In 2020, I stumbled on the phrase “moral idiot,1” derived from the Greek root of idiot, meaning a private person or someone not in the public eye.

Essentially, a “moral idiot” is someone in a public-facing role who doesn’t realise or care about how their actions—or inactions—affect others.

After reading this, I started to reflect on the many ways I’d been a moral idiot in my life. This reflection made me wonder: What is the opposite of a moral idiot?

The answer, I realised, is someone who cares deeply. Someone who goes out of their way, in a sort of maddening manner, when they should ideally have no reason to care and would be “justified” in not caring. Someone who treats every task—no matter how mundane—with respect akin to worship.

That’s where Mama Balo comes in. Mama Balo, my latest documentary with Kayode, is about someone who cares deeply about her job—the opposite of a moral idiot.

She is a toilet cleaner in Nigeria, where blue-collar workers are often overlooked and underpaid. Yet, she approaches her work with an incredible dedication that is rare for any job, let alone one society deems “unimportant.”

One vivid example of her work ethic comes from a day when she noticed a drainage that wasn't part of her duties had clogged. She didn't walk past it. She didn't say, "It's not my problem." Instead, she spent over an hour carefully clearing it [with her hands], ensuring the space was functional for others.

Her dedication made us ask: Why does Mama Balo care so much about her job? And is it useful—or even fair—to ask others to care this deeply when they’re underpaid and overlooked?

These questions lie at the heart of what we set out to capture in our documentary.

Mama Balo challenges everything we think we know about work ethic. She embodies the belief that any job can be dignified if approached with respect. A point James Somers echoes when he says that “no job is too low not to warrant care because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world.”

Beyond all this serious hand-holding, Mama Balo is also a secret documentary about joy—the joy of work and relationships, joy that’s richly and deeply independent of money. The joy that comes from finding meaning in a job because you respect it.

This film marks a shift for us. With The Gravediggers, our first documentary, we avoided moralizing. With Mama Balo, we’re leaning into it. We want to be didactic. We want to wring out global implications. Most importantly, we want you to care.

Through her story, we hope to challenge how you see work, dignity, and responsibility. If Mama Balo can find pride and meaning in her work, what excuse do the rest of us have?

If you’ve read this far, thank you. We’re currently raising money to give Mama B a retirement nest egg as she gets older and can no longer do her job.

If you’d like to donate to this, pls find the link here. Every amount counts and nothing is too small - thank you!

1

Idiot explanation from Merriam-Webster

Director’s Notes

Words by

The writer, Gay Talese, wanted to specialise in writing about nobodies — people who weren’t considered newsworthy. People who were largely ignored because they hadn’t committed a crime, been involved in a scandal, or suffered a violent death. 

Similarly, N.R. Kleinfeld — formerly of the New York Times — said the people he wrote about were labelled ordinary because they weren’t famous or powerful. But he found that tag diminishing. His subjects were extraordinary to him because an authentic richness filled their souls, alongside a “keen sensory awareness of the way the world works.”

When Kayode and I set out to make The Gravediggers, our primary goal was to tell the story of everyday people living as authentically as possible. Our initial aim was to tell the story of a 90-year-old tailor shop that had passed through three generations of descendants. But when that story fell through, a serendipitous conversation at Papies Maetro [behind Atan Cemetery] after one of our failed visits to the tailor shop spurred the idea for this documentary.

As someone who has always been fascinated with the rituals of death, I asked Kayode, “Why don’t we tell the story of gravediggers?” A few fevered pitches later, Kayode bought the idea, became gingered, and our journey started. 

At its core, The Gravediggers is an attempt to capture a sliver of the day-to-day experience of the people who make a living from burying the dead. Our intention with this doc is not to be didactic, moralising, or to wring out global implications. Instead, we aim to [hopefully] magnify and probably amplify the realities of people who fly under society’s radar of what’s “important.”

Nothing hammers this point like this one scene from the documentary. We had spent 20 minutes trying to get [another] Kayode, a bricklayer at the cemetery, to open up to us, but we needed more progress. He had given mostly monosyllabic responses to all our questions while shielding his core behind the cool, dark shades he had on. At one point, I asked him a simple question. 

“What don't you like about your job?”

Kayode seemed taken aback, almost as if he wasn’t used to his opinion being considered as important. There was a sigh and a pause in the mix. But after the pause, as if a spell had been broken, Kayode took off his glasses and started talking like a person for the first time since that afternoon. There was no facade, no high walls, just a few ordinary people connecting over the shared experience of living — which was precisely what we set out to do.

Friday, January 7, 2022.

As I step into his Uber, I can tell he’s an AC Milan fan. There’s a black AC Milan face cap on the dashboard. His chair covers are Rossoneri, red and black. I’m just trying to get to the office, but I’m also curious. 

“You must really like AC Milan,” I say. 

“Ah, I love AC Milan, die!” he says as a statement of faith. It’s followed by a brief moment of disappointment when he grabs his shirt under his hoodie and says, “Even the jers —” before he realises that he’s not wearing his jersey. “I no wear am today.”

“When did you first fall in love with AC?” I ask. 

“Milan v. Barca; 1994.” 

Barcelona walked onto the pitch that Wednesday night as favourites, but AC Milan thrashed them four-nil. 

“In 2003, I went to the cyber cafe and registered as an AC Milan fan,” he said. 

We’re halfway through the trip, and after one call he’s received ends with a quick “mo ń drive lọ́wọ́, let me call you back,” I ask him. 

“What’s your favourite Milan match ever?”

“Ahh, Milan v. Liverpool, return leg,” he says. 

