“It will be easy money!” says the native doctor, Babatunde, right as he passed me the charm I was going to use to marry the king’s daughter. Growing up in my village my family and I have lived like paupers for many years. Every day we have the same schedule, we wake up at around 6 am, when the day breaks, and we start working on our farm for hours till lunch. After lunch we go and fetch water from the stream so we can take our shower and cook dinner. Every day the cycle of suffering repeats, we were never educated, we barely ever made friends. In fact the only reason my family had so many children was to have helpers for the farm. My 12 siblings and I have been going through this predicament for almost 18 years. But my mission is to break the cycle of poverty. My goal is to marry the princess of my village, Chioma Okereke, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and her family is extremely wealthy, if I was to marry her eventually I would become the Igwe(king) of my village.
Although, marrying the princess will not be an easy task, she has many qualified suitors waiting in a line ready to ask for hand in marriage, my competition would be wealthy business owners, actors, princes, musicians, etc, I knew that I couldn’t marry her based on mere status so I had to find some alternative. At first I thought I could try and save her from an accident I created. It made sense, all I would have to do would be to put her in danger that I could control and be her ‘protector’. So what I did is I asked one of my brothers to try and rob her, while he would be in the act, I would come by and stop him, I warned him that my means might be a little violent, my idea was that showing some amount of brute force in front of the princess she would admire my passion and maybe even consider me as a possible suitor.
So, one day I saw her taking a walk and it seemed as if she didn’t have any palace guards walking with her so I called my brother Ifeanyi, he knew what the plan was in advance, and he trusted me, me and Ifeanyi had always been close from as long as I can remember, we were born separated by only eleven months, the first two of our family of suffering, we’ve been through the most pain and agony, and we know what we need to do to make it out of our godforsaken situation. So when I called Ifeanyi, I gave him the signal, and he struck, he had a yellow mask I made from one of our only shirts that we had, in order to hide his identity from what could be his future sister in-law. He asked for her necklace and earrings, because he knew it would’ve been longer for her to get them out, this gave me ample time to swoop by and come rescue her, I came through and like I said earlier I used brute force against my beloved sibling, i retrieved the princess’ jewelry and allowed for Ifeanyi to run away before the princess could alert anyone else. The princess thanked me but she didn’t seem to have any romantic feelings towards me, she rewarded me with one thousand naira, and asked me to continue my duties as a Good Samaritan and started to walk away. I was honestly heartbroken, I had just mercilessly decimated my favorite sibling for two or three days of food. I was puzzled on what to do next, as I walked home from the incident, all I thought of was what would I tell Ifeanyi.
As I came home, my mother and father were waiting for me. They asked why my brother looked like he was ran over by a car. I had to come up with a lie that they could fall for easily. I told them that he got robbed by the village gang. My parents, outraged by this, assembled some friends to fight them and cause raucous. Upon arriving at the gang’s headquarters, my parents would soon realize that the story I had given them was completely false. I had to explain what had really occurred. They felt disappointed and double crossed. How could my own child be so selfish? They said, I just couldn’t understand how my goal of escaping poverty and failure was selfish. They decided to disown. They felt like I was hindering they’re progress in life.
With this in mind I decided to leave my family to approach the local native doctor of my village, I needed a charm. I wanted a love charm, I could finally have the princess. I could be done with my life of suffering and pain. As I walked out of the native doctor’s shrine he told me, “It will be easy money!”