Eunike buried her mother under the ceiba tree at
dawn, the same spot where Mama Nkechi had once
whispered healing herbs into the wind. The plot —
three acres of red clay between Surulere and
IyanaIpaja — was the only thing left of her
mother’s legacy, a gift from the ancestors who
spoke through her palms. The land didn’t belong
to any title deed; it answered to the earth’s
memory, and the earth remembered when the
British soldiers shot her greatgrandfather for
refusing to surrender it in ’48.
Three days later, a Land Registry van rolled up
with a lawyer in a linen suit and two men in
pastor’s robes. They carried a certificate
stamped with the Lagos State Ministry seal and a
Pentecostal blessing from Bishop Okafor’s
megachurch. The rule was simple: no ancestral
claim stood against a registered title — but the
rule didn’t say what the land did when it was
stolen.
On the fourth night, the foundation workers woke
screaming. Their drills had hit something hard —
not rock, but a human skull fused with iron
nails, still warm. The foreman tried to bury it
again. By morning, the nails had grown through
his boots, pinned his feet to the soil. He
didn’t scream again. They took him to the
hospital. He never walked.
Eunike didn’t speak. She lit three candles at
the tree’s base, poured palm wine into the
cracks of the earth, and sang the old Yoruba
song that makes the dead sit up. The next day,
the developer arrived with a police escort and a
new surveyor. He laughed when he saw the nails.
“This is Lagos,” he said. “Even the ghosts pay
tax.”
That night, the water pump burst. Not from
pressure — from inside. Thick, dark fluid poured
out, smelling of burnt kola and old blood. It
pooled around the surveyor’s shoes. He stepped
back. The ground swallowed his left foot to the
knee. He didn’t scream. He just stared at his
leg like it had betrayed him.
The church elders came with prayer cloths and a
Bible. They laid hands on the land. Nothing
happened. The soil stayed wet. The trees didn’t
rustle. The wind stopped. The rule had bitten:
no one could own land that had swallowed a soul
without paying in blood — and the land always
collected.
On the seventh day, Eunike walked to the plot
with a hoe. She dug where the tree’s roots
curled deepest. She didn’t stop until her hands
bled. Under the clay, she found six skeletons —
all women, all healers, all buried alive when
their land was taken. Their wrists were tied
with strips of her mother’s cloth.
She didn’t call the police. She didn’t call the
press. She laid each skull gently on the surface,
one by one, facing the rising sun.
By noon, the developer’s office burned down. Not
from fire — from ash that fell like charcoal
rain. The surveyor’s leg had rotted clean off.
The lawyer’s tongue swelled until he couldn’t
speak. The bishop’s megachurch collapsed under a
storm that never came — its roof caved inward as
if pressed by invisible hands.
The land was quiet again.
Eunike planted new seedlings where the skulls
lay. No one came back. No one dared.
The plot still stands. No title deed exists. No
one owns it. But every morning, the soil is
fresh. And if you listen close, the wind still
hums the old song — the one that tells the
living: some land refuses to forget.
