Yes—Mama Tare, my mother’s friend, my mother’s sister in all but name.
She was more than a neighbor; she was family.
Our homes were joined not by walls but by laughter.
By the aroma of soup drifting from pot to pot.
By the habit of sharing meals without counting portions.
No quarrels. Not once.
Perhaps there was nothing to quarrel about.
Or perhaps, in those days, community meant more than conflict.
Yet beneath all that laughter, the ground was shifting.
Oil had been struck in Oloibiri in 1956.
It came with promises—bright, rich, sweet promises.
But the promises never reached us.
The creeks soured.
The farmlands blackened.
The fish fled the rivers.
And wealth flowed outward—to Lagos, to London, to boardrooms far away—
while the people at the source remained poor.
By the time I was a boy, you could hear the murmurs.
By the late 1990s, the murmurs had become war cries.
Young men with no jobs, no hope, no future—
they picked up arms.
They called it resource control.
Others called it lawlessness.
Whatever the name, the Niger Delta was aflame.
It was in those years my mother reminded us of our blood ties.
“My children, you are not strangers.
Your father’s aunt married into the creeks.
You have Ijaw cousins.”
Somebody help me tell Tompolo.
And I remembered.
Yes—I remembered.
Their visits were unlike any other.
The drums rattled our chest bones.
The laughter spilled across our walls.
The gifts of the river came with them—
smoked fish, periwinkles, palm oil red as fire, palm wine frothing at the neck.
And always, in the background, Robert Ebizimor’s voice.
His music rose from the cassette player like the tide itself.
Songs of fishermen, warriors, injustice and longing—
but also resilience.
He sang as though sorrow could be swallowed in dance.
Dance, dance, and forget your sorrow.
A command. A consolation.
Years later, in Bayelsa, that memory returned—cruel, sharp, unforgiving.
We had gone on a humanitarian mission.
The boat from Bomadi creaked like an old man.
We were filled with zeal, with hope, with the scent of Banga soup thick in the air.
And then—
the shadows came.
Boys, still boys, yet hardened into men by anger.
They burst into the house.
They demanded money.
They threatened the women.
They seized an old volunteer.
I stepped forward.
“I am the leader,” I said, though my voice trembled.
“Take me instead.”
And they did.
Rough hands.
Sharp blows.
Dragged into the bush, muttering about their shrine.
And there, stumbling in the dark, one thought pierced me like a blade:
These were my cousins’ neighbors.
My own Ijaw kin by blood.
And another thought came—bitter and late:
I had forgotten to tell them I was a Warri boy.
That my roots ran in the same soil.
That their cousins were my cousins too.
Perhaps it would have changed nothing.
Perhaps it would have changed everything.
But the moment had passed.
The irony cut deep.
The same people who once carried Ebizimor’s music into my childhood,
who once brought masquerades to make us clap until our palms stung—
were now leading me to captivity.
And in my ears, unbidden, his refrain returned:
Dance, dance, and forget your sorrow.
Only now—no dance, only sorrow.
But God was not absent.
On the path, salvation came through a woman.
The mother of a child I had treated earlier that day.
She recognized me.
She pleaded in her dialect.
And after long argument, they released me.
That night, bruised but free, I remembered Romans 8:35:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
The answer was clear.
Not militants. Not fear. Not betrayal by kin.
God had used an Ijaw mother on the road to set me free
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