By Nyangbay Von-nyon, Political Commentator
A fairly dark-skin haggard woman sat psychologically brutalized by the man she has known for years. She was tranced into the horrible days of punches that greeted her every time her drunken husband was out of order. She struggled to catch her breath. She was exhausted, frail, and hungry too. Last night she had not eaten much, for she had to surrender the left-over crust to her poorly fed kids. She stretched her two legs apart, twisting her lips in agony, but hoping the severe pain that is nearly killing her will ease away. But no, it was not to be. She had already reached her ninth month and few days. She was expecting a child, and whether it was a boy or girl did not matter. Then she mustered the courage and grabbed unto lappa rising clumsily to enter the living room, dusty, now a residence of flies.
In the hours that followed a child felt his first cold air! It’s a boy, she tilted her son who would wear two faces in his later age. His name was Martin, one of two brothers and a sister. His mother (name withheld) was happy, for he had snubbed her to come out for the last five days subjecting her to unimaginable anguish. Many thought this child was an “agbanji”, the Nigerian parlance for a cursed evil child. She exhaled a sigh of relief that at least her child is born and he was a boy too. The days, weeks, months and years that followed were nurturing time.
“If he is an evil child, we will know. He will plan evil, lie, steal, cheat,” an older woman would suggest. The boy was not be what his mother envisaged. Certainly, she did not expect her son would be a drug addict, visiting bars to drink his head off. Forecasting her imagination to the future, Martin was that treacherous and mischievous “agbanji”. From the look of him, he was this sweet, handsome, smart kid that will attract admiration but himself a lackey of evil geniuses. He would be cunning, a Machiavellian and chauvinistic fiend.
Martin wetted his bed, and that was obvious for a child who wanted all the food from the kitchen. But the part of him that his siblings detested so bad was his satanic act of portraying them as the ones who pee in bed. It may sound rather none-issue and obvious for a child to wet the bed, but it is not about wetting the bed. It’s a child who peed in bed and pushed his sister on the wet spot, changed his pants to feign it wasn’t him. And when his father or mother was landing thunderous slaps in the ears of his sister, this “agbanji” would laugh like an Hamas zealot who stands and rejoices why a bunch of innocent civilians are blown up by suicide bombers.
The philosopher Adam Morton once argued that “evil occurs when internal, mental barriers against it simply break down”. According to him the opportunity to think and do evil is purely manufactured by a person who intends to inflict harm. Like he rightly argued, Martin Kollie, learned to think and device evil machinations even why he was yet 14 years of age. What could be the lesson learned from a boy who made his siblings suffer for his sin, who put up an innocent face while others weep in anguish, who rejoices in his heart for fabricating facts to present damning situations that do not exist? Evil has a way of germinating slowly but anchoring solid roots that will come out like monstrous implants. What do we expect of a boy who always lies and create fake situations to amass sympathy for himself?
EDITOR’S NOTE: THE CONTENT OF THIS ARTICLE IS PURELY THE AUTHOR’S.
