Black Eid: Grieving in a time of feast

Fair warning: This column is coming from a place of loss and deep grief, so it will give you no joy today. If you need some comic relief derived from the politics of Senator Natasha Akpoti’s dramatic return to her constituency or the scandal of bearded sheikhs allegedly trading off their congregants for political payouts, […]

Fair warning: This column is coming from a place of loss and deep grief, so it will give you no joy today. If you need some comic relief derived from the politics of Senator Natasha Akpoti’s dramatic return to her constituency or the scandal of bearded sheikhs allegedly trading off their congregants for political payouts, this, today, is not the space for it. All that hullabaloo has gone over my head as I mourn the passing of seven family members on Eid Day.

When I got a call from my brother on Sallah morning, I had assumed that it was the customary Sallah greetings. The connection was tacky, and I was carting my luggage and getting ready to leave Uppsala for Stockholm in Sweden, so I told him I would call him back. He said, “Abubakar, listen. We have lost Hajiya.” And I felt the floor give way beneath me.

Hajiya Maryam Tatu, my paternal aunt, was the matriarch of my family. She was my late dad’s older sister and died almost exactly nine years and a month after he had passed away. She was aged and had been ill for a while. The last time I saw her was in June or July last year, and I feared we would not meet again. Yet nothing prepares you for the eventual loss of a loved one. Not even the fact that she had sat up in bed that day in June or July and had held me for a long time. She was excited to see me, and I was both excited and emotional. Her presence in my life has been grounding. She filled that father-shaped hole in our lives. I, too, held on to her as long as I could because I feared I would never have the chance to hug her like that.

After my brother’s devastating call, I sat on the threshold of the Grand Hotel Hornan and broke down. I felt empty and lost and overwhelmed by the gutting feeling of losing family while being far from home.

Somehow, I made it to my train to Stockholm, thanks largely to the kindness of a friend. And when I got to my hotel for the night, I got another call from home. My wife informed me that it seemed there had been an accident involving some of my relatives travelling to bury our matriarch. A few calls later, I gathered that six family members had died instantly between Toto and Koton Karfe. One of them was my cousin, Muhammadu Iron, his wife and his son. The other was his brother, Mohammed Usman, his own wife, and his son.

Muhammadu Usman Shehu, or Iron, as he was called, was a presence in my childhood when he and some older cousins would visit our family in Jos and spend days or weeks with us. At the time, I didn’t know how exactly we were related. I was just impressed by that strong older relative who loved boxing and a show of strength—a strength I had felt when he playfully punched me once. I understood then exactly why he was nicknamed Iron.

Life happened, and we didn’t see each other for years until we reconnected at a family event. We laughed about old times. I teased him about his playful punch when I was still a boy, and he had seemed embarrassed about it. We spoke occasionally on the phone after that, and I had the pleasure of hosting him in Abuja for some days when he visited my family.

If, as the British poet John Donne says, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in humanity,” what does the death of seven family members do to you? Does it crush you completely and beat you to a pulp or leave you sitting in a hotel room, all day, from morning to evening, staring at the wall, zoned out, with time slipping past, unnoticed, uncared for?

While these have been heavy losses for us all as a large extended family that stretches across states, the loss must weigh heavier on my cousins, the Tatu family, whose much-beloved and respected mother had breathed her last, but most especially on the remaining members of my cousin Muhammadu Iron’s family. My second cousin, Jamila, had lost not only her biological parents and brother, an uncle and a cousin, but also my aunt, who raised her from when she was a child. How do you condole a person in that position? How do you console yourself and the other members of your family? As Muslims, the practice of our faith to submit to the dictates and designs of a higher power becomes a significant crutch to lean on. May Allah grant my dearly beloveds compassion and an exalted abode, and may He grant us all the resolve to bear the pain of these losses with grace.

As far as black Eids go, this has got to be one of them, not just on a personal level, not just for my family but for at least the families of the 16 travellers brutally murdered in Uromi, Edo State.

They, too, like my kin, had been looking forward to an enjoyable Eid. They had been travelling to celebrate it with their own loved ones before they were intercepted at Uromi, beaten, clubbed, hacked, and torched in the most inhumane way possible. The suspicion that they could possibly be a kidnapping gang that had terrorised Uromi of late has been given as a justification—they were, after all, travelling with locally made guns and hunting dogs because they were hunters.

On the part of their murderers, there are three possible motivations—not vindications—for the barbarism that resulted in these lynchings. One might be fear, the other might be hate, and the third might just be sheer savagery. Fear because, according to reports, kidnapping gangs have besieged Uromi recently, and in response, the community had set up a vigilante group to secure the lives of the locals. Fear has made people do the most awful things in the name of self-preservation. The possibility of hate being a motive cannot be ruled out entirely, considering the ethnic hues that have coloured these killings. If it is neither of these two, then it has to be just the intrinsic savagery of the masterminds, who simply could not pass up the chance to spill the blood of others. None of these is good or even acceptable.

Whatever might be their true motivation, the failure of government cannot be divorced from this situation. The principal factor is the complacency with which we have handled the security situation in the country where gangs of criminals are becoming entrenched and are raiding communities at will as if these were prehistoric times. The failure of our security systems has meant that individuals, groups, and communities are taking security into their unprofessional and unregulated hands. The consequence is the democratisation of violence, whereby those with the greater capacity for violence fare better.

Violence is something that the state must retain a monopoly of and not be made accessible or normalised under any circumstance. Until this monopoly is restored, and until criminal groups are obliterated from the Nigerian system, incidents like the one at Uromi will recur where innocent travellers and non-native locals are murdered in cold blood.

The second major failure is our security response time. The lynching of the Uromi 16 did not happen in seconds. The failure of the security services to respond to such acts and the numerous criminal raids happening in this country will continue to cause the loss of lives.

The Edo State Governor, Monday Okpebholo, has, to a large extent, made a significant effort in damage control. Already, the killings were poised to draw retaliation from the North. The statement of the Edo State Government regarding the lynching was reassuring, or at least it sounded reassuring, and his visit to Kano, where most of the victims were from, to pay condolences and appeal for calm, was a great work of interstate diplomacy. Only God knows the number of lives that have been saved as a result. This does not discountenance the fact that the lives that were lost should never have been lost to begin with. Nigeria failed them, as it has failed many Nigerians before.

As for my relatives, as we say, such is their destiny. Their time had come. May we, and all who are grieving loved ones, find the strength to bear the losses we have suffered, and may the departed rest in peace.