It had been only five days since being seen off at Manchester airport by her parents and Edith. Benny, he would have only howled and annoyed the neighbours came as well.
‘Please come in while I fetch my wife.’ Zebediah had seen the confusion at the door; he came to assist. He had visited England on a few occasions and realised the regional dialects could be quite pronounced.
The Pastor had received many offers of assistance over the years; but, on the doorstep of a mission in Northern Nigeria, such a broad British accent was unexpected.
Fair-skinned as befits the cold and damp climate of Northern England, with dark, shoulder-length hair, she was severely exhausted by the time she arrived.
‘I’ll run a bath, it’s nice and hot.’ Mary, practical as ever, dealt with the essentials. ‘We can talk after. I will prepare a meal for you as well.’
‘She has led a hard life,’ said Zebediah. He knew the look of the street; it was on a different street, in a different country, that he had rescued Duncan. Mary and Zebediah never concerned themselves with her past. They accepted people for who they were.
‘I went to a presentation in Liverpool on missionary work. I felt it was something that I wanted to do.’ A plate of chicken and rice quickly consumed; she spoke between bites. ‘My life has not always been easy. I hope that you will let me stay.’
‘You are welcome. Stay as long as you like.’ Zebediah and Mary almost spoke in unison.
Over time, she would let on a little of her previous life to Mary, but she would never pry for more. Helen was the person they knew, not the person of the past.
Happily energetic with her life in Nigeria, she became passionate in her dedication to the Mission. She felt as though she would stay forever. The Pastor and his wife loved her as a daughter.
In time, she regained the vitality and the fresh, young and tender look of her youth in the dry and dusty north of Nigeria.
‘It’s a beauty. I can’t wait to start work on it.’ No one could remember Duncan being so excited. The motorised transport had arrived, or at least a loose definition of motorised.
An old Bedford truck, at least fifty years old, had arrived at the missionary, not the original as promised. The tyres were bald, the main bearings clanked, the steering imprecise and the brakes as effective as a stick pressed into the ground.
Red-haired with a susceptibility to the effects of sunburn, he had in the course of a few weeks managed to obtain some tyres of limited tread, fixed the bearings and worked wonders with the steering. He had also managed to resolve the brakes – they were never to be startling effective, but at the limited speed, the old truck moved they were acceptable.
He never managed to get around to cleaning the truck and the cabin smelt of something dreadful. Helen, in the first weeks, had taken to the vehicle with gusto and had somehow magically transformed the cabin into something resembling a patchwork quilt. The seats were covered in local fabric, the floors with some straw matting, and the dashboard rubbed down and painted with white enamel she had found in a local store. It was clean and unique; she was immensely proud of her handiwork.
‘It looks great. It’s better than new.’ Duncan was enthusiastic with the renovated cabin.
‘I know it looks great, but I can’t drive it,’ she said. ‘Every time I try to change gear, it makes a frightful noise, puts my teeth right on edge. I’ll keep to Sammy.’ The synchromesh on the gearbox was shot and the power steering and power brakes, non-existent.
Duncan loved the truck. He had commanded tanks in the past; this was just a baby in comparison. The others liked Sammy equally, and Helen quickly became the horse’s favourite; she was always giving him a carrot to eat.
***
The violence in Northern Nigeria had continued to escalate during the years they had been at the mission. The call to pull out until the situation stabilised came by way of a formal request from the Baptist head of Missions. ‘It would be appropriate for you to consider relocating to the south until the situation is more stable.
‘The people in the local community will look after us. For the present, we will stay,’ Zebediah said firmly.
‘I will respect your wishes, but if there is a dramatic increase in violence, you and your group will need to leave immediately. Is that understood?’
‘I believe we are best positioned to judge local conditions.’ Zebediah was obliged to agree, although he would be reluctant to abide by a decision made remotely. In times of decay and strife, that was when the Lord’s work was most needed.
He was confident that they were involved in the Lord’s work and his wife, Mary, was content to share her life alongside her beloved husband. Duncan was fully occupied, and Helen was truly happy. She had now been at the mission for two years and had not seen her parents since that rainy day in Manchester.
‘I am going to see my parents in Abuja,’ she announced. ‘They are coming over for a week. It is their first time out of England.’
‘Ask them to come here, at least for a week or two.’ Zebediah was pleased that she was reuniting with her parents after such a long time.
‘My father recently had a hip replacement. He would not be able to handle the trip up here.’
‘Please go with our blessing then.’
It was a bumpy trip down to Abuja, the surprisingly pleasant capital of Nigeria with its broad boulevards, luxury hotels and shopping centres. She certainly enjoyed the air conditioning at the hotel; but after two days, she missed her home in the north with a passion. It was her life, even if the Pastor’s attempts to absorb her closer into his religion had not been the great success that he had hoped.
‘We would not have recognised you,’ her mother exclaimed at the airport when they first met. ‘You look fantastic.’
Helen had left England that grey and miserable day, a woman aged beyond her years. She had a stooped posture and a facial complexion that showed every facet of her abuse at the hands of drink, drugs, and a life on the street.
‘You look so young,’ her father commented.
