Witch Child
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| Image source: The Huffington Post |
But the first time you felt the earth slow down, the first time you encountered love, you were 12 and you first saw it through the blinds that cordoned off your play area from Aunty B's office. Through these same blinds, on other occasions, you have seen the bags of rice, the boxes of golden morn and capri-sonne that grew higher as visitors came in but always somehow diminished when Aunty B went home for the weekend or when her friends came to visit.
On that day, the stacks of provisions were particularly high after a couple had left. Aunty B was in high spirits. You and your 'brothers and sisters' stood and watched as the couple drove away, and for a split second you saw the woman's eyes meet yours, as the man you presumed was her husband walked ahead of her... was she absolutely revolted by the rags you were wearing? or was she smiling.. at you?This was your first encounter with love but you did not know it at the moment.
It had been two weeks and you had started to mull over this experience less and less each day but on the second day of the 3rd week (you knew because you had been counting) she came back and you caught her gaze again, right before she went into Aunty B's office. When she came out after 2 hours, she said she was leaving with you.
You had spent all your life in 'Aunty B's home of abandoned children' and you knew that its claim of being a home was wrong from all possible perspectives. You never knew what it was like to have siblings, but you knew that the relationship you had with the children you called brothers and sisters was far from familial. In this place, survival was not about catering for your own needs, it was about hoping that as few people as possible could meet their needs, so that there would be more for you. It was about making sure that when the one pot of steaming white rice emerged from the kitchen , you would be lurking around, ready to grab hold of it and sprint to your dormitory before anyone recognised you as the saboteur.
So when Mr and Mrs Ikpe-Itauma went home with you on the 9th of February, the date that you later adopted as you birthday, you experienced love for the first time. It took you time, but you eventually learnt how not to store food under you mattress for 'the rainy day' when the loot would not come to your dormitory. They put you through secondary school, this angelic couple and the teachers at your new school were nothing like the screaming adults that came twice a week to Aunty B's home to teach basic English and mathematics to a room packed with people aged between 5-20.
It also took you a while to get used to being treated with affection. You were surprised when your new 'mummy' did not call you the devil's offspring when you broke the China or when you woke up 10 minutes too late. One time, when Aunty B was very upset, she said that she should have left you at the roadside where your biological parents dumped you after birth, she said that she should have left you there to die rather than bring you into her house to cause 'wahala' for her. That night, you laid on your bunk bed and cried and convinced yourself that really, Aunty B should have left you to die and decompose like the refuse on Nigerian roadsides.
In the months between your graduation from secondary school and your commencement of university, your mother was worried because, you were reading a lot about orphanages and adoption, she thought that one day you would pack your things and leave her, but what she clearly did not understand was that one cannot abandon one's only source of love. In your research, you found that most of the children at Aunty B's home were found in refuse dumps where their parents had abandoned them mostly because they believed them to be witches, or bringers of misfortune. You found online forums where people discussed the superstition of 'child witches' in your region and how 30% percent of the parents in your town abuse and abandon their young children. There was even a CNN documentary on the issue but not enough people had seen it, or maybe they had seen it, shook their heads in the dramatic Nigerian way and gone on with their lives.
The stories you read make you love your parents more because they had been able to rise above this superstition, to them, you were an innocent child, worthy of love and affection but for some reason, when you walk down streets you cannot walk with your gaze turned forwards, you look at the sides and into the gutters, you are searching for something. Maybe you believe that one day you will find a child lying there on the verge of death, that one day, you will come face to face with yourself.
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