Years ago there was an old woman in my village of Amuzi who almost everyone thought was a witch and if you saw her yourself you wouldn’t blame them. She was tall, thin and slightly stooped with age. All her hair had grayed to pure whiteness and she wore it in a stiff, colossal afro so big my hand hurt thinking about how much effort it took to comb it. Her light brown face was a mass of wrinkles and within this mass her two gray eyes sparkled brightly with tears eternally unshed. She had a long, thin scar that began to the right of her nose, a short distance below her right eye. The scar ran upwards almost to the eye like it wanted to blind it before changing its mind at the last moment and veering off to terminate at the back of her head. All of this combined to give her a decidedly eldritch appearance. If she stared at you standing at her full height, gray eyes glowing within wrinkles on a scarred face haloed by expansive white hair, you too would think she dabbled in otherworldly affairs.

They say that in her youth she was extremely beautiful and this was perfectly easy to believe for it was obvious to all those who saw her that these features would have lent her an ethereal one in youth. They said she had sacrificed her husband and child for long life and prosperity and that her chief pastime was casting spells of utter misfortune on unsuspecting villagers. They said that the reason she often seemed so morose was because she was pained by the thought that good things were happening to good people, somewhere on earth. People  believed this as firmly as scripture and not as gossip.

Sometimes it looked as if she was deliberately going for the image of a witch with her several weird habits, for example she owned a cat, a black one at that and she usually carried it with her wherever she went. Cats being short-lived creatures, she was obliged to replace them every few years and since all the replacement cats were also black and therefore almost identical, it naturally led to people thinking she had used her witch powers to make one cat live as long as herself. Also weird was that she was always dressed in black mourning clothes; it was custom for a widowed woman to wear black or white for a year after her husband’s death but she had been wearing black for the decades since her husband died when she was relatively young. She also did not go to church or participate in any religious activities.

But the weirdest of all her habits was a white rosary box she carried absolutely everywhere. From time to time she would open it, as reverentially as a Zoroastrian praying before a fire, and stare at its mysterious content, sometimes touching it with the tenderest touch. She could be walking along the village roads then suddenly come to a complete standstill, then she would bring out the rosary box, open it, stare at and touch its content before putting it away and moving on as before. What exactly was contained inside the rosary box was the subject of intense speculation in the whole village. Some said it was the fingers of a baby, others said it was the head of a crow, some others said it was the tongue of a white ram. Two things were certain however: first, whatever was in the rosary box, it was certainly not a rosary and second, whatever it was, was black. This much was gathered from the several independent witnesses who caught the slightest glimpses of the opened box. It was also uncontested knowledge that whatever was in the box was the source of her magical powers to inflict harm and misery upon the village. They believed it was a charm or Juju crafted by the hands of mermaids in the watery imperium of the Imo river and as such were absolutely terrified of it and its possessor.

The old woman lived alone in a small rectangular bungalow in a sizable plot of land which she diligently farmed. There was a huge pile of cement blocks in her backyard. The area of her compound was demarcated by a short fence made from palm fronds and bamboo. There was no attempt at a gate, a wide gap in the fence served as the entrance. Despite this poor security infrastructure, hers was the most secure home in the whole village because absolutely nobody dared to venture therein. This was despite temptations like the bounteous guava, mango, and native pear trees within for the young or her three fat goats for more mature thieves. The only one other than herself who went into her compound was a great galoot of a man called Chukwuma. At six feet, six inches Chukwuma was a brawny giant with a long, hardened face. He was one of those people who is so quiet that it was always a surprise when they spoke. His exact relationship to the old woman was not known but he was obviously very devoted to her. He helped her in the farm, he cut grass for her goats, did all sorts of manual labor around her house, he took her farm produce to market and also did most of her shopping for her. Like the old woman he also had no spouse or children though in his case he had never been married so at least they had that much in common. However, at the time of the events of which I write, he was fifty-six while the old woman was eighty so they were a generation apart.

So where do I come in all of this? Well, my family home was right next to the old woman’s compound. Originally, only her palm frond and bamboo fence separated our two properties but my father had erected another fence, leaving a space between ours and hers. At the time, unlike most of the village who were Catholics, my family was (and still are) fervent evangelical Christians. To my family, Catholicism itself and idolatry were separated only by the flimsiest of bounds which meant that our abhorrence of our witch neighbor was far more intense than the already intense abhorrence the rest of the village had for her. During our long and loud family prayers that took place at morning and night, my mother often said prayers directly against the ‘’diabolical machinations of Philomena Nwakamma.’’ 

