Chapter One: The Tree by the Gutter
I make bad decisions until it becomes a tree ripe for harvest..
My name is Kola, and I was born on a Monday evening, just before the rains came. My mother told me that the first sound I ever made was not a cry, but a cough, a dry, brittle thing, like the clatter of broomsticks on bare cement. The midwife, Mama Eunice, took one look at me, wrapped in tattered Ankara cloth, and said I had the face of a child who had lived before. In Malete, they say that children like that often return to settle a score with the world.
We lived in a one-room face-me-I-face-you with a zinc roof that rattled each time the harmattan wind passed like a god in a hurry. Our compound was a collection of souls waging war against the economy: mama with her overworked spine and endless trays of fried akara; Baba Shedrack, the drunk carpenter who spoke only to lizards; and children who learned arithmetic from the price of sachet water. Behind our house was a gutter so wide it could swallow a goat, and next to it, an orange tree, bent, bruised, but always flowering. That tree was my hiding place, my cathedral, my internet café, and sometimes, my pulpit.
My mother called me her miracle. She said I came from her womb after five miscarriages, and every time I stared into her tired eyes—eyes that held both holy fire and unspoken suffering, I knew that I owed her something big, something god-sized. She sold everything from mangoes to second-hand bras, just to keep me in school. She had faith like fire, the kind that melted even logic. But I, I had my eyes on wires, screens, and the cold gospel of technology.
While my mates played football with bare feet and angry knees, I sat cross-legged beside the orange tree with broken radios and dismantled flash drives. I could turn scrap into sound, solder wires like prayer beads, and type faster than our class typist. I wasn’t just a nerd; I was an escape artist, hacking my way through poverty one megabyte at a time.
But Malete had a way of reminding you that dreams are delicate things. Sometimes, it came as a NEPA outage that swallowed your unsaved project. Other times, it came as a gang of street boys who demanded “tithe” for walking past their turf. Once, it came as hunger, the kind that made your stomach sound like a talking drum.
Evenings were the hardest. My mother would kneel on her raffia mat, praying in tongues that sounded like war songs, while I tried to debug lines of code on a half-lit screen. There were nights she called me her pastor, other nights she called me a prodigal. I called myself nothing, I just wanted out.
The older I grew, the more I understood the rituals of our survival. There was a way to greet the landlord if you hadn’t paid rent, firm voice, eyes low, fingers crossed behind your back. There was a way to avoid fights in the queue for fetching water, say “abeg” twice and call them “uncle” even if they’re younger than you. And there was a way to lie to yourself that tomorrow would be better, say it quickly, before sleep steals your hope.
I remember the day I first saw a laptop, not in school, not in church, but in the hands of a corper from Abuja who came to do IT training at our community centre. He wore perfume that smelled like promises and shoes that didn’t make noise. When he opened the screen and typed “print(‘Hello, World’)”, I knew I had just witnessed magic. That night, I told my mother I wanted to study computer science. She paused mid-prayer, looked at me like I had announced I wanted to marry a ghost, and said, “Kọ́lá, your head dey too hot.”
Still, I persisted. I started fixing phones in secret, downloading coding tutorials from borrowed MTN data, and saving every naira from mending electric fans and laptop chargers. I worked like a man running from something he couldn’t name. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I was trying to outrun the ghost of my father, who left when I was two and only returned in whispers.
But no matter how fast I ran, Malete held on.
The streets knew my name, but not my dreams. My friends knew my jokes, but not my fears. And my mother—ah, my mother—she knew everything, yet never asked too many questions. She only said, “A boy who carries a torch must be ready to burn.”
I didn’t know then that the same light that guided me would also set me ablaze.
To be Cont’d…
