In his story in The Nation on Sunday, Olatunji Ololade writes a story about Hurti, one of the villages that saw plunder and death from their neighbours who are not Nigerians.
And I was drawn by the story of Julia.
A mother of two, she could not take his children with her when she ran to safety. She might have chosen her life instead of her own offspring.
From the bush, she looked at her home while the goons slaughtered both children.
“There lay her sons, still and scorched, flies buzzing over their carcasses…” writes Ololade of Julia taking inventory of the butchery of her family.
This is the sort of choice that a parent should never make.
That is what these marauders have wrought in Plateau.
No one can justify this. Shall we blame the mother for staying alive?
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Now, what kind of maternal conscience will be left of her?
Should she have died with her kids? Shouldn’t she have died with her kids?
This is what is called Sophie’s Choice, based on William Styron’s novel of that title.
It’s a story of a mother who must decide which of her kids she must surrender to the Nazis and which one she should keep. If there was no holocaust, the choice would not come. In the novel, the question is asked, where was God?
And response is, where was man? Styron poses this question, but it was first propounded in Harper Lee’s novel, To kill A Mocking Bird.
The implication is that if God is in man, why is man – all of us – failing God and ourselves?