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. Erere Onyeugbo’s “IThere is a Bullet With Your Name on It” is a notable entry.

Award Founder’s Note: With razor-sharp wit and a keen observational eye, “There is a Bullet With Your Name On It” dissects the peculiarities of the digital landscape for young men and women in Nigerian society. Looking closely at the cost of our screen-addictions, the slow but thorough rewiring of our brains, this essay brings a unique and necessary perspective to the relationship between technology and evolution of human relationships in the world today.

It is July 2016, and I have just been gifted a brand-new Infinix phone. Suffused with gratitude to my family, I am almost scared to touch its sleek edges or run my fingers over its fingerprint scanner for fear of bruising it. My sisters contributed 36,000 naira to buy this gift, and they were just as generous with their warnings. 

“If you like, use it anyhow, you hear? The next phone you get is the one you buy with your own money.” I had never owned anything so expensive or anything that required such vigilance. 

I belong to the generation that found ingenious ways to use a phone, mostly by stealing moments for it. Whenever I was sent to charge my mother’s phone, I would run across the cold tiles, mischief snapping at my heels, to plug it into the singular working socket extension which also carried the TV. Crouching low, my back to the screen,  I would dig my feet into the leather couches and play a few rounds of Bounce, Snake Xenia, and Tetris, alert to the sound of my mother’s approach. 

My mother was a master of stealth. First came the hot sticky smell of the kitchen clinging to her, usually of fried fish and onion and garlic, faint plop of slippers, and suddenly she would materialize in front of me, spatula in hand, ready to strike. But an ass-whooping was a small price to pay for the world that opened up in front of me while using a phone. I was drawn to it, desperate to leave my mark by changing her ringtone and swapping wallpapers.

I was tasked with sending messages because my father complained his thumbs were too big to target the little keys on the phone. He always pressed down too hard or picked up several letters at once. I would be entrusted to call Mr. This and craft an SMS for Mrs. That. My mother asked me to download gospel songs on the phone, praise medleys; but she, religious, and serious-minded, was oblivious to the fact that I had selected Wizkid’s ‘Pakurumo’ as her caller tune, to the consternation of her equally serious superiors, colleagues, and church friends. It remained a mystery to me how they let me handle tasks that seemingly exceeded their technical know-how, but condemned my burgeoning curiosity. What I had was a skill born of hours of pressing buttons and the mind-numbing activity of listening to the ringtones available on a Nokia 3310 till the vibrations made my eardrums hurt. 

In later years, their reliance on me shifted quickly. They grew adept and stepped into my world of screens. Before that, I turned their phones on their heads—taking them apart and reassembling them, a quiet coup that lasted until they gave up and left the devices to me.

****

Years earlier, my father belonged to the radio. On nights without electricity, he lay stretched out on a long bench while my mother or sisters sat nearby on plastic chairs. He played Osadebe, Oliver de Coque, or Felix Ugbekile. The music, along with their conversation, drifted up to me as I lay on the hood of my father’s blue Peugeot 504, warm at first, then cooling as the night wore on. I stared at the clouds. I disliked the dark, convoluted ones shaped like pillows, and loved the open ones that held the moon and stars like a waiting canvas. Before the possibility of becoming an untethered mind in front of a screen, I was simply a receptive, wistful child.

I grew up sheltered, in the literal sense, where I was not allowed to leave the house, and entertainment was reading every written scrap available. So at age 12, during a long break from boarding school, I  created a Facebook account, though technically, I shouldn’t have. My age had to be falsified, and a facade was created that filled me with precocious delight. I had exercised self-permission to defy the pretentious security checks imposed by Zuckerberg, to hold strong opinions and a penchant for arguing with strangers decades older than me. There were the deeply curious, the writers, the non-conformists, but also the hustlers and the pimps and the racketeers.

‘XXX Accepted Your Friend Request.’

In the dark of my room, with the generator sound reverberating across the walls, I was accepting new friends and developing a newfound love for notification chimes. I was giddy with excitement at every like, comment, or message, rubbing the soles of my feet together under the covers or slouched on my reading desk, thinking of ways to decode short-form texts, and realizing with dismay that anybody could create a profile and name themselves Tiwa Savage. My masquerading meant that I formed and absorbed opinions that were not mine, trading parts of myself for an online persona. The cost was the desire for validation from strangers. Still, there was a sliver of something organic in the early days. Posts stayed visible longer, long-form content thrived, and ideas circulated with some depth. From this space, I got my first writing job, joined literary communities, and gained experiences that would have been otherwise impossible in the confines of home. It is vastly different these days, with short video formats like reels making up roughly 30 percent of all videos watched on Facebook, and organic reach for traditional text posts has nearly halved, privileging attention-grabbing content. It wasn’t that the creators of this rapidly changing landscape held guns to our necks. They simply saw why we logged in in the first place.

