Thirty years after, the ‘Esusu’ curse still follows my father

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“My parents are poor and it’s not because they’re not hardworking. Early every morning, my mum would wake up to start her business day. She owned a roadside restaurant - those ‘buka’ type restaurants made up of a wooden shed knocked up against a wall but it’s located in an industrial area with high foot traffic so she gets a good number of customers. My dad works in a factory and takes on as many shifts as he can. They do all this yet no matter how hard they work, it just never adds up.

This worried me more as I grew older and I wondered why they could not get a break financially. Many people do reasonably well from the food business, no matter the size of it, yet despite my mum’s good location, many customers and consistent hard work, she just could not cross over to the ‘comfy’ zone. It was as if something drained her purse and worked against her.

When I finished public secondary school (high school), I was lucky to get a rich, nice uncle who was willing to sponsor me to university. I went to live with him and his family so I could stay close and also help out with errands at his home as a way to repay his kindness. One day, I drummed up the courage to talk to him about my parent’s situation. I expressed my worry about my parents’ bad luck and my fear that I and my siblings would end up the same way. Poverty has a nasty habit of turning genetic sometimes and I didn’t want to scrimp all my life.

He simply said ‘stay honest and you’ll have nothing to worry about.’  I didn’t understand what he meant but I didn’t want to probe further out of respect. It was years later before I brought up the issue again with my uncle and he told me a story about my father.

From the story, my dad was an ‘esusu’ collector in his younger days and he had stolen monies collected by him. These were monies of people who could barely feed but who still made those daily contributions in the hopes of accumulating enough to break their poverty cycle. My uncle explained that these impoverished people cursed my father after that incident. My uncle, and many others, believed that the ‘esusu’ curse was the reason behind his many failures as it was the curse of people who sweated hard and suffered so much for their little money. My uncle said stealing ‘esusu’ money is just like stealing from a poor widow; any curse from her lips would come to pass.

I was shocked, I didn’t want to believe it but somehow, deep down, I think it’s true. What other reason could there be for the many failures despite their hard work? The sad thing is he can’t even make amends because we don’t live in that state anymore and all those people who he stole from have probably moved on from that area. After hearing this, I began fervent prayers to break the cycle. I don’t want to suffer for the sins of my father. It would be totally unfair.”

 

Note: ‘Esusu’ is a form of savings for people, usually the poor. They pay small amounts of money to an ‘esusu’ collector who holds it in trust for them – sometimes for a specific period of time or with choice, no specifics attached. Daily, the money is collected and just like a bank, a deposit card is issued and ticked for every deposit made. It’s an easy way of saving money for those who get only very little amounts daily; it helps them accumulate money without strain.