“Ahh, 2007 revenge!” I remember the match. 

“Aha! Yes!”

AC Milan won the Champions League Final in Athens – two typical Inzaghi goals to one against Liverpool – but that night truly began two years prior in Istanbul. 

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The 2005 AC Milan side was incredible  —  Maldini, Seedorf, Kaka, the ruthless Gattuso. Of course, Pirlo was there that night in Istanbul, and so was Shevchenko. But My Uber driver, Gbemi, was in Lagos. 

“That night, I bet ₦15k  —  in 2005 o! See ehn; I don’t used to do online betting o, I want to be seeing the person that want to collect my money with my eyes.” He grips the steering tighter and leans forward. I can’t tell if it’s because of the point he’s trying to make or because he’s about to switch lanes on the 3rd Mainland Bridge. 

In the first minute, thirty-six-year-old Maldini scores the first goal. Crespo scores the second with an assist from Shevy a few minutes before halftime at the Atatürk Istanbul Stadium. 

In Lagos, “I give them money make them buy chicken.” He’s giddy again as if it’s the end of that first half in ‘05 again, and Crespo has just scored another goal from an insane Kaka assist in the forty-fourth minute, five minutes after he scored the last. AC Milan were three goals up against Liverpool. 

“Them done kill the chicken. Enjoyment done start,” he says.

Then the second half began. 

“Ah!”

Gerrard’s fifty-fourth-minute header was the first knock. Then Šmicer’s second goal came two minutes later with a shot from outside the box. The door was now open for Liverpool. 

Alonso’s rebound after his saved penalty levelled the match by the one-hour mark – three-three! Liverpool were back in it!

That match went into penalties. The early premonition came when Pirlo missed his penalty, but it was Shevchenko’s miss that was the final nail in AC Milan’s Coffin. Liverpool had staged a miraculous comeback and won the Champions League! Liverpool defeated AC Milan and Gbemi. 

“I just lie down for road,” he says. “I say, God, take betting away from me. Since that day, I never bet again.”

“Which area were you staying at the time,” I ask. 

“Ebute Metta there o,” he says, as we branch off the Yaba exit of 3rd Mainland Bridge. 

“Haha, me too.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I used to live in that Jakande Estate near Apapa Road. The first block on the top floor.” 

“Block 1?!”

“I can’t remember the name of the block because I was small, but we stayed opposite the *Abidemis, and —”

“Bukky!” he yells the name of the first child of the Abidemis. 

“Ah yes." Then I remember.  "Bukky died last week,” I blurt out. “She was buried this morning.”

There’s a moment of shock-induced silence, followed by a loud “Jesus Christ!”

He parks his car by the side of the road after we descend from the bridge. His hands are trembling. He’s trying to dial someone —the name reads Bayo, Bukky’s younger brother. 

“No no no no no no!”

The number is not connecting. 

“How did she die?”

“She was sick.”

He starts mapping out our entire block; I lived opposite the Abidemis’ door; a retired old couple stayed on the first floor under us, a lawyer on the ground floor. 

“The only people I remember are the old couple who lived under our flat,” I say. “And I remember them because they were always coming to complain that our playing was disturbing them. We left in ‘96.” 

“Ah, Bukky!” he screams. She was a teenager in 1996; I was just entering primary school. 

“She was forty-one,” I say. 

We’re quiet for a few moments. 

“Small world, eh?” I say. 

“Ah, this match that we were talking about, I watched it at the back of your block.”

I remember the block only from the perspective of my room window –  a clothing line, an uncompleted building where people gathered to watch big matches on a small screen. 

“Just park there,” I say as we pull up at my stop. 

A bell rings on his app; it’s a notification about another trip request. “I want to call my mum first and tell her,” he says, “she still lives there.”

Last Christmas, Bukky got a carton of frozen fish as a gift, then she grilled it all and shared it with her neighbours in front of her mini-flat in Ikorodu. That was the Bukky I knew and a few memories from the nineties, but not much else. She was like a second-degree connection that'd grown to feel like an eighth. I'd heard about her passing, just as he had, except mine was from my dad, not a stranger.

“What do you remember about her,” I ask, just before I step out of his car.

“She was so stubborn,” he says, “and she was so beautiful.” 

Thank you:

1. Ruka and Sonia, for the quick edits.

2. Peter, for looking at it with football eyes.

3. Tim Urban, for the headline inspiration from his totally unrelated You Won’t Believe My Morning.

Update on this tweet:

85 people have now said, “okay Fu’ad, let’s do thissss.” When this number gets to 200, I’ll turn it on. Get in line.

He was survived by his frail mother, whom no one was brave enough to tell. Alhaja just knew, somehow, that her son had died. He was survived by two siblings – an older brother and sister, who were secretly relieved it was over.

Before his death, Muri lived in his mother’s small apartment in a busy corner of Lagos Island – a single room where everything was aged or ageing poorly. The only natural light source was through the domot – a screen door attached to an old door that creaked at the slightest disturbance.

Everything in this room doubled as storage for old bags and broken things. Under the king-sized bed, on top of the shelf which hung above the bed. To the right stood an old fridge that had seen more use as a cupboard than as cooling storage. In the other corner, a chair dressed in heaps of clothes Alhaja couldn’t find a bag for.

There was barely enough standing room for three people at once in the room, and the ceiling fan hanging above, heavy with dust, spun so close to the bulb that the room got only minor interruptions of light. 

The dim lighting was why the morning Alhaja heard the loud thud that jolted her awake, she couldn’t tell what had happened. But the sound had been loud enough for a neighbour, who thought Alhaja had fallen, to come hurrying. Through the screen door, she found Muri’s body contorted on the floor. 

