to question more and say less - my mother taught me that.

In relationships, truth is the substance. And very few people tell the truth to one another these days due to fear. The bitter truth they call it. Mother would shame this generation. She tells the truth even if telling it hurts her. Once her husband my father was sued for something he said about the women in his community. She was invited as a witness to tell her own part of the story. She stood before the court and told the truth like she always did. Her husband was guilty and she would not mislead the audience. My father was furious and the people around were dismayed. She left with her head held high. after some years had gone, she told me that testifying against her husband was one of the reasons behind their divorce and that she did not regret it. This taught me to be true to myself and be truthful no matter what. Because when the chips are down you are left with no one but yourself. When I am confronted with a situation requiring me to choose between the truth and an alternative, I think back to my mother’s bravery and go for the truth and dare the consequences.

Mother was a married-single-woman. Being the mother of seven human beings, she is a perfect single mother. Very often in almost all of my adult life, I am thinking and asking myself; “How did she do it?” Raising all of us, and we all turned out fine. Everyone of us except me is raising a family now. When I see single mothers wailing of their travails despite their trappings, I am always tempted to say to them,

"You need to pay my mother a visit. She would have one or two things to teach you about raising children as a single mother".

Marrying a man with seven other wives means you will not have as much of the husband as you would need and with those number of children that could make up a village, the care of the children lies almost solely on the lap of the woman. She has to be strong enough to be the father and the mother. She gave all she had to make us have everything that we essentially needed, and very often we had enough. She could travel through dark jungles in the middle of the night gathering the fruits of the bush mango to make money so her children could be fed. She would walk through swamps catching fishes, clear forests to cultivate large expanses of lands, lift and balance heavy faggots of woods on her head and carry them long distances to provide fuel for her home. There was no government social care. . Non-government organizations that could provide welfare services were non-existent. Mother carried it all. Growing up with her and watching her taking all these in stride with self-possession taught me the greatest lesson in resilience. She is resilience personified, never complaining, always moving and every day was a call to duty. Now that I have to take care of my needs, no challenge deters me. She did this to me and I love her the more for it. With her everything can be done. When you are tired, stop, rest, refresh and continue.

I lived my life within the reach and limit of my senses for a while before my mom changed that. Many of the lessons parents and other adults teach to kids are delivered indirectly. People seem to learn more from running into something that interests them. I ran into my mother kneeling beside her bed praying to God for her children one morning. I am not sure she ever prayed for anything else other than their prosperity and safety. And I saw the passion with which she did it. Because I love and respect her, that became something that should be done. And very often I hear her say,

“I don’t walk or sacrifice to anything. I only pray that God will take care of and bless my children wherever they are”.

Now I have learned to talk to God as if I am having a conversation with a friend. That was how I saw my mother did it and I think that is the best way to do it.

I have left home for about eighteen years now and I am missing my mother every day. I go everywhere with her face right before my eyes. Her love for me expounds love in its perfection. Every action I take has her fingerprint in some measure. Very often I reflect on the things she taught. The last thing she told me when I was leaving was,

“In whatever you do, be humble”.

I am not sure if I have been humble enough or pay adequate attention to all the seeds of gold she sowed in my soul in words and acts. As I think through it all, there is only one conclusion that I could draw; the hands of God made me and the hands of my mother molded me.