Quantum Leap

Preamble

I janna is a village in the mid-western corner of Ogun State. Ogun State is situated in the south-western corner of Nigeria. It shares its western border with the West African country, Benin, formerly the French colony named Dahomey.

‘Ijanna’ means ‘the fight of fire’. The name was derived from the great fire that destroyed the old town in the eighteenth century. Today’s Ijanna consists of just nineteen adobe houses.

Ijanna and Ilaro, a bigger settlement six kilometres to the south, were staging posts on the slave trade route between the interior northern parts of Oyo kingdom and the Atlantic sea coast. The kingdom’s rule over the region extended to Ketou, about eighty kilometres north-west of Ijanna. As a matter of fact, Ketou was founded by one of the descendants of Oduduwa, the Alaketou. Though Ketou is now a part of Benin, it is distinctively a Yoruba town.

Chapter One

I n the only house in Ijanna with a roof of corrugated iron sheets, a man stirs. He lashes about for a while. One of his hands rests on one of his wife’s breasts.

‘No,’ she says, pushing the hand away. He sleeps on.

A few minutes later, the man stirs and lashes about again. One of his hands rests on one of his wife’s hips. He is awake.

‘No. What is the time?’ she asks. ‘Can you hear a noise?’

He draws closer to her.

‘Ah. E kuro (Leave off),’ she says. ‘I said no. But you said that you were tired.’

‘That was all of six hours ago,’ he says. ‘I have not seen you for two whole weeks. All you can say to me is Ekuro.’

‘It is not like that. Let us talk first.’

‘Talk about what?’

There is a tap on the door. It is the man’s father, Chief Adubuleja, the Chief of Ijanna.

‘Banji, wake up,’ he says. ‘A cock is crowing. It is too early for a cock to be crowing. Our god wants a sacrifice. Come and join the men. Wake up.’

A cock that crows too early in the morning in Yoruba land tolls its own death knell. Men can be heard coming out of their houses. A search for the culprit is on. It is caught presently. The men converge at the centre of the village, at the shrine of the god of the mountain just outside Ijanna. The village elders, led by Chief Adubuleja, join the crowd. One of the elders asks Banji to slaughter the cock. He cringes. He prefers returning to his room to performing a ritual killing. He has never slaughtered an animal before. One of the elders steps forward, pushes Banji aside, and slaughters the cock.

*     *     *

Banji returns to his room. However, Ajike is not in bed. She is not even in the house. Chief Adubuleja returns to the house.

‘He wants to tell me off,’ Banji thinks. ‘He will say: You are a woman. You cannot even kill a chicken.’

‘Dad,’ Banji says in an attempt to pre-empt his father. ‘Daddy, where…’

‘What is this daddy, daddy business?’ Chief Adubuleja interrupts. ‘You cannot call me father?’

‘Da… my father. Where is Ajike?’

‘I asked her to go and join the women who will cook the sacrificial meal. Banji, I want to talk to you. There is something that I want to talk about. I want to talk to you and Ajike. Tonight. Stop looking at me like that.’

Banji returns to his room. He lies down on the bed. His eyes become fixed on a wall-gecko walking across the ceiling. He reflects on the wall-gecko’s ability to defy gravity and ‘absolute freedom’. He thinks that the gecko is a male. ‘It must be,’ he tells himself, ‘judging by the way it is strutting about the place. No female gecko dare deny him his due.’ His thoughts wonder from the gecko to himself. Major events in his own life so far line up in his mind and pass through in a panoramic procession:

He is the only child of Chief Aremu Adubuleja. Chief Adubuleja at one time had three wives. They died one after the other during childbirth. The children died in the womb or shortly after birth. Chief Adubuleja consulted the Ifa oracle and made sacrifices to several deities. He was reassured that he will have a son ‘to bury him’. When he reached sixty, he took a fourth wife who was much younger than him. This much-beloved wife, Fadeke, became Banji’s mother. Fadeke’s death during labour broke Chief Adubuleja’s spirit. However, the child lived. Baby Banji was given to his maternal aunt to rear.

Banji grew up in Oja Odan, about twelve kilometres to the west of Ijanna. The most memorable event during his time at the primary school at Oja Odan was taking part in an end-of-year school play. Banji can vividly see and clearly hear himself on the stage performing solo. He recited a poem about a child that does not obey parents and teachers, does not get up early every morning, does not wash and clean his teeth daily, and goes late to school. That child, Banji’s, poem concluded, is an ‘omolangidi’. ‘What is an omolangidi?’ he asked. A miniature wooden carved doll of a naughty-looking child popped out from under his armpit. It was held up high. The applause was rapturous.

On the way home from the school, Banji’s aunt, his diminutive surrogate mother, put him on her back. Other parents could not help making fun of Banji’s ‘mother’ for putting a child almost as big as her on her back. His schoolmates literally pulled his legs. ‘Get down,’ they said. ‘Get down and walk just like the rest of us.’

Banji showed very little academic promise at Bobo High School, the secondary school at Ilaro that he attended. However, he grew exponentially in physical form and soon stood at five feet and eleven inches. He excelled at sports. High jump was his speciality. After other competitors had retired, Banji was still there trying to break another school record. The spectators always cheered: ‘Eye O!’ (The bird!). His coach was convinced that he would win many high jump competitions at the national level.

Banji was involved in a road traffic accident which occurred when the school team was travelling to another part of the state to take part in a competition. He sustained fractures of the right femur and pelvic bone. The injuries put paid to his ability to fly over the bar. His fortunes slid down further. A prolonged illness prevented him from completing his secondary school education at Bobo High School. He left Ijanna for Lagos to look for a job. The only job he could get was as a sales assistant in an ironmongery shop in the Aponngbon area of Lagos Island. The shop was owned by a friend of a friend of one of his maternal cousins. He worked in the shop during the day and slept there during the night, between stacks of shovels, wheelbarrows, hammers, and crates of door handles, knobs, keys, and nails.

