One Last Respect

All my life, I’ve basically only lived in two states in the entire thirty-six states that we have in this country, Lagos and Imo state. Although if I’m being completely honest, I spent a little bit of my childhood in the country’s capital city, Abuja…but that was when I was a little kid and I barely have any memory of the place, so it doesn’t count.

Anyways, if there’s one thing I’ve come to notice from both of these states (Lagos and Imo state), it is that they both have different ways of honoring the dead one last time, depending on what area you’re in.

_{Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova}

Earlier today I had woken up to find most of the shops still locked. I didn’t have to ask around to know what was happening as this wasn’t my first time seeing something like this.

Over here, whenever someone dies and they’re about to be buried in the ground, an announcement is made a day prior to the burial, informing all shops that they would be a burial the next day, meaning none of the shops were permitted to open up in the morning until 12 noon.

So the next day, you come out and it just looks like there’s an apocalypse that no one warned you about, due to how empty the street would look.

But you see, in the little ghetto I grew up in Lagos, things were done a lot differently but only for people who were considered to be important figures in the community like the Balè (someone who’s known as the king of that community).

If I remember correctly, nothing special ever happened whenever someone who didn’t hold a position in the community died, and luckily for us, there weren’t a lot of deaths that involved someone important because the one time someone important did die, it was chaos.

I don’t really remember the exact day the king had passed away, but all I knew was that we were all asked to rush back home from school because apparently they needed seven human heads to bury along side the king. If they later got the heads, I honestly don’t know. All I remember was that was what we were told back then.

Then later at night, the Orò masquerade would come out. This was the kind of masquerade that only came out at night and shouldn’t be seen by anyone, most especially a woman. I never saw them but heard them, because there was this sound they would always make whenever they were passing by our house.

But although I never saw them with my own eyes, I heard from people around that people accompanying the masquerade were always required to be naked from head to toe. So yeah, it was a weird dangerous kind of situation whenever deaths like that happened.

Luckily for us, things like that mostly only happen in the Yoruba land, which was where we were located at the time.

Anyways, if you ask me, I’d rather prefer the shops to be closed until noon every time someone dies, rather than run for my life every time a monarch dies.