WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

As soon as I came into the house, I knew there was something going on nobody was willing to talk about. You would always want to be a carrier of good news right? Or maybe if the news isn’t that bad, you could manage to divulge, but, how do you tell someone that “We just found your husband’s body mangled under a truck?”

They had been married for 7 years straight years, against the husband’s family will. They were of different dialects of the Yoruba nation, the husband of the Kabba extraction while the wife was from Otan Ayegbaju in Osun state.

The wife was not even welcomed into the husband’s family house. They might manage to welcome her if the husband came along, but she dare not go there alone. Time heals wounds they say right? But 7 years down the line and yet they would not bulge. Their treatment of her in the 7th year of her marriage was not any different from the first year she was introduced to the family.

If you are reading this from other parts of the world, it may sound a little weird to you. Aren’t you supposed to choose whoever you want to marry and get your family’s blessings? Welcome to Africa, Nigeria in particular, and more particularly the Yoruba kingdom. If you are married to a man, in the Yoruba nation, it may well be said that you are married to the family. As a matter of fact, one the questions you may have to answer is whether you are ready to marry the family as well. It simply means, you must accept and abide by the tenets of the family, attune yourself to the culture, beliefs and traditions of the family, and be a member of the extended family. You will join the other wives in the family to cook, wash, wear ‘and-co’ uniforms, and so on. And yes, your husband’s extended family has a say. That is if you are accepted into the family. Things are changing these days I must admit.

Never the case for Tunmise, tried as she did.

To make matters worse, she did not have a child with Dapo in all their married life. What the family said to Dapo can only be left to imagination. The childlessness of Tunmise is a bigger reason why she was not accepted into Dapo’s extended family besides other reasons. If she had a child, perhaps, who knows, they may accept her for her child’s sake.

The hatred, animism and unbearable treatment meted out to Tunmise and by extension her husband, was responsible for their leaving Kabba in Kogi state where they otherwise had everything going for them to Gboko in Benue state where they had to start life afresh as a couple.

Things did not pick up easily in Gboko as they had expected, life was difficult and so was child bearing. Some people even said a spell had been cast on them. Spells are meant to be removed or broken, aren’t they? Theirs was a perpetually glued tick. And Oh! They suffered. Moving from church to church seeking deliverance, from doctor to doctor seeking medical explanation and attention, relocating from house to house hoping it gets better, nothing, practically nothing changed.

Exactly seven years after they were married, Dapo had gone to work as usual, a dedicated electrician who also tried his hands on other crafts that could earn him money to take care of his home. There was little to do on that fateful day, and after the little was done, himself and other colleagues decided to take a nap under the shade of a parked lorry. Minutes much later, other people were up leaving him only still sleeping under the truck.

The driver of the truck had been drinking himself to stupor in preparation for the journey ahead. He entered into the vehicle to ‘warm’ the engine. One mistake led to the other, the brakes were disengaged, the truck was fired on with Dapo still lying down under it. In split seconds too quick for him to wake up and make his way out, the unspeakable happened. The truck crushed him into the side drainage of the road where it was parked, smashed his head so bad ‘things’ spilled out.

He died on the spot.

Tunmise came back from her own trade, and began very quickly to make the meal for her husband, a very dutiful wife, who loves everyone around and will do all within her power to share the little she has with whoever lacks. Five –o-clock went by when her husband usually returned. Maybe he had a little more to do today, she thought. Six-o-clock followed very quickly and so did seven. What is wrong? It was in the days when there were no mobile phones, but the “human phone” had spread the news around to everyone, everyone except Tunmise.

Most neighbours had to vacate their houses for the evening in order to forestall the divulgence of the news by their countenance. And at nine-o-clock, elders came to ‘greet’.

When elderly men come to greet like that, accompanied by elderly women, they don’t come without the kind of news that only elders tell. It was Tunmise’s turn for such news that day.

Here she was, seven years of marriage without a child, without a family that welcomed her, and without the husband, the only one she knew and had spent her life with. Of course she could go back to her own family, but not until she answers to the accusation of Dapo’s family, that she was the one that bewitched Dapo, destroyed his life and caused his death.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

To be continued…