The city died not with bombs but with silence —
after the Great Blackout of ’89, Lagos stopped
working. Phones died. Cars rusted. Power never
returned. But the spirits? They got bolder.
People whispered that the oil boom had awakened
something old — something that fed on greed, and
now it chewed through marriages like dry palm
fronds.
Amina, once a university lecturer’s daughter
from Enugu, became the third wife of Pastor
Chukwuemeka after his first two wives vanished —
one into a dreamless coma, the other into a
trunk of salted fish sold at Mile 12 market. No
one spoke of it. The church called it divine
selection. Amina called it a curse with a Bible
cover.
The marriage contract wasn’t paper. It was
cowhide stitched with goat’s blood and the
fingernails of seven dead virgins — a modern
witchcraft ritual taught by a retired area boy
who now ran a chapel in Surulere. Signing it
meant her soul was bound to his prayers. If she
left, the contract would burn her from inside —
skin peeling like wet papiermâché, eyes bleeding
black syrup.
But Amina had learned.
Every night, she stole a drop of palm wine from
the pastor’s altar. Not to drink. To pour over
the contract when he slept, whispering in Pidgin:
“You no dey know I go chop your shoe?” The
pastor’s left shoe — the one he wore when he
blessed the first wife’s coffin — had been
buried under the kitchen floor. She dug it up.
On the night the government sent soldiers to
confiscate the last generator in Surulere, Amina
lit the contract. Not with fire. With the shoe.
She pressed the damp leather against the cowhide
and whispered, “If your God no fit save your
first wife, why I dey fear you?”
The contract didn’t burn. It screamed.
The pastor woke up howling — his own tongue
turning into a writhing black snake that
slithered out his mouth and vanished into the
ceiling. His eyes went white, then glassy. He
dropped to his knees, babbling in Yoruba about a
woman in a red wrapper who’d been waiting since
1967.
Amina walked out with the shoe in her bag and
the marriage certificate — now ash — in her
pocket.
At the gate, a street boy with one shoe and a
transistor radio laughed so hard he fell. “Madam,
you just perform witchcraft for divorce? E be
like that?”
She smiled. “Na only way I fit get my own back.”
She never returned.
The church collapsed three weeks later — not
from scandal, but because the pastor’s second
wife walked out of the salted fish trunk,
singing “Omo Oluwa” with no voice.
And Amina?
She opened a small shop in Ikorodu selling
“Spiritual Divorce Kits” — cowhide, palm wine,
and one used shoe per couple. The sign above her
door:
“No divorce? We fix am. No money? We take your
husband’s left shoe.”
The first customer came with a broken fridge.
The second brought her husband’s socks.
The third?
She brought a pastor’s hat.
And Amina?
She laughed.
The city still died.
But now, wives had a way to leave.
