Killing of Twins: The Thoughts that Nourish the Evil    

    Charles Ajunwa   

One of the ways to look at the book, ‘If The Rain Comes” by Sunny Eze, published in 2022 by Kraft Books Limited, is from the angle of the thought processes that feed the culture of killing twins and the attendant corruption that inevitably associates with it. 

Thus, ‘If The Rain Comes’ interrogates the thinking processes of people in this primitive enclave for us to understand the ideas and belief systems that created the evil and stupid tradition of killing twins.                                               For instance, they see drought and famine as consequences of their failure to completely adhere to their evil custom. We see this in Chapter 19 when 

the character called Zone 12, in his address, says: 

“Don’t you speak like a child!” …. He took some steps out as if he was going to get into the nearby farm. He stopped some distance away, plucked a few leaves, and then returned to the gathering.                                                                                      “Can you see it? Can you?” He was dangling a withered root and its dry leaf. “It is the same situation all over the land. Look at those farms. Look well,” he said, pointing to the nearby farms.                                                                                        “Can’t you see the glaring signs? We have never witnessed this kind of drought. When we start battling with age long decrees, things like this are bound to happen.”

Other daft arguments that feed and sustain the senseless and evil customs appear in Chapter 18 of the book where Uduma tells the court: 

“When it comes to crossing a line which the fathers have drawn by themselves, discretion is the rule.” 

But there are also averters of evils like Ikemba, a man who possesses the mindset of a quintessential reformer or revolutionary that exists in every society. It was people like him that must have helped to make possible Mary Slessor’s task of ending twins killing in South East of Nigeria, although the scourge survives till this day in some parts of the country, hence the author’s remark from the beginning that “this work is not just about the past.” 

And then, there are others like Uduma, head of the elders, who stand on the fence. Ogbuefi Uduma is in dilemma between abolishing an unjust, murderous, fetish tradition and upholding it in the name of loyalty to some imaginary ancestral spirits. He is more persuaded by greed for power to continue to hold on to the evil custom.

The twins are executed by sending them to the hill, and when a twin child is sent to the hill, it’s a journey of death; it’s a journey of no return 

to the land of the living.

The reader feels both pity and anger – pity for the lad, Jidenna, who has been condemned to die simply because inside his mother’s womb, nature had split into two the fertilized egg that produced him and his brother making them twins – and anger against the society whose 

violent ignorance and barbaric superstition had turned the blessings and joys of mothers into inconsolable sorrows and lamentations. 

In such a society that kills twins, such evil is bound to be mired in corruption and become driven by a combination of vendetta and tradition:                                                                                               “They had simply issued their decree: To tame the Ikemba clan, and without finding any other loop, the lad had easily become the target. The age along vendetta of the fathers and the clan of Ikemba was going to be settled over his head…,” the author writes in Chapter 8. 

Corruption in the land that kills twins is also seen when the book in Chapter 8 mirrors the over-centralisation and lack of physical federalism which came to be Nigeria’s major problem after the collapse of the First Republic:                                                                                       “The fathers had reasoned: if we allowed the zones to control what they produce, what will be our work? Sit back here and control the air? Without the control of the resources, what else was left? Time had allowed the fathers to understand that one could control another man only to the extent you decide his means of livelihood.” 

However, even in the midst of the pervading corruption, there are still men of impeccable integrity like Okolo, the man who earlier rejected bribe money from Unachukwu, but still speaks in defense of Unachukwu’s condemned son: “I just have a question,” he said. 

“Sixteen years ago, when this very boy was born and their mother died, we agreed to pardon the family. Why did we suddenly turn back on that?”

The author, Dr. Sunny Eze, is a University of Port Harcourt trained medical practitioner with national and international recognitions. In 

November 2021, United Nations gave him award as the Overall National Best in Community Empowerment following some landmark projects he carried out within Nigeria. 

In addition, he bagged the Presidential Honours Award from President 

Muhammadu Buhari as the Overall National Best Youth Corp member in Nigeria for the 2019 service year. Also in December 2021, Dr. Eze emerged Overall National Best in a leadership program organised by Nigerian Prize for Leadership, an organisation dedicated to creating credible successor leadership. 

He currently works at the Department of Public Health, Federal Ministry of Health headquarters, Abuja, Nigeria.