DRAMATIS PERSONAE
A YOUNG MAN

A FIRST LADY – HIS FIANCÉE

A SECOND LADY – AN AKARA-SELLER

HER BROTHER

HER FATHER

A THIRD LADY – A CHRISTIAN SISTER

THE YOUNG MAN’S MALE CHRISTIAN FRIEND

A PASTOR

A MARRIED WOMAN

A FEMALE BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

A CONGREGATION

Scene I
A young man and his fiancée are seen on stage.  The young man is bitterly accusing her of infidelity, claiming that he has seen her dressed as a prostitute, bold and shameless, standing in the market-place, throwing her arms round a young man and kissing him. (PROVERBS 7: 10 – 12,18).  The fiancée is defiant at first, but then pleads for his forgiveness.  The young man angrily drives her away, paying very little attention to her feeble, pretentious pleas.  He exits in the opposite direction.

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I am about to steer the hornets’ nest, for in Nigeria, no issue can be as sensitive as religion. My apologies to those who might be offended by this piece, but what must be said must be said.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am a practicing Christian and by all standards I consider my self a good one at that. I believe in the existence of a God and in the reality of Heaven and Hell. But I also know where to draw the line between spirituality and deception.
I don’t know if the Churches pay tax, if they don’t, they ought to because they are now very potent money spinning institutions. At some point in our national life, I had held a strong opinion that since every other option had failed, the only hope left for the nation was the religious institution. I was not alone in this conviction, the generality of Nigerians thought so too. Then, as it is still now, the nation seemed on the verge of breathing its last with a combination of bad leadership, corruption and tyranny driving the people to desolation. Every one turned to the heavens for help like the children of Israel in the wilderness. 

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A repeated harsh pummeling of the narrow zinc gate into my fathers little compound brought first my mother and then my old grand mother out of their huts into the main compound. It was the wee hours of the day, too early a time to have a visitor. I lay in bed in that no-longer-asleep, yet not-quite-awake state, certain that who ever were at the gate had no good news.     

       
“Where is your husband?” the visitor asked rather rudely ignoring both mother and grand mother’s greetings. The voice was unmistakably that of Obong Attah, the richest merchant in the whole of my village. He owned a big shop at the market square in which virtually everything essential for life was on sale, from cooking ingredients and stockfish to drug tablets and dry gin. He also owned an old open lorry Long Jorni with which he conveyed these essential goods from the big market in Uyo once every week to our little village. His lorry was also my villages only link with the outside world, so it’s weekly trip to Uyo and back was usually an event people looked forward to especially the petty traders and those who had the privilege of having close relatives in the city who they went to visit once in a while.           

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I was certain it was not the beer, I was keeping count. The waiter just replaced the fourth and from experience, I required twice that to knock me off. So effectively, I was not drunk or so I thought, but I felt myself floating softly like a piece of paper blown by a whirlwind, ascending unsteadily, the rest of the world as I knew it at a standstill, like I would when I was eight bottles up.

Perhaps it was her voice, not trained like a master singer’s, something between tenor and soprano, almost coarse yet melodious, at least to me. She was singing a popular song by a white singer, either Celine Dion or Mariah Carey, I wasn’t thinking straight- it didn’t matter. What mattered was the sound in modulated wave lengths from the loudspeaker causing a tingle-almost a tickle on my ear drums, my entire anatomy quivering, like her every word, from that love song was to me.

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