Nkem (a story on human trafficking)

                                                     

Nkem.

Nkem.

How many times did I call you?

Correct.

A fly that does not listen to counsel follows the corpse to the grave. The disobedient chicken eventually harkens to the voice of wisdom inside the stew pot. Why did you abandon school and refuse to write JAMB and why have you ceased to help mama out at the provision store?

It is obvious that our mother’s health is sapping and her agility to catch those thieving customers who give her counterfeit notes has reduced. Every time, she complains that profit is dropping and she is only making money to put in a bag with holes. But instead of being well behaved, all you do is go about with those boys that smoke wee-wee and wear all the clothes I left behind, bragging to everyone foolish enough to listen, that your sister would soon ask for you to join her overseas.

Better kill your dreams of coming over here. Kill them and perform funeral rites on them quick because you are never going to join me here. You think I lay on a bed of roses where white people fan me like a cartoon princess? That is what your young imagination may tell you but truth is, there is no future for any young person here. Being here is like going to hell while alive.

Madam Igwe, the big woman that convinced me to follow her overseas, is not a good person at all, at all. Remember all she told? Nothing but lies. She spoke of a city full of lights and how I would make a fortune braiding white peoples’ hair. She said, This country Nigeria is full of suffer-suffer. Go abroad and see hairdressers like you living in mansions with cooks and butlers that they command up and down.

I looked at Madam Igwe with all her gold necklaces and diamond rings and I said to myself, This woman cannot be lying. She is only trying to help a friend in need. That was why I closed down my hair salon, sold everything in it: generator sets, hair driers, chairs and ceiling fan to Emeka, the electronics trader in Onitsha Main Market.  And he, seeing that I was in a hurry offered me chicken change so that I could raise money for my sojourn to the white man’s land. Madam Igwe told me that over here, my skill would be appreciated and in no distant time, I will erect a big mansion for my people and send all my younger siblings to school abroad. She said if I worked hard and saved for just six months, my level will change instantly.

I thought of our squalor and how hard it was to buy Mama’s high blood pressure medicines. I thought of how you cried every term for school uniform and fees and text books and how Peter’s Oga would not settle him after years of hardship in the name of apprenticeship. I was also tired of chasing debtors from one corner to the other like church rats; those women that buy weave-on and refuse to pay until you have disgraced them in the streets or met their husbands in their offices. That was why I embarked on this journey. And she, Madam Igwe, had the mind, the liver to tell me that the money would not be enough. She said I still needed to pay her in installments because she had rented a big shop for me. Chei, it shall not be well with the wicked.

She promised we would fly in an airplane and land just in few days and when we land the white men would open the doors of the plane for us and say, Welcome, how was your trip? Little did I know that I had sold myself at a giveaway price.

First of all, there was no aeroplane; we crossed the border in a dirty truck. Secondly, the travel papers she gave me were all fake. Fake like those Gucci shoes they make in our backyard. This meant that we had to run from authorities at every turn. At one port, Madam Igwe exchanged me for some huge amount of foreign currencies and left me in the care of a man who beat me and the other girls like we were criminals about to be crucified.

Crossing the desert is like going through frying pan and hoping to come out alive. Some people fall off the vehicles and are left to roast in the desert heat. When it is time to cross through the waters, they bundle us like sardines and if the ocean is angry and starts to boil over like a covered pot of rice, people fall into the waters and are drowned.

If you see how they treat us like monkeys here, you will be ashamed of your sister and cry bitterly for me. If you refuse to follow a customer, they will beat you. If you say you are tired and your body is paining you, they will beat you. If you say you are sick, they will beat you. If you are vomiting blood, they will beat you till you faint. If you fall ill, they abandon you to die and many of us have HIV/AIDS. I am afraid to go to hospital whenever I fall sick. I am afraid of what they may find out.

We don’t see the money that the men pay for our services. They give it to our oga, a Nigerian man. It is only occasionally that the men give us extra money for lunch which you can save and send home. Some of the men that come here are so smelly but, who are you to complain? You are nothing but a black prostitute to them.

I see many young girls who have not even started growing breast shipped down here to suffer and waste away. But I will not be alive to see my sister go through this same hellfire.

I would have come back to Nigeria since but where will I start from? What will I tell people I achieved after seven years of staying away?

So if you like, go to school. If you like, stay and be shaking your bottom from one street to the other hoping your sister will send you Visa. A fly that does not listen to counsel follows the corpse to the grave.