Ebun noticed that her husband was avoiding intimacy with her. He was travelling more, sleeping outside the home under one flimsy excuse or the other.
The traffic was terrible.
I did not want to drive home that late because my spare tyre is bad.
I had had an extra bottle of beer and my friends thought it was safer for me to sleep over instead of risking driving into a ditch.
The family meeting dragged on till the wee hours of the night.
All kinds of lines that he rarely used in the 12 years of their marriage kept popping up, very regularly.
Then when he was home, he would watch rerun of Premier League or UEFA matches until his wife slept off. One month became three months and then four months. Of course, Ebun started suspecting her husband.
She confronted him. He denied. She did not believe him. Why else would a man who wanted sex at least five times a week suddenly start avoiding his wife? But Ebun was expanding her interior decoration business and working long hours. She now had clients outside Lagos and jobs as far away as Port Harcourt and Abuja. Yet even after a whole week outside their matrimonial bed, Tunde still didn’t jump her tired body like he used to. Ebun was worried. She made many first moves but Tunde kept his distance.
Is my husband having erectile dysfunction? He’s just 46.
There must be another woman somewhere.
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She was as miserable as any starved wife could be. What was she supposed to do for sex, buy sex toys? Then she fell ill, very ill. She started losing weight. Everybody said it was stress and she must slow down. She did. She ate more, rested more. But her weight loss was steady. All tests showed she was good. No tumour, benign or malignant. Ebun’s very scared parents brought in spiritualists. One of them finally found something, something really terrible. Ebun had been laced with magun. Yeah, that magun, the one that is put on an unfaithful wife to catch and kill her lover! Tunde, urbane, fine-boy-no-pimples Tunde obviously thought, in fact was convinced that someone else was fetching water from his well and thus decided to poison the water. He must have concluded that the reason his wife’s business was growing so fast was because one man somewhere was giving her money and contacts. And of course, the ‘investor’ was visiting the website he designed only for himself. I can imagine him telling the evil man or woman who gave him the charmed broomstick (yes, you read that right), that one minister or billionaire oil and gas magnate was about to take his wife from him!
Close your eyes and imagine the handsome man who danced and prostrated with his friends and begged to marry your daughter, lacing her with magun because he thinks she’s sleeping around.
An unsuspecting Ebun must have stepped over the broomstick, maybe even in her own bathroom. She was supposed to take the deadly message to her lover’s bed and once the man ‘climbed’ her, he would summersault three times, gasp and die within minutes, eyes red, teary and bulging. Well, there was no lover anywhere. So there was no news of shame and disgrace from any of the hotels Ebun stayed in in Port Harcourt, Yenagoa or Abuja. Imagine what one woman’s husband of 12 years had planned for the mother of his two children.
Anyway, because no man ‘knew’ Ebun, the magun turned on her. Tunde, the planter of the dark magic also refused to reap the fruit of his labour. That was why he refused to have sex with his wife. He was expecting the news of Ebun’s lover first, to prove her unfaithfulness. Need I paint the gloomy atmosphere that descended on Ebun’s home after the ‘diagnosis’? Fortunately for Tunde, he was not home on the fateful day. Ebun wept uncontrollably. Ebun’s mother cursed the entire lineage of Tunde for producing a son that wanted to strip her naked in her old age, if you understand that expression. Ebun’s father paced up and down the house while the ‘spiritualist’ tried to cook up a cleansing solution to neutralize the magun that was eating her up slowly and dragging her towards an untimely grave.
To shorten a long story, Ebun’s parents confronted Tunde with the accusation. A little resistance and denial but Tunde owned up to the crime. Yes, it was a crime, attempted murder if you ask me. Just because he was convinced that another man was raising his wife’s legs, Tunde was willing to kill his wife or kill her supposed lover, or maybe both of them to prove his point.
Ebun moved out with her two children. How do you put your children with a man who would resort to fatal juju to shame his own wife? What is to say that he would not strangle Ebun in her sleep or poison her food with anything or lace her with ‘magun’ again?
They exchanged marriage vows before God and man. They professed love to each other. They made two beautiful babies, built a home together. Now 12 years seemed to have just gone to waste. Love has been replaced with fear. The children are confused. Ebun is resolute, the marriage was over.
‘Somehow, a ‘Gone Too Soon’ obituary poster kept playing in my head. Tunde would have worn dark shades and told everybody I died after a brief illness, right? Would he have one day told my children that my infidelity killed me? Those were some of the questions that ran through my head. Each day Tunde came to my parents’ to plead with me to return to our home, all I felt was fear, cold fear, the kind you feel when you see a man aiming a gun at you. Maybe one day, I would forgive him but I know I can never go back to being his wife.’
What kind of domestic violence or abuse was that; physical, mental, spiritual? Should Ebun forgive and go back to her matrimonial home?
There are extremes a man will go to that a come-back will be impossible. If lacing a woman with magun was something that law and forensics can prove and as such is admissible evidence in court, it would be in the same family with murder and manslaughter. Any man found guilty of it would and should go away for a long, long time. Unfortunately, magun is not a punishable offence. So, a man can do it and go scot-free. He can even kill more than one woman that way.
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For the men who are thinking, as they read this, that the woman should ‘understand where the man is coming from’ or ‘what unfaithfulness does to a man’s head and psyche’ should pause and first imagine if the woman laced with magun is their daughter. Yeah, why not? There are young crazy men all over the place doing all kinds of crazy things. Close your eyes and imagine the handsome man who danced and prostrated with his friends and begged to marry your daughter, lacing her with magun because he thinks she’s sleeping around. And your unsuspecting daughter who is not sleeping around just suddenly starts emaciating, withering before your eyes. Think of all the frightening suggestions fear would bring to your head: every kind of cancer would present themselves to you! Only for you to discover it was magun all along.
Will you allow your girl return to her ‘matrimonial’ home after such a scare? How will you convince her to forgive him? Will you be able to guarantee that he will not repeat the evil act or even do something worse if his warped mind wakes him one night to convince him his wife is cheating, again?
*Egbemode (egbemode3@gmail.com)
