“Maami!’

The screech tore into the fabric of the early evening peace. A boy took off at a run, ignoring the jeers of his peers. Big for his age of seven rainy seasons, his long legs ate the distance up like a maniac chased by demons visible only to him; his feet threw up red dust behind him. He zig-zagged between the cluster of huts, concerned only with reaching the object of his desire. 

The women present, all related to him in one convoluted way or another – this was his father’s ancestral iga, after all – clucked their tongues in indulgence. Watching Iya Raufu reunite with her son was a regular source of amusement in the communal compound, once every moon cycle. 

A person could plan their life by Iya Raufu’s scheduled rotation of markets. Every four out of five days – except on Jimo – she was out of the village just as the lemamu finished the dawn prayer. His recitation served as accompanying music to her morning preparations, and laden with large baskets of her precious wares – sometimes aided by her husband, or the workers on her plantation – she walked the distance in the peace of the early morning quiet; its silence and darkness pierced only by the voices of the worshipers from the mosalasi, and by the glow of fires from the huts of women with very small children. 

On the fifth day, when the biggest traders from villages far and near go out to ply Lusada, the largest market with the most varied wares from all over kaaro o jiire, Iya Raufu – contrary woman that she was – she rested. At about the time she was pregnant with this little boy, she added a far-flung market to her retinue. No one in the village was quite sure where the new market was; no one cared enough to. By then Iya Raufu and her trading enterprise, which always seemed to result in even greater success, had become an accepted facet of Ere life.

Abibatu Abeke, as she had come to think of herself after marriage, had maintained the same routine for the past seven years. Iya Raufu, mother of Raufu was the moniker she acquired in Ere. Claiming their dead mother’s ethnicity, she had chosen the imale-sounding name for her youngest brother, and she’d passed him off as her son. 

In the guise of a young, widowed mother of one, she had shown up one day with her brother and sister in tow, claiming to be from some Egun village on the French side of the border. Ere had welcomed the strangers, its sons had married the sisters, and Abeke had built a trade like no woman in the history of the Yewa river. 

In time, Ere had come to accept her. True, Iya Raufu did not conduct herself as women do, but the village was partial to Eyitoye, the one who survived. No one had thought Eyitoye would survive his third rainy season. Not after a fierce battle with a raging iba that lasted ten days. When he did, his mother succumbed to hope, as vigilant as it was lethal – unshakeable. 

You cannot afford to be soft, Abeke tells the mother in her now, that part of her soul most at risk, watching the body hurtling towards her. But Hope is a particularly hard foe to annihilate, no matter how many times one wrestles, it refuses to stay dead. Abeke couldn’t survive another dashing. She armed herself against its seductive whispers, trying to refuse its snare. By the very name she gave him, finally, when he was almost four rain cycles, she made a constant reminder to herself.  

Maybe not this far, but you have been here before. Do not get too attached. It never ends well.

There are days when the reminder worked more successfully than others. Days when she could almost let herself forget.

The River never forgets…

Abeke shivered at this other, more sinister, reminder. Then shook it off – that was over! She allowed herself this moment of weakness, of believing, placing her right hand on the bowed head of the boy who had raced to reach her, prostrating his entire small frame before her. Her son. 

‘Maami. E kaabo.’ He beamed up at her, waiting. 

Eyitoye had only recently begun to imitate the etiquette of greeting and was eager for approval of his idobale.  

Abeke muttered her customary, nonchalant greeting, ‘S’alaafia ni?’ 

Then she threw in an acknowledgement of how good a boy he was, waited for him to get up, and settled her burdens on his head. It wasn’t heavy – baskets of varying sizes piled inside each other – easy to hold on to. Keeping an eye on the occasional wobbling of his short arms, mother and child began the short trip to their home.

*

Abibatu Abeke survived the early stages of her first pregnancy without the vomiting that had plagued her younger sister just the year before. The persistent nausea, her only symptom, was tamed by her incessant chewing on ata ijosi. She’d remembered the remedy from nursing her mother through her numerous pregnancies. Those childhood memories served her well enough to convincingly play at being an experienced pregnant woman. 

She had confessed enough truth about herself to her friend, Shadia, days before her igbeyawo, to save her wedding night. Lasisi, too, became privy to her previous maidenly status that night as a matter of course. To everyone else though, it was, at least, her second pregnancy. That mass deception probably stalled tongues from waggling over the two full rain cycles it had taken her to get pregnant, too. Since she had ‘proven’ her fertility once before, Ere had been less easily triggered over how long it took her to show signs of conception. Patient to wait with a collective certainty that it was just a matter of time. After all, Iya Raufu had one healthy boy to prove her womanhood.