Muri had suffered a stroke. 

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The compound they lived in had ten similar-sized apartments. A small gutter boarded with planks doubled as the only pathway through the compound ran from the communal bathroom to the main entrance. There, it joined a bigger channel on the street. 

As Muri lay on the floor, limp on one part of his body, no one in the compound knew what to do. The neighbours had very few options regarding who to call. First, they’d barely seen Muri’s sister, Iya Muti, since her husband died months prior. The second option was Muri’s brother, Jamiu, but he lived on the outskirts of Lagos, several hours away. So they called the one person who’d left his number for everyone to reach for times like this – Bodun, Jamiu’s son.

A stroke happens when blood supply to the brain is interrupted or when the brain is bleeding. In a few minutes, brain cells start dying. The first few hours after a stroke is critical, and after four hours, the risk of disability climbs if treatment doesn’t begin. Every year, up to 200,000 people suffer strokes in Nigeria. 6 in 10 of them will die within the first six months. 

From when Muri first hit the ground to when Bodun finally arrived, six hours had passed. But Muri, a fighter, wasn’t dead yet. 

Bodun reached there just as the private ambulance service he’d called in advance arrived, and Muri was taken to the A&E ward of the Lagos Island General Hospital. There, Jamiu joined them.

A few hours later, Muri was in the back of an ambulance again, heading to a lab to have multiple tests carried out – the doctors had other concerns. 

After the tests and as they rode back to the hospital, the driver whispered to Jamiu, “Sir, whatever money the doctors tell you to spend on medicine, don’t bother.” Jamiu looked back at his brother and prayed silently, “Ọlọrun, bámi fi Ikú bó làṣírí.” God, please use death as a shroud for his secrets.

When the test results finally came, the doctors were looking at multiple organ failures. Muri was placed in intensive care. No one told Alhaja anything. 

By the next day, Iya Muti’s kids were by his bedside. A few months prior, they were standing by this same bed, with their own ill father in it. 

“When my sons told me he was on the same bed that my husband was,” Iya Muti told me, “I knew I was never going to visit that hospital. I couldn’t bear to go through what I went through with my husband first and then with my little brother.”

Her husband died less than two days after being admitted, and Muri had stood by his brother-in-law’s grave saying, inna lillahi, wa inna ilayhi raji'un. But Muri spent more than two days on that bed with his brother by his bedside. 

At the Accident and Emergency ward of a general hospital, there’s hardly ever any place to sit, not to talk of sleep. So Jamiu walked around when he got tired of standing. He pounced on it whenever there was a free seat and rested his head on the wall for a quick nap. But when someone came in with an emergency – a broken arm here, a knife in the stomach there, he’d take a walk.

Jamiu emptied Muri’s catheter every time it filled with brown piss. Then, when Muri’s mouth filled with spit, Jamiu wiped it with a towel so he wouldn’t choke on it. 

By the third night at the hospital, Jamiu needed a real bed and a shower, so he paid an overnight cleaner to check on Muri every few minutes. 

When Jamiu returned early the following day, Muri’s body was in the mortuary. That evening, Muri was buried at the Sura Cemetery, a few tombstones from his brother-in-law. Everyone who stood by his grave said inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.

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Muri was about 5’7, slouched and skinny. Burn scars ran from the right side of his face down his neck.

When he was alive, Muri started most mornings to the sound of the Muaddhin calling to prayer just before dawn. At the mosque, he stood toe to toe and shoulder to shoulder, with other people present. Finally, he’d finish his salah, first with a greeting to Allah, then to the people to his left and right. 

His next stop was a small corner close to the mosque, where he'd pay homage to grass, gin and Rothmans’. 

“A few months before he died,” Jamiu said, “I went to see Alhaja, and I saw Muri just sitting on the floor outside. I don’t know whether he drank scoochies or smoked, but he was drooling from one side of his mouth. He was also trying to eat, but he couldn’t lift the spoon in his hand to his mouth.”

Jamiu saw him like this often, too high to walk or eat, almost vegetative. Some days, he was violent. The last time anyone remembers him losing control, he turned on the most constant presence in his life, his mother. No one knows what led to it, but on the last night of Ramadan in 2017, he broke a bottle on her head. 

By the time Bodun reached the apartment to take Alhaja to a hospital, a neighbourhood mob had descended on Muri. Bodun found him on the ground, still surrounded by a few men. A cut above his right eye had flooded his face with blood, and his left eye had been punched shut. Muri just sat there, unmoved. 

Muri’s siblings believed that he was the overindulged lastborn. 

“When we were children,” Muri’s sister, Iya Muti said, “Jamiu and I went to live with our aunty. Muri was the only one who grew up with Alhaja. He grew up like an only child.” 

Every night before the bottle incident, Alhaja made sure of one thing; every time Muri returned home, whenever he returned home, there was always soup at home for Rice or Eba. She also never locked the aged door.

Whenever her other kids complained, she’d say, “But I’m his mother,” in an accent that reminded you of Ileya in Ijebu. A mother loves her child and hopes for the best. 

This sense of hope sent her to Ijebu in search of a wife for her son in 2007. Alhaja thought, perhaps, a marriage would bring a sense of responsibility into Muri’s life. She found him a wife, but nothing from the marriage lasted. Not the child Muri’s wife bore, who died a few hours after he was born. Not the marriage itself, because she left soon after her baby passed. 

