The Other End of the Cuffs

“Run!”

The man knocked frantically on our car window.

His vehicle was two cars ahead of ours. I had watched him abandon it and run barefoot towards us, then turn around and come back as though he had remembered something.

His side was bleeding badly. One hand clutched the wound.

“Run!” he mouthed again, waving both arms.

Then a gunshot rang out. The bullet tore through his head before I could understand what I had seen.

“Jesus!”

I ducked as my father slammed the car into reverse, speaking in tongues.

Everything happened at once. The man collapsed. My father reversed through the chaos. Gunshots cracked somewhere ahead of us. And beyond the toll gate, flames rose into the night.

I was fourteen years old. I was too young to die.

My father, who was sitting in the most exposed position, had high blood pressure. I remember thinking that if the bullets did not kill us, the fear might.

We had been trying to get home. That was all.

Hours earlier, I had still been at school, lying on a clinic bed with a fever and a migraine.

Two days before that, my seatmate, Aliyah, had told me about a dream.

“I had a dream,” she said during morning assembly.

She told me the floor had been smeared with blood. The gates around her were burning. She was trapped, surrounded by dead bodies.

Aliyah was an imam’s daughter. I was a Christian. Of course, there was no way I could believe her.

I nodded it off. “Pray to Allah. Maybe he’ll save us all,” I told her, the sarcasm beneath my words barely hidden.

At the time, I thought her dream was simply that: a dream.

Two days later, she came to the school clinic to tell me we were going home.

When she walked in, I could barely recognize her through my fever. All I could make out was her dainty white hijab and small, plump frame.

“Naya,” she called, sitting beside me.

Her fingers were cold when she checked my forehead. “Are you hungry? I brought tuwo shinkafa.”

I shook my head, but she insisted.

A few minutes later, I was propped up against three pillows, eating tuwo with spicy miyan gyada and snails. The food was warm and delicious, and for a while, it was the only thing in my world that made sense.

“We are going home oh! Mrs. Maduka announced during assembly.”

She paused to feed me another large ball of tuwo.

“She mentioned something like insecurity abi chaos. I wasn’t listening. But you remember that End SARS? Na wetin cause am.”

I shook my head.

The clinic was at the other end of the school premises. I had heard gunshots the previous night.

“Why would a peaceful protest cause a riot?” I asked, reaching for the bottle of cold water in her bag.

“I no know for una country ooh. Na today I go reach house. I don call my papa sharp sharp,” she declared.

Pidgin was prohibited in school. That was probably why she whispered the last part.

She left when I finished eating to pack her things.

Hours passed.

Cars came in and out of the school compound until, gradually, there were fewer and fewer of them.

Then there were none.

The school became quiet, like a place everyone had abandoned in a hurry.

I kept calling my father. He didn’t answer.

The principal had sent an SMS to all the parents, asking them to come and get us as soon as possible. After several failed attempts to reach mine, the matron finally received a message.

No one was available to come for me.

My mother was away on a business trip. My father had appointments he could not leave. So I stayed.

A novel and occasional warm meals kept me company. There were no friends left to visit. The matron and I talked, and she did her best to keep me entertained.

Then, on Wednesday, 20 October, my father finally arrived.

“The shootings have gotten bad,” he told me. “The school is no longer safe.”

I dressed in my neatest pinafore and brushed my hair in the car.

We left almost immediately. The roads were frighteningly empty.

“We’re not getting your usual this time around,” my father said when we passed The Place.

I looked at the restaurant, which was now shut. I hadn’t even eaten that afternoon, and yet there wasn’t a single car outside. A busy restaurant like that did not close in broad daylight.

That was when I understood that something was seriously wrong.

My father kept the windows locked and the air conditioner running at full blast, but he was still sweating.

He was a contractor. He never wore suits. Usually, he was in a T-shirt and loose trousers, making jokes and complaining about traffic. Sweating was not normal. Was he nervous?

Then I saw the smoke.

Thick, black smoke.

We were on the Igando Expressway, and the police station was on fire.

A man in a tank top and overalls stood ahead, waving a leafy branch.

“Where are you headed? This road is blocked!” he shouted.

My father spoke to him calmly, smoothly talking his way through whatever questions he asked.

I barely listened.

My stomach churned from hunger and anxiety. The hairs on my arms stood up.

Everything felt wrong.

There were no jokes from my father that day. His attention remained fixed on the road and everything around us.

“Oya, go,” the man finally said.

He stepped aside.

The leafy branch was left hanging against our windscreen.

It was a sign that we were on their side.