When the nine moons of her gestation passed and her pains finally started, the women of Ere rallied. They nursed Abeke in a rotation of two to three, making sure someone was with her at all times during the endless day and night before she delivered a healthy baby boy. And while no one said it, there was a palpable sense of relief when the little one made his arrival kicking and screaming. His cries piercing the silent nighttime calm, alerting the men waiting outside with the anxious father, gathered under a nearby almond tree, of his safe passage into this existence. 

Everyone at the birth had a clear recollection of Iya Raufu’s younger sister’s delivery, a mere rain cycle before. The deliveries had been much earlier than expected, by the calculations of the eagle-eyed village grapevine. But babies came when they came, and what were women except conduits for their passage? Sidikatu herself had been a model of maidenly patience, a stellar example for a first birthing, and the boy slipping easily between her knees mere hours after her pains started.

Unfortunately, a second baby arrived much too late after her brother, tired and dusky. She had been valiant, that little girl, clinging to life with huge gasps of breaths that grew increasingly further apart. Eventually, though, she, too, gave in to what the women already knew, and closed her eyes in peaceful rest.

Ibeji, the women had mumbled in commiseration, shaking their heads. It was always a battle with them, hence the great celebration when all three survived the pregnancy and birthing. Every Iya Ibeji that survived with two infants to show for her labour was a testament to the resilience of womanhood. In Sidikatu Aduke’s case, she at least had her son. And the unfortunate knowledge that her daughter’s unmarked grave was somewhere in the forest of the ancestors.

That loss, unspoken but heavy, sat in every woman’s mind as Iya Ibeji’s elder sister kneeled through her own labours. But everything went well, and by the end of it all, Abeke had a greater appreciation for motherhood. She, who’d taken care of many of her siblings, especially Raufu, from the moment of birth. She’d cared for him and considered him hers, even before he provided a perfect cover for a girl running away to avoid becoming a captive “bride”. 

That day, Abeke realized something that women who have given birth know. Until you have felt the sensation of a new life clawing your insides on its way to existence. Until you have braved the most unimaginable pain anyone has ever experienced, to come out on the other side. Only to forget it all the moment a squalling bundle is placed in your arms to suckle at your breast – triggering yet another birth, and the flow of life from between your legs. Until then, one never knows what it means to birth a child.

Then there was the actual mothering. The unheeded passage of moon cycles while a tiny human takes over your life with their loud demands – sleeping, feeding, and crying in the most inconsistent and inconvenient pattern. Time, passing in a blur of breastfeeding and pacifying a wailing and unreasonable infant. 

For Abeke, it was the most womanly she’d ever been.

After three full moons passed, and her womanly parts healed, she returned to the markets, baby strapped to her back. The first kola-nuts of her plantation were harvested and she began trading fully as a wholesaler. Selling to numerous end traders who claimed they sold their wares to men carrying obi across the seas.

Life marched on, relentless as humans are heedless. Abibatu Abeke and her family lived with the careless ease of people with no pressing hardships. Her business, her sons, her standing in the village society grew. Then, on one otherwise unremarkable day, after a brief bout of iba, her little son passed away, slipping peacefully into a slumber from which no one woke.

*

The somber atmosphere in the room, unusually large and overly illuminated for Ere, belied the momentous event taking place that late morning. 

Iya Raufu’s new house, standing in solitary grandeur on the outskirts of the communal compound, fell just within the boundary of iga Ajuwon. The main house was flanked by two mud huts, both large enough to rival her neighbors’ living quarters – her kitchen, and the sanitary hut. That Iya Raufu housed her salanga and baluwe in a proper hut, complete with a roof, with the two rooms separated by a non-fenestrated wall, had caused eyes to slant side-ways, for months. 

The three structures, enclosed by a raffia fence almost as tall as a man, were Abeke’s enclave, her refuge. She’d moved in as soon as the work on its construction was done. Just before the year’s rains started, and just before her husband married his new young bride, moving her into the hut Abibatu Abeke had vacated. 