Even before the marriage attempt, that hope also made Alhaja, with the support of Jamiu and Iya Muti, buy an okada for Muri in 2001. Then, perhaps, earning a livelihood would give him a sense of stability. But, one day, a few weeks after he got the okada, he didn't return home with it. This okada episode didn’t surprise Jamiu. 

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“After he came back from Ikoyi Prison in 1999,” Jamiu said, “I knew he’d reached his point of no return. It was inside that prison that he started taking everything without control.” 

Ikoyi Prison was the first time Muri had access to drugs he could afford with zero consequences. No brother or sister to disappoint. No mother to be heartbroken. 

In 2019, the prison officer-in-charge made it clear that 83% of 2,937 inmates held at the prison were awaiting trial. Overpopulation makes for a perfect breeding ground for the spread of diseases, competition for fewer resources, and perhaps worst of all, an incubation chamber for new vices.

Muri’s journey to Ikoyi Prison began when he was 22 in 1991, at the Muritala Muhammad International Airport. 

He’d gotten an American hospital invitation to receive free treatment for his burns after multiple letters and pleas. 

“We were all so happy and hopeful,” Iya Muti said. “Because of his injury, he was always in and out of hospitals for treatment and didn’t have much else happening with him.” So the family raised money for Muri’s flight ticket to get treatment abroad. But Muri had other plans. 

It wasn't uncommon to find Muri wrapped in bandages in 1991, but on the day he was to fly to the US, he was covered in more bandages than usual, which wasn’t much of a problem for the Nigerian airport security. 

“At first, we didn’t hear from Muri when he reached America,” Iya Muti said. “Our family in the US who was going to receive him also couldn’t confirm he’d arrived.” That’s when the worrying began. 

“In that time when we couldn’t reach him, Alhaja had a dream,” she said. “In the dream, as she handed Muri his passport, it fell inside water and got destroyed.”

It took finding a friend of a friend at the Nigerian Embassy to learn about Muri’s fate: while he’d successfully left Nigeria without incident, Muri never left the airport in the US – not as a free man at least. 

Underneath his bandages, wrapped tightly around his torso, were kilos of cocaine.

“We tried to understand what was happening, looked for who to blame,” Iya Muti said. “The person he was going to deliver the drugs to, we heard that he got killed in a raid.”

He spent the next three years in an American prison, never getting the treatment that made him travel in the first place. By early 1995, he was deported to Nigeria in the back of a plane and received by the rough hands of the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA.

Muri spent the next nine months at an NDLEA-run detention centre at their no-visitors-allowed head office in Ikoyi. Then, finally, some respite came for him when, for some extra cash pressed into the palm of an officer, his brother was allowed to visit him between 11 pm and 1 am, the only time they were guaranteed that the senior, stricter officers wouldn't show up. 

Until the officers did, a few weeks later.

“The night the NDLEA chairman Bamaiyi came, we hid in a gutter,” Jamiu laughed, “and we crawled on all fours to an adjacent street before jumping out and taking off. The visitors Bamaiyi caught that night spent the next month in detention with the people they came to visit.”

Cocaine made its big entry into the Nigerian zeitgeist in the eighties. In 2020, an Uber driver told me about his days working at the international airport in those years. “People used to tell us that they were carrying amala flour abroad,” he said. “They said they didn’t like Oyinbo food.”

They thought nothing of it “until Idiagbon opened our eyes.” On behalf of his commander-in-chief, Tunde Idiagbon showed up at the airport to give the staff a short speech about the ‘amala flour’. Idiagbon was General Muhammadu Buhari’s second-in-command and Chief of Staff from the New Year’s Eve coup in 1983 till a Babangida-led coup ousted their government in August 1985.  

In a 2012 interview with Ifreke Inyang, Buhari said about cocaine, “Wee-wee (weed) is planted here, but the hard drug, cocaine, most Nigerians don’t know what cocaine is. They (traffickers) just made Nigeria a transit point, and these people did it just to make money.”

Buhari’s justification for the crackdown was that “this drug is so potent that it destroys people, especially intelligent people.”

The government’s response to the cocaine deluge was capital punishment by way of Decree 20. One Wednesday in 1985, outside the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, an airport worker and two other men faced a firing squad of six men. 

The airport worker, Bartholomew Azubike Owoh, 26, smiled and said a prayer as the bullets plucked life out of him violently. Bartholomew was survived by a heartbroken family, one of them, Nkem Owoh aka Osuofia, one of the most iconic Nollywood actors of the last 30 years. 

Decree 20 was supposed to be a deterrent, but it turns out that when you execute people for a drug that makes people high or supposedly rich or both, you build attention. People who didn’t know what cocaine was at the time now knew about the white powder that got people shot at Kirikiri.

Mukaila Ojuloge, a man relatively famous in the commerce-heavy Oke Arin corner of Lagos Island where his father had sold meat, and his mother ran a small shop, was one of the people executed by the decree. 

Muri was a teenager who spent a lot of his days in Oke Arin when Mukaila was killed. “I think he started picking up bad habits from the friends he was following in the area,” Iya Muti said. 

At the time, Alhaja was the matriarch of their prosperous family business, a wholesale depot that connected stockfish from Iceland to willing eaters across Nigeria.

From the proceeds of this business, Muri found the cash to fund his new itch. “We’d count the money we made by the end of the day, only to find the money short and Muri nowhere to be found,” Jamiu said.

“On one particular day – this was in 1987 – I counted the money, and it wasn’t balancing. Ah, I was angry ehn. I just knew it was Muri.”

So, he went looking for Muri, and he knew exactly where to go: Woro Scott. An alley off Nnamdi Azikiwe Street, Woro Scott was a short walk from the then-to-be-completed Lagos Central Mosque.

