She walks the red dust path to the lecture hall
every morning, her headscarf pulled tight like a
vow, eyes down, hands clasped—until she sees him
leaning on the chalkboard, sleeves rolled,
smiling at the ceiling like God forgot to answer.
He teaches the 1953 Northern Elite Accord: how
the British handed the oilrich Niger Delta to
the HausaFulani in exchange for political
loyalty, buried the records, and called it
“national unity.” Students scribble. The dean
blinks. The Holy Ghost Ministry’s radio preacher
calls it “satanic revisionism” that same evening.
On the third Thursday, she brings him ginger tea
in a thermos—her mother’s recipe, sweetened with
palm sugar, wrapped in a handkerchief she
embroidered with her name. He takes it without
speaking. That night, the campus security finds
her name in his private ledger under “Assets of
the Unrepentant.”
The church declares him possessed. Not by demons—
but by the spirit of the Biafran dead, the ones
who starved while the North sold their oil. His
lectures are banned. His books vanish from the
library. His door is nailed shut with iron rods
blessed by a Pentecostal elder who claims to
have seen the devil’s footprint on his doorstep.
She refuses to sign the repentance form.
The university board convenes in the old
ViceChancellor’s bungalow, where the ceiling
leaks rain onto a cracked portrait of Queen
Elizabeth. The registrar reads the charges:
“Promotion of ethnic division, spiritual
incitement, and immoral association with a
daughter of the cloth.”
They expel him.
She stands up. Her voice doesn’t shake. She says
nothing.
She walks out.
The next morning, her father’s church van
arrives at her dorm. Inside: a new uniform, a
Bible, and a oneway bus ticket to Jos. She
leaves her school ID on the pillow.
That afternoon, a man in a faded Tshirt—no shoes,
one arm missing from the elbow—knocks on her
door. He gives her a brown envelope. Inside: two
photos. One of her father at the 1960
independence rally, smiling beside a white
officer. The other: her mother, pregnant,
standing in front of a hospital that burned in
1966, its sign still legible: “Nigerian Women’s
Health Centre.”
She burns the photos.
She boards the bus.
At the gate, the driver refuses to start until
she gives him fifty naira. She hands him the
last of her scholarship stipend. He stares. Then
he whispers: “You carry the curse now.”
She doesn’t answer.
Behind her, the campus bell rings—twice—for the
first time since the coup.
No one knows why.
But the students stop talking.
And the wind carries ash from the burning
library, black and warm, down the road to
Ibadan’s market, where a woman sells palm wine
and swears she saw the professor walking
barefoot toward the Niger, humming a hymn no
church dares sing.
