Taken from Kenya
Kanu has been seized in Nairobi and flown to Abuja in chains. The whole south-east went quiet, and then it did not.
Nnamdi Kanu was taken in Nairobi last week and appeared in Abuja in chains, in a photograph that was on every phone in Owerri within an hour. Not extradited. Taken. Put on a plane. The government is delighted and says so. The market went silent for a whole afternoon, the way it does when a big man dies.
I have my own reasons this year to know exactly what it is to have something done to you and be told, in the same breath, that you are the criminal. So I am not neutral. I do not think a man kidnapped from a foreign country can be tried fairly in the country that kidnapped him, and I think everyone in Abuja knows that too, and that it is the point.
And I am afraid of what comes next, because the network has guns now, and the boys at the roundabouts are angry in a way I recognise from the junction, and there are already whispers of a Monday. Stay home Mondays. Until he is released. The whole region, shut.
Mama took the flag out of the wardrobe tonight, for the first time since Python Dance, and unfolded it on the bed, and looked at it, and folded it and put it back. I asked her what she was thinking. She said, I was thinking about my mother. I do not know what that means either. I am writing it down.