There, for ₦5, you could get a punch; a rolled-up piece of paper about the size of a rizla with enough cocaine wrapped in it for one snort. Jamiu knew where to go because his old classmates from secondary school ran the darkest corners in that alley.

“I’m not the one that sold it to him o,” one of the dealers protested as Jamiu approached him, raging. 

It didn’t take long to make out the face of a boy sitting on the ground, leaning against a wall in a dark corner; his baby brother. At 18, and even though he already smoked everything possible, cocaine was when Jamiu first felt like they’d completely lost control of Muri. 

In October of that year, Pablo Escobar made his first appearance on the Forbes list. His 40% stake in the Medellin cartel, which controlled up to 80% of the global market, put his net worth at over $2 billion. A piece of this market was along West Africa’s coast, which quickly became a transit route for cocaine and heroin heading to Europe. It’s also how some of that cocaine ended up in Nigeria, in Lagos, in Oke Arin, for mules to carry and others to snort at Woro Scott.

“I thought it was just igbo,” Jamiu said. Cocaine wasn’t new to Jamiu, at least the knowledge of it. He’d attended the tribunal hearings of at least two people he knew personally. 

“Every time people were caught carrying,” Jamiu said, “it shocked us because those who knew them weren’t told anything. So we just found out when they got arrested.”

Jamiu punctuates every sentence with “Muri was spoiled” or “Our mother didn’t let anyone discipline him or say harsh things to him.” Iya Muti agrees, but disagrees with how Jamiu expressed his reproach. “One time,” she said, “Jamiu was so angry that he picked up a stool and flung it at Muri. If Muri didn’t dodge, he would have ended up at the hospital that day.”

When I asked them about a time before this Muri, they agreed on one thing: January 1984, things changed when the burns happened.

Muri was a Form Three student when he had an accident in the chemistry lab. During a class on acids, someone didn’t place a reagent container properly, and before anyone could catch it, it fell off the shelf and spilt. When sulphuric acid spills on the skin, it dehydrates the skin cells, then destroys it like fire destroys flesh. What starts off feeling like a prick becomes a burn very quickly.

Risi, one of Muri’s friends, was in the splash line, and her arms got burned. Nureni, another friend of Muri’s, got burned on his arms and part of his back. But it was Muri, who was directly in the line of the splash, that had the most severe burns. 

The acid got to the side of his face, his neck, and most of his torso.

“The only part of his body we could touch that wasn’t open flesh was his head,” Iya Muti said.

A few weeks later, Risi and Nureni were back at school, but Muri’s return would take longer. So, Alhaja brought him back to Lagos to get better care at the teaching hospital and spent all her time caring for Muri, leaving her children to worry about the family business.

She stayed by Muri’s bed every day, cleaning his shit, wiping his behind, and emptying his catheter whenever it filled with piss. With the help of nurses, she turned him gently several times a day to reduce the bedsores. She was there every time they had to change his bandages. She’d leave only to get food or other supplies.

“Every time I visited,” Jamiu said with a touch of affection, “he’d crack jokes. He never stopped cracking jokes.”

Muri spent all of that year in bed. His whole world was the hospital, medical staff, other patients, the occasional family visitors, and his mother. All he knew of the outside world came from hospital banter and the few times he could lay his hands on a radio. 

Outside, 1984 was an eventful year in Nigeria. Major General Muhammadu Buhari had not only seized power from the civilian government but he also passed laws – decrees, in fact – that were a reflection of his regime’s goals. Decrees that punished everything that looked like a threat to state security, gave unlimitable power to the military to arrest and detain and made it legal to purge the civil service – 200,000 civil servants fired. That stifled press freedom. 1984 saw Fela get detained at the airport for alleged currency smuggling. 

But 1984 was also a good year for football, with Nigeria reaching the Nations Cup final.

“We spent so much money in the hospital that year,” Iya Muti said, “that we started pleading for anyone to support us. We even wrote a plea to the government. Finally, one man came forward to help. Ah, all of us went to his house to thank him.”

Ajanaku, that’s what everyone called the man, was larger than life – socialite, community benefactor. When the family came to thank him for his generosity, he responded with “Ah, it’s nothing”. But it was, in fact, something. 

“Remember that cocaine they caught Muri with,” Iya Muti sighed. “It was Ajanaku that gave him to carry all those years later.”

When Muri left the hospital at 16, he realised that life would never be the way it used to be. “It’s like because of the accident, he just suddenly became uninterested in everything,” Iya Muti said.

People look at the injured with pity or repulsion, and it’s worse when you’re a teenager. Muri wasn’t only burned on over two-thirds of his body, he’d also just lost a year of his life while the world outside kept going.

“It was a few months after he left the hospital I first saw him with weed,” Jamiu said.

Despite coming to terms with the great difficulty Muri experienced in the year of the burn, it was difficult for Muri’s brother and sister, now 59 and 61 respectively, to make sense of why he turned out the way he did. Jamiu couldn’t see past his drug life. Iya Muti couldn’t see much past his bad company. And for his ex-wife, no one knows where she is or cares. 

The person who saw him from a larger perspective was his mother, the one who loved him through all of it. “Alhaja never really recovered from what happened to Muri,” Bodun said. Hearing his body drop in the dark, helpless as he lay there for hours, in and out of consciousness, waiting. 

Seeing her other children return home without her son and knowing she’d never see him again – at least not on this side – something changed, but not rapidly in the way a thing breaks, but gradually in the way butter melts. Over the following year, after Muri died, she lost things. The first thing was her memory. She’d hold on to objects tightly when she tried to remember things as if the memory was this tangible thing trying to slip away. The next thing she lost was her sight – that one she lost utterly. 

