28/05/2025
📖 WHEN THE DRUMS CALL
Chapter 1 – The Man Who Left Twice
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The text message read: "Sad News from Home."
Atanda didn’t open it right away. He stared at the notification on his phone like it was a strange name he was supposed to recognize but couldn’t quite place. He was standing in the middle of his flat in East London, tea gone cold on the counter, Spotify playing some ambient playlist he didn’t remember choosing.
The sender was his aunt, Mama Ṣadé. She never sends text messages. Last time they spoke, she asked if WhatsApp voice notes counted as video calls. She was a villager like that.
He opened the message on the third buzz. It was a three pages message.
“Atanda, mo bẹ́ ọ, ma bo wa abule. O ti sele o. Baba ti lo. Owuro eni lo sele. Asiko ti to. Come home. It has happened. Your father is gone. It happened this morning. You must come home. It is time.”
He read it twice.
Then a third time.
“Home,” she said.
What home? The last time he stepped foot in Nigeria, he was nine. That was twenty-nine years ago. They left under rushed circumstances—something about a job, schooling, “better opportunities.” He never asked questions. His father didn’t offer answers. Just said, “Pack. We leave by morning.”
Even now, he could picture the silhouette of his father at Heathrow, clutching a small box instead of a suitcase. Quiet. He was always so quiet.
Atanda closed the text message, shoved the phone in his pocket, and walked to the kitchen like that would help him think clearer. The kettle was still warm, but the tea was cold. That’s how grief felt: a delayed reaction. Something warm gone cold without you noticing.
The funeral, of course, would be in Ìjẹ̀bú; the village he barely remembered but that older relatives spoke of like it was sacred ground. His father had insisted that no matter where he died, he must be buried among the spirits of his people.
“Those who die in silence still walk loud in the land of the ancestors,” he once said.
Atanda hadn’t understood it then. Still didn’t. But he knew what would come next. It would be calls from aunties, uncles, the funeral committee, cultural obligations he didn’t fully grasp. They’d expect him to speak fluent Yoruba. They’d expect tears. They’d expect respect for customs that felt like costumes to him now.
He picked up the kettle and poured out the tea. Then, as if pulled by something beyond logic, he walked into his closet.
There, at the back, was a sealed cardboard box he hadn’t opened in years. Written on it in fading marker: Dad’s things – London flat, ‘98.
Inside were photos, half-folded letters, a carved wooden comb, a piece of cloth with symbols he never understood, and a cassette tape in a case labeled only: Oríkì – Àdékúnlé.
He held it in his hand like it might burn.
The man who left twice, he thought. Once from Nigeria. And again from this world. But the drums hadn’t stopped beating.
And somehow now withh death… they were calling him home.
