She landed at Murtala Muhammed with a suitcase
full of film credits and a spine stiff with the
weight of twenty years away. The city had
swallowed its own glow — oil money had dried,
and the streets now hummed with the sour breath
of austerity. Her name still flickered on cinema
posters, but no one bought tickets anymore. The
curse had followed her from Enugu to Ibadan to
Abuja: every man who loved her died before dawn,
clean deaths, no blood, just silence in the bed
like a prayer never answered.
Her mother’s house in Surulere still stood, but
the compound was rented out to a Pentecostal
revivalist who burned red candles every night
and shouted curses back at the spirits. Mama
Nneka’s mask — carved from iroko, eyes hollowed
with palm oil, lips sealed with cowrie shells —
hung behind the altar, now called “The Idol of
False Ancestors.” The church had taken it after
the third husband vanished, the one who bought
her a Toyota Corolla and died midsentence at the
Ojota roundabout, eyes wide, mouth still forming
her name.
The heist was never about money. It was about
silence. The curse wasn’t magic — it was
inheritance. The mask had been stolen by her
grandfather during the ’54 riots, taken from a
shrine in Abakaliki to sell to a colonial
officer who paid in British pounds and a promise
of land that never came. The ancestors didn’t
curse for theft — they cursed for forgetting.
Every soninlaw who died? They were the price for
the silence. Every time she turned away from
home, the land remembered.
She slipped in past midnight, when the pastor
was deep in prayer for a new Mercedes. The mask
felt warm in her hands, heavier than memory. As
she turned to leave, the floorboards groaned —
not from age, but from something rising. The
candles blew out not by wind, but by breath. The
wall behind the altar cracked open, not with
force, but with sorrow. Inside, stacked like
forgotten letters, were the shoes of all the men
who loved her. Leather cracked. Soles worn thin.
One pair still smelled of Palm Wine and pepper
soup.
She ran. The curse didn’t chase. It waited. At
the gate, a boy from the area — eyes too old for
his face — handed her a bottle of local gin and
said, “Your mama told me to give this when you
come back.” She didn’t ask how he knew. She
drank. The gin burned like truth.
At dawn, she stood before the Lagos lagoon, mask
in hand. She didn’t throw it. She didn’t bury it.
She pressed it to her chest, where her heart
beat like a drum calling home. The curse didn’t
lift. But for the first time since 1962, the
silence in her bed didn’t feel like death. It
felt like waiting.
The mask was never meant to be returned. It was
meant to be worn.