But it was when she lost her hearing that she started to disappear faster. Her body shrunk to over half of what it used to be in her days when she ran a flourishing business.

Alhaja’s caretaker, the one her family hired to care for her as her condition deteriorated, was the one who called this time after she’d died in the middle of 2019. That evening, she was buried on the piece of land she bought a few months before Muri’s accident. 

“When you take out jewellery, it’s the last major asset she bought, and she never used it,” Jamiu said. She paid for the land and got a grave. 

Bodun, too, saw Muri through a slightly wider lens. 

“Muri didn’t die well,” he said pitifully. “But even with all his problems, the times that we spoke when his head was clear, you could feel like it was coming from a place of intelligence. The way he picked his words when he was calm and argued his points when he wasn’t asking you for some change.”

Muri was a bright man, but his life never really shone. Was it because of the trauma of the burns or the ensuing drug problems? Was it timing, because why did cocaine choose that year to show up at Woro Scott? Was it his recklessness? No one knows, but everyone agrees on this; whatever course was set for Muri before the lab accident had been changed forever.

Muri was born January 4, 1969. He wanted to be things that no one remembers. In January 1985, he had a lab accident. It’s like being 15, standing at the top of a flight of stairs, and one accident pushes you down. For the next 33 years, he rolls down these stairs. At the bottom of the stairs is his grave, and he fell into it on the 7th of May, 2018. Muri never found his footing.

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Post-script:

I’m sitting in Iya Muti’s tiny living room in Lagos Island as she shares her memories of Muri. The sun is setting outside, a masquerade downstairs asks people for money politely, with a cane. 

“I didn’t see my brother before he died,” Iya Muti said, “but after he died, I had a dream.”

It’s at a busy junction, somewhere in Lagos Island too, and the street is thick with a harmattan haze. Iya Muti can see Muri in the distance, and he looks lost. 

“He started calling my name,” Iya Muti said as she got out of her chair and started pacing across her tiny living room. “But he couldn’t see me. And so, I hid. I just hid. I still don’t know what that dream means.”

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Thanks to:

1. Ruka for editing this through five drafts.

2. Mariam for the art direction.

3. The little 500-words-a-day Whatsapp group (feat. Ope, Hummer) that got the first draft out.

4. Esther for the fact-checking.

5. The over half-a-dozen people who I spoke to, and who also helped me with (mostly) early feedback for this. (feat. Hassan, Sunshine, Toheeb, Eruke, Samson)

6. Nana Banana, for allowing me stay up late (sometimes).

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One more thing:

I’m actively considering publishing more frequently. It requires a lot of time and resources. So, I’m wondering if you’d be open to making me write more frequently. I’m talking twice a month at least.

Make Me Write More

At first, everyone thought it was malaria because of the fevers and aches. Some said cholera because the rainy season means cholera season. But cholera doesn’t leave people bleeding to death from their mouths and noses. 

Others thought it was just isolated cases of people getting poisoned, but if there’s anything Gloria’s life has taught her, it’s that nothing is a coincidence. 

A teenage Gloria was living in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia when the rumours of war began in late ‘89. Charles Taylor, who had just moved to Cote d’Ivoire in December, was starting an uprising to topple the government of his former boss, Samuel Doe. 

When war comes, families are scattered in every direction, scampering for safety, like lizards when a hawk descends. 

Gloria’s parents asked her to gather all the other children in the family, and take them out of the country by road until things became certain. Gloria and the children travelled through dense forests and harmattan dust roads to the North of Liberia. Her sister headed east to Freetown, Sierra Leone, a country that was itself less than eighteen months from their own civil war. 

On the 23rd of December, Gloria reached a Liberia-Cote d’Ivoire border town in Nimba County, the biggest of Liberia’s 15 counties. 

On the Ivoirien side of the border, another exodus was happening, led by Charles Taylor, and by the dawn of Christmas eve, Charles Taylor re-entered Liberia forcefully with 100 rebels. Waiting with their allegiance were thousands of people from Liberia’s Northern tribes – the uprising was alive. Doe’s government responded by sending two battalions of the Armed Forces. 

And so, the First Liberian Civil War began, with Gloria and the children trapped in unfamiliar territory, surrounded by strangers. Gloria, the oldest of the pack, was 15. 

It took a ceasefire in ‘95 and an election in ‘97 for Gloria and her family to return home. Charles Taylor, the rebel leader she met at the border, was now President of the new government. 

That year, Gloria returned home to Monrovia, not just because it was now safe, but because she’d finally graduated from high school. She was 23. But as she returned home to reunite with her family, she was carrying a virus in her, one she went on to infect her entire family of nine with – chickenpox. 

Every infection, conflict or rumour of conflict since then has met a vigilant Gloria. 

When Liberians finally had a name for this new ‘thing’, the virus had begun to spread, and by the end of March 2014, Liberia had confirmed its first two cases of Ebola.

While Ebola travels by physical contact with the bodily fluids of the infected, fear has no such physical limitations. Entrances of homes had chlorinated water for handwashing on entry or exit. Hand sanitisers were lifestyle essential. But this came too late for some people. 

Because some of the first symptoms of Ebola are malaria-like – fever, pains, fatigue, aches and a bad appetite – some of the earliest infected were healthcare workers. They approached these first Ebola patients, touching them with the assumption that it was a familiar sickness. By mid-June, the first known deaths in Monrovia had occurred as a result of the virus – of the seven people who died, one of them was a nurse, including four other members of her household, one of them a baby. 

