Afamefuna was not the first man to disvirgin me.
This is a secret I have carried with me through all the years of my marriage. To me, whatever happened before I got married to Afamefuna simply never existed. I read somewhere once that when something is too terrifying or painful for the mind to handle, the brain buries that memory deep in your subconscious to protect you.
Afamefuna, my husband, treated me like fragile glass. It was no small point of pride for a traditional man to marry a woman so desirable who offered him the untouched proof of her innocence on their wedding night.
“She bled.”
It was dawn when he spoke those words to his mother in a low, measured cadence. His voice was stripped of all youthful fervor.
Afamefuna is a man deeply rooted in tradition and patriarchal ideals. To him, virginity, female submission, and male headship were non-negotiable pillars of life. As a woman with tertiary education, this might have rubbed me the wrong way, but Afamefuna understood what it meant to be a husband and a provider. The concept of “Girl, let me take care of the heavy lifting while you enjoy life” was all I ever wanted. Call me a pick-me or whatever you like. A girl who has tasted real poverty does not argue with comfort.
Afamefuna used to be my favourite customer back at Onitsha Main Market. His shop was always buzzing, stocked with everything from quality jeans and polos to sharp dress shirts. I was his steady plug for food and snacks. Sometimes, I would make special meals just for him. I cannot even pinpoint the exact day we started dating. I earlier said he knew how to be a husband, but before we even got to that, Afam could make you laugh until your ribs ached. That was probably why his shop was always packed. In a suffocating Nigeria where everyone carries a heavy heart, how could you visit a man’s shop, get such effortless laughter for free, and not want to return even just to say hello?
We dated for years before we finally tied the knot. Mind you, dearest reader, we did not delay because we were unsure of what we had. Afamefuna was the one who stalled. This man tested my loyalty in ways I cannot fully describe. I still remember vividly the rainy Wednesday morning he woke me up with heavy sobs over the phone.
“E fu go m,” was the first thing he choked out. “The guy I sent money to send me goods from China is telling me stories. Ugogbe m, I am finished. That money was not even mine in the first place.”
I remember sitting on my bed speechless, my own heart sinking into my stomach. What kind of terrible luck was this? Part of me wanted to detach immediately. What was the point of stepping back into the poverty I had fought so hard to escape, let alone with a man facing ruin?
He stopped going to his shop, leaving everything to his sales boys. I spent that entire week at his place, cooking, cleaning, and listening to him talk about how his life was over while he waited to see how I would react. But an Igbo girl knows her way around these things.
When he finally confessed it was all a test, I knew that within a few months, I would become his wife.
Afamefuna had a very close friend in that same Onitsha Main Market. His partner in crime, Nnadi. Boy was as cunning as Afam himself. Friendly, funny, jovial, and effortlessly charming. Nnadi had a tongue so sweet that if you were not careful, you would swallow everything he said, even when the truth was staring you in the face. They were joined at the hip, attending every market meeting and gathering together. But despite their similarities, I preferred my Afamefuna. He was fuller in stature, held a natural authority, and was well ahead in pockets.
The brotherhood between Afamefuna and Nnadi ended on the day Nnadi was buried.
Nnadi had come home from the market one Saturday evening and suddenly started vomiting. Blood. Sputum. Half-digested rice. More blood. Within hours, he was gone.
It made no sense. Nnadi was a man who laughed with everyone. How could life drain out of him so fast? What was the root of this?
Afamefuna stopped laughing. For weeks after the burial he would sit on the edge of the bed long after the lamp had been put out, staring at the wall as if Nnadi might still walk through the door with one of his ridiculous stories. In the mornings he left for the market later and later, sometimes not at all. When he did go, the sales boys said he barely spoke. At home the easy chatter that used to fill our evenings disappeared. I cooked his favourite soups, laid out clean clothes, touched his shoulder the way I used to; he would nod once and turn away. The house grew quiet in a way that felt heavier than silence.
Months passed before he began returning to the shop at the old hour and answering customers with something close to his former ease. The laughter came back, but thinner. Even now, five years later, there are evenings when his eyes go somewhere far away, and I know he is still standing at that grave in Amawbia.
It was however those same eyes I saw tonight. Anxiety. Grief. Absolute terror. Whatever.
Afamefuna came back home looking completely undone. There was no warm spread of his arms for me to fall into. He simply sank into the sofa, staring blankly at the floor.
“I saw Nnadi today,” he said before I could even ask what was wrong.
Nnadi. The same Nnadi we buried five years ago.
I remember it clearly. We had traveled to Amawbia that solemn morning and watched his wooden casket lower six feet into the red earth. And a month later, we wore matching white outfits for his memorial service along Awka Road, Onitsha. Every trader in our line at Onitsha Main Market was in attendance.
“I am sure it was him I saw,” Afamefuna said again.
He had called me earlier in the day to say he would be home late because he needed to branch to Aba to inspect a supply for an international client.
“I was still in my car, looking for where to park, when I saw him,” Afam continued, his hands shaking slightly. “He was dusting a line of denim jeans displayed in front of a shop. Ujunwa, it was him. I am certain of it. He was even wearing that favorite black Sudan leather jacket of his. I panicked. I rolled down my window and screamed his name at the top of my lungs, but the market noise swallowed it. I quickly parked, jumped out, and ran straight to that stall.”
