When the spirits know your name, Wale Bakare

Gbenga and I saw the coin at practically the same second. We were making a second sweep past Deola’s house, hoping she would come through the open, monkey-gate to go run an errand for her mother. Deola, Gbenga’s love interest, was 12 years old. As was Gbenga.As was I, the ‘follow-go’. I had not needed much convincing when Gbenga asked me to go with him to Deola’s home. She was his ‘girlfriend’ and he had not seen her since the day before. Well, I had seen her earlier that day and, though we didn’t say a word to each other, I was smitten and I knew she liked me too. I was home on holidays from the Military School in faraway Zaria and was quite the enigma to my age-mates in the neighbourhood, most of whom had never ventured outside Lagos. Deola had also heard that I was now a soldier and that I was quite in demand. Or so I believed.

As Gbenga reeled out all the lies about how much Deola loved him and how he had kissed her the other day in YetKem when he took her for the new sealed sandwich that was all the rave at the time (I didn’t believe him but I was jealous anyway), I feigned nonchalance and just wished he would keep quiet and leave me to my fantasies. And that’s when we saw it. A shiny, new 25 kobo coin. For those who cannot understand the magnitude of that find, let me try to explain. It was in real terms, the equivalent of two 12-year old boys finding about N2000 on the streets today. No owner, nobody to report to about how you spent it. All thoughts of Deola were immediately forgotten. We already knew back then that in a contest between money and women, there should be no contest. There was no disputation between us about who saw it first. 25Kobo was enough for both of us to have a very nice day. There was only one small problem. Who would pick it up?

My ‘oyinbo’ friends reading this can be forgiven for wondering why picking up this coin could be a problem. Let me explain. You grew up in an environment where witches and wizards are imaginary beings that fly around on brooms and talk nonsense that make children laugh. You even have one you call Sabrina the Teenage Witch who is quite pretty and does good deeds. The African witches don’t play. They are usually your grand-aunts or grandmothers who had killed off their husbands a while back. They suck blood. I am not talking about vampires with overgrown incisors biting into your neck and draining the blood out of your veins. I am talking of remote sucking that requires serious spiritual intervention before you start looking like the test subject of a new strain of HIV that WHO will have to come up with a new name for. Witches that turn to cats and turn people to yam tubers! Witches that have the power to turn to goats when being chased by the Police. If you don’t believe me, go and ask the police in Port Harcourt that arrested the goat the other day. But I digress.

So, at this time in our young lives, we were well aware that a favourite tactic of kidnappers for stealing children off the streets was by dropping a ‘jazzed’ note or coin on the road. The foolish child who picked it up would immediately turn into some small animal or inanimate object like a grinding stone, which the kidnapper could then easily take away without raising suspicions. Said child would then be hidden in a cupboard with a calabash on his head containing some food for the spirits. The new owner of the sacrificial child would then go stand in front of the child every morning and call his name 3 times. Money in all sorts of currencies and denominations would start falling like rain all over the room. This might sound almost crazy now but we had seen it in a drama on telly and we knew that whatever you saw on telly was God’s own truth. This was the reason for the conundrum about who would pick up the coin. “Sebi soja ni iwo. Eru nba e ni?” (I thought you were a soldier? Are you afraid?) I looked at him and wondered what was wrong with his head. “So it is soldiers that should be turned into yams, abi?” I asked him. “Maybe we should just leave it and go.” That wasn’t going to happen, Gbenga declared. He surveyed the area quickly to make sure nobody was watching and unbuttoned his shorts. Before I could say “piss”, the coin was being given a golden shower!

And so it was that the demystification of ‘jazz’, ‘kurube’, ‘airforce’, ‘otumopo’, and all its cousins like ‘magun’, ‘yahooplus’, ‘touch and follow’ began for me with the simple act of a 12 year old boy pissing on a 25 kobo coin! After the sanctification, Gbenga looked at me expectantly. The look on my face reminded him that while I might have been afraid of picking up a stray coin for fear of turning into agabalumo, I was still the only 12 year old soldier he knew. And I had been given that ‘horse injection’!

The famous ‘horse injection’! That was the myth back in those days about people that went off to join the Army. “O ti gba abere soja!” was the refrain of Alhaja whenever I showed any sign of stubbornness. Same applied to my older siblings and in fact any older civilian relative. They all knew it wasn’t my fault that I was an insufferable, stubborn, so and so. It was that injection that they give soldiers to make them unreasonable killers that caused it. Deep down, I was still that loveable and kind boy that they all loved. My father though, being a soldier himself, knew there was nothing like that so I avoided him. He knew it was a myth that probably developed from Yellow fever inoculation being given to soldiers who were going off to war and who, on their return, had PTSD and exhibited the psychological effects exposure to traumatic situations cause. But people believed I had taken the ‘horse injection’ and I had no intention of convincing them otherwise.

So, Gbenga quickly picked up the coin and wiped it on his shorts. We abandoned our mission to go see Deola and headed out to Abule-Ijesa. The aroma of the fried pork hit us long before we saw the trays of orange-hued meat, piled high like some mis-shaped pyramids! We quickened our steps and stopped talking, to conserve saliva, which our mouths were by now producing like some burst water pipe that had been patched with a piece of black ‘leda’! This was our favourite haunt. Anytime Gbenga or I got a spare 10k, we headed for the ‘elede’ joint. I don’t know what the fascination with pork was and why we loved it so much. Probably because it was taboo in both our homes. Whatever the reason, 10 kobo worth of pork were 2 solid chunks which we could spend 30 minutes eating. So, 25 kobo was a feast and a coke to share!!

We had worked out a formula to ensure that we both finished eating our portions right at about the same time. While you wanted to stretch out the pleasure for as long as possible, you also didn’t want to be the one left with anything by the time your friend finished his to avoid a situation where he begs for you to share and you have to make the life-changing decision of which would you rather keep: the miniscule piece of orange meat or your friendship. The meat won, every time! And the friendship survived, at least until the next test. And so we strolled back home, happy as could be. No girl trouble, no taxes, no worries. Just a brief thought about when we would be able to come back again.

But this story is not about girls or pork. It is actually about the demystification of juju to me and how I came face to face with a talking calabash that called me by name!

To be continued…