BOJO'S STORY (ARTICLE)

******** BOJO'S STORY ********

.......the year 2025.

I am the head of my clan. I have three wives. Hassana is making dinner, she is 25 years old. Lola is cleaning my room, she is 40, I rescued her from widowhood. Nkem is drawing water, she is 32. They are all pregnant for me. My grandmother says I must take another wife next season. I have no choice.

My name is Bojo, and I am 14years old.

Next week I shall join the men again. We shall plan the farming season at our meeting. The foreign traders would be coming to buy our crops. We hope, our leader, Kakuda, makes a good bargain this time. He is the eldest of us. Surely a 19year old should have enough sense to fight for his people's hungry stomachs.

After we decide that, we shall all gather under the big tree and drink wine. We shall discuss the story of our land as we learned it from our grandmothers.

For the hundredth time we shall talk about our uncles, fathers and grandfathers lying in shallow graves underneath the pepper plantations.

How they turned toward one another and flooded the fields with blood. How they went to the polls and never came back. How their bitter violence left us with an inheritance of overflowing elder sisters, whom we must now marry. How they bequeathed us with their young wives and fiancees, widows and anxious women we must now impregnate, lest we all perish.

Yes, we shall talk about a rare species of greedy beasts, now extinct. We heard of how they spent all the wealth drawn out of oily wells to buy glue, with which they glued their old wrinkled buttocks to the fertile salubrious sofas at Aso Villa and the city of NAAS.

We hear the grandsons of these beasts live in New York and Geneva, while our uncles stare blank eyed at us from photographs named R.I.P.

We shall talk about the smell of gunpowder that has refused to leave the air and our noses. We heard we once had skyscrapers where this barren savannah cover today. We shall talk about our nation. About a people, who had everything but enjoyed nothing.

We shall talk about the war that made adolescent boys emergency fathers. A war that have made the ladies that changed our diapers to wriggle under us in bed, in a bid to squeeze out children from our barely formed testicles.

After this meeting, we shall all go home, to our many wives and our sorry lives. We shall eat and lie with them, so that the story of the war that begun after the elections in 2015 would never be forgotten.

Note: Brothers and sisters, will this be the story of our land? Let's do it peacefully in 2015.

God bless Nigeria. God bless you.

KUNLE OMOPE.

Photo from google.com