" Every time the Ikoro sings, even our dead ancestors stop to listen," Mama once said.

My scepticism which developed from childhood didn't buy that line, until the first time I heard the deep, bone chilling hum of the great gong.

I was outside when papa made his way from his hut.

" Nnennaya, it's too early for you to be outside," he said gently, putting on his sandals on that cold harmattan morning.

“ Is all well? I heard it too.”

He narrowed his eyes, and contemplated for a while. “ The Ikoro doesn't  bring good news, my child. If it were so, it wouldn't call a man up from his sleep.”

His words were carefully selected like the noble speech the elders wore like a hat, which often irritated me.

“ Come back on time, will you?”

He chuckled, and waved me away. I have no doubt he would have barked at anyone else who said that to him, including Mama.

Hanging by our dwarf fence, I watched other men leave their homes until the village fell into a disconcerting tranquility.

Papa returned with a grave sigh. " Some of our children have been reported missing. The elders suspect our white visitors but the chief disagrees," he spoke to Mama, lowly in spirit.

“ Please, limit the way you send Nnennaya and Uchenna on errands.”

Papa's worries turned out right. My little brother went missing few months later. I stared, frozen, the second he was snatched from my hand.

It weren't  the white visitors that I saw, it were my own people. Unknown, yet of my skin colour.

Screaming proved futile, and for months, Papa tried to convince me it wasn't my fault.

" There was nothing you could do," he often said, but I could feel the unspoken blames in Mama's eyes.

Our relationship remained strained, and the rift deepened after Papa's death.

She remarried and I was left to wander in the mire of my guilt.

I stayed long enough to see the visitors become our masters. Right after another call from the Ikoro for unity. Maybe, no one was there to listen.

The white visitors brought schools, and churches and hospitals. Seemingly good things, but it became the beginning of our end as a people, and the era of servitude.

Papa wasn't there anymore to tell me what the Ikoro sings. I was sailed away to a distant farm where I imagined my brother might have come as well. The last of the faces I saw when the bargain was struck was Mama's. 

I never blamed her. She might never heal from the lose of Uchenna, but seeing the little bump on her belly, I prayed for a better tomorrow.

Nevertheless, I served with all my heart in search of redemption, and the peace I lacked since the day my little brother was taken from me.

As I pen these words, I know that this is a prison of my choice. It wasn't created by the white visitors, my own people formed it because it weren't  the white visitors that took my brother from my hand and stripped me of a mother's love.

( Imagining the trans-atlantic slave trade experience).