Moscow/5

I had always been shy and insecure, especially around women, for so many reasons:

The Obieze family compound is located in the Ovom area of Aba and houses 4 generations of the family. My great grandfather, a wealthy yam farmer, married 6 very fertile wives from whom he produced more than 60 Obieze’s; and that’s just counting those from my age and above. We could have been a lot more than that if not for my cousins and uncles who had been killed during the Biafra war…
A lot of the extended family had moved out of the compound and made their homes in other parts of the country and as a result some of their houses had been put up for rent. One of such houses, a 4 bedroom bungalow, was usually rented by girls from the neighbouring Ovom girls’ high school, who by their presence had turned our compound into a place of pilgrimage for a lot of the young men that lived in neighbouring compounds.

Most times, on weekends my nuclear family would travel back to the village on weekends from Owerri…a town that was about 90minutes drive away from Aba…and my cousins would regale me with stories of their escapades with the girls. They would then encourage me to try to have my way with them; apparently most of them where cheap and some of my younger cousins had gotten themselves dis-virgined by them. But I could never find the courage to approach any of them. “You need to learn the raps” Emeka, one of my closest cousins would say “once you learn the raps, everything falls in place”. And he would try to tutor me on the “raps”, but somehow the words didn’t quite click with me.

One day he had arranged one of the girls for me and had asked me to wait in a room while he got her for me. “Kasi, she likes you because you look different, with those your dark Yoruba features and she’s willing. I’ve done all the work for you…” he said winking. But I had escaped through the back window immediately he left me in the room to go and bring the girl! I simply didn’t know what to do or say!

I later decided to start reading up on a lot of romance novels to improve on my raps. And read all the Mills and Boon and Harold Robbins that I could lay my hands on, to the point where I became an authority on raps. I even started to compose love poems for some of my cousins to impress their girlfriends, but was never able to use any of them myself. I think one of the problems was the fact that I was darker than most people around me; certainly a lot darker than everybody else in my compound. And this always made me feel insecure around the people I came in contact with. You see in the village everybody was always equating beauty with the colour of ones skin; the lighter ones skin colour, the more handsome one is considered. And as a result of this a lot of people would spend loads of money on very expensive skin-lightening creams.

To make things worse for me, the old women in our compound liked to refer to people by different names, which they had coined based on one physical feature or other attributes that they noticed in any of us. I was called nwoko oji, which means the dark one in Igbo. Some others in the village would call me nwa Yoruba. meaning Yoruba child, if I had done something wrong, I am not sure if the intentions were to consciously make me feel ostracized but it always made me aware of the fact that I am different. And much as I didn’t like this identity, I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell people to stop calling me by names other than the name that my parents had given to me. Because each time they did so, they would re-enforce in me that sense of alienation from everybody else.…