In Abuja, they saw a woman reborn. Her face was fresh and tanned; she stood upright, confident and looked ten years younger.
‘We are so pleased to see you looking so well,’ they jointly said.
‘It is great to see you,’ said Helen. ‘I love it here. I do not believe I will ever leave Africa. It is my home now.’
Chapter 3
Somehow, Kate McDonald had avoided the inevitable wild youth of adolescence as the hormonal imbalance and the first flush of adulthood took hold. There had been the late night sleepovers with her friends from school where she had drunk more than was good for her, but the abiding respect for her parents had limited her foolishness. There was to be no experimenting with drugs, no indiscretions with the local stud, and certainly no writhing half-naked in the back of a car, although there had been plenty of offers. She was attractive, slim, with long flowing blonde hair. Her parents adored her as she did them.
‘Come on, it’s no worse than a drink of beer,’ Molly Barker would always say as she enticed her to down a shot of neat whisky.
Molly was her best friend, but they were as chalk and cheese. Kate was sweet and gentle; Molly was wild, always pushing the limits at school and at play. It was Molly smoking in the girls’ toilets. It was Molly giving a blowjob to her latest boyfriend in the school gym. Regardless of their differing natures, they shared a genuine friendship, always looked out for each other. Kate covered for her the last time Molly had failed to turn up at school.
‘Molly has a severe headache,’ she had said. ‘She will be in tomorrow.’ Miss Epstein was enquiring as to her friend’s non-appearance.
‘If you tell me this, Kate, then I know it is true.’ The teacher trusted Kate, and she felt some guilt afterwards about lying in this manner. She knew that Molly was giving Garry Spalding the ride of his life in the back of a Chevrolet SUV up at the lake ten kilometres out of town.
‘It’s only a cigarette. It will give you a
high, nothing more,’ Molly said, although she hoped she would not take it. Kate was the kind of person that she wished she could be, but her adolescence was playing dreadful havoc with her hormones. The desire to rebel and to screw every male she could get her hands on was irrepressible.
Molly, likewise, was the kind of person that Kate aspired to, but adolescence had not affected her with same degree of vengeance.
A few boys had cornered her, or she had cornered them, at parties that invariably occurred every weekend during her later years at school and then at college. However, it had never gone further than drunken kissing, with plenty of groping and heavy breathing.
One of the rampant males had almost managed to score, but she had sobered up and pushed him away.
‘Come on, everyone’s doing it. You don’t want to be the only virgin in college.’ Glenn Smothers, an acne-ridden star of the football team, had tried to coerce her into relaxing.
‘I can’t.’ She wanted to, but she wanted romance to accompany the physical act, and it was not love that he was offering. Next day, severely embarrassed, she feigned illness to avoid going to college and having him joking with his friends about how frigid she was. He didn’t remember anyway, he had been so drunk.
The boys were always looking for and expecting more, but she somehow resisted and held on to her virginity when all her girlfriends, especially Molly, had given it away. It was usually to some rampant male, such as Glenn Smothers, whose only attribute was that he was as drunk as they were, and in the right place at the right time.
***
Kate could have said to her parents that she was going away for the weekend with her boyfriend, but she still maintained the subterfuge of telling them that she was staying over at a girlfriend’s place. She did not want to upset them, and they would have only worried about this quantum leap in her life.
She had decided to give up her virginity for her first serious boyfriend, Bill Cleaver, a bright but lazy student at the college they both attended. The anticipation, the pheromones, and the unrequited lust were strong as they drove up to a motel some two hundred kilometres from New Orleans in Louisiana. He did not see the truck coming from the other direction in the half-light of dusk.
‘Stop it, I can’t concentrate on the road,’ he joked with Kate, his eyes looking in her direction.
‘Don’t you want to see what is on the menu for tonight? I’m only giving you a little appetiser.’ Both seized by forces that made sensible people foolhardy and unwise.
She was playing with his groin and cheekily flashing her breasts at him. At the last moment, he saw the truck. He slammed on the brakes, narrowly missing it. He did not, however, miss the embankment he had instinctively turned the steering wheel towards. The vehicle slowly rolled over and slid down the sloping incline into a small creek that flowed down into the Mississippi. It was not very deep, two metres at the most, but the car had slid down on its roof, and the doors were jammed by the creek bank on either side.
He quickly succumbed, wedged as he was by the steering wheel, completely disoriented, and confused. He drowned within a couple of minutes of the vehicle hitting the water. Kate managed to free herself and found a pocket of air at the back of the car. The driver of the truck jumped into the cold water, smashed the back window with a wheel jack and somehow managed to pull her out.
***
Bob McDonald arrived at the mission compound in Northern Nigeria unannounced one morning by helicopter. A friend for many years after Zebediah had approached him in Port Harcourt in the south of the country for some funding.
Zebediah was startled. ‘Bob, what brings you here?’
‘I have a favour to ask of you. I would ask if my daughter, Kate, could join the mission for a few months.’
‘You are aware of the terrorist activities in the area. Do you think it will be safe for her here?’
‘I will ensure that you receive enhanced security, regular visits by my people and a couple of reliable trucks. I will make sure you have a generator as well. Any sign of trouble and I will pull you all out.’