She’d been the architect of that union, seeking out a suitable bride and breaking down Lasisi’s reluctance, wanting to give her husband a chance at what she had so far been unable to have. She had been gratified not too long after, when her young co-wife started displaying signs of conception well enough for the rumors to reach her on the fringe she chose to inhabit. Everything had been going as planned, until she realized that she was pregnant. Again.  

Abeke had been pregnant six times before. Yet Raufu, the son not of her womb, was her only child. The children she bore – all six of them sons, all lusty and robust at birth, all plump and vigorous in life, until they weren’t. Every one of them died before living through their second harvests. Three from iba, sometimes with a rash; one had developed loose stools and slipped away after five days. Another had simply not woken up from sleep one morning. The last had choked on his akamu. 

How does a child choke on akamu?! 

Abeke heard the village whispers. She replayed the astonished gasps of women from neighboring Ajuwon huts. They had been the first to arrive on that day, their frenzy mingled with the cough-cough-coughing that had steadily grown weaker. Until yet another son was permanently silent. 

She’d stood watching everyone as they tried to save him, running about like chickens whose heads had been snapped off, numb. She’d known from that first choking sound, when his eyes had clasped hers with surprise and a knowing of his own, it had seemed, but no fear. She’d known then that this one, too, was going to die.

Abeke had thought she was done after the sixth. No more births for her, she’d decided. She took the herbs women did for such matters, even found Lasisi a bride. Yet here she was, again, surrounded by stern-faced older women well past the age of childbearing. They were the only ones who would brave her birthing chamber now. 

On this seventh birth kneeling, Abeke bore each bout of pain in stoic silence. Attended by the women whose very demeanor betrayed that none of them expected the child to live any longer than he – or his brothers – had done in the previous sourjorn. 

Iya Raufu, Ere had decided by then, was afflicted with abiku. Women of childbearing age stayed far away from her birthing chamber, and new brides no longer rubbed her swollen belly for luck. They wanted nothing to do with her pregnancy. With her cursed womb and the diabolic progeny it brought forth, the Abiku child might latch on to them. 

Except good old Shadia. Still as barren as she’d been when Abeke arrived at the village all those years ago; the lemamu’s first wife was comfortably settled into middle age. She’d been the one who’d alerted Abeke to the village scuttlebutt, reluctantly explaining the mythology of abiku. But Shadia had been vehement in her denial. 

Life and death were the purview of God, she’d insisted. Dead souls do not return to this realm of living. Certainly not to torment a woman, being born then dying in cycles of an eerily similar fashion. It was Allaah who gave life and took it in death – and yes, sometimes that meant even the souls of little babies.

Abeke never understood how that explanation was supposed to be consoling. The thought of an all-powerful God taking her children was no easier to bear than the idea that she was plagued by a spirit child. One who chose to torment her; by being born to her – and dying – on a continuous, heartbreaking loop. The end results have, so far, been the same. 

The collective consensus in Ere was that Iya Raufu must have encountered the spirit of the abiku child during one of her market trips. Unwittingly or otherwise, given her propensity for being outdoors during the unlucky noon hour. Everyone knows that the abiku roam the streets at midday like witches patrol the night, especially the marketplaces. This was why pregnant women and young children were shielded from exposure during these times. 

But Iya Raufu, the villagers sighed despairingly, with her strange ways and deficient understanding of norms. Who could blame her, who knew how she was raised in French, among the Egun? She must have inadvertently brought this upon herself during one of her trips to and from the market. God knows she was not the easiest of women at the best of times, brusque and bordering on insensitive. Maybe she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, what a price to pay for financial success!

Abeke was unsure what she believed, except that she was weary of birthing and caring for babies that died. Seemingly on a callously pre-determined schedule. Regularly, like the life cycle of cornstalk in the farmlands. Unpredictable but unavoidable. Except her sons did not live long enough to fulfill their purpose. They did not reach maturity, did not leave behind seeds to propagate their line. Like a swarm of locusts, death swooped in on her children, leaving nothing but devastation where there had been hope.

Abeke had come to hate Hope. 

She’d learned to steel her heart against loss, whilst yet expecting. A loss she’d lived with for so long now, it was a constant ache of a companion. Looming over her, even in this birthing chamber, the thought of this baby, too, dying. From iba; a diarrheal disease, a rash with fever; or just refusing to awaken someday.  How many ways could a child die? 

Abeke pushed all thoughts away, praying for good. For a child that lived. More than for herself, she wanted it for Lasisi’s bride. Her husband deserved a child that lives. Her every grunt was a benediction. Every pang she bore, she offered up as sacrifice. And when the pain passed, as everything does, Abeke was yet again the mother of a son. 