“Friendly protesters,” my father explained later.

We continued.

The silence inside the car was broken only by the rumbling of my stomach.

“Hold on, Nnem. We will soon reach house.”

His accent had grown thicker. He had abandoned his usual Queen’s English for his mother tongue.

I held my water bottle tightly and emptied it.

We passed one blocked road after another. My father seemed to know the roads instinctively, turning here and there, searching for another way home.

A journey that normally took four hours had already stretched beyond five.

Time seemed to move both too quickly and too slowly.

Finally, we approached the Lekki-Epe Toll Gate.

Home was close, just a stone’s throw now.

Then the man ahead of us ran.

He abandoned his car and sprinted towards us barefoot. Passing our car, he suddenly turned around and came back, then knocked on the window.

“Run!” he mouthed, throwing his arms about.

I noticed his side was bleeding profusely, his hand securing the wound from further blood loss.

Before I could blink, a bullet passed through his head.

“Jesus!” I screamed as I ducked in panic.

Father had noticed and was reversing at full speed, all the while speaking in tongues.

It all happened in a frenzy, but the scene never left my mind’s eye. I could still see how the bullet tore through his skull, the blood that poured out, and his eyes going blank, his gaze lifeless, before he fell like a chopped tree.

When we finally escaped the immediate danger, I looked back.

The toll gate was burning and people were singing the national anthem. Beneath their voices were screams.

We took another route home. When we finally arrived, we were drenched in sweat, hungry and thirsty.

My mother ran towards us, her eyes red from crying.

It was past midnight. My siblings’ food was still waiting, and I ate two servings.

After a cold shower, my fever finally went down. Perhaps it was the adrenaline leaving my body.

It was only when I watched the news that I began to understand how much larger the crisis was.

The protests had begun peacefully as Nigerians demanded an end to police brutality. But the country had descended into violence and chaos.

The events at the toll gate became one of the darkest moments of that period.

I watched the reports in silence. The images did not look real.

The burning gates.

The crowds.

The soldiers.

The blood.

People singing the national anthem.

People running.

People dying.

My mother watched with me.

“The military has always been brutal,” she said. She reminded me of the years when the military ruled Nigeria and of the reputation of the Mobile Police, the Mopols, for brutality.

But then she said something else.

She believed what had happened had been deliberately orchestrated by the government.

I listened.

For the first time, I realized how little I actually understood about the country I lived in.

Until then, whenever I thought about Nigeria’s problems, I had always known where to place the blame. The leaders.

Of course. Who else could it be?

I had grown up hearing about corruption, bad leadership, terrorism and fraud. I had even seen one version of it up close.

There was a man who lived eight streets from us in a white villa with green furnishings. His name was Godswill Ezechi.

I barely knew him because I attended boarding school, but my neighbour’s daughter, Vicky, had a crush on him.

She told me stories about his fraudulent escapades and sometimes borrowed my shoes or asked for advice about what to wear when she went to see him.

Barely a month into their relationship, Vicky’s mother came running towards me one afternoon.

“Naya, they have arrested my baby ooh!”

The police had raided Godswill’s house on one of his cash-out days. They found Vicky there. With a gun pointed at her head, they demanded that she show them where Godswill kept his money.

She knew.

She led them to a safe in his room where there was a Ghana-Must-Go bag stuffed with cash.

Vicky spent two days in a cell while Godswill was released after greasing some palms.

Their relationship ended.

At the time, stories like that only confirmed what I already believed: Nigeria’s problems were caused by bad people and worse leaders.

Then #EndSARS happened and suddenly, everyone had an opinion.

The government had tried to curb criminal activities, but the police force meant to enforce the law had become feared by the very people it was supposed to protect. Young people protested, the protests spread, then everything changed.

Aliyah’s dream returned to me: the blood, the burning gates, the dead bodies.

She had seen it before I did. I had laughed at her. I had dismissed her because her faith was different from mine.

But she had been right about one thing: something was coming, and when it came, it did not care what we believed. It did not care whether we were Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, protester or passer-by.

It simply came for us.

That night, I understood for the first time that it wasn’t only the government that had wrecked us. We had wrecked ourselves, too.

Injustice was a double-edged sword, cutting both ways: those who wielded it and those who suffered beneath it.

We had seen it during the earlier lockdown, when palliatives meant for hungry people became personal property.

Perhaps that was the hardest truth of all.

A country does not fall apart only because its leaders fail it.

Sometimes, its people help pull it apart.

Collection: Literesque Prize 1, Short Story List
Style: Memoir-like/Social Commentary.