The Snake Girl

Amanda held onto the long rope as I could view it from a distance. She was about the most popular baby in our street at the time. At the age of two, she could speak fluently to the understanding of adults. My laptop bag in my left hand and a polythene bag containing foodstuff I planned to prepare for dinner.
As I got closer to Amanda, the supposed rope turned out to be something alive. A snake. I almost shouted but on second thought, I felt it could endanger the child the more. My heartbeat had begun to race and pebbles of sweat appeared on my forehead and chest.

It was a rattlesnake. The tail blows itself like a whistle. Fear gripped me. In this confused state, I walked back a few steps so that the snake and little Amanda would not notice me. As soon as I negotiated a bed, I saw two adult men and told them what I just saw with the expectation that they would know what to do next but to my amazement, they laughed at me and walked away.

This guy must be a JJC here.

One of the men said. A JJC is a slogan used to refer to somebody who newly relocated to a place or is a novice.

I became weary and my pity for baby Amanda increased. Out of my curiosity, I advanced in looking for help elsewhere. This time, it was a woman. After narrating quickly what my fears were, she laughed and told me to calm down.

That little girl is a Genie. She has a thing with the snake work and the snake cannot harm her.

Another shocker. The woman sat me down and asked me not to bother about Amanda that she has the power to cast a spell on snakes no matter how venomous the snake could be.

I caught a cold after the old woman completed her narrative. I just held my laptop bag and the polythene bag containing the food I wanted to prepare for the night and walked towards the path that led to the corps members' lodge.

Janntul Hasan

Before I was posted to Agwu in Enugu state Nigeria, I had heard and read a lot about the people and their affinity to the snake goddess. Snakes are not meant to be harmed in the Agwu communities. Anyone who killed a snake was meant to pay heavy fines for the funeral, as snakes are considered to have played an important role in the existence of the people.

As soon as I got to the lodge, my other colleagues had already settled themselves for the night and were preparing to set up our local cinema in the compound. Our usual practice was that anyone who has an interesting movie will send it via bluetooth and Demi, one of the corps members will project it.

While all that was being done, I rushed to prepare and ate dinner to join the other guys. In no time, I had a shower and took my dinner then joined them in the local cinema theatre. But as soon as I joined them, there came the Nigerian saga, power outage. Everyone got angry and made moves to retire to their different room when I shouted:

Latest gist in town.

Everyone rushed back to their seats just to hear the gust.

Chai!! See aproko. You all like to listen to gist.

As they flapped their ears, I told them everything about little Amanda and the snake. Demi and the other guys were shocked. How on earth would people keep snakes as brothers? They wandered.

Two weeks later, about a month to our passing out parade, we were returning from the CDS meeting when we dabbled on Amanda again. This time it was a python that curled around her.

We were star-struck seeing such a television screen sight. Every other person passed like nothing special was happening but we kept our distance and watched little Amanda toyed with a python.

Now I believe all that you said. I thought you were just trying to scare us that night. Seeing is believing.

After a while, the python crawled into the nearby bush until its whole body could not be seen again. After that one year, I swore never to return to Agwu again no matter how significant my going back there could be.