When I was a child they said I was a witch. My mother’s stomach was too big to have accommodated only one baby. The old woman told me assertively that I had ingested my sibling in the womb and that I was a demon-child sent to this world to torment my parents. The unsightly “sixth finger” that decorated my left hand did not help matters. The barely there stub was said to be the manifestation of my twin struggling not to be totally absorbed and forgotten. I knelt and I listened, hands tied behind my back, literally. She dipped the leaves she’d cut from a banana tree into cold water and wiped me across my back, on my hands, shoulders, neck, head, wherever the cane found became it’s home.
As she flogged me she told me to beg. To beg the gods to rid me of the mark placed upon me at birth for being a murderer, to rid me of my tainted destiny, to commune with my dead twin to forgive me for taking its life before it even had one. When she was out of steam she untied my hands and gave me water to drink. She’d tell me to be grateful that I was brought to her and not to Ye Yaremi. She said Ye Yaremi would never give me water to drink and that her lashings were worse because she derived pleasure from it. She’d tell me how it hurt her to beat me and how saddened she was by the evil spirit that had possessed me in my mother’s womb. She said when she looked at me she saw the child I could have been and that was why she took it upon herself to beat me as she did every Friday at midnight under the stars.
I found out later that my parents had paid her to take me, to deliver them from the evil my mother had birthed. I like to think my father strong-armed my mother into letting me go and that she didn’t want to subject me to the inhumane treatment I faced at the hands of the “healer”. I know that’s a lie though, she gave me away willingly to absolve herself of the guilt her husband and his family heaped on her for birthing me.
They say I was the reason why the village flooded; that when I was born the land regurgitated my placenta and spat it to the heavens and the heavens in turn sent it down as rain that nearly destroyed the village. The day I was born the rain came and it was seen as a blessing because the village had not seen rain in months. But the rain didn’t stop. It rained everyday for three months and heavily too. The tin roofs on shoddily built huts (and most of them were) were blown away and mud walls began to leak. The old woman told me they had consulted the gods and the chief priest had told them to bring me to him. He said I was the cause of the misfortune and upon sighting my extra finger the theory was born. I, Ariyike, was a witch.
The rain stopped eventually but the title and its implications hung heavily over my parents and I. Women at the market would avoid my mother when she carried me, strapped on her back to sell her wares. She lost a lot of customers too. Who wants to patronise a woman who had held a witch in her womb? Who was to say she was not a witch as well?
My father’s business suffered too. He built and mended small fishing boats and in the years since his apprenticeship he had grown his business so much so that he now had seven apprentices under him. Needless to say, no one wanted to be affiliated with him too. He, father of the child who had sent rain to kill them all. His business no longer thrived but because of the quality of his boats and the necessity of his service (no one fixed holes like my father did) we did not starve. After a while my mother gave up on trade and my father became the sole provider.
When I was a child I’d catch my father looking at me with disdain heavy in his eyes. He blamed me too for the misfortune that had come upon the village and my mother and himself. He rarely interacted with me and when he did, every word in his address was dripping with contempt. My mother was kind to me. She gave me food and plaited my hair. In retrospect, that wasn’t as much kindness as it was obligation but it was the most warmth anyone showed me. That was soon to end too.
When I was ten my father had an accident while cutting wood for a boat. He’d lost his right hand, cut clean off the bone. Once again, I was blamed for this misfortune but this time I didn’t get off easy. My father after recuperating pointed his stump at my mother and told her to get the abomination (me) out of his house. His family came too declaring how there was no history of witchcraft in their family and so it must be from my mother. Then her family came and attempted to absolve themselves of guilt. In the end they decided that I had to be sent away to a place where “powerful people who can withstand her power” were. And that’s how I came to be in Ye Abeni’s house for the six years I spent there, receiving weekly lashes by 12am every Friday like clockwork.