He paused, swallowing hard.
“When I got there, he was gone. I didn't want to sound crazy by screaming Nnadi again, so I asked the nearby traders. I described him down to the black Sudan jacket. Uju, they looked at me like I was mad. They swore they had no idea who I was talking about.”
My mind raced. Could my husband be suffering from a sudden psychotic breakdown? That is nearly impossible. Nnadi had been dead for five years and we had long accepted his absence.
Could it be a tasteless prank? No. My husband has grown beyond that. Man has so many more pressing things to worry about.
“What frightens me most,” Afam whispered, looking up at me, “is that he wore the exact same expression he had on his face the day he died.”
A sharp coldness flared in my chest.
I remembered that look. I remembered the exact expression on Nnadi’s face as he took his final, agonizing breaths. His wild eyes. The blood on his lips.
“No!” I blurted out, stepping back. “Afam, no. Nnadi is dead. What are you saying?”
“Uju, I don’t even know again. I am so drained. I stood there for hours waiting to see if he would walk back out, but nothing.” He rubbed his face in defeat. “I tried telling myself it could be just a doppelgänger. It has to be. But why did he vanish the moment I parked? And why did no one around that shop know who he was?”
I stared at Afamefuna. He was panting, completely unraveling before my eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked, drawing closer to him.
“I hope I am. Prepare my bath and set my dinner.” He stood and dragged his feet into the bedroom. And maybe for the first time ever, I noticed my husband’s aging.
While I set the warm water for Afam’s bath, I sat by the bathtub and listened to the thick, lazy splash of water against the basin inside. My hands were still damp, but my skin felt tight and ice-cold. My mind was still hunting. My first thought was simple and sharp. Has my husband gone mad?
No. Afam is steady. He worries about market debts the way any serious trader does, but his mind has never slipped. He does not see things that are not there.
Could it have been a doppelgänger then? A stranger who simply looked like Nnadi?
In a country this crowded, lookalikes exist. But this one wore the exact black Sudan leather jacket Nnadi bought that harmattan before he died. The one with a worn collar he refused to replace. And the face carried the same wild, suffocating expression Nnadi wore while blood ran from his mouth. A random resemblance cannot stretch that far. The doppelgänger theory fell apart in my hands.
Then the darker thought. Could it be Nnadi never died?
We saw his body. We stood in Amawbia and watched the wooden casket go down six feet into the red earth. We threw in handfuls of soil. He was dead. He was buried.
So if Afam’s eyes did not deceive him, if it was not some uncanny double, and if Nnadi has been in the ground for five years… then what exactly did my husband see in that Aba market?
Just then, a long-buried memory rose without warning: ENG 202, Introduction to African Literature!
Back in my 200-level university days where we sat in crowded lecture halls. The days of Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ and Ben Okri’s ‘The Famished Road’. Our lecturer then, Dr. Egwu, would lean over his desk, adjust his glasses, and speak with that deep, steady voice:
"In the African worldview, my students, death is not a final door that slams shut. It is a curtain. And sometimes, when a life is violently torn before its appointed hour, the thread does not break. It simply weaves itself into a distant corner of the loom."
Those words, once only useful for term papers, now sat heavy in my chest.
The word that came with them was Akudaaya.
It comes from Yoruba tradition, where Aku means "the dead" and Daaya means "to create a substitute" or "to appear again." The accounts say that when a person dies before the years their ori allotted them are finished, the soul cannot cross fully to the ancestors. It remains locked out, still carrying the rest of its time. So it leaves the place where it was buried and goes far away, often to a crowded market town where no one knows its face or its family. There it lives again in flesh and blood. It sweats, it breathes, it pays for its food. It rents a shop, sells goods, talks to neighbors, and sometimes even gets married and has children. To the people in that new city, he is just a quiet trader who showed up one day. Markets suit it. Strangers pass all day. Identities dissolve in the noise. But there is one rule that appears again and again: the living dead cannot survive being recognised. The moment someone from the old life sees them and calls the true name, the secret is broken. They vanish.
Igbo people do not say Akudaaya. We speak, when we speak at all, of onye nwụrụ anwụ nke na-agharị (the dead person who still walks). The tradition says that every soul makes an agreement with its Chị before coming into this world. Every soul is given a specific lifespan, a set number of years to fulfill their destiny. But when death comes violently and too soon, that clock is shattered before it finishes ticking. So the fear is the same. A life cut too short, a spirit that cannot settle, a presence that continues among the living. The difference is mostly in how openly the thing is named. Yoruba tradition gives it a clear word and a clearer set of signs. Ours keeps it quieter, folded into larger talk about unsettled spirits and deaths that came before their time. Yet both recognise that some dead do not stay properly dead.
I held those descriptions beside what my husband had just told me.
The traces line up closely enough that I cannot push the thought away. What Afamefuna saw was most likely an Akudaaya.
The water from the basin had begun to spill over its edge, pooling around my feet, but I couldn't move.
How could something I once argued about in a lecture hall walk this close to my life? Nnadi, an Akudaaya? Nnadi, the first man I ever loved. Nnadi, the first man to disvirgin me.
