MY father was
kidnapped in Nigeria on a Saturday morning in early May. My
brother called to tell me, and suddenly there was not enough breathable air in
the world. My father is 83 years old. A small, calm, contented man, with a
quietly mischievous humor and a luminous faith in God, his beautiful dark skin
unlined, his hair in sparse silvery tufts, his life shaped by that stoic,
dignified responsibility of being an Igbo first son.
He got his
doctoral degree at Berkeley in the 1960s, on a scholarship from the United
States Agency for International Development; became Nigeria’s first professor
of statistics; raised six children and many relatives; and taught at the
University of Nigeria for 50 years. Now he makes fun of himself, at how slowly
he climbs the stairs, how he forgets his cellphone. He talks often of his
childhood, endearing and rambling stories, his words tender with wisdom.
Sometimes I record
his Igbo proverbs, his turns of phrase. A disciplined diabetic, he takes daily
walks and is to be found, after each meal, meticulously recording his
carbohydrate grams in a notebook. He spends hours bent over Sudoku. He swallows
a handful of pills everyday. His is a generation at dusk.
On the morning he
was kidnapped, he had a bag of okpa, apples and bottled water that my mother
had packed for him. He was in the back seat of his car, his driver at the
wheel, on a lonely stretch between Nsukka, the university town where he lives,
and Abba, our ancestral hometown. He was going to attend a traditional meeting
of men from his age group. A two-hour drive. My mother was planning their late
lunch upon his return: pounded yam and a fresh soup. They always called each
other when either traveled alone. This time, he didn’t call. She called him and
his phone was switched off. They never switched off their phones. Hour after
hour, she called and it remained off. Later, her phone rang, and although it
was my father’s number calling, a stranger said, “We have your husband.”
Kidnappings are
not uncommon in southeastern Nigeria and, unlike similar incidents in the Niger
Delta, where foreigners are targeted, here it is wealthy or prominent local
residents. Still, the number of abductions has declined in the past few years,
which perhaps is why my reaction, in the aftermath of my shock, was surprise.
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My close-knit
family banded together more tightly and held vigil by our phones. The
kidnappers said they would call back, but they did not. We waited. The desire
to urge time forward numbed and ate my soul. My mother took her phone with her
everywhere, and she heard it ringing when it wasn’t. The waiting was
unbearable. I imagined my father in a diabetic coma. I imagined his
octogenarian heart collapsing.
“How can they do
this violence to a man who would not kill an ant?” my mother lamented. My
sister said, “Daddy will be fine because he is a righteous man.” Ordinarily, I
would never use “righteous” in a non-pejorative way. But something shifted in
my perception of language. The veneer of irony fell away. It felt true. Later,
I repeated it to myself. My father would be fine because he was a “righteous
man.”
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I understood then
the hush that surrounds kidnappings in Nigeria, why families often said little
even after it was over. We felt paranoid. We did not know if going public would
jeopardize my father’s life, if the neighbors were complicit, if another member
of the family might be kidnapped as well.
“Is my husband
alive?” my mother asked, when the kidnappers finally called back, and her voice
broke. “Shut up!” the male voice said. My mother called him “my son.”
Sometimes, she said “sir.” Anything not to antagonize him while she begged and
pleaded, about my father being ill, about the ransom being too high. How do you
bargain for the life of your husband? How do you speak of your life partner in
the deadened tone of a business transaction?
“If you don’t give
us what we want, you will never see his dead body,” the voice said.
My paternal
grandfather died in a refugee camp during the Nigeria-Biafra war and his
anonymous death, his unknown grave, has haunted my father’s life. Those words
— “You will never see his dead body” — shook us
all.
Kidnapping’s ugly
psychological melodrama works because it trades on the most precious of human
emotions: love. They put my father on the phone, and his voice was a low shadow
of itself. “Give them what they want,” he said. “I will not survive if I stay
here longer.” My stoic father. It had been three days but it felt like weeks.
Friends called to
ask for bank-account details so they could donate toward the ransom. It felt
surreal. Did it ever feel real to anybody in such a situation, I wondered? The
scramble to raise the money in one day. The menacingly heavy bag of cash. My
brother dropping it off, through a circuitous route, in a wooded area.
Late that night,
my father was taken to a clearing and set free.
While his blood
sugar and pressure were checked, my father kept reassuring us that he was fine,
thanking us over and over for doing all we could. This is what he knows how to
be — the protector, the father — and he slipped into his role almost as a
defense. But there were cracks in his spirit. A drag in his gait. A bruise on
his back.
“They asked me to
climb into the boot of their car,” he said. “I was going to do so, but one of
them picked me up and threw me inside. Threw. The boot was full of
things and I hit my head on something. They drove fast. The road was very
bumpy.”
I imagined this
grace-filled man crumpled inside the rear of a rusty car. My rage overwhelmed
my relief — that he suffered such an indignity to his body and mind.
And yet he engaged
them in conversation. “I tried to reach their human side,” he said. “I told
them I was worried about my wife.”
The next day, my
parents were on a flight to the United States, away from the tainted blur that
Nigeria had become.
With my father’s
release, we all cried, as though it was over. But one thing had ended and
another begun. I constantly straddled panic; I was sleepless, unfocused, jumpy,
fearful that something else had gone wrong. And there was my own sad guilt: He
was targeted because of me. “Ask your daughter the writer to bring the money,”
the kidnappers told him, because to appear in newspapers in Nigeria, to be
known, is to be assumed wealthy. The image of my father shut away in the rough
darkness of a car boot haunted me. Who had done this? I needed to know.
But ours was a
dance of disappointment with the authorities. We had reported the kidnapping
immediately, and the first shock soon followed: Security officials in my home
state asked us to pay for anti-kidnap tracking equipment, a large amount,
enough to rent a two-bedroom flat in Lagos for a year. This, despite my being
privileged enough to get personal reassurances from officials at the highest
levels.
How, I wondered,
did other families in similar situations cope? Federal authorities told us they
needed authorization from the capital, Abuja, which was our responsibility to
get. We made endless phone calls, helpless and frustrated. It was as though
with my father’s ransomed release, the crime itself had disappeared. To
encounter that underbelly, to discover the hollowness beneath government
proclamations of security, was jarring.
Now my father
smiles and jokes, even of the kidnapping. But he jerks awake from his naps at
the sound of a blender or a lawn mower, his eyes darting about. He recounts, in
the middle of a meal, apropos of nothing, a detail about the mosquito-filled
room where he was kept or the rough feel of the blindfold around his eyes. My
greatest sadness is that he will never forget.
