THE CONSEQUENCE OF DIFFERENCE (A Kito Story)

For you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

The day was 24th of May, 2019. Somewhere before that day, a plan had been made for me, against my being. When the day came, the plan was set in motion and it was a success. It had taken only roughly nine hours to bestow a truckload of nightmares on a person, and this would go on to haunt the person for a long time before they were able to will themself to heal.

Having just paid my school fees at the Zenith Bank close to a certain junction which was relatively close to Ọgbọmmanụ, Onitsha, I stood at a place near the road to flag down a keke, to make home. This was during the period when keke napep had become a tool employed for malicious purposes for different reasons: theft, kidnapping, harassment. Onitsha is a city dense in all forms of insecurity, and in the most horrific manner. As a common rule, the slogan “Shine your eye” was the mantra of anyone who wanted to survive the kind of life the city only knew how to offer.

With all arrested sense of security and awareness in mind, I flagged down a keke and hopped in.

That was the last thing I remembered.

When I came to, my first memory of the place I found myself in was the damp smell that sharply wafted through my nose. My head was aching badly, so I took a minute to deeply breathe in before I opened my eyes. My blurred vision slowly became clear and aware.

Then the voice came: “The guy don wake.”

Three hefty young men entered the room, and with the way their gazes rested on me like judgment, I didn’t need a soothsayer to tell me this was danger. The memory of happened began to return in fractions. I remembered getting into the keke, between two men in the back.

Or was it one man in the back?

My memory was fractured.

Then suddenly, the person on my left grabbed me, jamming a handkerchief against my nose, and a chemical that acted like a thinner knocked me out. The keke had curtains, you see, and that was my silly mistake of the day. In truth, I had prepared myself to be security conscious as I stepped out of the house that day, especially because I had my school fees on me. I think I must have convinced myself of my awareness, such that it blinded me from seeing what was right before me, the easily-overlooked errors.

*

Weeks before the day I was abducted, I’d noticed that I was being stalked at nights. My memory recorded seeing a lone figure in the shape of a man always shadowing me. I used to stay with my aunt in Onitsha, and because my parents equally lived in the same city, I often visited them and usually left late at night. I was a chorister too, and our rehearsals usually ended around past 8 PM. After a week of my suspicion, I stopped keeping late nights. Then I convinced myself I was just being paranoid for nothing, that maybe it was my mind making things up. Then I started staying out late again, and the stalking began again. This time, the figure in the shape of a man had multiplied and become two, then the three figures became three, and so three men stalked me, and consistently. I made a post on Facebook, complaining about being stalked. I also informed my parents.

Then the stalking stopped. At least, I believed it did.

*

In that tiny moment between trying to figure out where I was and those hefty men walking toward me with clubs in hand, my mind did a quick mathematics and concluded that the abduction was a result of the stalking, even though there was no direct connection between the two events. What was now left was the question: Why?

As I slowly tilted my head up to look at faces staring down at me with angry, unfamiliar eyes, a resounding slap landed on my face and reverberated through my body. It was that slap that jerked my body into full consciousness and quickened my mind.

“So you be homo? Ọkpọntu?” one of them snarled at me.

And the question “Why” was answered.

Just then, something called on the attention of my captors, and they retreated to an inner section of the building.

This was kito –

Or something that looked like it.

I had read stories of gay people being kitoed. I had seen videos of the caricature they were reduced to. I had pitied the gay men and cussed out the homophobes. And now, it was my turn – and if I made it out alive, my story. As fear started taking over me, my mind began racing and willing me to act. I closed my eyes and opened them, closed them again and opened them, and then continued closing and opening them in quick succession, trying to convince myself that I was in a nightmare, that all I needed to do was wake up.

But that illusion would not hold. Echoes of the pain where the slap struck my face was reinforcing in my mind the very real situation I was in. I decided then to do something, anything!

Throughout this time, my captors were busy discussing something and paid me little mind. I jerked up, ran toward where they were gathered and jumped at one of them, knocking him down. I could feel a new strength surging through me, but really, it was just my adrenal rush of hormone reacting to fear, trying to make a way for me in the face of danger. The other two tried to hold me down, but I kicked and fought back. Then a fourth figure I hadn’t seen came out of nowhere, broke a stool that was nearby, and knocked me down with one of its legs.

As I dropped to the ground, I saw doom smirking at me, and I knew my horror had only written the first sentence in the genesis of its story.

*

When I woke up, I figured that the day had waned. The room which had earlier been lit with natural light was now dark. The first response to stimuli that I had upon my waking was the reception of immense pain at the back of my head, and a heavy migraine that accompanied it. I touched the back of my head and felt congealed blood, and I immediately remembered the leg of the broken stool which had been used to knock me down. None of my captors were in sight, so I tried to move, wincing as the pain in my head jackhammered away.

Then I felt another pain. I paused, moved again, slowly and gently, and I felt it again. It was coming from my backside. When I made to remove my clothes to properly check myself, it was then I noticed that I was already stark naked. My mind going in a whirl, I used my index finger to massage my anal region; it was wet and throbbed with a dull ache. The wetness was sticky and smelled like a flavoured scent from a certain fruit I did not know.

This was lube, and I’d been sexually tampered with. Surely, something had entered inside me, and lubricant had been used to aid the penetration.

It didn’t make sense to me. Even now, as I write this story, it still doesn’t. These were homophobes who’d abducted me because I am gay; why would they also rape me?

