Violence Against Hair
by Yemisi Aribisala
My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms. — James Baldwin
The young lady’s parents turned up on a whim to visit her. Or so it seemed, but the drive from Lagos to the university in the city of Ile-Ife was 200 kilometers long, a journey that needed planning, especially if you were planning to return on the same day. And it must be acknowledged that they came armed.
They arrived with coolers spilling jollof rice and fried beef stew, their hearts still overflowing with pride in this first child and only daughter who had earned a high score in JAMB (The Nigerian Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board Examinations). And a subsequent enrolment at the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University. Other people’s children had been rejected as easily as theirs had been accepted, so this was a significant achievement for them as parents in their community, their extended family, and in their church. Everyone in those frangible, protocol-guarded corrals knew everything about everyone’s sons and daughters. Circulated the blow-by-blow on milestones reached by each child over the years.
She wasn’t in when they arrived for the visit. Only a few weeks before, they had dropped her off for her matriculation at Mozambique Hall, one of the university’s four female undergraduate halls of residence. Their daughter’s absence from school lodgings left them more than slightly discombobulated. The young lady, not expecting her parents, hadn’t left a decoy. She’d spent the night with some unexceptional young man with glacé-cherry mouth who had turned up declaring love at first sight in the very same week of her arrival. It didn’t matter if his words were bullshit, the real issue was that the young lady came from a family where words of endearment were rare because they were un-Nigerian and sentimental. That made her an easy target.
This chancer, who turned up every year at the same spot in front of ‘Moza’ with fishing rod in hand, throwing a line in to catch undergraduate virgins from cloistered homes, had perfected his script over years of resits and repeats. He would surely have graduated on schedule himself, had his degree only been in creative writing. But there were no such fairy-tale degrees on offer in this traditional, hard-to-enter Nigerian university. He watered the young lady generously with words she had never heard in her life. He turned up every single night in an immaculately ironed shirt buttoned up to the neck, dropping Christianised nonsense. Grace, Love, Fellowship, Jesus-lite scripture quotes. We didn’t call it watering though, the treacherous thing he was doing to the young lady. It was “toasting” we said, something that made you think of skewered food being turned slowly over a camping fire, large bushmeat or small marshmallow sandwiches.
Keep us breathing fire!
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