Mama Baby's Open Secrets

By Oshiomowe Momodu

This is a murder mystery which exposes the secrets of Northern Nigeria.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312385511

Book preview

Mama Baby's Open Secrets

Mama Baby’s Open Secrets

First edition

Copyright 2014 Oshiomowe Momodu

All rights reserved

ISBN  978-1-312-35329-9

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Chapter 1

Today is the first day of my last trimester, I expect you will be here soon, so I have decided to keep a journal, a chronicle of sorts of all the events that have preceded your birth. My name is Safi Yakubu. I come from the village Ugieda under South Ibie in Edo state formally Bendel State. Presently our governor is not far from the village near ours and I am tempted to name you after him as most of our people are happy with his work in the state.

Anyway, I was born 40 years ago, so it is a pleasure to welcome you in my tummy. Many including the Igbo trader where I get my provisions have all told me that I am due for menopause and my eggs are about to turn to powder. That is why when you father said he would name you Yusuf , I was happy but not to give in readily I said I wanted to call you Mubarak because it is truly God’s blessing, Oshiomole  also has a nice ring to it and people will always think you are from the governor’s family . Hopefully if he does not die in disgrace before your birth; I will reconsider.

I am an orphan but I lived in my father’s house until three years ago, when I moved from the Government Reservation Area (GRA) Minna . I don’t have many fond memories because I went to Trans Ekulu Primary School in Enugu and Uwani Secondary School also in Enugu before coming back to do battle with my Joint Matriculation Board Examinations JAMB for five years, striving to enter for medicine. By the time I was twenty-six my father ordered me to go to the Federal College of Education Zuba, after my four years, where I took up chemistry,thereafter, I taught at a number of private schools. I never had the right connections to get me a teaching job at a government school be it a state or federal institution, so I moved to Suleja to teach at Model school Akwangaya.  My teaching experience spanned a period of six years before papa ordered me back to care for him. His last wife Adaeze, a Christian woman had finally packed and left, after 4 years of living in the house as bickering siblings, pap finally drummed up enough courage and asked her to leave.

My departure from the school was bitter sweet partly because I had just met Sharif, a married man through my close friend Rose. Albeit we had quarreled bitterly I still hoped for a reconciliation which I knew would be inevitable as long as we stayed in close quarters. Sharif was a lecturer at University of Abuja. He possessed Masters Degree in Accounting; he was well read, intelligent and easy on the eye. He was also from Afuze , a village not far from our place.

I can’t tell you the joy I felt when I heard our language; it gave me a sense of identity.  Don’t get me wrong, Hausas are nice, hospitable people but there truly is nothing like someone from your hometown. Word has it that when there is crisis, Hausas whom you have helped in the past will be coming to your house first to destroy, pilfer and maybe kill you. It’s just awesome, to see one who looks like you, talks like you, understands what you are saying and you do not feel like you were hatched.

I said my farewells to Rose and my neighbours at Dawaki as I went to the Minna Garage boarded a taxi to meet papa.  I knew that papa would not allow me to work; I would become his daughter, maid everything to a suitable suitor or his death arrived. I say this because it was my mother’s nagging that made him send me Far East. I was the only girl out of ten boys from my father’s three wives but my father did not see the need in educating me or training me in any type of skill.

It was when my father’s back got injured when he helped his oga carry load in the Office did he order everyone to fend for themselves. It was not a step down for us, neither was it a rag to riches story because my mother, the third wife at the time took care of her five children from the onset. My mother was a nurse. She met and married my father the hospital driver ten years before his injury when she was twenty-five and he was forty with two wives and six kids at home.  My father’s first wife suffered from diabetes 1, an incurable disease. She was a gift from my grandparents to my father at the age of 21. She was much older and the daughter of a man my grand dad, an addicted gambler owed a lot of money. No man wanted her because her father was a shylock and his daughter looked like a donkey; the men of our village felt no amount of debt was worth that type of bondage. Since Grandpa’s debt’s were not getting any lower and papa was always seeking his approval, he picked a winning ticket when he agreed to shylock’s decision of an arranged marriage between their children to wipe his debts. The lady demurred for five minutes but at thirty eight, she was happy to marry a young buck. I never met the lady, for she was long dead before I was born. An only child, her assets reverted back to her surviving father, who never forgave papa for marrying a second wife. Papa never forgave him for being an interfering old busybody. You would think papa was married to a Queen! Since

These are the words of my mother, which have been confirmed by the number of times Angela, my father’s second wife, would use my father’s past with the Queen against him whilst laughing at father, whenever he barked orders from a supine position.

Tell us the truth, Papa Junior, are you sure it was not when you were lifting, your father’s load(the Queen) that you broke your back? I have five sons for you; I cook, clean and perform other wifely duties. While the first lady hides in her room, reading her bible and clapping her hands to church songs. Where is it written that we should not assist, or sleep with our husbands? Abi Nurse are children bought in the daddy’s supermarket?

My mother told me, she always slipped away when ‘their madness’ started because it would end with them exchanging blows and then spending days on end in the room making up.

Why don’t you complain that she is eating into your time? I asked my mother one day.

Hush! You father is like a mad dog in heat. Please I am content with my life. I have all that any woman would want and need in a marriage. Plus she is looking for a baby girl. I just want you to be educated and not be married to a ‘pa zero’ like me, I married an old man with no certificate.

Mama, they said you did not have to marry papa …

Don’t mind those foolish men! Can you imagine, after my second child that was when my old boyfriend Kunle remembered me. By then I was married to a man I could handle. The man, I married was not full of big grammar, big ambitions or big brains, but a responsible, simple and kind man.

Should I marry a brainless man mama or a man like my father?

Can you handle it? It takes a lot to be married to a man, whose father tells him, what, when, where, why and how to jump but I am in good terms with his parents, when he misbehaves I just cry to his father with a keg of palm wine. Angela is the wife after his heart but she is too stubborn. She calls a spade a spade and that is why your father will never carry her to the village. She would tell that old man his life history in five seconds that would make him die of a heart attack sharp sharp!

Mama aren’t you jealous. Angela is beautiful but papa...

That is the price of polygamy. Angela makes us happy it’s because of Angela you are going to school now. You see how the house has changed since you left for school last year? Mama asked me, since I always