In July 2014, Gloria had to see a doctor for pain unrelated to Ebola – it was a sharp pain travelling up and down her spine. To get specialist care, she had to travel to Tapeta, a small town over 300 kilometres from home, somewhere in Nimba County. It was going to be a short trip, but still, she worried about leaving Cherry and Blooming behind – Cherry’s her niece, and Blooming is Cherry’s daughter. 

Blooming was born in 2011 with congenital glaucoma, a condition that caused raised pressure in her eyes. All vision is currently impaired. 

Cherry’s mother had heard about an eye doctor in Ganta and thought it’d be a good idea to seek help for Blooming’s eyes. 

“Haven’t you heard that it has reached Ganta,” Gloria said before heading for Tapeta, “why don’t we wait till it’s safe?” 

A few days later, Cherry called. “I’m calling to check on you,” she said, “but we’re in Ganta. Mama told us to go to Ganta to see the eye doctor.”

And as Gloria worried about their safety over the phone, Cherry tried to reassure her, “Aunty, if I’m the only one, then Ebola won’t reach anyone.” Cherry, Gloria’s darling niece, was a hermit who barely socialised.

“Take care of yourself and the baby,” Gloria said. When she returned to Monrovia, mother and child hadn’t returned from Ganta.

Ganta is an ambitious city of fewer than 50,000 people, just south of the Guinea border. It’s also the second-most populous city in Liberia.

There are multiple accounts about how Ebola reached Ganta. One account says that in July, a street vendor went visiting in Lofa County and returned sick. After spending a few hours at the clinic upon his return, he was discharged. 

Later that day, a woman took her pregnant daughter to the hospital. The pregnant daughter was admitted on the bed the street vendor had been on, while her mother sat next to her. 

Eventually, the street vendor, the mother, and 14 members of her family died from Ebola. As Ebola divided the living from the dead, so did it divide little Ganta. People on one side of the road stopped crossing to the side of the road where the family had died. It remained that way till November 2014. 

Another account says that a boy was home visiting from Lofa County. “The boy brought Ebola home to his mother who cared for him, not knowing it was Ebola,” a contact in Ganta told Gloria. He eventually died, and his mother had him buried. Shortly after, she came down with the illness and also died. She wasn’t just anyone, she was a banker with significant clout across Ganta. People across the town showed up for her burial – many of them believed she was poisoned. 

In their time at Ganta, Cherry and Blooming stayed in the banker’s compound as a guest of one of its many occupants. When she eventually called Monrovia, Cherry’s first words were “Aunty, I’m sick, and I’ve never felt this sick in my whole life.”

The pain cut Gloria in half. 

Cherry is the first grandchild of her family. Her mother had her just before she went to college, and thus, her care became someone else’s responsibility. That someone else was Gloria, and although she was quite young herself, everyone thought she was Cherry’s mother – she in fact raised Cherry like her own daughter.

“How is Blooming?” Gloria asked.

“We’re about 11 in the house,” Cherry said, “everyone is sick.” 

Everyone except Blooming. 

In August, Nigeria got its first death from the virus that later infected 20 people and killed 8, including Dr Ameyo Adadevoh, the lead doctor who treated the index case. According to the W.H.O., 142 new cases and 77 deaths were recorded in less than three days in August across Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Less than two weeks earlier, the organisation had declared Ebola in West Africa a public health emergency of international concern. On August 6, two days before, the President of Liberia declared a state of emergency. 

All attempts by Gloria and her family to find an ambulance available to go to Ganta failed. Emergency services were overwhelmed. Eventually, they found a cab willing to make the 300-kilometre trip.

Her brother-in-law, a doctor, wasn’t going to let her take the trip. Gloria later said, “They said my B.P. was too high, so he went with his wife – my little sister Rose – and the driver.”

Cherry was already so weak when they reached Ganta, that she had to crawl into the car herself – no one could help her, because no one could touch her. A man in that compound in Ganta was looking after Blooming as Cherry got sicker. He eventually passed away from Ebola, and his name was Jerry. 

As the cab headed back to Monrovia, Cherry sat quietly as always, with Blooming on her lap. The doctor urged her to drink water and stay hydrated. “Cherry, please be strong,” Gloria texted. “As long as you reach Monrovia, you’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”

On the 8th of August, upon entering Monrovia, Cherry and Blooming were immediately admitted into the Ebola Treatment Unit. From this point on, she no longer had access to a phone. 

By the next morning, Gloria and the family headed to the ETU. The tents were surrounded by a red, mesh fence, a boundary between the agonising pain of the sick, and the gut-wrenching anxiety of their loved ones.

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Every day, the bodies kept coming and getting dumped, some dead, some all but dead.

“Cherry are you there? Can you hear me?” Gloria would shout. 

A sick man came out of an SUV he’d driven himself and entered the ETU. He was never seen again. 

“I’m here. We’re here. We’re praying with you!” she’d shout another day. 

A family of five entered the ETU, holding hands in a single file. They were never seen again. 

“Nurse, help me, please. Cherry – she’s a soft child. Help me – make sure she eats. Please.”

“Your daughter is getting weaker by the day,” the nurse said. “But the baby – the baby is here. The baby is fine.”

It was Sunday the 24th of August before they saw Blooming again. A doctor in a hazmat suit came outside, Blooming in hand. She had no clothes on, only diapers. The doctor raised Blooming as high as his arms could let him. “She’s okay, nothing has happened to her.”

“Fine. What of Cherry?”

The doctor turned around and went back in. 

“How is Cherry?” Gloria asked the next doctor she saw. The response was silence. When the third doctor came out, her brother-in-law had had enough. 

