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Ogbudie, the Female Grave Digger
By WayoGuy
Uncle Oji died under mysterious circumstances. That is what his wife said.
{mosgoogle} For more than fifteen years before his death, uncle Oji had been renting just one room of a row-house from an Ogoni landlord. It was in that one room that uncle Oji and his five children slept. It was in that one room that four of his children were conceived and born.
His family was, at that time, easily recognizable among residents of Ikwerre Road in Mile One, Diobu, Portharcourt, because all his children looked exactly like him and none looked like their mother and because my aunt, his wife, sold akara cakes on the street corner. Six foot tall, two hundred pounds, and always clean-shaven, always wearing a white shirt, my uncle managed to stand out in that dirty gutter called a street.
As children, my brothers and I would travel from my village to visit them during school holiday seasons. We all slept in the same room, but of course we slept on a mat on the floor while husband and wife slept on the bed. Christmas times were the only times they returned to our village. My brothers and I had fond memories of them.
Then, one fateful day, we discovered that the tall palm tree had fallen to the ground.
That fateful day was one sunny Friday afternoon, at my village, when my brother and I came home from school and found my extended family’s compound deserted. This was not unusual except that my uncle’s wife, Ogbudie, who, as far as we knew, should be with my uncle in Portharcourt that day, was the only person in sight, right in front of us. She was on a parcel of land facing the compound, engaged in an unusual activity. She was digging a grave.
We knew right away that it was a grave because right there on the side of the excavation was a casket. In my entire life, I had never seen a woman participate in digging a grave; and here she was doing it and doing it alone. It was an abomination.
As my brother and I stood still with our school bags hanging on our shoulders, contemplating what to do, we could hear soft and low voices of people crying a little distance away from our house. As we listened to the crying, my uncle’s wife looked up, saw us, and waved us away. It was obvious that she did not want us near the house. We retreated to our neighbors’ house where we learnt that uncle Oji had died.
We were told that his wife arrived from Portharcourt that afternoon, with the casket, told everybody that uncle Oji had died and that the casket was sealed because the cause of death was contagious. We learnt that upon hearing the word ‘contagious’ everyone had ran in different directions, leaving her to the task of digging the grave. That was why the compound was deserted.
That afternoon, uncle Oji’s body was buried single-handedly by his wife. As if that was
not strange enough, the extended family did not make proper enquiries of his wife as to how uncle Oji died. Was it because she had suddenly become a grieving widow and everyone wanted to spare her feelings? Or was it because he was said to have died from a ‘contagious’ mystery disease?
One month after my uncle was buried, his wife, Ogbudie, suddenly began to build two houses in our village, three in Portharcout, one in Owerri, and two in Aba. She bought four commercial luxury buses, three sedan pleasure cars, and generally began to live like a queen. The sudden and meteoric rise to inexplicable wealth and the extravagant display of ostentation immediately attracted the wagging mouths of our relatives as well as of strangers. We, the children, were mesmerized by the wealth.
Critical mouths started to spread the rumor that my aunt gworo ogwu ego. Was this not the same Ogbudie, who lived in Portharcourt, River State with her poor husband; the same couple that lived right there on Ikwerre Road in Mile One, Diobu which, at that time, was a certified ghetto teeming with giant rats, open sewers and dirty gutters? How did she come about this stupendous wealth?
And so the mouths continued to wag that she must have had access to some juju, voodoo, witchcraft, which gave her money; in short that o gworo ogwu ego.
Some gossiping villagers supplemented the ogwu ego theory with the further allegation that she murdered uncle Oji for the money. But the problem with this new allegation was that my uncle was poor. Who kills a poor man for his money? For a woman suspected of murder, she showed no concern but instead went about building more houses and enjoying the money. Her children, however, were visibly dejected. Her eldest son, my cousin Nwaonyeoshi, used to hang out with me more than the others. I told him about the rumours, which, though he was already aware of them, made him even sadder.
My immediate family rejected all gifts from Oji’s wife. Personally, I did not reject any money that she gave me, contrary to the advice of my siblings who warned me that she would use me for ogwu ego. But ogwu ego or no ogwu ego, I did not care. I had never seen so much money in one place. In fact, with youthful exuberance, I wanted to know how I could become rich too. The smell of the money made me high and I never wanted to come down.
Five years after uncle Oji had been buried and while my dream of discovering his wife’s secrets of wealth was still vibrant, my aunt, Oji’s wife, became pregnant. That pregnancy would prove to be her downfall and the end of my dreams.
As long as I live, I will never forgive Ogbudie for getting pregnant. Not because her husband was dead. Not because she never remarried. Not because we never saw her with a man after the burial of her husband. No, it was because of the physical appearance of the baby she had. The baby boy, named Omechiuzo, looked exactly like her previous children, a mirror image of my uncle Oji!!!! Now we had a mystery which, to us, was more serious than death!
Now enter Union Bank of Nigeria (UBA) from nowhere. How UBA found out about the baby, is itself a mystery. Had they been watching my aunt? Did someone, who knew something about something, inform the bank? We don’t know, but they found out, about six months after the birth. I will never forget that day when UBA officials and some twenty members of the Nigerian Military, who accompanied twenty criminal investigation police to our family compound, arrived with guns, long vehicles and a Black Maria. It was six O’clock in the morning when they surrounded our house and forced my father and his brothers to start digging up uncle Oji’s grave. There was crying and wailing by the women who feared the spiritual repercussion of the desecration of a grave. But the army and police were not bothered. They kept barking orders for the excavation crew to hurry up.
As the casket was lifted from the grave, the Black Maria vehicle, which had been under guard all along, opened. My uncle Oji, a ghost of his old self, was the first to be escorted out of the vehicle in handcuffs. My aunt, Ogbudie, next came out also in handcuffs. They were asked to identify the casket as their property. They did. They were taken away again, back into the vehicle and driven off, straight to prison.
When the casket was opened, it contained dead wood wrapped in blankets!
The next day we heard on the radio the following news:
“A husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Ojiugwo and Ogbudie Oshi, were arrested earlier today in Portharcourt. Mr. Oshi, a former security guard at the Union Bank on King Jaja Street had allegedly feigned his own death and was supposedly buried in his village while he was actually hiding in Obigbo. After the fake burial, he was said to have then used information he gained in the course of his employment to break into the bank at night. Bank officials estimate that millions of naira was stolen. The police will not reveal how they tracked down Mr. Oshi but a reliable source informed our reporters that his wife became pregnant after he was supposedly dead and give birth to a child who resembled the suspect. The investigation, which had been closed, was then reopened; the police was said to have assigned a surveillance team to the case, which ultimately tailed Mrs. Oshi until her tracks led them to his hideout. The police expect to recover most of the money or confiscate properties purchased with the money. More arrests are expected of other insiders who may have assisted the husband and wife in the heist.”
I will never forgive my uncle for refusing to stay dead. Oh, how I miss that money!
WayoGuy@aol.com
(a
Washington
,
D.C.
attorney)
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Posted by Robot| 02.03.2007 05:54