Chapter Thirty-Nine: October 1, 1960
- Hadiza Bagudu
- Jul 18
- 7 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
The sun had almost gone down to its resting place in the west and the October wind felt warm on her face.
It had been seventy-six years since a lion almost killed her at that very spot and yet the place still looked the same as it was back then. She was standing under the Kuka tree in the grassland where she first saw Hayah. Old and frail, she could not help but reminisce about her life. A lot had changed since she last saw him… since she left Dikwa and came back to Ndokula. Loud sounds from a distance, like sounds of war, kept interrupting the train of her thoughts. But she knew they were not at war. She had heard of strange stories of a very large nation called Nigeria becoming independent from the Europeans. A nation that included Fombina Kingdom, Kanem-Borno empire, Gombe Kingdom and many others, even the Sokoto Caliphate! A place she would only dream of but never see! And what was this story she heard that Fombina was grouped with other Kingdoms and was now called Gongola. There were more white people around these days than in her younger days. Whatever independence meant, it sounded both good and confusing to her.
‘Oh, it’s all so confusing.” she thought, rubbing her head. She looked and listened for any grazers around, but there were none. She had been standing there for a while and had not seen one grazer pass by. They must have all gone to Gongola to witness the so-called independence celebrations.
Her thoughts wandered again. This time she thought about her late husband, Sa’adu.
“Oh Derdam.” She said, and closed her eyes to hold back the tears. “You were such a wonderful person, loving husband and a caring brother.” She then said a prayer for him.
She got back to Ndokula sometime towards the end of the rainy season of 1898. After Hayah died and Talatu banished her from Dikwa never to return, that was the saddest day of her life. She thought she was going to die. But somehow, she didn’t, even though she wished she did.
She didn’t think her people would still be there when she came back but they were. Her people never lived in one place for more than three years and in fact, they were about to leave then, but Malam Buba wanted to stay back and wait for his daughter. He believed in his heart that she would come back. The Bororo people pride themselves on their unity as one family. Each clan considered itself kin, related by blood and marriage, and would never leave one of its own behind no matter what. They felt ashamed for what they did. Malam Buba was a good man and did not deserve what happened to him. His daughter was their daughter too, and they felt sorry for chasing her away with their snide remarks and harsh judgments. So, they all decided to stay there and await her return. They waited and waited until she finally returned. And so, they settled there and never moved again.
After all was said and done, forgiveness was asked and given by all involved. Marriage was once again arranged between her and Sa’adu – who, by the way, was already married to another woman with two children. After she eloped with Hayah, Sa’adu was distraught with grief. Out of pity and a genuine concern he might harm himself, Chubado’s father, who was a younger brother to his own father gave his daughter to him in marriage without him having to go through the Sharo ritual again. The maiden had always liked him, but back then he only had eyes for Fantah. After her return, she was given to him without having to go through the dreaded Sharo. Lucky guy!
It was obvious he loved her deeply and he forbade his first wife from making fun of her or doing so at the expense of her marriage. In the sixty-six years that they were married, she bore him two wonderful children, a boy and a girl, and they were blessed with eight grandchildren and twenty-five great grandchildren. She had wanted so much to give Hayah a son but it was never to be. She wondered if their union could be termed a blessed one. The man had been dead for so many years yet she still had sweet memories of him. He was her best friend. Wasn’t he?
She was brought back to reality by another loud crackling sound, followed by some brilliant displays of lights that lit the sky. She stared in awe, mesmerised for a while, before her mind drifted back into her past.
Her younger sister Diddi had given birth to a set of female twins after the birth of her first son with whom she was pregnant when Fantah left Ndokula. By the time Fantah came back, the girls were four years old. The children in turn gave their mother Diddi, many grandchildren and great grandchildren. Diddi and her husband had the happily ever after that Fantah had always dreamed of, and died a decade earlier, well into their eighties and just a few months apart from each other. Their love was truly epic.
She looked around the green vegetation and reminisced about how she and Diddi used to run around the fields playing, how they walked on this self-same well-worn path on their way to the stream to fetch water and how Diddi and Murtala used to meet there and she would serve him milk. She was so overwhelmed with nostalgia that her watery eyes filled up with tears.
