Ogbanje

1^stEntry: Ogbanje

I am not an ordinary child. My mother had borne ten children and nine of them had died in infancy. I was the only child of my mother who survived longer than the others.

After my mother’s second child died, my father went to a medicine man. The man told him that the child was an ogbanje, one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers’ wombs to be born again. It is almost impossible to bring up an ogbanje child without it dying, unless its iyi-uwa is first found and destroyed. In my culture, iyi-uwa is a special kind of stone which forms the link between an ogbanje and the spirit world. When I was born everybody knew that I was an ogbanje. When they called me ogbanje I was disappointed but my mother believed that I had come to stay.

I still remembered when I was nine years old and was just recovering from the serious illness, my father asked Okagbue who was famous in all the clan for his knowledge in these matters to help me to break my iyi-uwa. At first, I did not want to cooperate with him because there is no ogbanje would easily yield her secrets. Futhermore, the medicine man said that I buried my iyi uwa in the ground somewhere so that I can die and return again to torment my mother. It hurts me when he said like that.How could he say like that? I did not dare to anguish my own mother even though I was an ogbanje. But, when I saw my mother’s eyes, sad and pleading were fixed on her, I was touched. So finally, I decided to tell the medicine man about my iyi-uwa and they managed to destroy it.