The day I was sent to her house, the whole village came out to watch as I was led out by a rope tied around my hands like a cow to be slaughtered. They dragged me through the village first, reciting incantations and chants to rid it of my evil in the same way they lead a cow to the slaughterhouse, blessing its meat and those who may eat it. Then they pushed me on my knees in the village square and whipped me, screaming at me to declare that I release my hold on the village. The cow’s four legs are tied separately and pulled in all four directions. I collapsed from exhaustion and pain and they hoisted me back up and continued the lashings as I screamed that I had no hold on the village. At this point the cow collapses, its legs broken. If it puts up a fight it is whipped for good measure. Soon I got the message and said I had loosened my hold on the village. “I let you go” I said. Now, the cow is dead. I had given up but most importantly, I had come to the realisation that it was much easier to just say and do what they wanted. Yes I was an evil witch and yes I enjoyed working iniquity and facilitating turmoil.
At Ye Abeni’s house when she called me a witch I replied “yes ma I am a witch”. When she said I was evil for ruining my parent’s lives I agreed. Still she whipped me every Friday but at least I had food to eat and water to drink. She occasionally took me to the market and I got to see what trade was like in this new, strange village that I never did explore. The stigma had followed me to this new place. As I was a witch in my village, I was a witch here as well.
I had become used to life in that house, alone with the old woman and only seeing the people who came to buy her herbs and charms, never interacting with them. The weekly lashings were habitual too. I’d kneel outside waiting for her to whip me, hoping it’d be over before the mosquitoes congregated in their numbers. By the time I ran away, when I was 16, I barely had any flesh on my back. An array of scars and forever open welts graced the surface of what once was skin. She’d give me ointment to apply after every caning to facilitate fast healing so that my back would be ready for the next.
One day a woman came to buy herbs for her ailing daughter from the old woman and she saw me sitting on a stool, staring at nothing as I always did. When Ye Abeni went inside to get the medicine, she pressed some money into my palm and immediately moved away like nothing had happened. I hid it in a hole I dug behind the house knowing the old woman would probably kill me if she found out I had the audacity to interact with a customer and worse still, collect money from her. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe because I was scared that if I rejected it my contact with this woman who had chosen to touch me, to see me, would end. Over the next few months she came a couple of times for various reasons (I wonder now if they were made up so she could perform her act of kindness) and each time she’d give me some money. The last time I saw her she had come and in typical fashion she gave me money. She had asked Ye Abeni for something I cannot remember now and after grumbling, the old woman had told her to wait that she’d have to run to the market to get it and would be back shortly. After she gave me the money she told me to run. She said she’d given me enough to take me to Lagos where they would not find me. She told me how to leave the village and who would take me, no questions asked. She told me to do it that night and so I did. As if on autopilot, my legs carried me out of the house while the old woman slept and into a bus headed for Ibadan where the woman said I would find another bus heading straight for lagos. She said there would be some money left over when I got to Lagos and she gave me the address of her cousin who she said would help me. I asked her why she had helped me, a witch, and why her cousin would want to do so too. She told me I was not a witch and the real witch was Ye Abeni for what she had subjected me to. I had further questions but it was evident that she was not going to answer them and so I took her actions over the past few months for what they were, a senseless act of kindness; one I would forever be grateful for.
Today as I look in the mirror with hair finally sprouting out of my head now that my scalp has recovered from the years of scraping with a razor blade and the application of engine oil to my bald head afterwards and I wonder if all those years truly happened or if I imagined them. I wonder if such evil could truly exist. I’m resentful not only of the people who did these evil things to me but also of the beliefs, passed on to them from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers that fuelled and inspired their wickedness.
Looking at my left hand and seeing the scar of the now surgically removed sixth finger, I am reminded that for the first sixteen years of my life I was in fact branded a witch and I am regretful that for a while I started to believe it too. I think of my supposed dead twin I was said to have absorbed and wonder if she felt the lashings too as I felt them, knowing she did not. She never existed to begin with. Lucky her.
I've been a ghost reader ish for a while but this really got me. AMAZING WORK! You really inspire me to get better at writing.
This is an interesting read. Thank you Atinuke for sharing💜