A Nigerian Nightmare

Mike Ekunno on Seasonal State-Tolerated Murders

Dear Republic,

The worst is not when you remember someone else has it worse than you do. Let the “Dark Times” world tour continue.

-ROL

A NIGERIAN NIGHTMARE

The cab driver’s facility with navigating the Old City neighbourhood showed a certain familiarity. The alleys were unclogged, which I thought boded well. With hindsight, it was a giveaway. In that downtown part of the city, carts and urchins and vagrants and regular folk would be normally angling for rights of way. From the back seat, I flipped the warrens of street blocks with bloated columns and beams – handiwork of natural architects. Then, suddenly, the cab came to a stop. It was by a clearing where the relentless alleys breathed. I quickly took in the unfolding scene – boys wielding cudgels, machetes, iron rods and cut tree branches. It was a disorganised scene like the brewing of something more full scale and sinister; a seasonal communal angst. They disembarked us – the driver and me. In a fleeting moment, I wondered whether it was all a set-up with the driver virtually surrendering his hunted quarry to his patrons. But a double take showed the driver was also being marched away with me to I know not where.

I was mortified. I was the ‘other’ in that crowd. Merely from looks, my captors already knew it. I picked up the staccato of ‘Nyamiri, ne!’ ‘Nyamiri, ne!!’ identifying me by the pejorative of my ethnic group, the Igbo. My people have been led like sheep to the slaughter ever since the pogrom of 1966 in Northern Nigeria. But in recent years, the killings have become more inclusive, incorporating minorities from Nigeria’s Middle Belt. I could see the glistening machetes, daggers, improvised sticks and rods. Their wielders were a motley of urchins with rheum in eyes and unwashed bodies. I was being poked randomly as they walked me along. The gang on the cab driver had stopped on the way and he was being interrogated. He wasn’t Igbo and, in the pecking order of slaughter candidates, the Igbo occupied the topmost rung. As I saw my gruesome murder in the glistening blades of iron, I tried to remember what could be the origin of the extant mayhem. I was fully self-conscious. My real life persona would not be in the dark concerning any security alert and would not knowingly breach the jackals’ pack. But I could not recall any latest national or local provocation to have warranted what surrounded me.

I prepared for the worst and steeled my nerves against the steel around me. I couldn’t run for it. This was the middle of enemy territory. A dash would finally give them the excuse – like the times I have had to brave it past a host’s growling dogs. We walked along to where must be their leader’s court all the while being rudely poked here with a stick and there with the tip of a machete. The bystanders gawked me like some circus animal. The pathological dread inside of me was unspeakable. As I walked my final moments on God’s earth, I remembered my young last born. The others would mourn my unfound corpse for a while and move on but Ifechi would not be able to bear it. It was the thought of him that brought my weeping. And then I woke up.

It wasn’t gratitude that immediately gripped me. It was the sorrow I felt for my own near death. The tear drops on both cheeks were evidence enough that the nightmare was ‘real’; it wasn’t made up. Then I flicked on the rechargeable lamp by my bedside and with it I made my way to the switch by the wall to have the room fully lit. I was lucky, electricity had returned while I slept and I was immediately bathed in familiarity – my wardrobe, desk littered the way I know it, the mirror picking up my distraught image. I felt welcomed back to life and grateful.

Nigeria’s Christian genocide figures have recently grabbed global attention thanks to President Donald Trump. Most killing fields of developing countries are not so much state-sponsored as state-tolerated. How does one explain that in the long bloody history of Nigeria’s continual slaughters, nothing near a commensurate number of convicts exists for the slain? In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any convict from Nigeria’s seasonal slaughters going back to independence in 1960.

Letting killers go scot-free is like a second death for the hapless dead and their relatives. The victim’s tribal, religious, or ideological constituency is being told that they are the inconsequential other. Since the dead were killed just for belonging to a particular faith or tribe or holding on to a certain ideology, their perceived offense is corporate. It could very well have been any other member of the group. Needless to say, one set of unprosecuted killers which melds back into its community and boasts of its exploits incentivises a successor set which would be out to earn its own bragging rights at ‘the fire next time.’ And if the next pretext for mayhem is too long in coming, one is instigated. All this because the chances of the killer ever being prosecuted and convicted simply do not exist. Over time, kill-and-go-free becomes endemic in these regions – Northern Nigeria; Darfur, Sudan; Gaza, Palestine. We are not talking here of full-blown war zones. We are talking of low intensity but continual massacres with body counts that rival many full-blown wars. At least with a war you know to avoid the war zone.

Many a national government’s claim to sovereignty consists in securing her borders from external aggression. This they ought to do without neglecting internal insecurity, which is the bane of many a developing country. Every government becomes complicit in the killings within its territory when the killer is not brought to justice. When one now has to talk about serial killings or ethnic cleansing, it goes from tolerance to instigation by default.

In Nigeria, one of the usual suspects for the seasonal carnage loomed large on the national psyche at the time of my dream. Political campaigns had been flagged off with politicians poking the nation’s fault lines with brinkmanship’s rods. During every such election period, settlers leave their abodes in droves for the safety of their ancestral homelands. Even The Nativity doesn’t come close. While the primary costs of such a huge internal migration would be felt in road accidents, burglaries of un-manned shops, and homes and disruption to children’s schooling, the intangible costs are more deep-rooted in the psyche. They include nightmares like the one from which I woke.

Mike Ekunno is the author of the story collection, Soul Lounge, and won the inaugural Harambee Literary Prize. He also won fiction category in the 2025 Native Voices Award of Kinsman Quarterly. He is published in The Republic, The Brussels Review, The First Line, Mysterion, Bridge Eight, Rigorous, Kinsman Quarterly and other places. Mike works as a freelance book editor.