Our house was a high duplex; hence, we could stare into the old woman’s compound from upstairs and I often did. She liked to cook outside on a big fire built on three cement blocks in front of her bungalow with her cat for company and I would watch her from my bedroom window, seething with hate. For there she was, an agent of darkness, living in peace and comfort while she made others suffer; like most other villagers I would have harmed her if my hatred of her was not also checked by a healthy fear of her powers and Chukwuma’s muscles. I think there should be a word for that phase of ardent religiosity that sometimes occurs in teenagers roughly between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. I was in one such phase of religious passion at that time; I was fifteen years old then and I took the epithet ‘’soldier of Christ’’ a little too literally and fulfilled the injunctions of my faith with a militaristic sense of duty. 

The church I attended with my family was a small building in proportion to the size of its congregation, consisting of a hall and a tiny room used to store religious equipment. Sunday service there was not for the weak or fainthearted for it was loud and brash almost to the point of violence as if we sought to engage Satan and his minions in a spiritual melee. The pastor at the time, John Nwaeze, was a short wiry man with a shrill voice who promised eternal damnation at the slightest infraction. But one Sunday a guest pastor came and gave a sermon that spurred me to calamitous action. I remember that Sunday very vividly, I remember what I wore, what my family wore, what we said in the car on our way to church and other such unimportant details. But I remember the guest pastor most vividly of all. He was of average height and stockily built, he was dark but not very dark in complexion, his head was large and his eyes were small and piercing, he was dressed in a plain brown suit and whilst the regular pastor’s voice was shrill, his was deep, like a well in a desert.

‘’You know all of you… or most of you I should say, your faith is shallow, like the roots of crops grown on rocky soil,’’ said the guest pastor, walking about, gesticulating wildly as he gave his sermon. ‘’You say you fear the lord god but you do not! You are all like Peter at the crucifixion, you fear the strength of man more than the justice of the lord. Tell me, are you not more likely to fight Pastor John here, an anointed man of god, than the local chief priest, a worshiper of idols? Tell me why is that? Don’t you believe that our god is the one true god? Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent? Then why do you fear those in league with the fallen angels, those who worship gods of wood and clay who do not speak or walk more than the followers of the most high? Why do you tremble before witches and wizards? Is it because you do not believe the scripture when it says that you are lambs sent into the midst of wolves but that you should have no fear for the lion of the tribe of Judah is behind you? Is that why you are so silent in the face of iniquity? Why do you cower at the invocation of demons? Brethren this should not be so. Your faith should be like a tree planted by the river side, and whatever you say shall be. People of Christ I want you all to dig deep into your hearts, connect with your creator and stand strong and firm in the face of the evil and sin of this world. You should be militant in your faith! You should go out every morning to fight the good fight! Far from running away from evil you should seek it out and destroy it! You should go to the shrine of the idol worshiper and burn it! You should trample witches and wizards underfoot! You should go to the houses of fornication and drive away the sinners! And you should do this with no fear for he says he shall cover you with his wings and you will be safe in his care! His faithfulness will protect and defend you! You need not fear any dangers at night or sudden attacks during the day or the plague that strikes in the dark or the evils that kill in the daylight! Praise the Lord!!!’’

He spoke on for a while longer but that was the gist of the sermon and it electrified my whole being. Such was my passion that if the beast or the seven-headed dragon from the book of Revelation appeared before me then I would have charged it with nothing but my bare hands. Immediately, I started searching within my mind for some evil to seek out and destroy, for a witch or wizard to trample underfoot. It wasn’t long before my mind settled on the woman, Philomena Nwakamma; I would use her to prove the strength of my faith. So I started observing her more intently, looking for the perfect moment to do something, anything against her. I knew I couldn’t trample her underfoot as she deserved for being a witch for I would be arrested and sent to prison so I pondered upon how to negate her evil. Then I struck upon a wondrous idea: I would destroy her talisman, whatever it was that was inside her rosary box, I would destroy it and thereby her power. With this in mind I observed her even more intently, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. And one day, the moment came.

It was late in the evening, I watched her light a fire on the three cement blocks and start cooking. When she had added everything to the pot, she sat down on a low wooden stool to wait for it to be done. As she waited, she brought forth from the folds of her black wrapper the rosary box and I knew the moment had come. Like a flash, I ran down the stair and out the gate and for the first time crossed the threshold of the old woman’s dominion. Following a circuitous path very close to the palm frond fence, I gradually approached her from behind. Like a tiger creeping low in the mangrove forests of Bengal, I neared the fulfillment of my monstrous purpose. She opened the rosary box as reverentially as ever and was about to touch its contents when I sprang from behind her and in a single motion, seized both box and contents and cast them into the fire. Just before the fire destroyed it in an instant, I finally saw what was in the box: a little tuft of hair.