Yet, there was something intangible in all these changes that terrified me. It wasn’t the depravity of the faceless 26-year-old who knew I was 12 but asked me what I wore to bed every night and how often I shaved. Not the frozen pictures of bold wicked-sharp eyebrows I was never able to perfect; luscious lips and makeup forbidden to appear flawed. Neither was it the selective narratives and media propaganda that concealed the inadequacies of the government or banal sexist humour that garnered likes and reactions to make the smallest of men feel brilliantly uplifted. What terrified me in this digital landscape was the erosion of my attention that would subsequently change the way I interact with the world, narrow the aperture of my ambitions, and make school work, once effortless, feel laborious. It was as though my mind had forgotten its own gait. The change was gradual, like a room slowly growing dim while I was still inside it.

****

I was not alone in this subtle theft that began to stain the consciousness of an entire generation. C, my childhood friend, existed within it too. He was light-skinned in a way that always made him look flushed, as though the sun lingered on him longer than the rest of us. Tall and lean, he moved with a loose, staggering ease, his body always a half-second behind his laughter—a throaty, careless sound that rose from him without warning. His round brown eyes followed me everywhere, observant and amused, as if he were always filing the world away for later.

His brothers were bodybuilders, their presence a daily spectacle. They lounged in front of my mother’s shop which was in front of our house, like statues made warm, their ripped, glistening bodies catching the light, muscles rippling as they shifted their weight. They made my juvenile mind swoon, made masculinity feel loud and unavoidable. With only a bare brick fence separating our homes, C and I watched each other grow through the awkwardness of puberty, through embarrassment and exposure. He witnessed my most “uncool” moments: my mother’s voice ricocheting across the street when I burned her pot of ukwa, shouting that I would “vomit every seed”, a threat that baffled me, since I despised ukwa to begin with and could never imagine ingesting it. He saw my capri jeans hanging open at the groin as I sold him Indomie at the shop, my hands busy, my dignity slipping unnoticed. These were the small, ordinary humiliations through which we learned ourselves, and through which, slowly, the world learned us too.

He shared Phyno’s Guts to Glory album with me, and I fell in love with the cadence, lyrics, and wordplay, and we would dissect every beat on my sister’s mp3. He taught me how to navigate 2go  to earn the highly coveted Veteran star. The frenzy to obtain this online badge meant more sneaking around my mother’s phone while she slept, and him, his father’s, timing our chats so our accounts stayed active as long as possible. We monitored the filling of the progress bar, panicking at the possibility of being demoted to ‘Novice’ – the very bottom of the 2go food chain. Yet, no matter how carefully we planned, I always got demoted every time a new term started and I had to leave for school.

Being a class ahead of him, I witnessed him return from school some days when I vacated earlier than him, yellow and maroon uniform well-ironed, smelling of a cheap cologne, sweat, ink, and glossy textbooks – the furtive musk of school hallways. He was tender and thoughtful and slightly revered that I could survive in a boarding school. He teased the books I read, and randomly did things like picking five unrelated items at once from my mother’s provision store.

“How much for these? Two seconds.” 

I would squint at the items. “Four hundred, one two fifty…hundred–”

“Two slow!” he would laugh. “It’s nine hundred naira, and I don’t even want to buy anything.”

When we weren’t playing speed math games, we were often hunched over a borrowed device. An MP3 player, a phone. In a sense, we went into that digital space together. It felt communal, innocent. I teased him that he was starting to look less sunburned, lighter somehow, the less time we spent outdoors. At the time, it was a joke, a small observation passed between us. What I did not see was how those devices began to hold us, how it asked less of our bodies and more of our gaze.

I gained admission into the University of Nigeria, and his family moved out of the street. Soon, our interactions were limited to the internet, and it tapered off into viewing posts and stories over the years. I began to feel in him a wary, malignant despair, evident in the things he posted online. He had crossed the threshold of boyhood and had discovered ideologies that changed him. It started with posts about politics, heated debates about the Nigerian civil war, and what it  meant to be a man. Violence was strength, indifference was power. Women were a scourge, relationships a hoax. The order of survival on the Titanic was a sham – the strongest and most virile of men should have gotten on the boats alongside a few women and children. I had told him I was frightened of him, and he laughed. 

