My Share of the Northern Cake

Chapter One

My share of the northern cake is indeed a terribly sweet one. The bitter taste is one that has an eternal after taste. Blood was my common favorite, painful, eerie sight and physical and emotional pain, combined with loneliness and constant replay of the brutal death of my parents and siblings on my mind's eye have become my constant companion. The experience is deafening.

I was in the toilet when it began, and that seemed to be my worst saving grace, a moment I don't know now if I should be thankful for. Looking back to that particular day, I do not know now if I should rejoice for escaping death or hate the fact that I had survived with these sorry sores over me, sores that would leave eternal hurting scars all over the walls of my mind and body.

I heard the usual booming of the bomb. It frightened me more than the others had. I was used to it, we in Chibok were used to it, but this one came closer and was more frightening than the others. What frightened me the most wasn't the close sound of the bomb but what I know of the sound wherever it is heard. These daredevils, the engineers of the bomb blasts were never satisfied with the results attained by the blasts, they often accompanied the deadly blasts with showers of bullets; shooting from every nook and cranny so that those who managed to escape death from the blast would face it squarely not knowing where it came from. Where that failed, they followed it up with swords, axes and machetes to ensure that those hiding in their houses are not left out of the countless crowds highly accompanied to the great beyond. This was my fear. We heard the bomb blasts often from a distance but this time it was around us, around me, close to me, in my own door mouth. I ran from the toilet to join my parents and siblings whom I thought would have rounded up with the dinner or perhaps, looking for where to hide now. The Sulan members were there already in our room interrogating my parents and sibling and I ran into their arms unknowingly. I heard one of them say in Hausa;

"Oh, this one is sweet, make me I take this one cool my body." Immediately, I felt I had entered it. He drew me closer to himself and attempting to carry me when others started butchering everyone in that parlor. They were much, so they had about three people on each one of my parents and siblings. The ones that went to my mother and sister took turns raping them after which as I was struggling and watching, they slit my mother's throat, then chopped her head off her body like they were slicing off the head of a frozen fish. When the three that were on my sister were through raping her, they ceremonially tore her cloth. I watched them insert a sword into my sister's vagina and kept pushing it in, all pushing like they were pushing a failed vehicle until the sword completely entered into her and while two of them held her legs to pin her to the ground, the one that first inserted the sword pulled it up through her stomach and tore my sister's stomach open from her vagina. I saw the entire inside of my sister's stomach, I saw her intestine, and one of them inserted his hand and drew out her heart. And they rejoiced over it with a shout of "Allah Hu Agba". Then, they carried my father and mother's heads upward in their swords and then, the one that held me carried me on his shoulder despite my struggling, and we left what was my house, my family, my home. Everything I used to know about family life and home vanished right then from my sight but never from my mind.

We went to the next village after mine; the village where my school was situated. The school was a central school, located in a place where pupils from the farthest part of the three neighboring villages around the school would not walk for more than two miles before they would get to it. It was dark all around. The several blasts around the state, the city and my town have cut short the flow of electricity as the poles and transformers have been completely damaged. Even the Power Holding control house that controlled the entire town was bombed few months back and according to news report and community gossip, only the regional manager who was on official assignment at the time of the blast survived the bloody incident.