The old woman was perfectly still for a moment, staring dazedly at the fire that reflected in her wide open eyes. Then she slowly fell off the stool and began to make a sound that would haunt me for the rest of my days. The sound was a gust of wind preceding a storm, blowing through a cemetery on a starless night, the sound was a bereaved muezzin calling the faithful to pray in a shattered mosque in some war-torn city in the Middle East, the sound was of the purest desolation and despondence, of the human heart broken to its very foundations. I immediately knew I had done something terribly wrong because here was not the rapacious anguish of a witch who has lost the source of her power but more like the profound sorrow of a parent who has lost a child or a poor man reduced to watching his family starve to death in a famine. The old woman grabbed at her white hair and began to roll on the ground still wailing, still making that ghastly sound with tears streaming down her face while I just stood there and watched. I didn’t know what to do, so adding cowardice to my lists of flaws, I took off and ran home.

At home I didn’t tell anyone what I had just done, I skipped dinner and went to bed. As I lay on my bed I was tormented by a heavy sense of my own baseness, of my own despicable turpitude. One of the most bitter things you can experience is to acknowledge to yourself that you are not a good person after having always felt that you were; to realize that you are not on the side of the angels but on the side of shadows. I felt all this and cried myself to sleep. I woke up the following morning as perfectly miserable as the night before, everyone asked me what was wrong and I told them nothing. Breakfast was tasteless to me and I actually wished school was in session so as to be occupied and kept out of my mind but it was the Christmas holidays and I had nothing to do. Early in the afternoon my father sent me on an errand to buy some things at the biggest store in the village which was quite far away. As I walked on the dirt road, I suddenly felt a powerful pair of hands seize me and drag me into the bush. It was Chukwuma and he immediately started raining heavy blows on me. ‘’Do you know what you have done!’’ he roared to me in Igbo as he beat me. While I certainly couldn’t have fought him off, I could have easily shouted for help or wiggled away from his onslaught and run away but I didn’t because I knew I was getting what I deserved. I suppose he saw my remorse, too great to have been caused by his fists, then stopped and proceeded to tell me the story of the old woman to make me understand how abominable my actions were. 

She was originally from Anambra, far away (relative to the size of Igboland) and he had known her since he was a baby. She had come to our Amuzi as the wife of Akachukwu Nwakamma who was one of the rising stars of the village, a future big man. Her beauty was a thing of legend, it was said that when she passed down a street, all through the length of it there would be people standing still with their necks turned backwards to steal one last admiring glance of her radiant form. As a child he always thought she was a goddess of some sort for such was the effect of her sparking gray eyes, set in a face that glowed like newly varnished wood, framed by dense hair, blacker than a crow’s wing, that he felt that he was beholding a heavenly being. Decades later he was still yet to see a woman more beautiful than Philomena Nwakamma. Unfortunately however, beauty does not equal fertility and for many years she was unable to conceive and so began her conflict with her husband’s family. Highly desirable man that he was, they all pressured him to take a second wife but he refused and remained ever loving, ever devoted to the gorgeous one he already had. This was how the first accusations of witchcraft arose as her in-laws began to spread the rumor that she had charmed their brother’s head with the power she got from ‘’tying’’ her womb. That she was from Idemili, a part of Anambra all too famous for the occult did not help matters.

Fifteen years after she got married and came to Amuzi she finally conceived and gave birth to a boy, a child with “a piece of sunlight inside of him.’’ Chukwuma didn’t see much of her at the time because he was staying with some relatives in Asaba and even if he wasn’t she and her husband mostly lived in Aba where her husband worked for Nigerian breweries. But they had kept in touch, she being his unofficial aunt, a close friend of his mother ever since she came to Amuzi. Approximately forty years ago, Easter came around and she would be coming home with her family. Things had been going well for them, her husband had received promotion after promotion at the breweries, her son was growing strong at five years old and to top it all off, she was pregnant again. They had planned to demolish their little bungalow in the village and build a shiny new duplex as befitting their rising status in the community. This was the reason for that pile of cement blocks behind her house. Chukwuma was sixteen years old at the time and when he got back to Amuzi he eagerly awaited her arrival. But when she did arrive he wished she had never set forth.

On the road back home from Aba, being heavily pregnant, she often had to ask her husband to stop the car often so she could pee. At one such urinary intermission on the busy Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway her husband stopped by the roadside and she squatted down a short distance away. As she eased herself, without rhyme, reason or warning, another car slammed into theirs with unspeakable force. The impact crunched up both cars like aluminum cans and they burst into flames. So can a person’s life be upended in an instant. She saw the accident from where she squatted and at once began to run to the burning cars. The roadside hawkers restrained her from her suicidal dash while she screamed a scream to rend the heavens. After struggling for several minutes against them, suddenly, with a force that should have been impossible for a pregnant woman, she broke free and ran to where her husband and child were being cremated alive. She managed to reach the car and reach through the shattered backseat window in a vain attempt to save her child. She had begun to pull him out by his scalp when the hawkers pulled her away just before both cars exploded. Both husband and child were turned to ash, there was nothing to bury. The hand with which she had grabbed her son’s scalp was still firmly clamped shut, when she had calmed down enough and released from the hold of her saviors, she opened the hand and saw a tiny tuft of her son’s hair, all that was left of him, of the family she had made and it became her most prized possession until I came along forty years later and destroyed even that. 

