Oluchi, had lived on the wild side of life.
Her parents were Igbos and had settled in the Edibe Edibe area of Calabar in the nineteen sixties, just before the Nigerian civil war. Her father, Igwe Emeka Okereke, was one of those killed by the Nigerian troops during the fight to ‘’liberate’’ Calabar in 1968, led by the infamous, ‘’Black Scorpion’’ – Colonel Adekunle.
Mr Okereke was working in St Margaret hospital in Duke Town, when the naval bombardment of Calabar began. He was among the initial casualties recorded during the naval siege of Calabar in 1968.
Mama Emeka, Oluchi’s mother, had to raise her and her three siblings all alone, with the little proceeds she got from her trade in imported second hand clothes, popularly called ‘’Okrika’’ and ‘’Okporoko’’ (in Igbo) or ‘’Ekporoko’’ (in Efik).
Oluchi, as the ‘’Ada’’ or first born daughter in the family and in the absence of her disciplinarian father, arrogated some domestic authority to herself, over and above her younger brother and first son of the family. She was both domineering and uncontrollable.
Mama Emeka, who felt safe and comfortable in remaining a widow, had easily blamed Oluchi’s behaviour on ‘’the foreign land and culture’’ – since women were relatively ‘’liberated’’ in Calabar than in her native Igbo land, in the areas of cosmology, laws of inheritance and succession, amongst other freedoms.
After her primary school education, Oluchi was sent to the Holy Child Catholic School, Marian hill, Calabar. It was the period that her truancy and deviant behaviour came to a head. Despite Holy Child School being an all-girls school, Oluchi was always found in the company of boys: going to school, returning from school, going for lessons or sports. Her usual excuse was always that they were friends from the neighbourhood or from nearby secondary schools.
Her mother could not muster the requisite energy and time to supervise Oluchi properly, because she had to contend with her trade and sharing her time with the rest of the children. And the clock ticked on.
In the final term of her fourth year in school, Oluchi became pregnant and consequently expelled from school. As a Catholic school that upheld high academic and moral standards, all appeals for her to be allowed to take her examinations were refused. So Oluchi stayed back at home, had her baby, a baby girl. She was named Jacinta.
All attempts to extract the name of the baby’s father from Oluchi were futile. She attended to her baby, without a father. After the initial apprehension and frustration, Jacinta was accepted in the family.
Motherhood sobered Oluchi – it seemed.
By Jacinta’s second birthday, Oluchi had returned to her wild escapade and was spending her nights and days away from home, sometimes for weeks. By the time the civil war ended, the other three children were in secondary schools and Jacinta had been enrolled in a nursery school, quite close to the family home. And with the government ban on the importation of Okrika and Okporoko, mama Emeka had the worse time of her life – and could not care much about Oluchi’s indiscretions and shenanigans. She had to fight for her survival – and her other children and grandchild.
Oluchi had comfortably settled into the circles of school drop outs, school leavers and shady characters with undecipherable means of livelihood. Some of them were Igbo boys and others were Efik, Ibibio, Annang, Oron and Yorubas. She felt she was hot and had become one of the ‘’happening babes’’ – wearing an ‘’Afro’’ hairstyle and mini-skirts and donning platforms – the signature outlook of Nigeria in the seventies.
A providential signal was once again sent, but Oluchi was too blind to see. She could not afford to let life pass her by – in her brain. So, she carried on – in her chosen ways.
It turned out that one of her boyfriends was a notorious criminal, known to the security agencies and the public. His name was Phillip Bassey Inyang, simply known as, ‘’Phillip Baba’’. Phillip’s life was a vicious cycle of alliances masked in a motely of aliases. He was both dangerous and useful in the social circuits in Calabar.
There came a time that incidents of crime increased in Calabar metropolis and the police came under pressure from the military Governor to stem the tide. The police commissioner and all the service chiefs at the state level, came under intense pressure from ‘’Dodan Barracks’’ in Lagos, to ‘’shape up or ship out’’, as they say in the local military parlance.
So, known criminals and even police informants were hurriedly rounded up and detained. Oluchi’s friend, Phillip Baba, was accused of the crime of Armed Robbery, but he claimed that he had spent the fateful night with Oluchi as his alibi. Which was true. In a bid to save face, the police arrested Oluchi, detained and tortured her for several days and threatened to charge her as an accomplice if she did not denounce her boyfriend, Phillip Baba.
Under duress, Oluchi denied her boyfriend, thereby leading to his conviction and execution by Firing Squad, of Phillip Baba in Calabar – all within six months. Oluchi was released. She had escaped by the whiskers.
It was not the death of Phillip that shocked Oluchi, but the tactics and method employed by the police to murder her boyfriend. This served as a reality check for her, about life in Nigeria. She had read Shakespeare’s King Lear and learnt that: ‘’ As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’’
She was now one of the characters in the play, but in a bigger theatre and playing to a wider audience. She desperately needed to take stock and rearrange her life. So she left Calabar to an unknown destination. To her family and friends, Oluchi had simply, ’’changed her level.’’
