Ezekiel, 32, sells roasted plantain by the
Oshodi bus stop, his hands cracked from years of
frying under the Lagos sun. He once carried his
mother’s bones back from the East when the war
ended, but no one spoke of it. He never did
either.
The drum came from a crate marked “NIGERIAN OIL
AUTHORITY – OFFICIAL USE ONLY,” left unguarded
outside the new Pentecostal cathedral in
Surulere. Inside, thick black liquid sloshed
like syrup, smelling of burnt palm and wet earth—
not diesel, not crude. No one else noticed. The
pastor’s son claimed it was “blessed fuel for
the generator.” Ezekiel knew better. He’d seen
this oil before, in his father’s village, before
the missionaries came with their Bibles and
their bulldozers.
He stole it. Not for money. For silence.
That night, he spilled a cupful on the floor of
his shack. The air thickened. The flickering
bulb dimmed. Then—his mother’s voice, clear as
rain on tin, singing the Igbo lullaby she never
sang in Lagos. He dropped the cup. The scent
vanished. The song stopped. But the floorboard
where it fell? Now bore the faded carving of a
colonial tax stamp—1953, from a village he’d
never seen.
He tried again. Another drop. This time, the
walls peeled back. He saw his uncle, tied to a
tree, being whipped by a white man in a colonial
uniform. The pastor’s grandfather stood beside
him, holding a ledger. Not watching. Writing.
The oil didn’t burn. It unmade lies.
He stole three more drums. Each spill showed
another wound: children buried alive for
refusing communion, a chief’s daughter drowned
for marrying a Muslim trader, the very soil of
his village turned to concrete for a mission
school built on a burial ground.
The church found him. Not with police. With
prayer. Three deacons came at dawn, kneeling
outside his door, weeping, begging him to stop.
“The oil is God’s wrath,” one said. “You’re
making the dead walk.”
He didn’t stop.
On the fourth spill, the whole block trembled. A
mural on the cathedral’s outer wall cracked open—
revealing a mural beneath it: British officers
handing oil rights to three Igbo chiefs, signed
in blood. One of those chiefs was Ezekiel’s
greatgrandfather. The church had buried that
pact under saints and hymns.
The next morning, Ezekiel was gone. His shack
stood empty. The drums were gone. Only one cup
remained, halffull, resting on the altar of the
cathedral—where the pastor now kneels every dawn,
not to pray, but to stare at his own reflection
in the oil, seeing the face of a man he never
was.
The street vendor didn’t vanish. He became the
rumour. The story whispered between market women
and taxi drivers: if you spill oil on the right
ground, the past bleeds back. And the church? It
still has more to hide.
The oil drum still turns up—always near a new
cathedral, always near a buried truth. Always
found by someone who knows how to listen.
