”Nobody is perfect in this life, just be truthful especially with yourself.” – Darren Aquaisua

My grandmother was a very wise woman, she taught me how to read the Efik bible and I appreciate it as I lost touch with my language having grown up partly in the northern part of Nigeria. She gave me one advice but in Ibibio and I am trying to use a transliteration in order to get as close to what she meant;

I still see the eyes of a man lynched in Akpan Etuk street of Uyo. I was about 11 or thereabouts and I was on my way back from junior secondary. I asked my classmate last year if he remembered that event and he said no; I explained more and he seemed to beam up with some vague memory of the event; he said:
“Oh ino ado, I remember small small!”
This broke me that someone else was able to forget such a horrific event, I was sad but envious at how easy it was for him to forget.
If you’ve witnessed a lynching in Nigeria before, you’d notice that the rubber tire is usually forced over the torso of the victim leaving his head exposed for plunking and thudding sounds from metal bars or anything capable of inflicting injury on to the skull.
That fair man was wreathing in pain despite the constraints and he did look at me and I saw those eyes, his head moved and gradually ceased but those eyes still stared me in the face.
I’ve been haunted by those eyes ever since. I saw it last night and I’ve been troubled since.
I didn’t try to stop the lynching out of fear or maybe out of the ghoulish desire to see what would happen if someone got burnt alive.
I haven’t forgiven myself since, I can’t turn back the hands of time but I am here in 2016 doing a postgrad research but he is not, he died long ago but those eyes are alive in my head because I was silent when I should have said something.
I can’t afford silence anymore in this life, the grave will offer enough time for silence.

Darren Idongesit Aquaisua