MY OWN PEOPLE KILLED MUSA - MY BEST FRIEND (A short story dedicated to the souls lost in Nigeria's ethnicity crises)

By
Arinze Esomnofu
arinzeesomnofu@gmail.com
08031391676

When I was only six, I had a friend who was the age of my father. Although I never knew my father, Nnem (my mother) told me. She said he was tall like Musa, but never had a thin face and those marks like the one in our drawing book which was all over Musa’s face, and that made him look like a cat.

On my way to school every morning, Nnem will take me by hand and we will visit Musa’s kiosk near the main road that led to school. I will run to embrace Musa and he will say “Yo waa”. Before I go, he will dip his hands into his 'babariga' and give me lollipops, the ones I liked most and I would hide them from Nnem. When we reach the gate of our school, Nnem will seize my bag and take all the lollipops leaving one for me, and she will say that too much of lollipops will kill my teeth.
Then I will never lick the sweets as my classmates did, I will make sure I crush them with my teeth so that it will not kill my teeth.

On Fridays when I will visit Musa, he will not look at me or talk to me, he will sit the way I sat when I played with sand – his eyes closed- he will knock his head softly on the floor, raise it up, and cover his face with his hands. Though I never saw Musa go to church, he will still pray with a chaplet, the types with beads bigger than the one our teacher sister Margaret wore.

Then one faithful Friday morning when I was in school playing with the toys Nnem bought for me, we started hearing shouts and cries of people singing "Iwe Iwe Iwe" and then i saw people running with speed i have not seen anyone run before. I saw men with matchets and long sticks, then we knew something was wrong, and we all started crying.

All that happened was strange. Parents were running all over our school compound, shouting names of their children and moving them to cars parked outside. Our P.E teacher ran to the school’s store and came out with a cutlass in his hands shouting; “where are they, those uncircumcised fools?”

Soon, Nnem came and bundled me into her arms, shaking and saying things at the same time. Instead of the bus we usually boarded home we both stopped an Okada, and Nnem was still holding me tight, talking out of breath.

“Thank God, thank God ifukwa, they said these people are going into schools and killing children, Nwam”.

I thought that our house has burnt down too, as I saw a heap of something like tyre we used to play, burning beside the road, when we were coming back.

But everything was still the same only that Papa Obiora who never came back to his house till 5pm was sitting in front of the house with other men, discussing something, heaving their shoulders.
Then Nnem called her sister Oluchi on the phone, and asked her if the thing reached their side.
“What is that?” I asked again, but Nnem said it was nothing, carried me up, and told me my friend Musa has traveled to Kano but will soon return. I asked my mother where Kano was, so that I will visit him, but Nnem said it was too far.

All these things happened Twelve years ago when I was still six. But now that I am eighteen I now knew what had happened without Nnem telling me. I now knew that what happened then was one of the incessant ethnic-religious crises between the Igbos and Hausas. And that Musa was Hausa and me an Igbo; there was a clear difference between us, so that I wouldn’t have loved him.

Then I knew Musa never traveled to Kano, rather he was killed by those people Nnem called “our own people”. “Our own people did to them what they did to us”, she would say, and this made me hate her. Now the death of Musa came back to me as if it was fresh. His gentle face still peered at me when I closed my eyes, and when I wake past his shop, I would still see something like him, sitting on his box chair, and pushing needles into shoes. My head will swell and I will run back home.

At night, I will watch the NTA news, where I would see Igbos and Hausas shaking and hugging themselves, and after the news a song will come on, a song that ends with “unity in diversity is our strength”, and will because of that conclude that the violence, the Hausa-Igbo crises, was a thing of the common people; people like me and Musa, not for the leaders who hugged each other as long as there is cash to share.

At bed when I wanted to sleep, I tore out a sheet of paper from my exercise book and wrote on it in capital letters. “MUSA MY BEST FRIEND, AM SORRY!! FOR NOW I KNOW YOU WERE KILLED BY MY OWN PEOPLE. PLEASE FORGIVE US”. I folded the paper in my hand, and slept with tears in my eyes.

Tomorrow, I will drop it at a place where used to be Musa’s shop, and hope he will pick it the way he picked me up when I was six.

hmmm

Touchy! But....

Foolish man. Don't let me get you. Efulefu.

Also ponder on our own people that musa's people killed.

Every ethnic killing that happened in the SE is always a retaliation of what the hausas where doing to our own igbo people in the north.

You can hate your mother as much as you like, but the truth is musa's people killed our people and our people killed musa's people.

I grew up in Aba and I witnessed several of such riots, as a matter of fact it always start in the se when they start killing igbos in the north.

At the end of the conflict, they will now do corpse swapping, the northerners will return the igbos killed to the east while the northerners killed in the se will be sent to the north.

I remember vividly seeing corpses of igbos killed in the north unloaded along with several wounded ones many atimes and it always spark off retaliation.

All these happened till OBJ era, it was the emergence of Jonathan that stemmed those conflicts.

I abhor violence and would never partake in it but for you to blame the ethnic violence on one ethnic group shows that you still don't know a thing about such conflicts.

op if u like toast it,paint it,touch it, u know nothing,stick to your nnem,she knws better 4 u,3 million souls is an unhealable scar between the north and us,in the years to come there will still be crisis even war to the extent that a nuke at hand is a nuke on position,u knw wat i mean,u even deserve a slap to wake up

Mynd44 my brother I hope this thread is not against the Nairaland rules and ethics? How you see am?

dis thread belongs to literature compartment.

ddddon, I feel you.
I know you know God and try to keep his commandments.
You have a good heart!

Hmmmm, Musa.