Married for two days

LIFE often seems like a stretch of sorrows punctuated by dots of happiness. Literary writers, for one, understand this fact very well, and so their tragedies are typically more profound than their comedies, perhaps because of what I once described in a linguistic stylistics paper as “the intellectual fascination with sorrow.” Sorrow indeed goes into the core of the human soul: it is a reality check. On this page on May 7, 2022, I referenced the sad story of Mary Whiddon of Chagford, England, which took place on October 11, 1641. Mary, who had just exchanged marital vows with her husband at the Church of St Michael the Archangel, I wrote, “was basking in the adulation of cheering crowds when a bullet wended its way through the crowd and silenced her forever. The culprit was a scorned suitor who had for months lamented his unrequited love.” I was lamenting the mindless killing an Igbo soldier, Private Gloria Matthew, and her fiancée, MWO Audu M. Linus (retired), who were on their way to their traditional wedding ceremony in Imo State, by Eastern Security Network (ESN) terrorists. The terrorists not only gang-raped the woman before her fiancee, whom they then gunned down with his companions, they in fact decapitated the horror-struck bride. It is a crime that polluted the land, and may the murderers’ bloody hands wither away.

Well, the ESN dogs are at their murderous game once again. Penultimate Monday, they cut down a 22-year-old  woman, Mrs Ifeoma Amarachukwu Ochiagha, in Nnobi, Anambra State, while enforcing their senseless sit-at-home decree, as vigilantes from Nnewi tried to repel them. The vigilante commander, Mr Eloka Ubajekwe, was killed during the duel, and so was Amarachukwu, whose wedding had just taken place the previous Saturday. Lamented a relative: “Amarachukwu, who got married on Saturday, met her sudden death (unknown gunmen) the next Monday. May your gentle soul rest in peace, Nwadiana.” I don’t know what Nwadiana means, but it looks like a term of endearment. An innocent woman just starting her marital life was cut down by those who claim to be the protectors of their people, but who habitually rob, rape and kill the same people!

In my piece, Why separatists should not be trusted with power (October 23, 2021), I narrated the September 29, 2019 fatal ordeal of Florence Ayafor, a mother of three returning from the funeral of a loved one in Pinyin, North-West Cameroon. Florence was slaughtered by the separatists called Amba Boys, who had snatched from a vehicle along the Bali-Bamenda road. They stripped her stark naked, raped her to stupor, then tied a rope around her neck and dragged her body, legs wide apart, along the dirt road, for several hundreds of meters. Then, as I wrote, “one of the masked fighters proclaiming the Ambazonian dream viciously detached her head from her body. The body convulsed as the knife went in.” Freedom fighters!

The Amba Boys, who say they want to free Southern Cameroon from French terror, are still at their murder, robbery and rape ‘games’. And the ordinary people of Southern Cameroon, who continue to be at the receiving end of the brutalities of their French-dominated government, including the revenge attack by Cameroonian soldiers on Ebam village in 2020 which saw at least 20 women raped, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), remain stuck between a rock and a hard place. That is exactly the same position in which the innocent people of the South-East have found themselves: they are slaughtered by herdsmen and ESN dogs, and left unprotected by government forces. If they complain about the herders, who gang-raped a 13-year-old in Aku, Igbo Etiti, Enugu State recently, they get no respite and if they dare disobey ESN, their head gets disconnected from their bodies. ESN dogs rob restaurants, filling stations and supermarkets: they slaughter Keke riders in cold blood and kill okada riders and security agents for sport. If these are freedom fighters and liberators, then how cruel the real oppressors must be! I saw a video where ESN dogs poured the jollof rice a woman was selling to feed her household into a gutter, and I shuddered at the sheer cruelty. That was the feeling I had as an undergraduate when I saw a woman being ordered by a certain lecturer to throw her pot of freshly cooked corn into a gutter, because she had no authority to ply her trade on campus.

The demons of bloodshed are indeed having a party. In January, a traveling couple got murdered by suspected hoodlums in Anambra State, and their corpses were dumped inside the boot of a vehicle with registration number EE-621-EU. In South Carolina, United States, a drunk driver, Jamie Lee Komoroski, crashed a rented vehicle into a golf cart conveying a new bride, 34-year-old Samantha Miller, and her husband away from their wedding reception on April 28, 2023. Miller died in her wedding dress. Like Mary Whiddon, who got married but had no taste of man and whose epitaph read that she died “a matron, yet a maid,” Miller went to her grave on her supposed day of joy.

Life is indeed a nightmare, and bride killing isn’t always at the hands of strangers. In November 2023, 29-year-old Chaturong Suksuk, an ASEAN Para Games silver medalist, was heard arguing with his wife, Kanchana Pachunthuek, 44, at their reception in the Wang Nam Khieo district of northeastern Thailand. Shortly thereafter, he massacred her; her 62-year-old mother, Kanchana Pachunthuek, her 38-year-old sister, Kornika Manator, and another person, Kingthong Klajorho. Stray bullets hit two other guests, killing one of them, Thong Nonkhunthod, 50, and injuring another, Bamrung Chaterarat. The ex-soldier killed the victims in a drunken rage following the arguments over his insecurities. Again, history is dotted with stories of uxoricide, the act of killing of one’s own wife. Ptolemy XI of Egypt had his wife and stepmother, Berenice III, murdered 19 days after their wedding in 80 BC. Herod the Great had his second wife, Mariamne I, strangled on trumped up adultery charges. He acted just like his kindred spirit, King Henry VIII of England, who executed two of his six wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, on false charges of adultery, treason and incest. Roman Emperor Tiberius had his second wife, Julia, starved to death in 14 AD on adultery charges, while she was in exile on Pandataria.

And so Ifeoma Amarachukwu, two days old in her marital home, perished just like that. Sad! May her family and friends find divine help to overcome this hour of trial. May her killers perish in worse circumstances and lack even the funeral of a dog. Readers, I pray that we shall not suffer loss of our children. Amen.

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