There would be no celebration. After the ruckus she had raised following the third baby, Lasisi knew better than to attempt naming the boy. Ere did not expect merry making or ikomo ceremony for any more of Iya Raufu’s sons. She had stopped naming them after the third one and hadn’t shed tears for the last. Why invest in a life bound to be so fleeting?

Abeke got up after the mandated seven days of her lying in and returned to what she could of her routine. When she emerged from her home, after forty days, Ere saw Iya Raufu go about her business, a woman refusing to be deterred by life and its trials or by death and its biting viciousness. With the boy strapped to her back, life continued between intervals of nursing and caring for him. 

She threw herself at life, expanded her trade and her plantation bloomed. She cared for her little family and clung to her position of influence in the village. By her very existence, Abibatu Abeke dared anyone to malign her – or worse, pity her. Even as child after child born from her womb continued to pass on, regular as seasons.  

*

She had not been to the Yewa in almost forty years. 

Somewhat surprising, seeing as she lived in a village off the bank of one of the river’s tributaries, this wasn’t uncommon. At almost eighty years old, by the estimation of those who bothered with such – her son, his Egun wife, their alakowe children – Alhaja Abibatu Abeke was an old woman. 

Even in Ere, where no one reckoned people by the passage of years, she was old enough to have become something of a legend. Tales of her economic prowess and activism for women and children were still cited, years after she had all but withdrawn from public life. No one told an Ere girl or young woman she could not, as a woman, do anything; they immediately pushed back with the story of Alhaja Abibatu Abeke. 

Young children were exhorted to academics by citing her children and grandchildren, “see what schooling can do!” Young men prodded themselves to achievement with the reminder that success was not out of their reach, not if a “woman in the olden days” could achieve it.

So, no one expected a woman of her years and caliber to visit the Yewa. Women like her, privileged enough to have lived to a certain age, existed indoors. Life came to them, a measure of their importance. Young women popped in between chores, the ubiquitous baby strapped to their backs, to see how she was doing today. 

Older, slightly-past-middle-age women, no longer having the demands of domestic work weighing so heavily on their time, stayed for hours on end. Lamenting one child, one woe; celebrating the other. The men shuffled in at unpredictable intervals, with varying degrees of uneasiness, to discuss village politics and their business interests, or gauge the collective female pulse on pressing matters.

Everyone knew Alhaja attended only special social gatherings when she did venture out. Transported on a mashini, the annoying and loud motorcycles that young Ere men made their source of livelihood in recent years. On those occasions, she arrived early, and left before the merriment began and people descended into indignity. 

At those events, she was one of the first people, allowing for the politics of extended familial and marital dynamics, called upon to beseech the ancestors. With a prayer for the newborn or bride, a graduating student or the young person embarking on a craft or trade of their own after years of apprenticeship. In those moments, she appeared as undiminished as the fantastical tales of her exploits.

Alhaja Abibatu Abeke was as tall and statuesque as she had been thirty years before. None of the weight loss, weight gain, slouching or folding backs that plagued other old women seemed to touch her. Dressed in the finest ankara iro and buba with matching iborun, she masked any signs that age might have left on her body. Her eyes, unfaded and as intimidating as they had ever been, and her tongue – grown even more acerbic with the privilege of age – challenged any notion that she was in any way diminished.

Abibatu Abeke’s only concession to old age were her knee joints. The pain and stiffness increased steadily over the years, no matter what her nurse daughter-in-law tried. She gave up walking any distance longer than the perimeter of her compound. And she wielded a walking stick with the gusto of old-woman relish, alternatively leaning on it and whacking impertinent younglings with a swiftness that belied her years. 

There was no pain now, though. Abeke didn’t feel the constant fatigue that made its home in her bones these days. How was that possible? 

Yewa was almost an hour’s walk from the village! Maybe the boy and his mashini had brought her…? She looked around, noticing what she hadn’t before. 

It was night. There was no machine, nobody was there. She was all alone with the Yewa.

Was this a memory of those trips she’d never told a soul about? 

It felt eerily familiar, solitary walks to the river on a full moon lit night. Once a month, every month for seven years. Naked but for the white cloth tied around her torso from breast to knee, she had made the trip to appease the Yewa. Barefooted and carrying the clay plate of the etutu prepared for her by the priestess. 

