When I was 7, I used to ponder on how I would fight the darkness when I was all grown up and had moved out of my parent’s house. I would imagine buying a lot of oil lanterns and hanging them at strategic points all over my living room. I would then, before the darkness came, light all the lanterns. That way I would be safe from whatever it was my young mind was sure would be lying in wait.
I didn’t think much of the heat from the flames. That it would get hot and uncomfortable was a thought that my brain did not at all compute. The ghosts were my problem, not the heat. As long as I wasn’t left alone in the dark, I was safe.
I was wrong. There were no ghosts. And now in my young adulthood, I often prefer to stay in the dark. But I was right about one thing. The darkness of my childhood would be ever present in my adult years. Why it never occurred to me, even as a child with endless imagination, that one day Nigeria would have stable electricity, and there would be no need for lanterns, and I would have the luxury of being free from both the ghosts and the heat, is beyond me.
Maybe my little mind, even back then, knew that something wasn’t right with this country. Hence, my inability to imagine a better future for myself. At least I didn’t get my hopes up. Nearly two decades later and Nigeria still doesn’t have stable electricity to protect all its little ones from the ghosts.
My childhood was inundated with stories of cash gifts from strangers which had the power to replace the DNAs of little boys and girls with that of yam tubers, biscuits on the floor half eaten by the devil, and “blokos” snatching Hausa men in crowded market-places, waiting to make your penis vanish with one touch. All of which was reinforced by a face-paint wearing Patience Ozokwor on my pot-bellied television screen.
Today, I still suffer from a little anxiety when people come close to me on the street. Whenever a stranger brushes past me I pat myself down to make sure everything is just as it was before the meeting of our bodies. But I no longer pat down my crotch to see if I still have a penis. I pat down my pockets to make sure I still have my wallet. The pick pockets and petty thieves now fill me with more dread than any mystical power that could turn a man into carbohydrate. The Hausa blokos thief story, I now know was a product of something more dangerous and deadly than any ghost- tribalism.
When I was a boy, I was scared. And now as a young man I still am from time to time. But my fears have evolved. I no longer fear the metaphysical things that plagued my mind and made me run to my mother’s room at night for comfort. The physical realm is a much more dangerous place. I’ve learned that ghosts pose no real threat and that all the devils are men. Flesh and blood just like me. The darkness of my babehood holds a new meaning in manhood (this is not a blokos reference). The strangers on the street now pose an entirely different threat.
A lot has changed since I was a kid … alot has changed, but a lot is still the same.
