How One Girl Faced Her Family’s Dark Legacy

I thought of sheol, hades, and death as my grandfather’s hands moved in circular motions on Órogun, his chi and our family’s deity. As a young girl, I watched these rituals with fear, not yet understanding the weight they would place on my future.

My grandfather touched the calabash just at the feet of the standing Órogun and then took some of the blood in it and smeared it on my forehead.

It was my blood; wrung out of the cloth material that grandfather had handed me the moment I told him I’d started seeing my nsọ – my menstruation. He said we would dedicate it to Órogun so he waited for the third month when the flow became a little heavier.

And so here we were, at the back of our hut, at the thatched outhouse made of mud, before the personal deity of our family, offering my menstrual blood to it.

“Say you will not allow any man to touch you. The day you do, the man will surely die. If you get pregnant through him, the child would belong to this family and would bear my name,” he said in Ika, our language.

I repeated after my grandfather, my Ika reeling off my tongue in quick succession. He touched my forehead with his bloody fingers and made a mark. A dot just between my eyes, and he said that we would leave my blood there; we were offering it to Órogun and he would accept it. We would find the calabash empty by the time we checked back tomorrow. Órogun would drink it all.

I felt repulsed immediately as I stepped out of the family shrine and wished I didn’t have to live with my heathen grandfather. I wished I lived with my mother in the city and that she hadn’t borne me out of wedlock. I wished every female in the family got married and didn’t have children without a father.

I walked to my room in the main house and I wondered what Madea, my best friend, would think of me when I told her in school the next day; she would say, of course, that I’m a traditionalist. I wondered what Miss Enoch would think of me too; she would say I had chosen the devil over Jesus, whom she preached to me about.

Well, they did none of that when I told them in school, and to my surprise, Mrs Enoch told me never to use cloth material again and not to allow my blood to be wrung out of it. She gave me a pack of sanitary pads and asked that I dispose of them in our latrine or burn them after use. Then she told me to denounce whatever ties I had with Órogun immediately.

I went back home and everything began to make sense to me. Órogun would accept our blood of innocence but would deny us husbands; it’s all in the oath we took before it that any man who touches us would die. That oath didn’t stop at just any passerby but even husbands. It was all-encompassing, and I saw the sheer wickedness of it all.

Grandfather thought he was protecting us from losing our virginity but didn’t know that he was making us lose more than that: our future. My mum has never had a stable relationship. My father died while he was making love to her; she told me that in a hurried whisper and how she had to run away to avoid being caught by the police.

My aunties were not left out of the struggle either, all three of them getting old but not married. I wish grandfather knew that his ritual was causing something in the lives of his daughters and maybe even in the lives of his granddaughters.

I went to the shrine and peeped in to see if Órogun had accepted my blood and probably drunk all of it as my grandfather said it would. The calabash was still there, and I walked in to take it; the almost congealed liquid stared at my face, and I ran out quickly to dispose of it in the latrine.

READ ALSO: A Christian Journey That Started With Theft

About Author

Maryann Ijeoma Nwokoye

Maryann Ijeoma Nwokoye is a creative writer, storyteller and development communicator. She is particular about using her skill in communication to see that this world becomes a better place and for men to turn their spears into ploughshares.

Beyond writing and storytelling, she is enthusiastic about human development. She has also managed programs for Non-governmental organizations that are focused on human development through technology and entrepreneurship.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication and a Master’s degree in Applied Communication (In View) with a core interest in technology and development communication.

See author's posts