Godwin Inyang's Blog

  With his new friend, the tout, Tom had torn open a side of the leather suitcase and found the jewels and money. They took out the first five thousand dollars for the bus terminal tout to go exchange and know what it would amount to in naira. The tout did change the dollars and brought back eighty thousand naira which Tom split equally between them. He took another five thousand dollars and gave to the tout to go exchange – it was safe they exchanged the money in bits. While waiting for the tout to return, Tom bought himself new clothes and shoes and was running around with the village girls. The percipient stepfather noticing Tom’s sudden transformation, looked into the synthetic bag, saw the strange-looking bills but seeing what was happening, decided to pilfer some, remembering a popular saying of his people: ‘When God helps you; help yourself.’ When the police came, the alert stepfather stole out of the house and it was he who saw the tout coming around at the same moment the ...

  With that Mma Tom left the akara business to her eldest daughter, got into the Land Rover which turned around and drove them to her compound down the road. As the police vehicle cruised into her compound, Mma Tom noticed a lanky stranger waiting there already and as the Land Rover stopped, he walked from behind to meet them. They all quietly moved onto the veranda of the mud house with a corrugated iron roof with a long bench which the first three men and Mma Tom sat on. The new man opted to go further and perch on a table at an angle to the bench, leaning on an adjacent wall. ‘If I may ask,’ Tom’s master said, ‘you said you’ve not seen your son?’ ‘E tay I no see am,’ she replied in heavily accented pidgin. Looking like she would have a problem expressing herself, she said every other word in her mother tongue which the brother and the policeman who understood helped interpret for the other two who didn’t. After the tirade and wild gestures, the man perching on the table...

  MMA TOM SAT BESIDE THE FIRE, the oil in a pan sputtering as she formed balls of milled beans and carefully dipped them in the oil. With a perforated ladle, she would check to see if the underside was brown enough, showing half the bean cake popularly called akara was done and then she would turn it over for the other half to be equally brown. When the entire ball became sensibly brown, Mma Tom gingerly with her ladle would remove them, placing them in a tray on a table with customers itching to buy. Her eldest daughter assisted in selling, wrapping the balls of akara in old leaves of newspapers, collecting the money and putting it in an empty plastic custard cup. Mma Tom from the corner of her eye did see a police jeep crawling on their yet-to-be-tarred dusty road, being the dry season, as if the driver was scared of unnecessarily raising dust, towards her. But her younger daughter, who was churning the milled beans in a mortar with a pestle by her carelessness, distracted he...

  After finishing with one-third of the bread, I placed the remaining part on the floor and went for water. From a twenty-five-litre plastic container, I fetched myself water with a big plastic cup. I had hardly swallowed the first sip when I heard the sound of something being torn: I turned and my eyes went straight to my food. Lord, a myriad of big fat rats were attacking it! Blood flowed into my brain and my chest felt like bursting. The food I bought on credit the foul-smelling rats from the gutter were ripping apart? ‘Scoundrels! Impudent bastards!’ the words choked my chest. ‘Today, you’re all meeting your forefathers!’ I shouted, breathing hard and went for a weapon – a fat rod in a corner of the room. As I grabbed the rod, a rat lunged and gave me a nasty bite on the wrist. I screamed, threw the rod away and hit the rat with my other hand. For a moment, I was in a daze. ‘You miser!’ the biggest rat boomed. ‘Eat alone and die alone! Look, we’re halting you from furth...

  THE TIMES WERE TOUGH and this day was particularly rough for me. We had gone to our boss at the end of the day’s work for the week’s wages, as it was the weekend, but he was telling us something about how lack of fuel in the accountant’s jalopy had not let him get to the bank for the money needed to pay us. For a very long time, only the accountant’s car had been on the road. The others – the site engineer, the supervisor and the contractors – had parked theirs. Some masons and menial workers (including me) trekked long distances to work and most were now sleeping on the site to curtail the hassles and exorbitant fares of commuting daily. Everyone’s story was all too familiar – across the length and breadth of a major oil-producing nation, with the status of having its own refineries, there was a scarcity of petroleum products. Those in government thought it was cheaper and wiser to import fuel while the refineries were left to rot. The petrol station owners and attendants, con...