Two weeks later she would give birth; the child was stillborn. You would think that the whole community would gather around her to show support after such a tragedy but you would be wrong. For before her husband’s ashes had even cooled his brothers wanted to dispossess her of all the property they had accumulated in twenty years of marriage and bundle her back to Anambra, back to Idemili where she could rejoin her coven. But they would be thwarted as she soon showed she had the heart of a lioness. Calling on her uncle who was an army colonel and hiring a lawyer, she intimidated them with soldiers and battled them in the courts and kept what was rightfully hers. Being far from gracious losers, her in-laws began to spread even more egregious rumors, that she had killed her husband and child as a sacrifice to the potentates of a marine kingdom in exchange for money and power on earth, that she caused all sorts of misfortune in the village. The rumors were perfectly effective and she would soon become an outcast and remained one ever since. 

In those days the only person who took her side was Chukuwuma. He could never believe that the near goddess of his childhood was a witch but even he advised her to leave and go back to her family rather than stay where she was unwanted and unloved. But she resolutely refused and swore she would live and die in her husband’s house where she had found love and happiness, whose walls would hold forever the memories of their glory days. But even the strongest heart can be brought to despair. One day three years after the accident, while he was feeding her goats he heard a strange gargling sound from her house. He found her hanging by her neck from a rope in her bedroom. She had set the noose rather ineptly and it rode up her neck and the thin rope cut into her face giving her that iconic scar. When he managed to extricate her from the rope, she cried to sleep in his arms, her bloody face staining his clothes. He promised her that so long as he lived, she would never be alone. And he had kept that promise and she had endured mostly without incident until I came to destroy the last vestige of her glory days.

When Chukwuma finished telling me all this I realized that no matter how bad you feel, it is always possible to feel even worse. For after destroying her ‘’talisman,’’ in my guilt I thought I had reached the lowest depths of human feeling but now knowing the full story I somehow felt worse. Aggravating my emotional turmoil were two contradictory desires because on one hand I never wanted to see her again and be reminded of my monstrous action. On the other hand, I wanted so badly with all my heart to apologize and ask for a forgiveness I did not deserve. There was no point in trying to make amends, even if I was a billionaire or the president I could not repair the damage I had done. All I could do was appeal to her mercy. While I blamed myself for what I happened. I was also angry with my society, with my family, with my religion which had sent me down that path. I swore from that day to always question everything both the sacred and the profane.

Eventually my desire to apologize to her won out and I crossed her threshold a second time and knocked on her door. When she opened it, the look she gave me cut me to quick, like I was a soldier from a marauding army who after raiding her home the first time, came back again to finish her off. I tried to speak but I started crying, I started to kneel but I ended up lying down full length at her feet, my tears wetting her toes. I stayed there sobbing for a few minutes before she lifted me up saying “nwa nkem ebezina,’’ my own child do not cry. I kept saying over and over again, “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry’’ and she kept saying that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t know what I was doing. She held me while I cried, the woman who just a few days before I hated with all my being, who I thought was an instrument of Lucifer himself. When I regained my composure she gave me some water and made me wait till she warmed up some soup for me which when I had it, was the best I ever had. After I had eaten I kept trying to apologize but she would stop me and ask me questions about my life. She seemed very happy to have somebody to talk to. It must have been painfully lonely for her all these years if she would so readily accept the company of one she should rightfully hate. When I finally took my leave the sun was rapidly setting and I was actually feeling happy for the first time in days.

From that day to the end of the six remaining years of her life, despite the incredulity and protestations of my family, I was the grandson of Philomena Nwakamma. 

Ugochukwu Reginald Okeke lives in Bayelsa, Nigeria. He studied English and Literary Studies at Niger Delta University and has been writing since he was ten. 

Visual Art
Olude Peter Sunday is a Writer, an Artist and Poet from Ogun State, Nigeria. He has a few of his works published and Forthcoming in Magazines including: Hayden's Ferry Review, Non-Binary Review, The Rush Magazine, The Lighthouse, The Shallow Tales Review, Typehouse lit mag, Paper Lantern, Blue Marble, Last Girls Club, NativeSkin literary magazine and elsewhere. He won the second place prize for the Coffee Art Table book March 2024. 


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