Abake Ojo, not real name was ushered into the room and was immediately asked to sit on a small mat.
A 70-year-old ritualist, popularly called Baba in the village, sat on a stool in the dimly lit room filled with the smell of animal blood.
Abake was brought to the shrine by her sister-in-law to confess to the gods her involvement in the death of her husband. It was the tradition of her husband’s village, called Egbe, which she barely comprehended before her marriage.
“The baba chanted incantations, and I noticed that the small room seemed to close in, and certain darkness descended,” Abake, a native and a Muslim from Osun state, told the 21st Century Chronicle. “The language was strange, but it charged the room with fear and chill.”
Abake said her husband, Ojo who hailed from Iborokpa Akoko in Ondo State, only made a passing mention about the tradition during a conversation shortly after they got married.
Egbe is a rite performed to invoke the spirit of the dead to appear and speak about circumstances that surround his/her death, especially where there is the contention that the person did not die a natural death and someone could have killed him spiritually.
“When my husband told me that night, I thought it was just an ancient tradition that is no longer in practice,” Abake said.
“So, I did not fear. My husband is also a devoted Christian who did not believe in things like that. I never knew that after my husband’s death I would be subjected to this.”
Ojo slummed in a petrol station and died, 25 years after their marriage that produced four children.
“Prior to his death, he showed no signs of sickness He was buried in Ajaokuta, Kogi State where he lived and died,” Abake said.
She said her husband was loved by many, as people offered her assistance and money to help cater for the family after his demise. But her sister-in-law who stayed back after her husband’s burial felt entitled to some of the money, her refusal to share with her husband’s sister must have drawn deep ire.
“A month after my husband’s death, my sister-in-law told me that my mother-in-law wants to see her grandchildren, so we traveled to Iborokpa Akoko where my husband hailed from,” Abake said.
“On reaching the village they told me that I have to see other relations, but instead of them to lead me to the relations, they took me and my children to a ritualist.”
She said her children were made to wait outside the building as she was ushered into a mudroom with thatched roof.
“A man in red cloth promptly stood up and asked me, ‘Abake did you kill your husband?’ And I replied ‘No!’
“My voice was shaking and began to feel intense heat in my body.”
“The Baba recited some incantation and commanded me to look towards a white cloth spread on the wall, and I did with absolute obedience.”
“I fixed my eye on the cloth, and what happened can better be imagined. Much like a television screen, the white piece of cloth rippled for a while and an image began to take form… soon my husband’s image appeared, in the same suit he was buried.”
On sighting the image, Abake said she felt a palpable chill that spread down her spine like a mist, and the room seemed to get closer to her.
“Time seems suspended,” she said. “And the ritualists shouted at the image ‘Who killed you Ojo’.
“At that point, tears started dropping from my eye, and I began to feel like I was floating on air, with no gravity.”
Abake said a heavy silence ensued in the room for some seconds before the image of her dead husband answered.
‘It was my time he said simply.’
But the ritualists queried further.
‘Did your wife Abake kill you?’ the ritualist asked.
‘No’, the image answered.
‘Are you at peace over there?’ the Baba asked again.
‘Yes,’ the image responded.
‘Go back to sleep Ojo,’ the baba commanded.
Abake said it was after the conversation that the image of her late husband stepped back, and the white piece of cloth went blank, very abruptly. And that was the time she fainted.
“It was the sound of activities and commotion around that woke me up from my sleep,” Abake said.
“I was completely disoriented and kept on trembling until the ritualist intervened and told my husband’s sister to take me home.”
Abake said she has been dealing with post-traumatic stress and hallucinations and acute fear, since her horrible experience of the Egbe culture.
