Content warning: This story contains graphic violence, including scenes of burning.
When you’re going to burn someone, tie his legs and hands together first, preferably behind him; humans tend to go mad when fire touches them.
A clue: always use petrol, instead of kerosene. It doesn’t matter if the person is yellow like overripe pawpaw, or so dark his lips look like sun-dried charcoal. No. It does matter if you are short of cash, what with the price of petrol. It doesn’t, however, matter if the person is someone you tried winning for Christ, petrol is always better. More flame and more color, it makes the whole thing more glorious. Ejike was nine when he found out about this. It was not something he was told—God forbid a child is told of such things. It was something he saw, in passing as he walked back from school, but saw enough to know that petrol is the only way to do it.
Five men, men who have children that attend the same school as Ebuka, men who may give the same children 20 naira as offering money for church every Sunday, were forcing car tires around the necks of two young men, one fair, the other dark (this wouldn’t matter moments later when they turn into a grotesque-looking molded mass of blackness with teeth caught mid-sentence, which may be a last attempt to scream). The fair one was too skinny and the car tire dangled to his waist, an oversized waistband that encircled most of his torso, and Ebuka wondered if someone should go and pull the car tire back to his neck. Their skin glistened under the hot afternoon sun, the way Ebuka’s face shone that morning after Mama Ebuka rubbed Vaseline on his face and his newly shaven head.
The next day, after a night filled with thunder and lightning and a crying sky—a sign that the sky was angry at the black smoke sent upwards from the burnt car tires—the road, already maimed by potholes, flooded, swallowing the tires of a bus carrying adults and Ebuka that would run over the thieves’ bloated bodies, unknowingly because the bodies are underwater, and produce a funny tokum sound, and everyone in the bus would laugh. Ebuka would laugh, too, because the adults were laughing, all the while wondering what the thieves’ skin looked like then.
There were active and passive spectators. The active spectators were hitting the young men with stones and canes that were sold for ten naira per one and used by teachers at the community primary school Ejike attends. Canes that were other things moments ago: a plank from the construction site close by, a stick used to erect a signpost, an old exhaust pipe from the mechanic shop opposite the street. The other spectators, the passive and staring ones, and less important in the bigger scheme of things: women who threw smaller stones and sachets of cold water at the young men, hawkers who had trays on their heads and excitement on their faces, school children looking for stories to share with friends. A small group of pacifiers with arms crossed, cursing the devil and his evil works.
The men started with kerosene, a liquid that doesn’t cook humans, at least not effectively, from a five-liter can of all-natural orange juice now filled with the fuel. “Wụọ ya ọfuma. Make ya sure na kerosine zuru ahụ ya nile. Pour it very well.” The men, bound and bloodied, had a new shade of fear that Ejike assumed only shows up right before one is burnt to death, and even as the young men begged and screamed, Ejike knew that one’s fire is born in Aba—it doesn’t just go before it is sated with skin and flesh. Then someone threw a lighted matchstick at them. And there was light.
But it stopped, seconds later, the men’s skin raw and red, their torn shirts blackened, but okay nonetheless. They did not burn. It looked like, to Ejike, that these men refused to burn, that maybe they had the same juju that those Bakassi people possessed that made bullets and cutlass impenetrable to thick skin, maybe these men had a well-wishing relative that was a Bakassi. One of the men started hitting the young men with a renewed energy, energy fueled by his anger and disappointment that these men, after performing the unforgivable act of stealing from people, refused to burn. Someone shouted “Wote fuel! Bring fuel!” And fuel (petrol) appeared, too fast, almost as if it has always been by the side, kept as Plan B. And before the petrol could touch the men and the car tires around their necks, another fire was born. The man that was hitting them before for refusing to burn kept throwing petrol at the fire from a distance, wanting to make sure that, this time, they burned.
And they did.
Augustine Okam is a Nigerian writer. His writing has appeared in Flash Frog and Temz Review, among others. He is currently a student at Ebonyi State University where he is pursuing his MBBS degree.
Header photo by Maksim Safaniuk, courtesy Shutterstock.
