TAMING tHE Thug! by Becky Peleowo
Mama Kokwe said the blood that flowed in Agbero’s blood was a potpourri of cannabis, tramadol and tobacco and the scent that emanates from his armpits was worse than the stench of a cesspool. Agbero was not a bad guy but he was unfortunate to have met me. Perchance, Agbero would have been some “Jamal”, “Richard” or even “Bankioluwa”, if his quick-to-impress mother had not abandoned her sales of ‘Bebe-okwu’, “Skirt’’, “Opa Eyin” and the other liquor she sold, to become Beske’s fourth Baby-Mama. Beske, a notorious lout was infamous for everything thuggery until his rugged life was cut short by an Army raid at Ojuwoye market. He died by the merciless rifles of a military troop who came to calm the unrest in the area. The meagre asset he left behind would sustain his large family of 15 people, living in a single-bedroom apartment for a month or two. Hard-ass Agbero learnt to survive amidst his large family and the ghetto area of his birth. “Your mixture is ready.” Iya Dongoyaro called out to Agbero as she extended her overly bleached right hand towards the towering street urchin with a pot belly. “How many shots of Jedi dey there?” Agbero’s distorted lips were raised in doubtful interrogation. Iya Dongoyaro had the habit of selling less than she was asked to, in a bid to make more money. “I no fit lie for you. Wallahi, it’s two shots!” She placed the tip of her index finger on her tongue and raised it to the sky, an act common among the locals to show that one is not lying. “Na so you go dey call God name dey lie. I no dey pay for this one!” Agbero retorted and in a flash, he gulped the hot liquid down his throat. “Ehn, kojo!” Iya Dongoyaro grabbed Agbero’s faded T-shirt in defiance as she demanded for her pay. His belly popped up and down as she waggled him and rained abuses on his ancestors. The spirit of his ancestors must have shrieked at her high croaky voice. Agbero’s friends and a few by-standers made an attempt to loosen Iya Dongoyaro’s grip on him but she was adamant. The sun smiled wickedly at the fighters as it was past noon. Agbero’s gold-tinted hair was dripping sweat and Iya Dongoyaro cared less that the stinking drops fell on her blushed skin. “Wham!” The resounding slap that landed on her face afterwards knocked Iya Dongoyaro out. There was pandemonium! Igboro, the driver of the bus that Agbero was its conductor, rushed to a close by vulcanizer and scooped a bowl of contaminated water to sprinkle on the older woman’s face. Iya Dongoyaro spent days at the public health centre; days that preceded the news that she had breast cancer. To her well-wishers, Agbero was the cause of her ailment and Agbero has taken up her after care since then. I grew up eating from the same bowl of flies with Agbero. When our mothers dropped our enormous bowls of Garri with sugar and countable groundnuts on the burial ground of Alhaja Kubura, they never minded that we crunched a few houseflies with the local cereal. All they needed to see was our protruded belly and then comes the question, “se o ti yo?”; their own way of ascertaining if we were filled. But who will argue that we were not when our protruded belly was saying otherwise? After having our fill, Agbero and I would run to Mummy Chidera’s compound where her daughters were breaking ekuro, and we will join them in the tedious task as we throw some of the hard nuts in our mouths. I was not cut out for the ghetto life as I always ended up with a cough after chewing the nuts but Agbero never felt sick. No one ever saw him cry. Mama Kokwe had once told my mum when she came to have her nails painted that Agbero did not cry when his mother birthed him. It was said that when he refused to make a sound, his father landed a slap on his flappy buttocks and exclaimed in Yoruba to his mother, “Did you birth an Agbero?” In such a manner, his father named him even before his Sunna. The Islamic Cleric named him Suleiman but to avoid being called Sule, ( a name that had become an insult), he adopted Agbero and that was what everyone called him. The Junior Secondary Certificate Examination was a few days before we got the news that Beske had been shot to death. Agbero did not blink an eye when he heard of his father’s death and even when he was the smartest boy in class, his father’s death ended his formal education. My mother wanted me to leave ghetto life behind so, anytime she attached artificial nails for her rich customers, she would put my career forward, in a bid to find a sponsor. That way my education was secure and I even got admitted into a polytechnic to study Secretarial Studies. Luckily I was able to get a job at the State Secretariat in Alausa. Agbero on the other hand, completed his apprenticeship as a mechanic but ended up as a bus conductor. I came back to the slum as a politician and I had only one mission; to pick Agbero from the gutters and to introduce him to the elite world. “Omokomo! Ehn, is this you?” Agbero greeted me cheerfully, throwing his greased stained body over my white flowing agbada. One of my bodyguards moved to shove him aside and Agbero started displaying his punches, prancing like a gazelle and eulogizing himself. I smiled as I recalled our childhood. He was the audacious one and would take up a difficult task or face a serious punishment while we were wetting our panties in fear. I recall Mr. Keshinro, the Introductory Science teacher in JS three. He always gave challenging and demanding projects that required creativity and spending