Image by Samuel Martins, Unsplash.
Muyiwa is a simple man, really. He lives in a self-con in Igando, an area that is so unexciting and unpretty that visitors often ask if people in that area think of themselves as Lagosians. The walls of his room, once painted the green of a beer bottle now look dirty, the light, clean green morphing into the dirty green of slimy gutter water. He will repaint it in December, when the school where he teaches Mathematics and Computer Science to secondary school students vacates for a Christmas break.
Every Sunday, he sits in the front row in church, beside the banner that reads, Your Sunday Worship Is Incomplete Without Sunday School, Be There. He smiles and responds to greetings with a cheery, "God bless you." He teaches Sunday school too, answers questions about Paul’s conversion; paying tithes; the position of women in the church (seen but not to be heard, silently visible); about fornication and adultery, and all the other questions that arise after each Sunday school class. Last Sunday, when someone asked if drinking is a sin — Jesus after all turned water to wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, he told them not not to twist the scriptures to suit their own self-desires. He condemns rape, expresses an open disgust for homosexuality (Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam), and teaches that pornography is a tool used by the devil to win souls to his kingdom.
At the end of each Sunday school lesson, he reads a Bible verse for everyone to memorize and live by. 1 Peter 1:15 is his favourite. “Can we all open to our verse?” he would say, and Bible pages would rustle as everyone opened to the page. But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.
Everyone likes Muyiwa. When he is done with Sunday school, the pastor says in a voice sodden with love, "Let us clap for God in the life of Brother Muyiwa," and the entire church smiles, claps, and says, "Glory". When the clapping peters out, the pastor implores the church to become blind to the things of this world and the evil desires of the flesh. “I want you all to strive for growth. I want to see you mature spiritually the way Brother Muyiwa has matured and keeps maturing. Amen church?”
Amen.
The men include Muyiwa in polite conversations. He is twenty-eight, they are in their mid to late thirties and forties, and yet they bow slightly when they shake his hands. When he says a prayer, they are quick to receive it, palms outstretched and eyes closed, a group of hungry people savouring the crumbs from an overflowing table. They regard him with the shiny, overdone respect accorded to a person who carries the Holy Spirit, something they do not have enough of. The women — people who cry and speak in tongues when he leads prayers; people who twist their mouths in self-righteous horror when he talks about homosexuals; people who nod to show their approval of the required silence of women in church — want to feed him even though he says he has food at home. They brush off his protests and insist on buying him bread, a cold bottle of Pepsi, boiled groundnuts. They tell him, "We enjoyed Sunday School today oh, Brother Muyiwa.” Or, "When you prayed, I felt the hand of God in my life," and he smiles and says, “It is God o.”
But at night, before he goes to bed, Muyiwa picks up his phone, turns on his data connection and visits xvideos.com. In the searchbox, he enters “Naija rape,” or ”Teenage girl rape by black guys.” When the results load, he selects, carefully, as though selecting bread, a video that shows a wide-eyed Yoruba school girl whose hair is in rough cornrows, being raped in a bush by four guys. They are older and heftier than her, these guys. Beneath them, she is fragile, small: a twig of a girl. And yet, they ignore her tears and pin her down. They ask themselves, "Guy, shey your prick don hard? Oya come fuck your own." They take turns to hike up her uniform and swiftly thrust their erect penis into her. It is like a sword cutting into a fruit; it slices into her deftly and comes out whitish as though coated in shea butter. And this motion is what hardens Muyiwa’s penis until it pushes against the fabric of his boxer shorts.
While the girl cries and the guys quiet her by flattening a palm over mouth, Muyiwa takes off his boxer shorts, and with his erection sticking out in front of him as though guiding his path, he walks the short distance to his table to get his body lotion. He squeezes out a thin stream of the white lotion onto his palm and begins to rub his erection. He begins with slow strokes, his eyes trained on the crying girl, and then the strokes increase in vigour, the ring of his palm moving faster against his penis, his butt clenching steadily until his semen spurts out, a spray of warm, thick liquid that spatters on the floor, some falling on his body. Only then does he slacken his hold on his penis; only then does he exhale deeply, sated. He closes the browser tab, and in the silence that follows, he feels a tinge of guilt. So he takes a long shower and prays for forgiveness of sin. Between his legs, his limp penis throbs with the ache of desire.
He does not do this every night though. Sometimes, he dials a number on his phone, a number named “D.” When D picks up, Muyiwa says levelly, "Can I see you by 10pm tonight?” D hesitates, but he always says yes. Sometimes, he takes a long time to arrive. But when he finally arrives in a cloud of cologne, a little after 10:30pm, Muyiwa locks the door and leads him to the bed. "David, why do you like posting me?” He asks. And David laughs, a willing, malleable kind of laughter that leaves no room for further questions. Muyiwa recognises this cue: there is no time to waste. He grabs David, pins him to the wall and begins to kiss him. When the clothes fall off, David falls on his knees too, and takes Muyiwa’s penis into his mouth. Later comes the condom and the lube, both bought and brought by David, because Muyiwa never has any, never buys any. But he is quick to roll the condom over his penis anyway, quick to squirt some lube onto David’s willing entry, and even quicker to thrust into him, his palm flattened against David’s mouth to keep back his moans.
But of course, Muyiwa is a simple man. And he means no harm. God, after all, is a forgiving God.
Brief notes about “A Simple Man.”
This piece is dear to me. I wrote it in less than one hour in my dark room, sometime in 2015. I am trying to replicate it, write something even better, but this story is a child that locks your womb and prevents you from producing another to rival it. Now that it’s out here for you to read, I hope it sets me free.
- Kunle. ❤️
PS: I am grateful to everyone who read BoyGirl and left a comment or shared it. It is a gift I do not take for granted. - Kunle. ❤️
A beautiful story, Kunle. I enjoyed your narrative style!
Well written sir