In the African culture, the Igbo culture to be precise there were a lot of absurd traditions.
Traditions that hearing them alone would make your blood boil. One of them being the OSU caste system.
There were different ways an individual could become an OSU.
There were sacred streams in the community and if anyone fetches water from such streams, he/she would become Osu.
If a man/woman slept overnight at a shrine he/she would become Osu too.
And to top it all off, once a man or a woman became an Osu, all the children he/she would produce shall all be Osu's it was that bad.
They were treated like the dirt of the community, inferior human beings.
My name is Chima, I am the first out of four children, I was not an OSU, or am i one but what I experienced was so dehumanizing and it all started when I lost my dad.
“Chima” I heard my name being called by my mom.
“Ma I’m coming,” I said.
While going to meet my mom, I was a bit suspicious because when she called my name her voice cracked a bit. My mother is a strong woman and that was something new to me so I immediately knew something was wrong.
When I got there, I saw my mom in a pool of her tears.
She was crying silently and that scene broke my heart into a million pieces.
“Mummy, what is it, why are you crying”? I questioned my mother.
“Chima my son,” she said.
“Yes, mummy I’m here what is the problem” I replied.
“Your father had an accident and he didn’t make it” she broke the news to me.
All the strength in my body left as soon as I heard what she said, I forgot how to breathe for a minute and didn’t notice until I heard my mom calling my name frantically.
I fainted upon hearing the news.
It broke my heart to know that I won’t be seeing my father again.
I knew the next thing on the agenda would be the burial and that would be in the east seeing as we lived in the south.
The planning for the burial began and it was a lot trust me meetings upon meetings were done my father’s brothers were nice as usual or so I thought . The process went well and then something I only watched in movies happened.
My uncles suddenly switched and accused my mother of killing my father. It was shocking to see the same men I had grown to love accusing my mom of something she didn’t do. My mom being a strong woman understood their antics and with the help of her siblings she refused to do the inhumane things they asked her to do to prove her innocence. One was drinking the water used in washing my dad's corpse and sleeping with the body in the same room for some days.
The burial went well but the hate tension between my mother's family and my dads was so thick I think everyone there noticed something was wrong. After the burial, we stayed in the village for 2 weeks extra.
They tried making life hard for us in the house my father himself built. My father was a rich man. It was so bad my mom had to call the police to take them out.
As if that wasn’t enough. When we had gone back home and thought everything was settled because after the police case a general family meeting was called and the hatchet was buried so we thought, we woke up one day to someone banging on our gate and my mom enquired from our gate man who was knocking like that.
“Na oga brothers madam ( its the boss’s brothers)” he said to my mom.
“Let them in,” she said.
When they came in and all pleasantries had been given, they started demanding that my mom shared my father’s property amongst them.
An absurd demand right?
“Why will I share the property I and my late husband and worked hard to get between us when I have children to take care of”? My mother asked angrily.
They went on and on and even tried overpowering my mother to go get the deed of the house we were living in and that's when my mother officially had it.
She called for security in our house,
She rounded them up before calling the police once again to take them away but this time she refused to bail them out.
Their various wives had to come to bail them from jail.
This is what is going on in some Igbo cultures.
If my mother wasn’t who she was, they would have bullied her and taken everything she and my dad worked for