“Here’s my medical licence,” he said, “can I go in? Whatever happens, is at my own risk.” They agreed, he geared up and went in. 

When he came out almost thirty minutes later, he was alone. He walked up to them, Rose and Gloria, hugged them tightly. 

“Let’s go home. We’ve lost Cherry.” 

Cherry Adikwu passed away after 17 days of fighting Ebola in the ETU. Her body was cremated the next day.

Early in August, Liberia’s Health authorities had issued a directive that the bodies of all the people killed by the Ebola virus be cremated instead of buried. After Ebola has killed a person, the body of the deceased remains contagious for up to 7 days. 

When they saw Blooming again on the 25th of August, a doctor in a hazmat suit held her to her chest, again with no clothes. 

“We’ve tested this girl three times,” the doctor said. “We’ve sent her blood to Belgium, and all the results say the same thing – she hasn’t caught the virus. We can no longer continue to keep her.”

And so it was that Blooming, who stayed in a house in Ganta where 11 people got sick, came back to Monrovia sitting on the laps of her sick mother, staying in the ward surrounded by the sick, somehow stayed immune to the virus. 

She was there, as the virus travelled in the bodies of those around her, forcing their cells to explode, damaging their organs from the inside, and making them bleed from their eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and even give bloody diarrhoea. Blooming was there, seated, and unable to see anything when her mother breathed her last. 

She was in the thick of it all, and she came out unscathed. 

A 2015 study of Ebola survivors found that while some people came in contact with the virus and recovered, another group who came in contact with it never got infected at all. The women in the study “are phenomenal women who have had a horrendous story to tell,” Prof Miles Caroll told Guardian UK. 

Prof Miles Carroll is a virologist and Head of Research, National Infection Service, Public Health England. The team studied 60 women, including 25 from Guéckédou, the town in Guinea where the West African wave is believed to have started with a 2-year-old boy. The women in the study, despite cleaning up after the sick and caring for them, never got infected. The study suggests that it’s in their genes, and it appears that Blooming’s case fits.

When Blooming returned home, she returned to a Liberia that was paranoid and on the edge. On the 18th of August, a mob in West Point, Monrovia’s biggest ghetto, had descended upon an Ebola clinic in their neighbourhood, protesting its very presence there. Protests quickly turned violent, leading to the looting of the clinic and the eviction of everyone inside, including the infected. There were real fears that protesters might have gotten infected.

By the next day, the Liberian government had quarantined West Point and President Sirleaf Johnson had declared a nationwide curfew. By the 22nd, violence broke out again, with the armed forces firing at protesters, killing one teenage boy, and injuring others. 

Closer to home, Blooming’s household was ostracised by the entire community. No one was taking cash from them, the church community wanted nothing to do with them, and they weren’t allowed into the markets. 

No one wanted anything to do with a family whose child had returned from the ETU. “This is when I knew that Ebola had really hit us Liberians,” Gloria said.

The next few months were the hardest. Gloria’s contract at the NGO she worked for had expired in July, and she didn’t renew it. Her mental health depreciated as the weeks went by as she was plunged into shock first, then depression. Her hypertension worsened. 

In November, President Sirleaf lifted the state of emergency in the country. That same month, Gloria moved out of her family house with Blooming, to a new neighbourhood where no one knew about her or the little one. It was also around this time she began calling Blooming by another name: Miracle. 

“She was such a strange child,” Gloria said, almost trembling, “she’d sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night. And hug me, and say it’s okay.”

2015 was when Gloria decided to give life a chance again, “for Miracle”. By April, she got a job working at an NGO, four times less than what she used to earn. But she needed to be with people, and thus, her office became her healing ground.

To fulfil her need for closure, Gloria held a memorial service for Cherry on August 24th, 2016, two years after she passed. She invited family and friends, with a blown-up portrait of her surrounded by roses. 

“Like a proper burial,” Gloria said. Every second Wednesday of March since then, she’d buy helium-filled balloons, write little notes in them to Cherry, and release them. Across Liberia, this is called Decoration Day, a national festival Liberians have marked since 1916, where they refurbish the graves of their deceased, clearing away the bushes and cleaning the headstones. 

Other times, she’d buy roses, drive to a river – any river – and leave the roses there. On the 9th of May 2015, Liberia was declared Ebola-free. 

Their biggest hurdle now is Miracle’s vision. Glaucoma has no cure, but treatment is possible to slow down further damage and prevent permanent vision loss. Despite her right eye being in better shape, the race to restore Miracle’s vision is a race against time.

While Gloria struggles to find funding, these days you’ll find Miracle, now 9, in grade school. Whenever she doesn’t show up at her school for the visually impaired, her classmates come to the house to see her, huddled together. She’d crack jokes with them, mostly mimicking Gloria’s speech.

Keep your sweets, she’ll pass, but in true Liberian fashion, she never turns down Rice and Torborgee or Palava sauce. 

When music is playing, she sits quietly, absorbs, and sings it later while rocking her tambourine. On Sundays in church, she hangs around the drumset – she loves the bass drum the most. 

If she feels your presence and likes you, she’ll walk up to you, feel your palms, and ask for your name. When you ask for hers, she’ll say, “my name is Bloomingdale Miracle Adikwu.”

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Thank you:

• Dounard for being a dependable plug in Monrovia and introducing me to Gloria and Blooming.

• Kayode, for bonding with

• Solomon, Esther, Nnamdi, for the extra perspective.

• I’d kept this draft sitting for almost a year, and Ope pushed it to the finish line. Thank you.