The Fishermen

Mother was deeply shaken by the weig

Have you all seen it? Have you seen what your folly has caused? Didn’t I say we should stop going to this stupid river, but none of you listened?” He piled both hands on his head: “You will see that she will certainly blow the whistle to Mama. You want to bet it?” He slapped his forehead. “You want to?”

No one replied. “You see?” he said. “Your eyes have now opened, right? You will see.”

There were times when I could not understand his actions, or his decisions. I depended mostly on Obembe to help me clarify things. After the encounter with Abulu the previous week, which Solomon had just referred to, Obembe had told me a story he said was responsible for Ikenna’s sudden change. I was pondering this story when Boja cried: “My God, Ikenna, look, Mama Iyabo!” He’d seen one of our neighbours, who hawked groundnuts about on foot, seated on the bench in front of the church with the priest who’d come to the river earlier. By the time Boja raised the alarm, it was already too late; the woman had seen us.

Why are you all going now?” Solomon said. “Is it because of the priest or because of that day you met Abulu? Did I not ask you not to wait? Did I not tell you not to listen to him? Did I not tell you that he was just an evil, crazy, madman?”

But none of us said a word in reply, nor did we turn to him. We simply walked on, Ikenna ahead, holding only the black polythene bag in which he kept his fishing shorts. He had left his hooked

Solomon did not complete his sentence; he’d understood. For the seed of what Ikenna had now begun to act out—a lack of interest in fishing—was sown the previous week. He’d had to be persuaded to come with us to the river that day. So, when he said: “I want to go and study. I’m a student, not a fisherman,” no one questioned him any further.

after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola—a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilomet

Because there was a perennially erratic power supply in Akure in

him to let it go, but he refused. Then, one morning, he lifted the bird’s lifeless body in his hand and dug a hole in the backyard; his heart was broken. He and Boja covered the sparrow with sand until the bird was buried under the earth. This was exactly how Ikenna vanished, too. First, the earth poured by the mourners and the undertakers covered his white-shrouded trunk, then his legs, arms, face and everything, until he was obliterated forever from our eyes

I sat there, frozen under the power of his words, unable to say anything.

had no home, no fixed allegiances. He loved the far and the near, the small and the big, the strange and the familiar.