The Agidi Incident — The Day I Stopped Being A Bully

Growing up, everyone saw me as a good, quiet and brilliant boy, all of which I was, except that I had a penchant for teasing younger ones. I don’t think I was the typical bully but there was this guy called Prince that I always taunted.

Prince was an overly pampered only child whose only job was to eat, play and sleep. His mom, a corpulent 6ft tall woman, had a provision store which encouraged his gluttonous lifestyle and she was ready to go to any length to ensure her son lacked nothing. His dad, although quite the opposite of the others both in height and size, was always fierce in defending his son whenever he was in actual or apparent danger. I once heard that he stabbed a man who knocked his son on the head—something he had never done since the boy was born.

This boy ate an average of ten times a day and I’m not exaggerating! I understand the biological imperative to care for one’s children, especially when you have just one, but Prince was coddled to the point that he became obese and extremely dumb.

They lived adjacent to my street but he had to pass through my street when coming back from school to get to his house so that gave me ample opportunity to bully him. I would call him “fati bom-bom” and then mock his lopsided gait which was as a result of the load of the two giant lunch boxes he usually carried coupled with his oversized bag pack. Oftentimes, I would hit his bum and knock his head and then speed off whenever he cried. This continued until the day his amazon of a mother intervened and saved his precious son from the hands of a tiny, malevolent bully.

That day, my friend, Godshand, visited me so we went out, like we regularly did, to play “agidi” on the street. “Agidi” is a kind of football game in which every player has his own goalpost and each player tries to score into any of the opponent’s goals, for those who don’t know. In the middle of the game, I saw my weak prey coming from school and grinned sinisterly.

I kicked the ball and made sure it touched him just to find the slightest excuse to beat him up. After asking him why he touched my ball and he refused to speak up, I recruited my friend—a more notorious boy than myself—and we beat him to a pulp. He cried home threatening, in between snuffles, to call his mom, his dad, his uncle and his aunty for us. We jeered him to bring his grandparents along and laughed scornfully in satisfaction.

When he had left, we resumed our game. As we continued to play, we could feel the ground vibrate vigorously and persistently. I got disturbed and pointed out to my friend that it could be a sign of a looming earthquake and that we should leave immediately but he insisted that it was an underground snake that was causing the vibration and that it couldn’t crack the tarred road. I don’t know where he got his reasoning from but I’m sure his assumption was as absurd as mine.

While we were still trying to figure out what was happening, the vibration increased as the sound of giant footsteps approached. Just then, my friend ran off shouting, “blood of Jesus! Blood of Jesus!” As I turned to see what exactly made him run, a faint shadow slowly spread over me. I then looked up and saw Prince’s giant mom overhead.

This woman actually dived on top of me with full force. Before I knew it everywhere got dark and then I passed out. I woke up 24hrs later but everywhere was still dark. Ten seconds under the giant monster felt like one full day. Madam was still lying on top of me unmoved. That was when the phrase “shorter day, longer night” made sense to me. Seeing that her plan was to suffocate me, I decided to suffocate myself by giving up the ghost. Let me just die my die.

The next day, after I had been rescued from the snare of the fowler, I was told that it was my two older brothers with the help of a neighbourhood, Chijindu, who pulled me from beneath that witch.

Brothers and sisters, that was the last day I talked to Prince let alone touch him.