Bob explained. ‘Kate was in a car accident with her steady boyfriend. It was fatal for him although she received no injuries. She is full of guilt, feels that she should devote her life to good deeds as a form of penance. No doubt she will eventually deal with her grief and move on, but in the meantime I could not think of a better place and a better person to entrust her care to.’
A week later, she arrived at the mission. Even Zebediah had to admit that she was a beautiful woman.
The local men, intrigued by her looks, could not keep their eyes to themselves; the local women, meanwhile, could not get enough of her. They wanted to be close to her, to enjoy her company, to express disbelief in how someone could be so white.
Never to be a dedicated missionary, she was religious in a conventional American, every-Sunday-to-church manner. She was not as strong a personality as Helen was, but she helped the best she could. She made the living arrangements more homely, ensured the chapel had flowers, the Bibles well stacked and placed in the pews on a Sunday.
Her father guaranteed regular visits from the security company that he used for his burgeoning business in the Niger Delta. They did not enjoy coming and they did not have the benefit of a helicopter. They had a couple of good, air-conditioned four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruisers, but it was still bumpy and long, and the dust still managed to get inside the cabin.
The promised Toyota trucks duly arrived. Helen loved them. At last she could drive, although she was sure to make certain Sammy received due attention and plenty of carrots. Duncan continued to use the cantankerous old Bedford, as challenging as it was.
The situation in the north continued to deteriorate; the fundamentalists were even committing terrorist acts in Abuja. There had been bombings of schools and bus stations, and the security at the entries into the city was becoming more intense.
Continuing escalation in the kidnappings of children, especially schoolgirls of marriageable age, some as young as fourteen, were being reported. Their fate was indeterminate, but it was easy to imagine that it was not pleasant. Forced conversion to Islam, given to the foot soldiers for entertainment, sold off for marriage across the border in Chad or Cameroon, were all put forward as scenarios, but there seemed to be no proof. The Nigerian military tried to control the situation, but there remained large parts in the northeast of the country beyond their control.
Chapter 4
Abacha, a member of the Kanuri people, had never experienced love or affection as a child. There had never been the love of a mother’s embrace, the nurturing at a milk-laden breast as a baby; or that of a father, proud of the son that he had seeded in his wife.
‘Get out of my way, or I’ll beat you.’ His father was an angry and violent man who blamed young Abacha for his troubles.
It was only at the Madrassa in his village, in the remote south of Niger, close to the border with Nigeria, that he found respect and attention.
‘Have you studied your Koran today, Abacha?’ Mullah Ibrahim always asked every time that he saw him.
‘Yes, I have.’ Abacha was diligent in his study of Islam and embraced the religion. He could recite from memory, large parts of the Holy book of Islam by the time he had reached ten years of age. There was a varied education at the Madrassa, but religious studies predominated.
His mother was only fifteen when she had died giving birth to him. Her death was not because of him, but because his father, Harouna, was a stupid man. Illiterate and narrow-minded, he saw a woman of no worth other than breeding him sons, as many as possible. She had been screaming in labour for fifteen hours, but he did not concern himself with her anguish. A doctor could have dealt with the excessive bleeding and his wife’s agony, but his father did not have the money to pay, or the intelligence to care. Eventually, the baby literally cut out of her by a local woman in the village. His mother died soon after of severe blood loss and shock.
The child, a male w
as strong and healthy, but it was to be his only son. To have only one son was a sign of weakness and failure and Harouna knew he could not afford another wife. He had laboured in the capital, Niamey for two years, in order to pay her parents, and he was not so young now. The miserable food that was dished up at the end of the day would not maintain his body for the relentless fifteen-hour workdays required.
The child grew firm and strong and at sixteen, Abacha was a handsome youth; tall and slim, with jet black skin. Considering the neglect and abuse of his father, it was remarkable. Mullah Ibrahim was more like a father to him than Harouna.
‘You’re not too old to get a clout from me,’ shouted his father.
His father still attempted to hold control over him. That, however, was to be his final act of abuse. Harouna took a swing at him with a piece of wood that was lying on the floor of the yard. Abacha grabbed the wood and promptly hit his father with severe force He fell to the ground, bleeding and unconscious. He would never threaten him again.
Mullah Ibrahim, for all his good points, was a fundamentalist who believed all that one required in life was contained within the words of the Koran. He abhorred the West, although he had no knowledge of it. Islam and the Koran were the guiding principles of his life.
At the age of eighteen, Abacha saw the need of a wife. ‘I will work hard and not complain,’ he explained to the foreman at the building site. A wife cost money, and labouring on a building site was the only way to secure sufficient. He was following his father’s approach by working in the capital of the country. Stronger than his father had ever been, he was back in the village within one year.
Samira, a first cousin, chosen as per the tradition and whereas she was pleasant to the eye, he could not view her with anything more than disdain. She was for breeding him sons, nothing more.
‘Please leave me alone. I am scared and ashamed.’ She pleaded with him on that first night. He did not care, or take any notice. He just ripped her clothes off and took her from behind with no feeling of remorse for her pain and humiliation. In fact, he had enjoyed it.
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