The confusion had not fully set in when they returned, one with a machete, another with a kitchen knife and mortar, the third with the leg of the broken stool, and the last one with a smartphone. I swallowed hard and tried to prepare myself for the imminent torture.

But nothing prepares you for pain, because when they asked me to lie down and I humbly and quickly succumbed, hoping my obeisance would grant me some measure of mercy from them, the machete landed on my back with a force so inhumane, anguish exploded inside me, tearing a scream from my mouth and causing me to leap upward to my feet. They beat me back down and held me down, so that the one with the machete continued to whip me without mercy. At some point, I could no longer move, so weakened was I from the pain. Then the guy with the leg of the broken stool came over, and with a force full of wickedness, whacked a heavy blow on my legs, three times. I deserted my body and retreated into my mind. The physical body had become worn out, weak and useless.

When they were done brutalizing my body, the guy who I suspected was the leader came over and handed my phone to me. He told me to make calls to whoever could pay ransom for my release. I told them no one could pay ransom for my release, and that was the truth. They threatened to pick a random number from my phone and call it and reveal to whomever answers that I am a homosexual. In truth, that wasn’t a problem for me, because asides my parents’ contacts, everyone else in my phonebook was queer, and I only had about fifteen contacts saved in the phone. But I was scared of anyone who was not a relative finding out about my predicament. I didn’t want the pity, and should I make it out of this alive, I wanted to control the narrative.

So I took the phone from them and called my best friend. The moment he noticed the fear in my broken voice, he cut the call and called my parents, who then called me to speak to my captors.

It was my mother who first called. She didn’t wait to hear what they had to say; she simply launched into prayers, raining Holy Ghost fires on them.

When they disconnected the call, they started sneering at me, talking about how I am a disappointment to my righteous mother who’d probably raised me in the ways of the Lord, ways which I’d abandoned to become an abomination. They had a solution for that.

They turned on the video on a smartphone and recorded me do their bidding – which was for me to kneel down, naked and bruised as I was, raise my hands in worship, and sing and pray the gay away. With each word of prayer I uttered, a lash of the machete or a blow from the stool’s leg landed on my body, as though the blows were intended to punctuate the prayer I was saying, as though their intent was for me to remember the pain and never sin again.

This, they said, were all for my god-fearing mother.

My phone rang again, and this time, it was my father. I don’t remember the details of the phone conversation or where he got the ransom he sent them. I never asked my father about it. My captors decided that two of them had to go withdraw the money and make sure it was complete, while the remaining two watched me. If the money had not been sent or it was incomplete, the next thing, according to them, was to kill me. I knew I was never going to live a long life, but I never imagined it would end like this. I started preparing my mind to accept my imminent fate, and meanwhile, the two left to watch me decided that, to while away their boredom, they’d torture me some more. They laid me back down on the ground, with my face down and my hands and fingers spread out, and the blunt part of the small kitchen knife was used to hit on my phalanges, while the machete kept doing its turns on the back of my legs.

In response to this, I retreated once again to the safety of my mind where no woes of homophobia could touch me. They could kill my body, but my spirit would never be broken. And although each force of pain made me perish, I was comforted by the fact that my martyrdom was for a good cause, and that comfort made my mind stronger.

When they got tired, they returned to videoing me naked. Their threat was that they would upload it to social media and make sure it went viral. In front of the camera, they made me say over and over that I would never engage in homosexuality again. They also made me swear to stop my gay activism on social media. I alleviated their boredom by becoming a clown for their amusement. I wore shame like a skin and threw whatever pride I had under the carpet. As I confessed my sins of homosexuality to them, I was laughing at them in my mind. They had no idea how much stronger their sheer inhumanity made me.

When the other two returned and it was apparent that the money was complete, they told me to dress up. I did my best with putting the clothes on my tortured body. As we walked away from the building where I’d been held hostage, I tried hard to make out its location, but it was dark and my head was banging so hard, I couldn’t focus. The goal was to get home.

We reached the road, and I managed to stagger across, leaving them on the other side. Then I stopped a keke. The perceptive keke driver immediately noticed my condition and requested for my address. I told him and he took me directly home.

The first person I saw was my mother, in front of the house, pacing back and forth. My father stood still beside her, quietly. He was just looking forward in expectance of something. My best friend stood behind them, and he supported himself by leaning against the wall with his hands akimbo. When I got out of the keke, my mother rushed towards me and embraced me. I immediately recoiled in pain and pushed her away with the little strength I could muster. Then I fainted.

When I opened my eyes, I saw faces staring down at me, and in the blurry vision and confused mental state, I called out for my mother, struggling to get up, but she held me down and kept whispering to me, “You are fearfully and wonderfully made… You are fearfully and wonderfully made…”

She must’ve said this like five times while rubbing what smelt like olive oil on my forehead. I tried to look around to make out the faces around me, but I felt so dizzy and my eyes started to close. Then I saw a figure come towards me. It was clad in a white robe and was smiling down at me, and my mother made way for them to come close to where I was lying.

“You will be fine. You just…”

That was the last thing I remember hearing before I passed out again. The figure in the white robe smelled like sickness and malaria drugs. I had been admitted in the hospital.

Homophobes are like scared bullies in secondary school who take out their own anger of insecurity on weaker students. In their own limited moral conviction, they make the world a better place by being homophobic – but what history has ever recorded that illogical hatred and violence aimed against innocent people ever made the world better?

Written by janet meziem