Red Sand
A smile takes Benji’s mother’s face. Benji has been cleared for his NYSC program by his university just months after Benji’s mother paid a bribe to the exam officer. But when her boy specifies the state he's been allocated to, her jaw drops.
“What?”
“I am to serve Nigeria in Kaduna State, mummy.”
“That terror zone? God forbid.” She reaches for her phone. “Let me call your uncle.”
“It is the government that allocates, mummy. Nobody can change it.”
“Wait and see.” She taps the green button on her phone screen. The phone lets out a beep. Benji's uncle picks up. Their conversation lasts ten minutes; Uncle Ade, who works at the Nigerian embassy and knows a lot of big men, bluffs about how he'll have it changed so his nephew can serve at a better place. Say Lagos, where he would gain quick employment thereafter.
But three months pass and Uncle Ade is still unable to change things. He no longer takes Mummy Benji's calls, even. The poor woman is forced to take the matter to a kabu-kabu prophet, who mouths that if he be a man of God, she'll receive a letter from the guffmen in a few days.
When the letter doesn't come, she asks Benji one last time as they have dinner: “Do you want to go?”
“Yes, Ma,” the twenty-year-old says, his voice child-like. Though grown into the form of a man, he is still his mummy’s baby; she has looked after him since his father passed seventeen years ago. “I have to get it over with so I can get a job. The service lasts just one year after all.”
—
Benji leaves on a Friday morning with four bags in his arms and prayers hovering over his head. He squeezes into a rickety bus smelling of onions. This is the first time he has truly left his mother.
The bus jerks to life. A man comes in and prays, collects some cash offerings, steps back down onto the red sand, and waves goodbye. Benji heaves a breath.
Many hours into the journey, the girl seated beside him, a stranger who, it turns out, is also on her way to the NYSC camp at Kaduna, laughs because his phone is beeping for the umpteenth time.
“Again?” she says. Her hair is braided into cornrows and her forehead, Benji thinks, is too big.
Benji nods.
He notes a baby’s eager eyes on him and smiles back at the baby. The phone keeps beeping.
“Tell her you're fine.” The girl says.
Benji takes the call. “We are in Kastina, mummy.”
The girl puts a hand on his shoulder when the call ends. “Don't be scared.”
Benji lets her hand linger there, before closing his eyes until her hand turns into his mummy’s.
—
Screams from every direction jolt him awake. He looks around. A dozen machete-wielding strangers–bandits, whispers the girl next to him–have taken the bus. The smell of dust wafts in the air, as thick as smoke.
A machete strikes the glass window to Benji’s left thrice. Pieces of broken glass shoot in every direction.
The girl beside Benji takes a slashing from one of the pieces. She cups her face in her hands. Blood.
The baby lets out a yelp. Its mother shuts her eyes and holds it to her breasts.
The bus comes to a screeching halt as its tires burst open.
Benji’s mind races to his mother in Ondo State, how she will lose her breath when it is casually announced in the news that a score more Nigerians have been kidnapped along an expressway.
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“Some weeks ago, some of my closest friends almost lost their lives on their way to their NYSC camps. I spent days listening to their stories, horrified at the horror in their voices. Some part of me bubbled with angst. Why were people being killed so often? This anger found its way into the veins of a story. Red Sand shows the world what happens in Northern Nigeria. It brings to life the struggles of my people.”
©2023 Ubong Johnson
UBONG JOHNSON is a Nigerian storyteller and medic. He is thrilled by all the possibilities of literature.