by Alfred May
CASE TWO
September, 2011.
Prophet Sam Ogga
(The Blood Ritual Anointing)
“The blessing of the LORD, it makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it. It is as sport to a fool to do mischief: but a man of understanding hath wisdom. The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him: but the desire of the righteous shall be granted. As the whirlwind passes, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation. As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to them that send him. The fear of the LORD prolong days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened. The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish.”
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I boarded a bus going to the South-South geopolitical zone of the country. I was jobless. I needed a job madly. The only job I had procured was a teaching job in a county in the Niger Delta region of the country. People claimed that the land is rich because they have black gold―petroleum in their soil. The states in the Niger Delta region included Bayelsa, Cross-rivers, Delta, Edo, Ondo and Rivers states. I got to my proprietor’s home. It was a bungalow with red rusty gate. Its fence was not plastered. They were made of six-inch cement blocks affixed together by mortar. Bryophytes were growing on the fence. The house is a bungalow with three bedrooms and one master bedroom. The sitting room was big. It has two set of chairs. The only door leading into the house from the frontage leads into the sitting room. The set of chairs are arranged one set on the right and another set on the left. The sitting room was joined to the dining room to give the appearance of the sitting-cum-dining room a T-shape.
I shared a bedroom with the proprietor’s brother and his three sons.
Things were rosy in the county as every of my needs were met. Food, shelter and transportation were no problem for me. Though the work was a bit tedious because I was teaching for the first time and I taught more than five subjects including Mathematics, Integrated Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, etc., I was a utility teacher. I actually read Microbiology at the university. This made those courses a piece of cake for me. In the region, the most common food is yellow eba with draw soup or yellow eba with banga soup. Her people love eating vegetables especially ugwu or bitter leaf. The earth is not muddy but sandy. Other food crops in the region are yams, rice, beans, maize, plantain, etc.
I had a cold war with the proprietor’s brother over a village girl. We later resolved it. He won. After spending about three months with the proprietor and his family, he decided to rent an apartment for me and two of my colleagues.
The story starts from here….
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In the neighbourhood of my new apartment, I met a Yoruba woman of my tribe. She asked me where I was staying and I described the house.
“What! Why did your proprietor rent that cursed house for you guys? Why?” She asked. She seemed concerned about my safety in the house. I could not answer her because I was confused. I stood there looking at her mouth. From her conversation I discovered she pronounced the word ‘v’ as ‘f’.
“You hafe to be fery careful o. This fillage is bad o. It is a small fillage but it is fery hot.”
She narrated some stories about events that have happened in the village to me. She paused to whisper slowly as if she was talking about lord voldermont of Harry Porter.
Those boys staying in your new house are cultists. They are fraudsters. They might attack you or dispossess you of your personal belongings. Tell your proprietor that you cannot stay in that house. It is dangerous. He should get another house for you.” She advised. I thanked her and made ready to leave.
“You know one of them, the eldest, was with one group of fraudsters who duped my husband to the tune of five thousand naira when we newly arrived here.” It was not a question, it was a fact.
I could not voice a word. I have heard enough for today. I bade her farewell and walked sluggishly towards my apartment in a new fear. I relayed the story I heard from my tribe woman to my colleagues when I got home. The three of us spoke extensively about the subject. We assured ourselves of our security in the hands of God. Night fell. We bade one another goodnight and when to bed.
Around 2:00am in the following morning some armed men drove into our compound bashing our gate with their vehicle as they entered. They drove a Toyota Hilux. They started shouting in Pidgin English….
“Hey, wey Kutty?” one barked like a berserk dog.
“Kutty Commot,” another howled. Then one of the intruders fired a shot towards the skies from his assault rifle. I almost froze to death with fright as those events were happening. I actually thought they were armed robbers or other cult groups, but we later got to know that they were anticrime policemen. Kutty is one of the sons of our landlord. He is a strongman. In physique he appeared as one who would single-handedly pull up a full-grown Mahogany tree. Kutty was a frat. He was accused of leading a cult rampage that led two young men in the village to their death. Kutty did not leave his room. He hid inside. The policemen broke his door and dragged him out of the compound forcefully. Twenty minutes later, the policemen came back. They ordered every one of us living in the house out of our rooms and gave us the beating of our lives. It was indeed police brutality. They broke a plastic chair on us while beating us with it. We were flogged with cane; they kicked us with their boots; hit our heads with the butt of their rifle. That was our experience in less than 24-hours of living in the house. We suffered like bush meat. Few weeks after, when the tension has died down, even Kutty has been released from police custody; we got to hear that the house was the headquarters for aye frat in the whole of the village. Kutty was the former leader of the frat. His immediate younger brother too is a frat; he belonged to the buccaneer frat. They even had series of meetings in our compound. There was no where we could run to. We had to live with it.
One Thursday morning, while sweeping our house compound, I heard the younger brother of Kutty, Desmond, praying and speaking in tongues. I was shocked. This guy is a frat, a cultist and he is speaking in tongues? I could not believe what I was seeing or was it what I was hearing? I kept that in my mind for references. On Sunday, the next week, Kutty invited me to his church. He gave me a handbill gingering me to come. To satisfy his curiosity, I went with him.
The pastor was a young man in his early thirties. His ministration was power packed. Then when it was time for prayers, he prayed like one ready to spit fire. He swung his right hand to the right. Every member of the congregation on that right-side fell like bamboo tree. Some screamed before they fell. Some even somersaulted before lying flat on the floor. He did same to the left. Everyone on that side fell too. He blew wind with his mouth towards the congregation and people began to catch anointing; they began to runaround the auditorium as if they’re now crazy. I was not spared. On a Sunday service, the pastor pointed a finger at me and prayed, “Rabastarabushat…take it.” The pastor prayed. The prayer hit me on my head; I spun like a rotor before crashing to the floor like a ceramic plate. I continued to attend the church service until one day….
