ESCAPE!

ESCAPE!

By

AROKOYO CHRISTOPHER BAMIDELE

CHRIDAMEL PUBLISHING HOUSE

ILORIN

2018

DEDICATION

To Bolanle, JohnPaul, MarieClaire and Victoria

©Arokoyo Christopher

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-978-965-882-4

E-mail:krskoyo@gmail.com

Website:www.chridamelpublishing.com

CHAPTER ONE

Our story took place in the Niger Delta area in the late 1400s. It began in the shack of Enorhor. She was a woman of about fifty years of age. The pleasant, rotund face had obviously seen better days. She lived in a thatched house. It was a neat and well-kept abode. Her belongings were neatly stacked on various raised platforms of bamboo in order to keep them safe from the floods which ravaged the riverine area every so often. Apart from the main house there was another slightly smaller outbuilding. Enorhor used this building to ply her trade which was midwifery. She had been the midwife of choice for most of the women in the village for about three decades now. She cut her teeth in the trade through helping her mother, who was also a midwife of no mean repute, in delivering babies of the various women that patronized her. Her mother allowed her to deliver a baby on her own when she was only eighteen years old. This was after her mother had observed that she was a natural at assisting women birth their babies.

Since her husband passed on at a young age soon early in their marriage, she had immersed herself in her trade. Such was her love for her husband that she vowed never to remarry. Without having her own child, she had decided to invest her time and energy in delivering babies and doing the follow up on the growth and the development of the children she helped birth. The mothers in turn showed their appreciation by giving her gifts like cane chairs and tables, raffia mats, fruits and other food items. These items made her generally self-sufficient to the extent that she gave others in need some of her possessions. Only two nights ago she gave a table and some tubers of cassavas to Obatare. Obatare was a mother of two children whose husband, Ebiketon, suffered from a bad leg after an unfortunate fishing incident. Ebiketon had stepped on the poisonous cone snail while fishing among the mangrove. He suffered from a debilitating limp since then. This had seriously reduced his productivity as he could not go for the fishing trips that brought food to the table and which was also exchanged for other necessary household needs. Ebiketon was also grieving the loss of their children who were born twins. The two boys had been sacrificed to the gods for the continued good of the community according to the custom of the land. Twins were an ill wind that blew no one any good. They were ill omen not only to the immediate family but to the whole village. They were the harbingers of everything bad- from failure of crops, violent storms that blew roofs off the thatched huts, to making the fishes go to depths out of reach of the fishermen, to the loss of fishermen at sea, etc. The only rational and reasonable thing was to do away with the twins as early as possible. This would stay the evil hand of the gods.