Once in a blue moon, something happens that throws you back to the distant past — almost like reliving the thrills of writing a cover story for DRUM several decades ago.
A man, Emeka, who had died in Nigeria in 1999 showed up in the Gambia ten years later, married a lady named Amina and fathered four children before disappearing forever. Four years ago, an unknown visitor told Amina and her father that they had all along been dealing with a ghost from the spirit world.
When the story became public, petrified neighbours and strangers teamed up to banish Amina and her children from their midst. Virtually destitute and horror-stricken from stigmatisation and ostracism, his family fled to a neighbouring country and his wife undertook a journey of faith to Nigeria to trace her husband’s roots, following the few hints he had dropped while he was with them.
The major clue she had was that he was from Ogidi in Nigeria’s Anambra State and that his brother was a dealer in pharmaceutical products in Onitsha. There was also the bizarre fact that he had a stark burn patch on his leg as if he had suffered an accident with hot water in childhood. Remarkably, Amina’s children, too, had the same marks even though they had never suffered any such accident.
Wazobia’s Help
In Nigeria, the popular radio station, Wazobia FM, through its staff, Expensive, helped trace her husband’s roots after a rigorous process facilitated by the Ogidi Town Union. The husband’s family confirmed that the young man had died in an automobile accident in 1999 and that he had a mark of a burn accident on his leg. In an identification parade of six photographs conducted by the radio station and the Ogidi Town Union, Amina correctly picked out Emeka’s picture! It was the stuff of which mind-bending fables are made!
Some salient questions arise. What are ghosts really? Can ghosts exist in physical form? Do dead people go on sabbatical in the land of the living? Can they beget children?
According to Nikhil Dave, an Ufology and mythology enthusiast, the length of time a ghost spends on earth depends upon how they died. Those who die of natural causes usually don’t return as ghosts. However, a person killed in cold blood might stay long as a ghost on earth until he gets justice. “An accident victim may also return live on earth for thousand of years until they given an option”, Dave explains.
An Advisor on the paranormal, Brian Mc Cann, says: “Ghosts are restless spirits of the dead, unable to find closure for various reasons, so as to move on beyond the 4th dimension. Until such time that they come to terms with whatever is bothering or holding them back, they will manifest as ghost, remaining earthbound entities/ghosts.”
On the other hand, he argues that, “Phantoms are residual electromagnetic energy of an exact replica of a deceased, stuck in the specific area where it died, performing repetitive actions stuck in one spot endlessly. Elementals are negative energies created by those practicing satanism.” Or, they could be “malevolent spirits of the living who intentionally decided to remain in their astral bodies, thus unable to move on and becoming negative evil earthbound spirits, with the ability in pestering and sometimes possessing their living targets.”
Reincarnation
While several religions don’t believe in reincarnation and therefore cannot readily accept the possibility of ghosts living as human beings all over again, Hinduism and Buddhism religions postulate that souls or consciousness can take rebirth in different forms, including human. However, it doesn’t explicitly endorse the idea of ghosts participating in human births. In Bengal and in many African communities, ghosts are believed to be the spirit after death of an unsatisfied human being or a soul of a person who dies in unnatural or abnormal circumstances (like murder, suicide or accident).
My friend, Prof. Jibrin Ibrahim, thinks that it is all baloney. He insists that it is all a carryover from my mythical peregrinations in the DRUM magazine of yore.
As usual, the matter has generated a slew of stories on social media which make you reconsider our collective arrogance in pretending that we know all there is to be known about objective reality. Suddenly, similar stories about ghosts are trending everywhere. It’s as if everyone has one ghost story or the other.
One @Owologbo narrates his version: “There was the story of a man who died in his village, went to a different part of the country, got married and had children… When he got tired of the pressure from the wife, he decided to take her to his village. He engaged two motorcycle taxis. As they were going he stopped at a compound not too far from his own and told the bike man carrying his wife where to drop her, and that he quickly wanted to see a friend. The wife only discovered that she had been married to a ghost when the family showed her his picture and grave.”
During my career in DRUM, we made a living on stories such as Ghost-Emeka’s marriage to Human-Amina, a union which produced four children. What fascination can be greater than finding out if a ghost can impregnate a woman? How can the undead impregnate the living?
The concept of a ghost being a biological father raises significant conceptual challenges, as ghosts are not considered tangible entities that can engage in biological processes. Biological parenthood is typically determined by genetic contribution by the biological mother and father. In Nigerian law, paternity can be established through various means, including marriage, acknowledgment, or DNA testing.
There could be some challenge in inheritance rights involving children produced in such controversial ghostly circumstances. Suppose the deceased had had a nuclear family before embarking on his second coming? Would the children of his second marriage as a ghost have the same rights as those he had when he was still a regular human being?
Palmwine Drinkard
Like many people of my generation, I grew up on a diet of creative phantasmagoria in a never-never world where the boundaries between the physical and the ethereal didn’t mean much. One of the more fascinating literary offerings was Amos Tutuola’s “Palm-wine Drinkard” which was brought to life by dramatist Kola Ogunmola in his adaptation, “Omuti”.
The storyline: Lanke (Omuti), a ‘drinkard’ decided to host his friends to a palm-wine drinking party. They soon exhausted the palm-wine and Lanke’s guests were getting restless. So, he called his palm-wine tapper, Alaba, to fetch some fresh palm-wine. In the process of climbing the palm tree, Alaba fell and died. Shattered by the tragic loss of his favourite tapper, and determined to satisfy his fellow ‘drinkards’, Lanke, in a dream, traced his tapper to the land of the dead — a dangerous adventure which took him through the habitation of spirits, forest beings, a mythical cruel king and the town of the dead. In traditional folklore, you could physically travel to the land of ghosts and spirits.
Now we are saddled with this digital-age collapse of the boundaries between the seen and unseen worlds in the Amina story. This is beyond Artificial Intelligence (AI). When I asked ChatGPT if the story was plausible, it mumbled: “No, a ghost cannot impregnate a woman…”
I hope we can get round to conducting DNA tests on Amina’s children to seal any doubt about their paternity. If DNA says yes, then shame on AI and the arrogance of empirical science! But, what if they have no genetic footprints?
