Like his multireligious, multiethnic country, Jubril’s life story was more complicated than what one tribe or religion could claim. He had lived all his life in Khamfi and was at home with his mother’s people, the Hausa-Fulanis. He had always seen himself as a Muslim and a northerner. Looking at his skin color, he had no problem believing he would fit in where he was going. There were many on the bus who were fairer than he was. He could have been from any ethnic group in the country. What worried him was that he did not know enough about Christianity to survive in this crowd. It seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. So many times, he cleared his throat and grabbed his Marian medal with his fingers and stroked it, his whole attention focused on it, as if the Muslim in him now shared the same Catholic adoration he had considered idolatrous in Khamfi. Though Mary was accorded a lot of respect in his religion, he had always thought the Catholics went too far by making thousands of sacramentals about her and setting up shrines. The advice of Mallam Abdullahi, the man who gave Jubril the medal, flashed across his mind: Don’t feel too bad wearing the medal, as Maryam in the Koran was the mother of Prophet Isa, Jesus. Though Jubril would rather not have been wearing the medal, this theology was good enough for him—and, besides, his rescuer had assured him that all Christians who saw him wearing it would think he was Catholic and let him be.
JUBRIL’S MOTHER, AISHA, a sad willowy figure, like Jubril, had told him a long time ago that he was born in his father’s village, Ukhemehi, in the delta. His father, Bartholomew, a short taciturn man, used to be a fisherman and farmer. Jubril’s maternal grandfather, Shehu, was a cowherd who had migrated with his cattle from Khamfi in the north, away from the widening Sahara, to the rain forests of the delta. One thing had led to another, and Bartholomew fell in love with Aisha. Their relationship soon became a community concern, not because the two friends were doing anything wrong but because no one in that area would dream of having a serious friendship with a Muslim lady, much less marry her. Shehu agreed with the villagers: he did not want his daughter to marry in the south or to change her faith. The Ukhemehi people were fine with allowing Shehu and his family to cultivate the land and graze their cows, but the prospect of this beautiful girl and handsome young man coming together unnerved the community, and people were already gossiping about them as if they had been caught sleeping together.
Bartholomew was a chorister in his village church, Saint Andrew’s Church, and a member of three pious societies, Saint Anthony of Padua, Legion of Mary, and the Block Rosary, in addition to being a member of the Catholic Youth Organization, to which every youth in the church belonged. So, naturally, when he started getting close to Aisha, pressure came from all these affiliations. But he could not stop. Things came to a head when the two rebelled against the jingoism of the community and started running away from home for days on end to Sapele and Warri and Port Harcourt.
When Father Paul McBride, an optimistic, outgoing Irishman, noticed that his church was heading for a major scandal, he called on the two and counseled them. When he was sure of the depth of their love, he spoke to their parents. It was not long before they married. Though Aisha’s people were staunch Muslims, their tradition did not consider a woman converting to the “People of the Book,” as Jews and Christians are known in the Koran, apostasy. Aisha converted to Catholicism and was christened Mary. Jubril was the second child of this marriage.
And, just as at his brother’s infant baptism three years before, when Father McBride insisted on Yusuf (Joseph), a saint’s name—something, according to him, without the traces of paganism the missionaries associated with native names—at Jubril’s baptism, he picked Gabriel. He entrusted the child to the patronage of Saint Gabriel, the archangel.
They were a model family, a point of reference for intertribal and mixed marriage. In fact, in his homily at the wedding, Father McBride had reminded the congregation that the couple was a symbol of unity in a country where ethnic and religious hate simmered beneath every national issue, and he challenged the whole village to emulate the couple’s openness. Perhaps the myriad tribes and religions in the country could be welded together by the love within such marriages, Father McBride thought, and the respect accorded in-laws would at least instill tolerance. He did everything to support the marriage. Because Bartholomew and Mary were poor, Father McBride begged money from the white tycoons of nearby multinational oil companies to help celebrate the diversity of this marriage, building them a house and supporting their needs.
But these were hard times. Due to decades of oil drilling, the soil was losing its fertility. Rivers no longer had fish, and, worse still, repeated oil fires annihilated hundreds of people each time. Shehu, fearing for his cows, moved away from the oil-rich villages to other parts of the south soon after the wedding.
When ancestral worshippers began asking people to bring animals to sacrifice to Mami Wata and other deities whose terrains were supposedly desecrated, Father McBride told his faithful to forget the pagans. The problem deepened when little children began to develop respiratory diseases, and strange rashes attacked their bodies, and the natives started running away to the big cities.
One day, without warning, Aisha escaped with the children to Khamfi, her father’s original home. Yusuf was five and Jubril two years and three months. Bartholomew was crushed, and his resulting depression left him open to the taunts of the community. To protect their Catholic marriage, Father McBride advised Bartholomew to follow his wife to Khamfi, offering to foot the bill and arranging for a nearby Catholic parish to hire him as a laborer. But Bartholomew refused to go for fear of recurring religious and ethnic cleansing in the north. His only hope was that the children would come back when they were old enough to ask about their roots. He remarried promptly, even after Father McBride told him his wife’s action was not sufficient reason to annul the marriage; he became a member of Deeper Life Bible Church.
Yusuf and Jubril grew up in Khamfi’s sprawling Muslim-only Meta Nadum neighborhood and lost contact with their father and Ukhemehi. Their mother went back to Islam, and the brothers went to the mosque with their uncles. But Yusuf kept asking about his father and remembered a few things about his childhood in Ukhemehi and never quite felt comfortable in the mosque. Over the years, while Yusuf indulged in the snippets of their family history that often spilled out of their mother on her bad days, when she bemoaned her misfortunes, Jubril was the opposite. While his brother pulled closer to his mother to hear these stories, Jubril was distant. He blocked them out because they embarrassed him, and a measure of enmity came between the two boys as a result. Aisha was afraid for Yusuf because she could see he was in danger of apostasy.
This was Yusuf ’s situation when one day neighborhood friends called him a bastard. The following month he decided to go back to Ukhemehi to search for his father. In spite of Aisha’s plea and his uncles’ threats, Yusuf ran away. Having been gone barely four months, he came back, surprising everyone, as a firebrand Deeper Lifer. It was from him that Jubril first heard about the supposed freedom of the south and the fantastic notions of a better life and how the whole village and the Deeper Life community welcomed him like the Prodigal Son. When Yusuf started insisting that his name was Joseph, instead of Yusuf, in Meta Nadum, Aisha could not sleep at night. Yusuf was not deterred by the antagonism this created between him and his brother or by the cold shoulder he was getting from his extended family. Seeing that he was determined, Aisha did not ask him to abandon Christianity altogether, but sneaked out to the nearest Catholic parish and recounted her ordeal to the priest. She wanted Yusuf to return to the Catholic Church because she knew that way his risk of being killed would be less than as a Deeper Lifer.