About fifty metres from the shop where Banji worked and lived, there was a food shack, ‘Madam Muyi’s Restaurant’. ‘Muyi’ means ‘pick this one’. The nickname was given to the lady owner because she was the only food seller in Apogbon who would allow her patrons to pick a particular piece of meat or fish from the cooking pot. Madam Muyi’s Restaurant was a food shop in the day, a bedroom at night. Men stayed overnight sometimes.

Madam Muyi brought her niece from Idogo to assist her in the restaurant. The niece was a fourteen-year-old called Ajike. Her light complexion earned her the nickname: Aponbepore, ‘red as palm oil’. Ajike’s arrival poured oil on the already flaring fame of Muyi’s restaurant. In addition to her very light complexion, Ajike’s full bosom and curvy form brought men in by the dozens.

Madam Muyi did less and less of the chores involved in preparing and serving the food. Once she poured her short and rotund eighteen-stone torso into her chair, the only parts of her that moved were her mouth and the hand she used to collect money from customers.

‘Stop looking at my daughter like that,’ she would say to any man ogling Ajike.

‘Take your hand off my daughter,’ she would shout at another customer holding Ajike’s hand.

She once slapped a customer and banned him from the restaurant. He had pinched Ajike’s bottom.

One day, a friend took Banji to Madam Muyi’s Restaurant. It was not the same Banji that went to the restaurant that returned to the ironmongery shop. The taste of the food captivated him all right. The sight of Ajike was what transported him ‘to the third heaven’. Ajike’s upper set of teeth had a gap in the middle. There had not yet been born a man from Ijanna area that would not develop wobbly knees at the sight of a woman with a gap in the middle of the upper set of teeth. On the visit, Banji even got to speak to Ajike and found that Ajike was from Idogo not far from Ijanna. It was Madam Muyi’s stop-looking-at-my-daughter-like-that treatment that brought him back to earth.

One day, Banji’s cousin returned unexpectedly to the ironmongery shop late at night. He found Ajike in the shop. Banji was summarily dismissed.

Hakeem, the friend who introduced Banji to Madam Muyi’s Restaurant, proved to be a friend in need. Banji started to share a room with him in the Yaba area of Lagos mainland.

*     *     *

One evening, when business was uncharacteristically slack, Madam Muyi closed the restaurant. She took Ajike to a room at the back.

‘What is the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘You are becoming so sluggish. You are ruining my business. I brought you to Lagos from Idogo because I thought that you will bring good luck to my business. Things were going very well, but now, you are ruining my business. Wait a minute! When was the last time you saw your period?’

‘Period?’

‘Yes, period. Take your clothes off.’

‘What!’

‘I said take your clothes off.’ Madam Muyi yanked off Ajike’s blouse and wrapper. Her pant and bras were soon on the floor. Ajike bent forwards and tried to cover herself with her hands.

‘Stand up straight. Put your hands to your sides.’ She slapped Ajike. ‘Stand up straight I said… You’re pregnant.’

‘Pregnant? Me? How?’

‘Asewo ni e (You are a prostitute). There is only one way to get pregnant and you know it.’ Madam Muyi slapped her in the face several times. ‘Who is it? Who is responsible?’

‘I… I…’

‘I will kill you today. Who is your lover? Tell me or I will kill you.’ More slaps landed on Ajike’s face and shoulders.

‘Please, my auntie. Please don’t kill me.’

Suddenly, a calm descended on Madam Muyi. ‘All right. Put your clothes on. Stop crying. Come and sit down here.’

Ajike sat. Still standing, Madam Muyi held both hands heavenwards.

‘Olodumare’ (Almighty One), she said. ‘You act in mysterious ways. I have been praying for years for a child. You are yet to answer my prayer. This child is not praying for a child, and you have given her a child. She does not even know it. Well, you are the only one who knows everything.’ She turned to Ajike. Auntie hugged niece tenderly. ‘Ajike,’ she said softly. ‘You are pregnant.’ Madam Muyi resumed talking to herself: ‘I have not been a good example. This girl has been seeing men stay with me in this shop. Hmm. Who is responsible for this? It must be that tall thin wiry boy. It is that boy from Ijanna. Ajike changed from the day that boy started coming here.’ She turned to Ajike. ‘When did that boy touch you?’

Ajike confessed to having spent two, ‘maybe three’ nights with Banji in the ironmongery shop.

‘One night is enough to make you pregnant,’ Madam Muyi said.

‘Is it?’

‘It is, my dear daughter.’

‘What can I do now, my mother?’ Ajike asked. She started to sob.

‘Nothing, my daughter,’ Madam Muyi said tenderly. ‘I need to talk to that boy. And to his parents as well.’

*     *     *

Two months later, Banji married Ajike at Idogo according to native law and customs.

Two years, two children, and only three very short-lived jobs in Lagos later, Banji finds himself lying on a bed in Ijanna envying a wall-gecko.

Chapter Two

B anji and Ajike are before Chief Adubuleja.

‘You said that you want to talk to me, Ajike,’ the chief says. ‘What do you want to talk to me about?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Ajike says, kneeling down. ‘May God grant you good health and a long life. The trouble, sir, is with my husband. He—’

‘What is the trouble with me?’ Banji asks.

‘Keep quiet, Banji.’ Chief Adubuleja emphasises his point with