Victim and Aggressor
Winning Entry of the ULES OWLS Competition
If you’re an Engineering student of the University of Lagos, there’s no way you could have missed the ULES OWLS writing competition announced at the start of the semester. After a grueling selection process, the results are now in. Kudos to all participants for their brilliance, but there can only be one winner.
Congratulations to Ndujekwu Ugochukwu, a 300 level student of the department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, for emerging as the winner of the ULES OWLS writing competition!
Here’s his winning entry to the competition; it’s such a captivating read:
Victim and Aggressor by Ndujekwu Ugochukwu
Oluwajimi had that chaotic laughter that carried more humour than its source, the kind that required an apology when unleashed in public — loud and irritating to an uninterested observer. He possessed an uncanny wit and intimidating genius that made him synonymous with academic brilliance. 'Jimi does not have two heads', our teachers often said, attributing his academic excellence to hard work we all knew existed only in their imagination. However, it was a necessary white lie, intended to encourage the cognitively less fortunate like us to strive harder.
We lived in the same face me I face you. My parents — hovering around the border between lower and middle class — could afford a TV and decoder, a feat which made me the envy of my peers. Something about our privileges inspired the beginning of our friendship; his intellectual prowess and my relative material comfort. He'd borrow my PSP and my Bakugan toys and I'd burden him with my maths problems. He was the only kid my mom allowed to visit our home as he pleased. She worried that other children might have a negative influence, but she made an exception for Jimi. Smart kids were, by default, considered morally upright until proven otherwise; and luckily, Jimi had mastered the art of affecting a demeanour around adults that confirmed their bias.
Our friendship was a bit strained when we advanced to senior secondary school. We were both day-students but of different schools. Fazil-Omar Community School was breeding cultists, and my parents, fearing my corruption, had to transfer me to a saner and pricier school. The kind where students feared their teachers; a healthy and necessary fear, the kind that had long and short service as morning and afternoon assembly, where students were disciplined for not wearing the right colour of shoes, for not wearing stockings. Pidgin English was prohibited and even punished.
We no longer had the same homework, we had fewer teachers and girls to gossip about. I'd made new friends, and he had made even more. He still helped with my maths problems, however, even if it was with less patience. We still went to Oniran's gaming centre to play our favourite Mortal Kombat, even though it was now with four of his other friends — the kind of friends that would later make my mom mad and ban me from going without her permission; one I stopped seeking because she never acquiesced. We still talked about the madness of the cult fights, only now he spoke with less vitriol because he now had friends of friends that belonged.
Boarding house was compulsory for SS3 students at Mater Ecclesiae Secondary School. And it was during my stay that it happened. My dad had visited on the first open day in the second term, bearing good and bad news. My mom had got a promotion and transfer, and we were already searching for a new place in Surulere. His countenance fell almost immediately after he announced this and — not allowing me to revel in the great news — he added, ‘Mummy Jimi has died’. Mummy Jimi was well known around the area for her hardwork and deadbeat husband. Suddenly feeling nauseous, I contemplated the tragedy while we said nothing for the rest of our walk back to my dormitory.
Things had fallen apart swiftly when I returned for the Easter holiday, my last at the ghetto. Jimi had joined, and it was no surprise. The Buccaneers were notorious for preying on the young and vulnerable, and Jimi was an easy target. I was tempted to believe my intuition was wrong, but I saw it in his new set of friends, in the Benson cigarette hidden in his drawer, in the late nights. We relocated not long after and I lost contact with my best friend.
Two years had passed since I heard of Jimi until one fateful night. That night in my second year at the university when I told Fisayo that I liked her, and she smiled, asking what took me so long, caressing my cleanly shaved beard after a long kiss that warmed my stomach. It was that same night when the moon, as though endorsing the new relationship, smiled at us with dreamy luminousness. That same night when we danced at Johnny Drille’s concert, her waist swaying with serpentine undulation. It was that night that I heard the news; a gang of notorious robbers had been arrested in my old community. Jimi, their leader, and three others.
I attended the court session, and my heart sank as the judge declared their sentence: life imprisonment. They had killed several, and the families of their victims made sure they got what they deserved. Jimi stood at the dock, putting on a brave, unremorseful face. But I knew better than to be deceived by it. I looked at the families he had caused pain, and I saw the deep resentment in their eyes. All they saw was an unrepentant monster.
I think about what could have been had his father not failed him. How he could have turned out differently had the tragedy of his mother’s death not befallen him. I partially blame myself for abandoning him for a better school. I was his one real friend, and we kept each other sane in the madness of the Fazil-Omar community. I think of Jimi, and I see the ever-happy child and his annoying and infectious laughter. I see the genius intuiting maths problems that his peers saw as complex. I see a boy failed by his family, his society, and his best friend. Failed by life. I think of the many people with a similar story but with no one to tell them; of people, aggressors, yet victims.
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Nice!
Wow!