The first time she’d taken the trip, heartsore from being pregnant a tenth time, she’d developed misgivings similar to what she was feeling now. She’d begged the old woman to come with her, but the priestess had only smiled. 

‘This is between you and the River.’

So, Abibatu Abeke had gone. Alone, scared. Unsure if she really believed that wading into a river to leave a bowl of food on its tide on a moonlit night could prevent the child she was carrying from dying. Desperate enough to try, to keep going back. Once a moon-lit night, every moon cycle from the moment she got up from her ikunle, forty days after childbirth. Inventing an overnight trip to a far-off market. Leaving her baby sleeping in the priestess’ hut while she appeased the river goddess for his life. Leaving him at home when he was old enough to wean and talk, to inadvertently spill her secret…

The last time she’d been here, Abeke had met a different priestess. Younger than the other, but old enough to serve Yewa – only women who no longer bled did. Abeke had panicked, but the woman, in the white clothing and cowrie shell ornamentation of her calling, had smiled the enigmatic smile of her predecessor and reassured her that ‘the River never forgets.’

The River never forgets. 

Abeke is rattled by that reminder, eerie after so many. 

Why was she here? It is pitch black. There is no moon. She’s wearing her usual dress of a colourful ankara ensemble; iro, buba, gele, iborun. None of it is white. She has no bowl of concoction in her hands. Abeke looks around, almost hoping there might be one lying about; another etutu to appease whatever the Yewa wanted in summoning her here. 

This is not a memory.

She shivers, the balmy night failing to warm the chill of her soul’s premonition.

What does the River want?

***

 When she woke up that morning, nearly forty years after the days her son ran around disturbing the peace of the iga, Alhaja Abibatu Abeke couldn’t shake the disquiet that lingered. The same dream had plagued her for days now. The River never forgets. What does that even mean?

She went through her day – the meticulous preparation for jimo; the festival-like air of attending mosalasi; the greeting of everyone deemed important and accepting her own felicitations in return before the lemamu began his kutuba; sitting in on the women’s league meeting, something she rarely did anymore. And all the while, that dream nagged at her.

When she returned home to find one of her stepsons waiting for her outside her home – he was the oldest of her long-dead husband’s sons of those living in Eko – she knew. She grunted in response to his greeting, handed him the key and watched him fumble with the padlock holding her gates together. She followed him inside and sank into her armchair, grateful to not have to keep her knees from knocking for much longer. She said nothing, watching him attempt to make small talk, then abandon the pretense.

“Liadi is dead.” 

He dropped the news in the middle of an inane sentence she hadn’t been listening to.

Eyitoye. 

Abeke’s eyes closed. She had flashbacks, several of them, to the years of birthing and burying babies. So many babies. And to desperate alliances with priestesses of the Yewa river.

 That was what it meant. The River never forgets. 

She squared her shoulder, took a long and deep breath. “InnaliLlaahi wa inna ilayhi raajihuun.”  To God we belong, and to Him is our return. 

Saadia, the eleha friend of her youth, long gone from Ere and this mortal world, would have been proud that Abeke remembered her God in this, her moment of devastation. 

Patience is at the first strike of adversity, she had loved to quote.

And so, the people of Ere would hold up Alhaja Abibatu Abeke as a paragon of womanly patience, afterwards. This would join the many tales of her legend; her fortitude when she lost her only son, at his prime of just forty-five years old. 

The woman did not cry, did not wail in sorrow or rail against the gods, even though no one was more justified to do so. Everyone knew the story of Alhaja Abibatu and her only son. And if she had withdrawn almost completely into a life of solitude, not even coming out of her house to attend jimo, until her death three years later – surely she had earned that right? 

Yet in all of the speculations and legend peddling, Ere would miss a crucial detail. 

Abibatu Abeke never brought in another bowl of river water during the annual Yewa festival, ever again. The water every household in all seven villages served by the river had to fetch, or else…

For Abeke, there was no threat any longer, no mishap greater than her current reality.

The River had done its worst.

About the Author:

Laide Akaso is an emerging Nigerian writer, middle-aged and in semi-retirement. Over the course of nearly two decades, while raising little humans, she has written as intensely or as sporadically as Life permitted. Laide was shortlisted for the 2022 Owned Voices Novel Competition for her as yet unpublished African historical fiction novel, for which she is seeking representation. She is still trying to figure out Twitter.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay