Editor’s Note: In partnership with The 2025 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction, Isele Magazine publishes the winner, the runner-up, and the notable essays selected by the curators of the award. Sapphire Mclaniyi-Agbley‘s “Ká ríra lọrun” is the winner. 

Award Founder’s Note: The winner of the 2025 Abebi Award in AfroNonfiction is Ká ríra lọrun; an intimate portrait of grief, loss and freedom rendered in five striking fragments that refuse to look away from what we have been taught to become blind to. In this tender and powerful act of witness, a father’s passing is both burden and gift – these words refuse the easy binaries of good or bad. Instead we are thrust into the frenzied complexity of the human experience where multiple truths collide in our bodies until all we can do is dance, laugh, cry and be.

I

“When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, We were like them that dream.” 
—Psalm 126:1 

When Ruby’s call interrupted our morning prayer, I knew. A weight lodged in my throat as I began to reject it. I stayed muttering the name of Jesus – long absent from my lips except in my mother’s forced prayers/rituals – desperately hoping for my own miracle as seen on the church TV the previous Sunday, that my father was not, in fact, dead. A sense of guilt washed over as I remembered the dream I’d had some days ago of him lying still. I’d told myself it was just anxiety. Now the dream had stepped out of my head and into my morning. I have forgotten how exactly my mother broke the news to me, perhaps because I’d already understood. She simply opened the floodgates. 

I imagined my sister, Ruby sitting on the cream-colored tiles, back to the wall demarcating our rooms, knees to her chest as she waited for dawn, so as to not disturb us with the news. I think about it a lot: how many years those two hours or more must have felt like; how many times she must have walked back to his room, hoping it was just like my dream. 

Hoping he would at least turn sixty, or eighty, or really any age that wasn’t forty-nine, in any year that wasn’t 2019, anywhere but that three-bedroom Badagry house being nursed by just one daughter and a girlfriend. 

The first thing I learned about grief was how quickly it had to be shared, how necessary and urgent it seemed to start informing others. My mother sat down to make calls, her voice steadying itself for friends and relatives. Within the hour, her best friend was already in our room, dressed and ready to make the journey to Badagry with us. She had lived there, schooled there, lost friends to the sea there, so it seemed almost natural that she was prepared once again to return and meet grief. 

By the time we reached the bus-stop, the news had outrun us. A man I had never seen before, who turned out to be my mother’s colleague, stopped us on the road. The moment the words rolled off his tongue, I wanted to push them back in. “I’m…” It had better be something else. “…sorry.” How could he know already? It had only been two hours. “…for your loss.” Whose loss? I had rebuked this dream, why was I still inside it? 

Blood of Jesus. Blood of Jesus. Blood of Jesus.

II 

“Leave your country, your kindred, and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you.” 
— Genesis 12:1. 

On our way to my father’s house, buildings I should have known looked strange, and I no longer remembered the roads I once walked absentmindedly. The okada rider’s where you dey go? made my mind blank. My mother had to speak up, pointing out the landmark, a primary school behind the house. Only then did it return to me that the house was behind it, not in front. 

The last time I had been there, more than a year earlier, was before dawn. I was dragging my small travel box, a scarf veiling my face, throat hot with swallowed tears. My only prayer was to get out without being seen. My legs wanted to run, but my heart ached to turn back and pull my sister with me. What if I was abandoning Ruby to something worse than what I was fleeing? I thought of all the women who had fled their own homes, who packed in darkness knowing staying meant dying. But what do you do when the danger is the man who taught you to pray and whose love was meant to be your birthright? 

Daughters are typically expected to leave their father’s house. Where I’m from, a man should arrive with palm wine and ceremony, declaring there’s a flower he wishes to pluck. There are other ways too: like a girl slipping out with one skirt in a sack because her father has threatened to kill her mother. The same girl packing only two gowns and a diary after being slapped and called a witch for accidentally dropping a bottle of insulin. 

And every night the girl wore bumshorts, whispering psalms to herself in the dark, because the man whose DNA she carries is ruled by desire and might mistake her for shelter. Those nights, she hurled her vulvodynia into a bag –all the burning, the impossible tenderness, the way her own flesh had become enemy. Her body learned to say no when her voice could not and vaginismus came running after like a guard she desperately needed. 

These are the exits no one blesses, and never are these departures acknowledged. 

III 

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of-” 
— Romans 8:38

I sat in the sitting room, staring at the tiles. My eyes lingered on the patch where I once mopped blood after one of my father’s disciplinary moments with a plier to the head. I think about how Emerald’s blood was the first I watched drop on a tile while I hid behind walls as a child, too small to intervene. 

My mother sat with a blank stare, her chin resting in her palm. Her friend stood behind her chair and suggested we go and check him. She said it like it was part of the consolation ritual we had somehow missed. I pretended not to hear. When my mother called me, I whispered “Do I really have to?” A sharp look from her friend brought me to my feet and right behind them. 

My mother’s friend pushed open the wooden door. I immediately recognized the mattress I had once forced through that frame – how many hours had I spent wrestling it at an angle, Ruby pulling from the other side? On it now was a lump, wrapped in ankara. On its chest sat a stainless plate weighted with nails, a generator plug, and scraps of iron. Ruby would later explain it was a form of urgent local embalming. The packed travel bags in the corner must have belonged to his girlfriend. The dressing table was cluttered as always with bottles of perfume, creams, and hair products. In the corner, the single green-and-gold sofa I had always liked still sat. Everything in place. 

He remained covered until my mother’s friend asked again if we wanted to see his face. I pretended not to hear – again. My mother stepped forward, pulled the wrapper down to his chest, and instantly pulled her scarf to shield her face as sobs tore through her. Her friend shot me a look, and I moved closer. 

I saw him. 

People say the dead look like they are sleeping, but he didn’t. He simply looked there. His eyes shut, jaw slack, skin dry and poorly moisturized, like harmattan had claimed him before the ground could. 

My mom’s shoulders shook and her nose ran. It was the kind of ugly crying that begged you to follow suit and it hurled me back in time. To 2014. To the last time my parents had been in his house together. 

My mom had traveled home to see her sick father, leaving a message on Facebook for my father because he would not let her go. When she returned, he ordered her out. She tried to stay till he locked the room, doused fuel on her, the rug and on himself, and struck matches that, by some miracle, did not catch. 

That was when she left. And now, here she was, crying over his body in his house, wearing the aso ebi from my grandfather’s burial. 

As for me, the last time I saw him alive was about 8 months ago, in a private hospital whose name I have since forgotten. Ruby phoned in a panic that we needed to see Daddy. When I arrived, I noticed Emerald wasn’t there. Maybe her last memory of him was already too heavy to add another.

I half expected a Nollywood script. An old man on his sickbed, asking for forgiveness. I asked how he was. He said he was alive and my absence didn’t break him. When he switched into Yoruba, I wondered if it was honesty or another of his mind games. Something about respect. Something about children and parents and betrayal. The usual script about Yoruba traditions I’d supposedly violated. I cried into my palms, eyes fixed on the floor and ceiling, never on him. When he finally fell silent, I offered him fruits . He refused saying he wanted nothing bought with my mother’s money. I said I was leaving. He turned his back. I said it again, louder. He began to sing: Ká ríra lòrún ló jajú, koye kafi ayé yíí se àrimo. Now I found myself back on the sofa, my wrapper tucked between my legs, my hands digging into my locs. I did not know when the scream tore out of me, only that Ruby was suddenly at the door. 

IV 

“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.” 
— 1 Thessalonians 4:13 

We stood at the window of my room, the same one from which I’d stared at the moon, thinking of my SS2 crush. Now we stared at six feet of red earth. I remembered a line from a poem I loved: “six feet is too shallow.” But from where we stood, six feet looked far too deep. 

The coffin bearers lowered him in. My uncle was the first to drop a shovel of soil. Then my mother. Then Emerald, Ruby, and me. His girlfriend stood at the edge watching it all unfold. Emerald stood and I could see the weight settling on her shoulders. Her last encounter with him wasn’t finished business like mine. It was just… finished. 

“Dust to dust” was no longer a thing. We weren’t supposed to mourn as if there were no hope of reunion, as that would cast doubt on the existence of God and the afterlife we’d been promised. A part of me found it almost comical how the pastor said cheer up, as though we really should respond with a smile. 

I wondered, for a moment, if I had to believe in the afterlife just to hope for a reversal of this scene. That I would see him again. Would I be glad to? Did he make it to heaven? Was the hurried prayer of forgiveness he muttered on his sickbed enough to undo the wreckage he left behind? What if he had not even prayed, so sure he could never die, hardened by all his near-death experiences that had taught him nothing? And was my judgment damning me more than him? Do I even stand a chance at heaven to even see him?

The mosque behind our house stood completed now, my father had sworn it would not be finished in his lifetime. I wondered if at all, what his ghost thought of it. 

V 

“When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.” 
— Psalm 126: 1-2 

We ate together that night. The clatter of spoons against the plates, the steam rising, and the shuffle of chairs against the tiled floor were all ordinary. I had expected some cinematic refusal of food, but hunger won. We ate, and the act of eating itself seemed to insist that life was still here,demanding its due. 

Afterward, I sat with my sisters and the conversation drifted easily. I saw Ruby move closer to our mother, tucking herself under her arm like she hadn’t done in years. 

At some point, I stood to show my sisters that I could dance Zanku and that my locs now touched my forehead. I bent low, hopping one leg after the other, shouting “Gbe body!” Ruby’s laughter came first and loud then mine, until my stomach ached and I was gasping for breath. Emerald rolling her eyes as usual. The breeze from the window slipped in, cool against our hot faces, and for a moment I worried about it carrying our laughter into the night and what neighbors would think about the mourning children. But for the first time, we were loud without fear. For the first time, we could fill the house with our joy. Zion had been set free.

About the Author:

Sapphire Mclaniyi-Agbley is a Nigerian-Ghanaian storyteller whose work explores love, grief, abuse, and the complexities of human relationships. A 2025 SprinNG Writing Fellowship alumnus, she has published in or has forthcoming works in Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, Almanak Media, IFA Journal and Naija Feminist Media. When not writing, the capitalist world demands she cosplays as a product designer. Find her on Instagram: @mclaniyisapphire

*Feature image by Sergio Cerrato – Italia from Pixabay