In the intervening period, mama Emeka’s business had picked up and her children were doing well in health and academics. Jacinta, who had come to know and call her ‘’mama’’, instead of grandma, was also faring well. Life was good, though in small doses. But mama Emeka still missed her ‘’ada’’.
Many months passed by without anything being heard from or about Oluchi. She had not paid them a visit, since the day she abandoned her daughter and walked out of her home with Phillip Baba.
‘’Now that her criminal friend had been executed, shouldn’t my daughter see the reason and sign to return home?’’ Mama Emeka would lament occasionally, with her visage betraying her shock and consternation.
On the third anniversary of the execution of Phillip Baba, there was a bank heist along Calabar road, where two police officers were murdered. This prompted a massive manhunt for the ‘’cop killers’’ and they were eventually arrested in a hotel night club in Aba, in the company of girls of easy virtue and transferred to Calabar for ‘’processing, investigation and prosecution.’’
The suspects were eventually arraigned before a High Court in Calabar. Charged along with the suspects, were all the girls that were arrested in their company in the hotel nightclub in Aba. They were charged as accomplices and conspirators – ‘’after diligent and thorough investigations by the police and sanctioned by the Attorney General of the State, through the Director of Public Prosecutions(DPP).
One of the girls that were convicted was Oluchi. The seven male suspects were sentenced to life imprisonment, while the three women, who were charged as accomplices, were convicted and sentenced to thirty years imprisonment, each. No member of Oluchi’s family had attended the proceedings, nor were they aware of her trial. Maybe, it would have turned out to be the last straw for mama Emeka.
Angry and resentful about her situation, Oluchi sought freedom from her first day in Afokang prison, albeit, illegally. So, she concocted a plan. She was determined to break out of the prison, which, incidentally is located close to a swampy section of the Calabar river tributary – close to her family home at Edibe Edibe.
Over the years she made friends with one of the prison caretakers, called Mike Udosen. His job, among others, was to bury those prisoners who died in a graveyard just outside the prison walls.
The usual practice was that when a prisoner died, the caretaker would ring a bell, which was heard by everyone. This was a death notice. The caretaker would then get the body and put it in a casket. Next, he would enter his office to fill out the death certificate before returning to the casket to nail the lid shut; after which he would put the casket on a hand drawn wooded wagon (known as truck) to take it to the graveyard and bury it. Knowing this routine, Oluchi devised an escape plan and shared it with the caretaker.
Mike Udosen was reluctant to go along with this plan, but Oluchi, being so beautiful, easily seduced him and he agreed to do it. And their friendship grew stronger, despite the difference in their ages.
Both of them had agreed that the next time someone died and the bell rang, Oluchi would leave her cell and sneak into the dark room where the coffins were kept. She would then slip into the coffin with the dead body when the caretaker would be out to fill out the Death Certificate. When the caretaker returned, he would nail the lid shut and take the coffin outside the prison with her in the coffin along with the dead body. This was a fool-proof plan.
Mike Udosen had organised and procured an oxygen device for Oluchi. This was to sustain her until later in the evening when the caretaker would return to the graveyard under the cover of darkness, dig up the coffin, open it, and set her free.
Several months passed by no prisoner died. Oluchi became easily agitated and apprehensive over this development. In one of her dalliances with Mike Udosen, she was forced to ask Mike, ‘’Abi person no wan die for this place?’’
‘’Be patient, dear. See we fit stay two years, person no die. But e dey like person go die before this month end. Chill, person must die before December’’, Mike had assured her.
She waited two more months before someone in Afokang prison died. It was on the second day of October – just a day after the commemoration and celebration of Nigerian Independence from Colonial rule.
She was asleep in her cell when she heard the death bell ring. She got up and slowly walked down the hallway. She was nearly caught a couple of times, before she eventually made it to the makeshift funeral home. She was both scared and nervous. But all the signs indicated success.
She easily located the coffin that contained the dead body, carefully climbed inside and pulled the lid shut to wait for the caretaker to come and nail the lid. Soon she heard footsteps, followed by the pounding of the hammer on the nails.
Even though she was very uncomfortable in the coffin with the dead body, she knew that with each nail she was one step closer to freedom. ‘’Idang Cemetery, here I come’’, she muttered under bated breath.
The coffin was lifted onto the wagon and taken outside to the graveyard. She could feel the coffin being lowered into the ground. In her jittery state, she didn’t make a sound as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave with a thud.
Finally, she heard the dirt dropping onto the top of the wooden coffin, and she knew that it was only a matter of time until she would be free at last.
After several minutes of absolute silence, she began to laugh. Oluchi was free! Free at last. Her days of making careless blunders were over. Never again would she be caught napping. She had heard of The Count of Monte Cristo and Escape from Alcatraz and this was going to be her escape from bondage – from Injustice. This escapade was going to add to her enigma. Or so she thought. She was ready for a new life, far away from Calabar – even in the Congo – if she could not escape to Europe. Anywhere else, but Nigeria, she had decided.
Feeling curious, she decided to light a match to find out the identity of the dead prisoner beside her.
Behold, lying next to Oluchi Emeka Okereke, was Mike Udosen, the Prison Caretaker.
Orok Otu Duke
Duke Town
