“Life is difficult for everyone. Even goats will testify to their inability to find their preferred ‘brand’ of yam peels daily. Humanity of course has the additional complication of wanting to make life difficult for each other. What we fail to see is how much more that tendency complicates our own lives. Human beings are just masochists! Honestly, just take a look at the world around you girls! This social media obsession is founded on sadism I tell you! One day the youngsters are Facebooking or Immagramming or whatever they call it, the next day they’re on Twilight or is it Twister…?…Twitter? Yes, Twitter. These are hovels! Hovels housing Rumpelstiltskins of all races plying their trade of spinning straw to gold, it’s all self-aggrandizement and lies. The worst thing is that little children like you, the best of humanity, suffer the brunt; instead of growing organically you’re pressured into premature adulthood. And this feral thing has violated our homes; it reaches our kids from right inside their bedrooms… I can’t even protect you anymore. With all that posing and pouting you see on the TV, Ale, how will you remember that you’re only four or Ego, that you are a six year old? Is all of this foolishness aimed at reducing little ladies to duck-lipped faces with a vacuous, a trendy prettiness? Or is the bombardment with images of perceived perfection simply to reduce self-esteem to its barest decimal?”

Mr. Zako was on one of his socio-political soliloquys again. His little daughters sat staring at him, all ten eyeballs belonging to sisters ranging from twelve to two years of age reflected variations of curiosity, boredom, respect and unadulterated confusion. But Zako had always spoken to his daughters like adults. He regarded them as pint-sized versions of their future adult selves and treated them accordingly.

The Zako house was a steaming pot of bubbling debates and his girls grew up saturated in its juices, never knowing until well into their teenage years that not all mothers argued politics at the dinner table, that not all fathers asked children to write scripts instead of watching television or indeed that some children couldn’t even speak more than one language. It would always hit them with varying degrees of shock to learn that those “…duck-lipped females with a vacuous, a trendy prettiness” did not only exist in their father’s rants. The Zako girls survived on intellectual stimuli, rich in culture, deeply curious and emotionally vibrant, they were Mr. and Mrs. Zako’s one living boast.

Mr Zako himself was rare, a capitalist’s socialist. Like a true member of a minority Nigerian tribe, he was egalitarian. However, Inaadi Zako was a proponent of the ‘survival of the equally fit’ theory. While he believed in equal opportunities, he was realistic enough to expect different outcomes. His household was very much a reflection of this character and his daughters; Camari, Damiete, Ego, Aleruchi and Belema, were raised with the understanding that they were entitled to equal opportunities but the outcomes their chances granted rested squarely upon their individual shoulders.

Their father, Zako (as he was fondly called), was a simple man who fought hard to train the minds of his daughters to violate the principles of the world they lived in. He hated ordinariness and rejected the perception of ‘normalcy’ in all its varied expressions. He always said that he was allergic to mediocrity and suffered the terrible reaction of doing less than his potential, to the horrible disease Mediocrity. His car sticker boldly declared the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history” to the eternal consternation of his conservative friends who worried he didn’t raise his girls right. He always retorted with a shrug that he was a leftist anyway.

He was that kind of man.

Quietly but firmly set in his ways, full of an abiding confidence that arose from his silent assurance that he was a relevant, indeed an essential part of the universe (no one had, at the time of publishing, confirmed otherwise). He taught his daughters to believe the same; to trust that their existence was of such importance that the repercussions of their actions were powerful enough to devastate the lives of others, to distort destinies. As a result, his daughters lived as though they carried some sort of transcendent power, like they were gods in themselves whose role was central to the working of the universe.

All of Zako’s women were confident, years later people would wonder what drove them to achieve all they did.
He brought the girls up with the belief that they were far more than the sum of their body parts. He always said that with so much to offer he felt it was a violation of the laws of the universe to reduce a woman to a mere body, a shell. He agreed with C.S Lewis, “”You do not have a soul, you ARE a soul. What you have…is a body”.” For this reason he constantly reminded his girls of the fickleness of the world’s trends. His favourite saying was “Inaadi IS Inaadi.” Meaning, no onw can do Inaadi like Inaadi can. He told two year old Belema the other day “B, you are a charmer! But I need you to always remember that there will perhaps be 2000 women far more beautiful than you, maybe 3000 more intelligent, 4000 far kinder than you could ever learn to be…but not ONE will ever be better than you. You are the best, for after all who can achieve your dreams better than you or live your life with more certainty than you? If you do not fulfill your destiny, who will? ” In response, Belema waved her chubby baby fists in his face and pulled his goatee, laughing.

Seeing the potential long before the full picture arrived, that was Zako. It was as though he knew that his words would serve her well when she became president of the Nigerian nation. President Belema Amore (nee Zako) bamboozled the men at Aso Villa meetings with luminous eyes and lashes that shadowed high cheekbones. Her features already carefully set by her Creator were artfully defined by her creatrice, Mac and ingeniously distracted from the intellect of Mr. Zako’s last child. The combination of innocence and femininity was often too much for the men she worked with. You see, it is hard to see a woman clearly from a mind befogged with the smoke of entitlement to money, to power and to women…a direct result of an engorged ego stemming from an over-indulgence in the national cake.

Every time one of those thirsty politicians approached her, the air surrounding them humming with a savage oleaginous fervor, she smiled thinking of her father’s phrase, “Sycophancy, the Nigerian pastime.”