SOURCE: SATURDAY TRIBUNE 07/12/2013/P. 6/51
The 25-minute journey on a motorcycle from Akoda junction to Odeomu to Gaga
to Odansidi to Omodeere to
Olodan to Abese to Ayetoro and finally to Tonkere village, all in Ayedaade
Local Government Area of Osun State
was uneventful. Members of the sleepy and rustic communities, from their
homestead, waved at Saturday Tribune’s
TAIWO OLANREWAJU and OLUWOLE IGE while some who met them on the way greeted
them expectantly and some
currency exchanged hands. They were on the trail of a woman found to have
been sired by a ghost and married to a ghost.
Before now, chilling stories had been told of individuals who continued to
experience life even after their clear deaths.
The Yoruba call them Akudaaya. To the Hausa, they are Satalwa. Time after
time, there were stories of how the dead, who were
supposed to be six feet under the ground, would still stick around on the
surface of the earth and lead lives as normal, regular
human beings albeit in faraway places where their chances of bumping into
either families or acquaintances who had previously
bade them goodbye from this world are virtually zero.
Many have dismissed such stories as fictions, hallucinations or
fabrications, but the recent experience of a 20-year-old Taiyelolu
Abdulrahman, whose father, who died almost 20 years ago, nurtured till she
was married to another dead or “ghost” husband, is lending
credence to such weird developments.
It was a Herculean task getting Taiyelolu to grant Saturday Tribune an
interview because, according to her, she had already spoken at length
with a popular Yoruba magazine which she claimed only used her story for
economic reasons. “Where is the assistance they promised would
come my way as a result of the interview I granted them?”
Her father-in-law, Mr Raufu Gbadamosi, also was not favourably disposed to
Taiyelolu granting another press interview. He showed disapproval
when he shook his head, disappeared into his room and then reappeared with a
cap and just exited the house.
When she finally opened up, it turned out that nothing could be more bizarre
than Taiyelolu’s story. She and her twin brother, Kehinde, grew up with
their father in a flat at the Ajah area of Lagos. They led a relatively
comfortable life in the house where they only depended on generator as the
only
source of electricity. Although their father was not engaged in any kind of
work, he provided for them.
“My father was not working. He never left the house except on a few
occasions at night. But if I asked for N50, 000, he gave it to me. We had no
visitors
and we visited nobody,” she said.
All they had to do were sleep, eat and watch home videos.
Asked about her mother, she said she and her twin brother grew up to know
only their father. They did not see any woman with him. To go out of the
house,
their father gave the twins a small gourd each which they simply clasped to
their palms and then they burst out on the road and board vehicles to the
market
to purchase food items like wheat, semovita, macaroni, spaghetti and rice.
They never consumed amala (yam flour meal).
On a particular day, however, Taiyelolu forgot to take her gourd and as she
stepped out of the house, what confronted her was a cemetery with a lot of
vaults
and a bushy environment.
She screamed and dashed back inside. Then, her father told her to pick the
gourd, atona (guide) as it was called. As she clasped the object to her palm
and
then ventured out, this time, she found herself on a busy tarred road.
Another incident which frightened her happened in the night. “My father went
out whenever he wanted but it was always around 10.00 or 11.00 p.m. He would
not take anyone along with him. But there was a day I begged him to take me
out to where he usually went and he obliged. When we got there, something
strange and fearful happened. It was like a canteen and there, I saw a small
cooking stand with a big pot on it without firewood or fire and the food was
boiling.
I asked my father how it was possible for food to cook without firewood and
fire and the woman selling the food became angry and slapped me. She asked
my
father who I was; that I was not part of them but only wanted to expose
their secrets. My father begged her and we left the place,” she remarked.
After the incident, her father refused to take her out again so that she
would not be privy to the secrets and circumstances surrounding their true
identities. Since
then, she refused to take food from her father, but only cooked her own
food.
By the time Taiyelolu came of age, her father did not allow her the choice
of a husband, but asked her to marry someone identified as Abdulazeez. The
man moved
in with them and behaved like her father.
Soon, she got pregnant. And when she eventually went into labour, she said
her father went out, brought back a particular kind of leaf which he applied
on her navel
and she was delivered of a baby boy without any complication. Her father,
who acted as the midwife, took care of the placenta. She bore her two other
boys in the
same manner. Her children were named Abdul Qayum (now eight years old),
‘Rokeeb (four) and Jamiu (two and a half).
But what revealed the true identities of her father and husband? She
disclosed that all the jealously guarded secrets began to come to the open
when Kehinde declined
to marry a lady recommended by their father.
They continued their routine life until their father considered Kehinde
mature enough to get married and brought a lady home for him. But Kehinde
was said to have refused
outright to marry “one of them.” Taiyelolu said she asked him what he meant
by “one of them” but he told her not to bother as she was only a woman who
was oblivious of
what was happening.
“One day, Kehinde was eating and he suddenly coughed, slumped and died. My
father did not feel any sorrow as a result of this. He buried my brother in
an unknown place.
When I asked him about where he buried him, he said some Muslim clerics had
come to pray over his body and he had buried it. Not convinced by his
response, I said to him:
“When I had my babies, no clerics came for the naming, but they came for the
burial of my brother?’”
Disturbed by the shocking death of her brother, Taiyelolu confronted her
father that she wanted to know his family. That decision marked the
beginning of her journey into
a new world.