When I tried to argue the ridiculousness of his ideas, he would defend himself with references from this forum and that forum. All online and seemingly innocuous, but curated by people who seemed to exist in a state of perpetual anger.

“I’m telling you,” he typed one day, “This world is the way it is because women are becoming men and men are becoming women. We need a hard reset.”

We were texting on snapchat, and he had replied to a video I posted of Millie Odhiambo, a member of the Kenyan Parliament challenging the speaker and asserting how being a ‘bad girl’ had gotten her ahead and not subdued like the ‘good girls’ who never got the corner office. I thought it was funny but mostly inspiring, a nod to assertiveness and the permissibility to do the bold thing in a world that wants you to be docile and quiet.

“What is it to you?” I replied.

“She’s the type to whore around and cheat on her husband and feel proud about it. Women shouldn’t even be in parliament in the first place. I can bet she isn’t solving any problem, just speaking louder than everyone.”

I felt a revulsion, holding that phone, his bitmoji smiling in the yellow snapchat cut out, wondering if I was really chatting with my friend or a hollowed-out digital double. 

“What does being outspoken have to do with adultery? And to judge her competence from a 30 second clip? So if I went into politics, you’d label me a slut because I challenge men?”

“You’re different..” He replied in only a few seconds. I imagined he was typing frantically. “But I wouldn’t even advise you to do that. Everybody should know their place. XYCore posts about people like this woman all the time.”

Different had never seemed as disparaging as it did to me in that moment.

“But do you even know any woman in the parliament in real life?”

I could argue that anything could have changed my friend, perhaps a nasty heartbreak, a person he looked up to in real life, his hypermasculine brothers, a book or movie, like the Hitler Youth who read Mein Kampf. But I am inclined to blame the peddlers of silicon and code. The profit driven corporations that benefit from targeting specific demographics. They say, “Don’t you know we know you so well?” Here’s something for you:

Male 
Aged 19 

You looked up how to talk to women? Here’s a clip on what truly makes them fall for you. Linger long enough, and we will show you how to control, not be controlled,  how to take them, break them. Here’s this discussion thread. Here’s more content to keep you scrolling. A page, made for you. A bullet, with your name on it. 

****  

When I was younger, my parents would open the door, sit at the corner of my bed, and glance around the room as if something might reveal itself. Then they began to stand at the doorway, perplexed.

“What is in this phone you are always pressing?”

Then it gave room to anger.

“The food burned because you were pressing the phone.” 

Then curiosity. 

“Show me how to forward this message to my wassap platform.” 

Then conversion.

“You still sleep with your earpiece? Didn’t you watch that video I sent on wassap?  The girl with the exploded ear? When you watch it, you will understand what you’re  doing to yourself.” 

Then dependence. 

I watch them spend languid Sunday afternoons laughing into screens or letting fake news drive them into an anxious frenzy. 

I tell my mum to stop sending me gory videos of people getting butchered, and news of a certain tribe injecting AIDS-infected blood into watermelons, and AI-generated videos of Oprah  Winfrey claiming lemon seeds cure hypertension. I cannot be cross because I know that the media is curated for her, to milk attention, gather unease. Just as I am fed ads, nudged to consume, because nothing can assuage the insatiable greed of consumerism, and everyone is trying to sell something to you. Spaces I regarded as sacred are no different; Quora, Reddit, where I could reach across time and find stories of women with menorrhagia, who, like me, understood the daily arithmetic of survival using different sanitary products in a world that expected you to show up despite the bone-deep exhaustion that came with each day. Places where I could feel less alone were infiltrated by chatbots posing as humans, trying to sell false hopes to me. 

**** 

At 17, my grades began to suffer, and I attributed it to a moral failing and lack of discipline, so I printed all my school materials, switched off my phone, and hid it underneath my mattress. It was my first digital detox where I whipped my faltering will into concrete resolve. I occupied the self-righteous high ground of being the only one screen-less in a room full of people engrossed in their phones, the returning silence broken only by an occasional giggle. We would talk briefly, but each interruption left me wringing my arms, unsure what to do with my boredom while everyone else sought their entertainment. My digital disappearance worked, but it was not a long-term solution. There was always something to do: notifications waiting, messages to answer, and the insistent, seductive pull of the screen, promising novelty and entertainment. 

