True life story: My parents begged me to give them a son.

Dear readers, please note that names have been changed, to protect the true identity of the real characters in the story.

Hello LivelyStones,

I used to be proud to be an African while in England. To me, Africa was still kind of pure and unsoiled with the moral decadence and religious apathy that was a growing phenomenon in the Western World, until I arrived back home to Nigeria, and came face to face with some barbaric customs of my people; the lgbo tribe of Eastern Nigeria.  The worst thing about these customs is the fact that no amount of western education, wealth or exposure to Western culture and religious convictions, can stop an African from practising these terrible things.

My bitter experience made me realize that you can take an African out of Africa, but you can never take Africa out of the African.

If you doubt me, just wait till you hear my painful story.

My name is Amanda Eze. I was born on 16 November 1982 in Awka, Anambra, Nigeria. My father was a lecturer of fine arts at the University of Calabar before he set up his own gallery of fine arts in the city of Calabar. It was in that gallery, that a Greek arts buyer met him and offered him a job at his art company in London. We all migrated to London; my parents, l and my seven sisters, and our stories changed forever.

I was the youngest of eight daughters. My parents, in a desperate search for a male child, had eight children. But we all turned out girls, for no other reason, other than fate. After I was born, the doctor warned my parents not to try another pregnancy if my mother was to live.

I and my siblings attended county schools in EsS.e.x, England. My father trained a group of young African artists and set up a gallery for them. Midas Studios was born, and just like Midas, everything my father touched, turned to gold. Within a few years, Midas studios was worth over 18 million pounds. They sold artworks to rich clients all over the world. We lived in a huge 18th-century mansion in EsS.e.x county, and were stupendously rich. I went to University of London, and read Sociology.

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Then, all of a sudden, my father took ill in the year 2006. He went to the hospital and our worst fears were confirmed. After a series of tests, my father was diagnosed with end-stage prostate cancer. Dad considered all the medical options available to him; he could either go for radiological treatment, or he could go for chemotherapy. Either way, he could only live for an extra four years with all the terrible pains and traumas of the therapies. On the other hand, he could just pretend like he didn’t have the sickness, go on without any treatment, and die after two years at most. Dad chose the latter option.

By this point in time, I was the only child living with my parents. My father and mother insisted, in their traditional African way, that none of us girls must live outside the home until we were married. All my elder sisters were married except me. My father wished to die back home in Nigeria and be buried among his people, so I followed my parents home to Nigeria, to await my dad’s imminent demise.

To our horror, when we arrived at my hometown, Awka, my dad discovered that his younger brother, Obinna, had squandered all the money he had been sending him from England, to build a befitting village house for us. And the big mansion, that he had been lying to my dad all this while, that he had completed for him was nowhere to be found.

My father bought a modest house in the neighbouring town, and we moved into it. Nevertheless, he called a meeting of the elders of his kinsmen, where he demanded that they ask Obinna what he did with all the money, which amounted to a whopping 450,000 pounds, that he had been sending him, to build a house for us. My uncle stood up in the meeting and boldly reminded the elders, that my father had no son. Therefore, he saw no need, why he should waste the family’s farmlands; available to his own sons to inherit, building a house that no male son will inherit in the future. The elders told my uncle to return the money or face the consequences.

But we all knew that he would never return the money. He was just waiting for my father to die.

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I met Seun Ajiboye at the Airport, the day I returned from England with my parents. He was our next-door neighbour when we were living in Coydon, London, in the early days when we arrived in England. He was a handsome bespectacled Nigerian kid, born to a widowed mother. My father later made money, and we moved into the British Hinterlands, leaving the slums of Croydon forever. And I forgot all about Seun.

That day at the airport, he told me that he was working with a big pharmaceutical company in Nigeria and that he was bored and all alone. Throughout my idle stay in Nigeria, Seun became my only company. We talked on the telephone each night. And when he was free most weekends, he visited me in Calabar, and we spent the time in a cosy little hotel in town.

Slowly, Seun was falling in love with me, and I could do nothing to stop him. We spent a lot of time having S.e.x, as though it was the only thing left to do in a place as dry and boring as Nigeria. He pitied me so much, knowing that I was waiting for my father to die, and there was nothing we could do to stop his imminent death. Many nights, I went to sleep, weeping in his arms, whenever I thought of the hell, that my mother would go through at the hands of my uncles, once my father dies without a son.

Then, one Sunday morning, my mother called me into her bedroom and directed me to sit down between her and my father.

“Amanda”, my mom began, “How would you like everything that your father and I suffered to build together, to be taken over by your uncles, as soon as your father dies?”

“Well, we don’t have to lose much; we only have this house in Calabar, the smaller one in Nibo, and a few shares in companies, and money in the bank, that’s all. He can’t come to England to take any of our properties, can he?” I innocently replied.

My father, in a very weak voice, replied, “So what you are implying is that, as soon as I’m buried, you will just go back to England, and forget your Homeland, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said naively. I can never overcome the shock, I received when my father broke down crying! He looked so old and wizened, the sickness having consumed the life out of him. Then, my mother joined him, begging him to forgive her for not giving him a son. My mother’s sorrow overtook that of my father. She fell to the ground and started cursing the day she was born, telling God to take her life, for making her a woman barren of a male child! She bitterly regretted not having encouraged my father to take a second wife, when he was young and healthy. I was so overwhelmed by both of my parents weeping like that in front of me, that I cried out of fear, telling them to forgive me if I had said something wrong.

At length, my father begged my mom to stop crying. Then, my mother got up from the floor, wiped her eyes and said:

“Amanda my daughter, have I ever asked you for anything special, since you were born?”

“No mom”, I replied.

“Have I ever been a bad mother to you?” She continued.

“No mom.”

“Is there anything I ask of you, that you would refuse?”

“No mom.”

“Amanda, your father is an African man. He was a professor of fine arts here in Nigeria, before he went to London, and made his money. He is worth a total of 25 million pounds (like I didn’t know all this already). Amanda, your father is a great Igbo man. He can’t afford to die without leaving a lineage behind, it would mean that he was a cursed man. Amanda, it would mean that I, your mother, was his curse!”

At this point, she broke down and started weeping again. I begged her to stop and get on with what she was trying to tell me.

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“Amanda, my beloved daughter, you are twenty-two years old now. You have a Masters degree. You are no more a small child. I have no fear that you would not understand what I am about to say to you, because you have a mature mind. But I have a fear that you would refuse me this favour, and Amanda if you do, I am finished! I will commit suicide, once your father dies!”

“Mom, what is it?”

“Amanda, if you have a male child now, without a husband, in Igbo tradition, that child belongs to your father and l!”

She stopped, and they both looked anxiously at me. Slowly, the full implication of what they were trying to say dawned on me. My father and mother wanted me to have a child out of wedlock, that would inherit my father’s vast estates, and maintain his lineage when he dies. I also knew whom they implied, by proxy, to be the father of that child, Seun! I was so distraught by their sorrows, that I dared not refuse this implicit request. But I had only one worry though:

“What if I get pregnant, and it turns out to be a female child?”, I asked. My parents exchanged a look of such tremendous relief, that I almost burst into tears, out of pity for them. My mother then said, while smoothening my hair:

“Darling, if you get pregnant, we will determine the S.e.x of the child after a month through Ultra-scan, if it is a female child, we will abort it. And you will persuade him to make you pregnant again!”

That was how l started plotting how to trick Seun into making me pregnant.

To be continued…… tommorow

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