“Eventually, my father agreed to take me and the children to his hometown,
Offa, Kwara State. He said he was from the imam’s family. When we almost got
to his family house,
he said he wanted to check on someone close by and pointed the house to us.
He asked us to ask for Alhaji Hussein Salmoni, his uncle. When we met his
uncle and explained
ourselves to him, he was taken aback. He eventually showed us his grave. He
said my father died over 20 years ago,” she said.
Amid bewilderment, Taiyelolu left for the only place she knew as home, Ajah,
Lagos, but could not locate their house again. What worsened her situation
was the mysterious
disappearance of the gourd which her father had given her and could have
guided her back to the house.
She went to Ilorin in an effort to locate her mother’s family house which
her father told her was Isale Koto. She managed to strike up conversations
with some people who
introduced her to a radio presenter who narrated her story on air. She also
met a lady who she followed to Ede, Osun State, and stayed with for about a
month. It was while
in that city that she traced her husband’s parents.
She claimed that she was walking by the road one day when a car parked by
her side and the driver told her that it was her birthday and in order to
felicitate with her, gave her
a handset with a SIM card. Taiyelolu is uncertain of her age, but assumed
that she could be more than 20.
“It was when I got to ‘this world’ that I realised that I am too young to
have given birth to three children with the fourth on the way. Also, I did
not know that there is a place
where people struggled to earn a living until I got here. It saddens me that
I now wake up every day with no money.”
She said she never attended a school, but that her father had the knowledge
of the Qur’an and had western education. According to her, her father was
the one who taught
her and her brother Arabic and a bit of western education,” she said. It is
obvious that Taiyelolu is truly versed in the recitation of the Qur’an. Her
children now attend a primary
school in the village.
On how she got to Tonkere, she said she went to observe the evening prayer
at a mosque in Ede when, after prayers, she was chatting with the imam and
an old man appeared
and told her in clear terms that she was suffering.
The man then asked her why she was obstinate about returning the children
with her to Tonkere, her husband’s place of birth. The man said if she
refused to do so within three days,
something unpleasant would become of the children and the man disappeared.
Then she asked the imam if he saw the old man who just interrupted their
conversation, but the imam said no. She then collected N200 from the cleric,
fetched her children and the
four of them, at about after 8.00 p.m., boarded a motorcycle to Akoda
junction for N50.
At the junction, she asked another cyclist to take her to Tonkere but the
man, because of the fact that it was late in the day, charged her N1000,
whereas she only had N150. But it
was necessary that the children got to Tonkere that night because their
father, who was deceased, demanded that she took them to his people.
As she pleaded with the cyclist, a car parked by them and mediated in the
matter. The driver asked the cyclist to convey the woman and her children to
their destination for N500,
which was the usual fare. The man gave the cyclist the N500, wrote down the
motorcycle’s number and warned the cyclist to take the passengers to no
place but the mosque at Tonkere.
As they alighted from the motocycle at Tonkere, Taiyelolu said her husband
appeared to her physically.
She said he pointed to the shop opposite the mosque as his mother’s and the
third building to the shop as his father’s house, saying “I should ask for
his father, Pa Gbadamosi.
As they conversed, her husband said a lady who was passing by, Tosin, was
his sister and he called her.” Between the time Taiyelolu looked in the
direction of the lady and looked
back in her husband’s direction, he had disappeared.
The lady is with her husband’s people now, but they did not receive her with
open arms because the aged parents of Abdulazeez were confused about how
their first son, who died
at a tender age, could have fathered three children. They are suspicious of
their supposed daughter-in-law and are acting cautiously around her. But she
dismissed any suspicious of
band motives asking why she would want to lie herself into a poor home.
Also, Taiyelolu’s mother-in-law, the Iyalode of Tonkere, had been down with
stroke and the father-in-law is a farmer. Financially, they are not capable
of supporting Taiyelolu and her children.
The lady, who said the clothes she uses now were given to her, added that
they were rags, compared to the ones she wore in her father’s house. What
pointed to the fact that she could
truly be from another world was the way she was lamenting openly about the
treatment meted out to her by her in-laws. She said if she had made up her
story, rather than bringing her
children to the old mud house, she would have taken them to the governor’s
house. The mud house, she said, did not compare with her father’s house in
“the other world.” She said she
only left her father’s house with a black bag and a Qur’an, which are still
in her possession.
She also claimed to have dreamt of her father once, who was all tears,
lamenting with his finger in his mouth that he warned his daughter not to
embark on this journey. She said her husband
pleaded with her in her dreams each time his people offended her. She said
her husband said the reason he insisted she took his children to his parents
was for his parents to have the joy
of raising his children as they did not have such opportunity with him even
as a first child.
The parents said they could not remember where they buried Abdulazeez.
The survival of heavily pregnant Taiyelolu and the future of her three
children pose a challenge to her. She said the aged parents of her “ghost”
husband could no longer work, hence, the
fate of her children hung in the balance.
When she called our reporter last Monday, she said she was having signs that
she would soon put to bed. She, therefore, appealed to the Osun State
governor, Mr Rauf Aregbesola; his wife,
Alhaja Sherifat, other well-meaning Nigerians, including corporate
organisations and non-governmental organisations to come to her aid by
empowering her so that her future and that of her three
children abandoned could be secure.
What about her husband? She says he these days appears only in her dreams.
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