THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Abiku means a child 'born to die'. In Yoruba belief, certain spirit children keep a pact with their companions in the wilderness: they enter a womb only to die at an agreed hour and rejoin their band, then return to the same mother, again and again, bringing a family one burial after another. Such children are said to be beautiful and quick, and to slip away at life's thresholds — circumcision, naming, betrothal.
Against an abiku, families keep a whole armory. The body of a dead infant may be nicked or scarred before burial, so that a later baby born with the same mark stands revealed as the returner. Iron anklets and bells are fastened on; a babalawo divines and sacrifices to cut the child's tie to its spirit company. Above all there are the pleading names, still common in Yorubaland: Malomo, 'do not go again'; Durojaiye, 'stay and enjoy life'; Kokumo, 'this one will not die again'; Banjoko, 'sit and stay with me'.
The abiku became one of modern Nigerian literature's great motifs. Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark each published an 'Abiku' poem in the 1960s, the one a taunting monologue of the spirit child, the other a parent's plea; Ben Okri's Booker-winning The Famished Road (1991) is narrated by the spirit child Azaro. The Igbo ogbanje is the parallel belief, embodied by Ezinma in Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
