09/05/2025
There was once a quiet boy named Jide who lived in the heart of a tough neighborhood in Lagos. He kept to himself, always reading, drawing, or helping his mother sell akara by the roadside. People barely noticed him—he wasn’t loud, he wasn’t flashy, and he never caused trouble. But he noticed everything.
Jide’s father had left when he was just a baby, and his mother worked herself to the bone trying to keep them afloat. The streets were rough—drugs, gangs, and violence were normal. Still, Jide stayed out of it. He believed in peace, in books, in minding your business.
But one day, everything changed.
His mother was caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout. She wasn’t the target—just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jide held her in his arms as she bled out, her last words a whisper of prayer for his safety. The world around him went silent. Something inside him broke.
The quiet boy disappeared that day.
What replaced him was calculated. Cold. He stopped going to school. He stopped drawing. Instead, he sought out the very streets that took his mother from him. He joined a gang—not for protection, not for brotherhood, but for vengeance. He rose quickly, not because he was the loudest, but because he was the smartest. The silent type people feared.
In time, people began to speak his name with caution. “Don J,” they called him—leader of a crew that ruled the blocks with brains and brutality. But behind the dark glasses and hard stares, Jide’s heart was still cracked, his soul still asking one question every night before sleep: “Was this the only way?”