“Oh, how time flies,” she asked rhetorically.
She thought of Hayah, and how he had loved her more than anyone in the world, of their adventures, their love, the good, the bad and even their stillborn child. She closed her eyes again to hold back the tears welling up in her eyes and placed her hand on her womb. She wondered what it would have been like if she had had that child. Was the child a boy? She was convinced he was. Maybe he would have inherited his father’s throne and become the most powerful prince in the world. She wondered if Talatu, Hauwa, or Rabbeh, would have tried to kill him, oh... she would have protected him with her life. But it wasn’t meant to be. Hayah had a dream. A dream he never got to see come to life. All he ever wanted was what belonged to him - his father’s throne - the seat of the Caliphate in Sokoto. Everything he did was to actualize that goal, but he never got to reach it.
Her train of thought strayed to Talatu and Hauwa, and she wondered what became of them. She almost felt sorry for Talatu, despite being a princess who was trained all her life to hide her emotions, she had loved her husband without giving in to such restrain to the end. She loved him with all her heart, but her love was never requited. She endured the pains of watching him pour all his love onto another woman. Nonetheless, she was a strong woman who kept her honour while he lived. In the end, though, she overcame her naivety and remarried for power and not for love.
Fantah wondered what might have happened to her sons: Sai’du and Mu’azu. Were they all grown up and married now? With children of their own and even grandchildren? They both held titles when she was banished from the Kanem-Borno empire. But with all the recent upheavals in the empire, she hoped they had retained their privileges.
Hauwa, on the other hand, was her father’s spoiled daughter. A chip off the old block, who fought Fantah and Talatu until Hayah died. She couldn’t even bear to see him leave Dikwa alive; she had him killed out of jealousy. Whatever became of her?
She thought of Rabbeh. “Oh Rabbeh, you conniving bastard!” she said out loud. “You stabbed your trusted friend in the back.” Rabbeh manipulated her husband into fighting his wars on the false premise that he was going to return the favour in kind, only to abandon him in the end. When the man decided to pick up the remaining pieces of his life to move on, it was Rabbeh’s recalcitrant son that did him in. The way she remembered it, Rabbeh never showed any remorse for Hayah’s painful death at the hands of his son. If he did, he wouldn’t have married Hayah’s widow just a few weeks after his death. She heard that Rabbeh kept fighting unnecessary wars and spreading terror everywhere he went until, led by his own son, the French forces finally caught up with him. His refusal to pardon his son for ruining his selfish plans when he killed Hayah eventually led to his own death when he kept sending men to hunt down Abdou and kill him. Out of fear for his life and that of his sister, the Young man approached the Europeans and struck a deal. In return for protection against his father, he sang like a canary. He divulged Rabbeh’s secrets, military tactics, plans, and locations of secret weapons. The strongman himself was intercepted and killed at a place not too far from Kousseri while on a military campaign to conquer Fombina. Rabbeh put up a formidable resistance and even succeeded in killing Major Lamy himself, but the French forces finally put their superior weaponry and war tactics to good use and overcame him. But being the man that he was, he refused to surrender, stood his ground, and fought to his death. It was typical of the man. He would rather die a thousand deaths than give in to captivity.
“Isn’t life funny?” she thought. From a provincial young maiden, she went on to dine with kings in palaces and returned home as a nobody. She once carried a prince in her womb but ended up giving birth to two commoners. She once had wealth and possessions more than what a young woman of her age would have ever imagined and yet here she was with nothing to call her own. Once upon a time, long ago, she was the significant half of a great love story and yet, here she was, weak and lonely.
Suddenly, there was a familiar stillness, a chill too difficult for words to describe. She cast a searching look at the grasses round her, they seemed to be moving away from her, it felt like she was drifting mid-air. But she wasn’t scared. In fact, she was hearing voices from distant lands calling, whispering her name. She closed her eyes slowly and whispered softly.
“Here I come, my love…”
THE END
✦ Thank you for reading
Comments