A visitor who had come to the church to pray was pressed. She walked past many of the closed doors along the line of offices leading to the vestry. She was looking for the toilet. When she got to a particular door she stopped, thinking it might probably be the toilet. She tried the handle, the door opened. She gladly rushed inside. What she saw inside the room….
At the center of the room was a teenage boy who was on his knees. He was wholly naked. He had white powdery substances on his body. The boy was vomiting blood. Lo and behold, the pastor! He was there too naked. He was busy collecting the boy’s blood in a fetish calabash covered with charms and cowries. He was using the blood to wash his body―a ritual.
The woman could not control herself. She screamed and ran out of the room. The pastor, realizing that his secret has been exposed; though still naked, he made towards the woman. The woman fled. The pastor ra
n after her and would have killed her if he caught up with her. But he slipped and fell. He broke his ankle. The woman escaped.
The next day we heard that the pastor had committed suicide. He flooded his church with petrol, poured some petrol on his own body and set himself ablaze inside the church. The church burnt to ashes. We later learnt that he had killed a total of fourteen teenagers before his death. The last teenager vomiting blood was a servicing boy in his house. We also learnt that the pastor was a godfather to some fraternity groups, fraudsters, and occult groups.
CASE THREE
June, 1994.
Prophet Z.B MOSES
(The Necromantic seer)
Prophet Moses has a prayer room that is exclusively used by him alone. The prophet was a powerful minister of the word. Once you step the doorpost of his church he would start revealing your past lives to you. He was the kind of prophet that once he sees you, he would know your life history.
“Hello Mr. Pius, you are coming from your brother’s house. You ate beans and plantain this morning. You work as a vulcanizer. Your wife’s name is Lola. You have three children. You are the last born in your father’s house….” The prophet would go on and tell you everything about yourself to you once you step into his church. The prophet used to visit his prayer room once in a year. He could use between three to twenty-one days in his prayer room without disturbance. He has been a priest for about five years. This year, he was going for his annual special prayers in the prayer room. He warned that nobody should call or visit him in his prayer room, no matter what happens.
“Even my wife should not bother to check on me,” he instructed. He promised to return after the third day. He travelled.
Believing that she had endured it for five years, Prophet Moses’ wife, Linda, thought it was unacceptable for her husband to tell her never to check on him in his prayer house. She decided to spy on her husband. She too went on a journey to the prayer house. When she got there she waited at the entrance. She decided not to rush inside the prayer room. She preferred eavesdropping. She heard her husband talking with somebody. They were talking about all the members of the church. The voice sounded familiar. Who could that be? Linda was wondering. Then the prophet called the name of whom he had been talking with for about five minutes that the wife has been eavesdropping. The name she heard was like her first child who had died five years ago. In fact, that voice…she could distinguish it among a million voices. It was him, no doubt. It was her son! How did this happen? A dead son talking to his father…or was she in a world out of the one she used to know? Then she decided to open the door. She opened the door and entered into the prayer room. Once inside, she saw that the prayer room has nothing more than two coffins. No bibles, no seats and no lightings. Her husband, prophet Moses was seated in one coffin. He had no clothes on and he had some fetish things all over his body. Linda’s eyes drifted away from her husband to the second coffin. She saw her dead child, Peter, who had been dead for about five years seated in it. It was his ghost she was sure of that because she was there when their first child was buried. She couldn’t guess what to do next. By stimuli, she screamed and fled from the prayer room. She was running away to anywhere her legs were taking her. The prophet, who was in a trance all this while because he was talking with his son’s ghost―his messenger, regained consciousness. He picked up a wand from inside his coffin and swung it in Linda’s direction. It was just about forty seconds after she started running away.
“Die! Die!” He commanded.
Linda felt as if a dum-dum bullet had hit her in the forehead. She fell facedown and died.
But the prophet too was not spared. He had broken the covenant. Peter the ghost jumped out from his coffin and held the prophet in the neck tightly, wanton to strangle him. The prophet’s eyes dilated in horror; his tongue stock out of his mouth. He couldn’t breathe. He was grunting like a pig. Somehow the prophet managed to struggle himself free from his son’s ghost. He fled. But that was a temporary escape. Three days after that, the ghost reappeared to haunt Moses. Prophet Moses ran mad. He had broken the covenant. The covenant was that no living soul should see him when he is ascending into the spirit realm when inside the coffin. His wife saw him.
The prophet used his first child as a sacrifice to acquire the power of divinity and revelation through necromancy.
How do we get Prophet Moses’ story? You may ask. Mad men speak. Moses confessed his atrocities. He is still alive today roaming the streets somewhere in Edo state in his rags. He speaks to invisible spirits on the street. He still confesses about how he wanted great spiritual powers and fame so badly that he ran to the devil for powers. His solution came through necromancy, but he got it on a silver platter of a human sacrifice―his first child.
The blood of the innocent cries
Woe and destruction to you killers
You do the work of darkness
You cause pain to someone loved
You take a life you cannot create
Imagine you were not born
Imagine you had been aborted
Imagine you were a stillbirth
Those innocent souls will be alive
You know yourselves
I have an offer for you
Eat poison and die!
If you can’t do that then why kill?
But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, they shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of which the way of truth shall evil speak of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingers not, and their damnation slumber not. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an example unto those that after should live ungodly; and delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: for that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds; the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished…
The End.