I average 8 to 7 hours of screen time. Sometimes it’s as high as double digits. I don’t  know how I have managed to get a degree, meet people, or function cognitively. Countless arguments have been made about the finite nature of our attention– that constant notifications erode memory and focus, that multitasking on devices fragments thoughts– and we all read or watch them on our devices. Some shrug off and say that before the phones, there was TV and before TV, there were newspapers and iPods and radios and skateboards and magazines – anything to occupy time and shape beliefs. At least the kids are not doing drugs. At least it is not prostitution or wanton wandering or vandalism borne of being bored out of their bloody minds. The phones are harmless;  the assaults on thinking are not things we can see. Better for the kids to be holed up in their rooms than cutting up cocaine lines in a dank, mouldy bathroom somewhere. We should count our blessings, right?  

We find out that we cannot lie to ourselves for too long. Something about the way we see the world is beginning to get calcified. Hijacked. The digital glow, the curated feeds, the constant measuring against screens and strangers, it all seeps into the sinews of thought until even our desires feel preordained. We still catch ourselves unable to hold a gaze in the middle of a conversation because we are bored, impatient, and irate. On a friendship date with my girlfriend, I notice a couple across the cafe. The man has a pleading, a desperate look in his eyes, and the woman sighs intermittently. The overhead lights catch her perfectly manicured nails, the way she angles her phone just so, lips pursed for the perfect filter. The clatter of cutlery and quiet hum of conversation around them feel almost muffled in the intensity of their own microcosm. She takes pictures of every entrée, nods along to whatever he says, and clicks away at her phone with mechanical precision. The man is leaning so forward on the table, I fear he might get sautéed by the steam from the spread they have ordered. She barely eats. After a while, she gets up and asks him to take pictures of her. With every frame she inspects, a crease appears between her brows. Despite his crisp white shirt and navy blue blazer and presence that seems to draw the attention of everyone in the room, he appears eager and helpless, fumbling with the angles and failing to meet her invisible standards. It is impossible to know if her distraction stemmed from disinterest or something more personal. Perhaps she didn’t like him, or they were lovers in a fight. But what struck me was how her phone seemed to exist like a bulwark between them, how she never met his eyes once.

In a separate setting, my colleague tells me she hasn’t gotten past the first three pages of the book I got her for her birthday.

“I was going to tell you it’s tedious to read despite the hype,” she says, “To be honest, I just can’t find the time.” 

“But it’s been six months?”

She purses her lips, her expression sour. “Okay fine, don’t police me abeg or I’ll just ask ChatGPT to summarize it and we can talk about it.” 

We try to fight back. We make resolutions every year to stay off the apps, to read so and so number of books. To write more, journal on physical paper, truly witness those in our lives. But we find out quickly that the screens are an appendage we cannot cleave ourselves from without pain of losing the familiar. I have made certain milestones, deactivated for months at a time, or gotten so busy that I do not remember to check it. But the consciousness is always there. It is decades of programming, an itch that persists. 

****

My generation now wields sleeker and faster phones. I own my time, independence, and I am assuaged by choices. To speak to a friend or read one more argument on X? To witness the quotidian lives around me, or occupy myself with the details of a polished distant life? To be or to be seen to be? 

The days are slower without the apps, and my conversations are more meaningful. I am more open to picking up a call than communicating over a text. To hear the voice of a loved one, their inflections. I want to be so removed from the need to use devices. I want to feel in control. I want to listen to my dad talk for an hour about his memoir. I want to inquire into the well-being of my friends and solve the tiny problems I can. I want to subvert the angst and become a creator, one more cog in the machine with a personal agenda to spread what is true and just and tender, even though that path is often a slippery slope. I want to apprentice myself to the fine art of noticing. 

Yet, on some days, I want to watch carpets get methodically cleaned at 3 am. I want the bizarre, unserious, anthropomorphic AI-generated cat videos. I am entertained and empowered by the siren leading me astray. When Wilhelm Röntgen created the first X-ray image in 1895, it was of his wife, Anna Bertha Röntgen’s hand. Her wedding ring bright against her bones; she, fascinated and terrified, whispered, “I have seen my death.” Over a century later, I open my phone. It does not show me my bones, but reflects only the trail of hours spent, the ghost of who I might have been had I looked up instead.

About the Author:

Erere Onyeugbo is a Nigerian writer. Her works have appeared in The Kalahari Review, African Writer, The Muse, and tell!Africa. She is an alumnus of the 2021 Tampered Press Fiction Workshop. She loves poetry, delectable prose, and stories that exist outside the fringes of normal.

*Feature image by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash