BEFORE THE SKY BREAKS

She had lived a full life, one without regret, one where she explored and broke boundaries, burnt a few bridges along the way, cried, laughed, loved, she knew her story needed to be told not everyone had the opportunity to experience her so at least they can get to read about her, this isn’t a story about the typical African woman who was broken, cheated, abused, this is a story of a woman who through it all never stopped trying and failing until she overcame, this isn’t our typical feminist story as a matter of fact Asabe hated that word “FEMINIST” and yes Asabe is my name and this is my story in all authenticity. The house was just across the street, a brown building with big windows, a narrow yard, a Mercedes Benz W114/115 popularly referred to as “THE STROKE” was parked there, four blocks of flat, the first flat inside was carefully decorated, you could tell that whoever decorated the house had a strong character, The heat of the Lagos afternoon drifted in through lace curtains, their delicate white embroidery dancing in the breeze like whispers from another time. The living room, dimly lit yet deeply alive, held the soul of the house—equal parts modern ambition and ancestral pride. The floor gleamed with speckled terrazzo tiles, cool beneath bare feet. A soft, floral rug from Leventis lay beneath the carved mahogany coffee table, its surface polished to a shine that reflected the amber sunbeams. At the center sat a crocheted doily, carefully handmade by Mama herself, anchoring a glass bowl of kola nuts, ginger sweets, and groundnuts—a quiet offering to any guest who might wander in. A low hum came from the ceiling fan above, slicing through the heavy afternoon stillness. On the far side of the room, a sturdy velvet couch—upholstered in mustard and olive green—held the gentle sag of long conversations. Flanking it were matching armchairs, British imports, but reupholstered by the carpenter down the street in Tejuosho. Woven raffia stools sat proudly beside them, the kind found in Yoruba palaces, their cowries glinting like tiny ancestral eyes, the walls told their own stories: a studio photograph of Baba in his agbada, arms crossed over a walking stick, hung beside a poster of James Brown mid-scream. Between them, a framed piece of Aso-Oke, rich in indigo and crimson, added a quiet boldness to the space. A wooden crucifix hung above the door, and below it, the calendar from UAC Nigeria marked the day, By the window stood a grand cabinet, glass-fronted and filled with fragile ceramic teacups next to clay pots from the village. An old Grundig stereo system sat beneath the television—both proudly humming and crackling with life. Today it played Sunny Ade’s “Ja Funmi” on vinyl, but next to the records lay Aretha, The Beatles, and Fela—stacked like ideas waiting for their moment. It wasn’t grand, but it was sacred—this room. A place where cousins played ten-ten on the rug, where uncles argued politics after Sunday rice, where radios announced coups and weddings in the same breath, and where the past and future met daily in conversation and in the middle of it all, under the breeze of the fan and the weight of framed memories, sat Papa’s chair—its cane back curved, its seat worn smooth—waiting for him to return from the shop and ask, as he always did, “Have you put on that Sunny Ade again?” Baba as he was fondly called, was in his middle 50’s but you could hardly tell, his vibrant taste in arts and music will almost make you think he was a young man living out his 30’s, he had always loved music and his taste in them was indeed impeccable, his strong bold charisma was interwoven into even the most intricate details of the living area, he was sitted on a wooden chair just across the living room wearing khaki shorts and a pale blue singlet by looks of it you could tell it was overly worn, he crossed his leg humming to sunny Ade’s “ja funmi”, “good music really is food to the soul” he said smiling and nodding while still humming, My mother’s name was Euphemia. Yes—Euphemia. A name so holy and aristocratic it sounded like it belonged to the wife of a white Scottish bishop or a woman who owned seven cats and read Latin for leisure. And yet, there she was—my mother—born in Zaria, the first daughter of a farmer and a woman who couldn’t spell her own name. But somehow, hey landed on Euphemia, She always said it slowly, with pride, as if it were a title: “Eu-phe-mi-a.” and God help you if you called her “Mama Asabe” in public. She’d politely correct you with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Call me by my name, dear. It means ‘well-spoken.’” It didn’t matter that no one around knew what it meant. Or that they struggled to pronounce it. She made them try. Euphemia was a tall, slender woman with cheekbones sharp enough to slice yam and eyes that held the kind of quiet judgment that made grown men sit up straighter in church. She always wore her hair in a neat bun, the edges laid with precision and grace—like her sentences. Unlike most women in the compound, she didn’t fuss over highlife music or hoard records of Sunny Ade. In fact, music annoyed her. She said too many drums distracted her from “deep thought.” But give her a good book—a tattered, secondhand novel with half the cover missing—and she’d sit cross-legged on the living room carpet, tuning out the whole world. I once watched her ignore a full-on family quarrel while reading Jane Eyre. The house could’ve been on fire—she wouldn’t have looked up unless the flames started licking the pages, She read everything: Chinua Achebe, Charles Dickens, and any church newsletter that had a sermon printed on the back. Her bookshelves were full, her pots sometimes empty. If she had to choose between buying meat for stew or a new paperback from CMS Bookshop in Marina, well…we had a lot of egusi soup without meat growing up, But she was brilliant. The kind of woman who didn’t go to university but could debate a reverend about theology or recite whole Psalms from memory. When she got angry, she didn’t shout. She quoted scripture—and somehow, that was worse, My friends’ mothers wanted lace and dance. Mine wanted solitude, a pencil, and silence. In her own way, she was soft and powerful. And even though she came from little, she carried herself like someone born into British royalty—minus the accent, of course. And yet, she was still my mother—Euphemia. The woman who would fight a market woman over stale onions in the morning and sit in perfect peace with Tolstoy by evening, sometimes I wonder how papa got a woman like her, she seemed far advance in knowledge and not just that her dashing looks, a lot of times I sit in awe as I stare at my mother she was indeed a dashing, beautiful woman, good thing I got her genes. “Umar could you turn down the music a bit, the sound of it is deafening” she said, you could hear the irritation in her tone, “baby” as Baba would tease her, she didn’t like that term in her own words “it is the most basic and lackluster title to call your spouse, so unimpressive and lacks passion” my mother if anything at all was always driven by passion and it showed in every aspect of her existence, the way she talked, loved everything she did, she did with utmost love and a burning passion. “you have no idea how this particular track speaks to my soul” baba said with enthusiasm, she rolled her eyes “there’s nothing music does to anyone, you all are just stuck in a limbo, all believing a lie in unionism, I don’t have an issue with the craft, I just have an issue to how the consumers of the craft try to read meaning to every empty lyric” now this was definitely the beginning of an unending argument “and your books all have meaning? I mean all these writers ever talk about is romance, a made up fairy tale that has no truth in it, warping the true definition of what love should feel like” Umar was a man built of quiet storms — equal parts ink, melody, and memory. Born in the late 1960s in northern Nigeria to a middle-class, educated Hausa family, he grew up between pages and phonographs. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a midwife, and together they raised him with books in his hands and discipline in his breath. But it was music that truly found him. Even as a boy, Umar heard things others didn’t — the emotion in a guitar’s twang, the politics buried in a saxophone solo, the longing tucked into a falsetto. While other children kicked sand and chased lizards, Umar sat by the window of his uncle’s radio repair shop, mesmerized by every note that poured out of that dusty speaker. But like many young men of his generation, life took him first to war. My father, Umar had ink on his fingers and music in his bones. To the world, he was a printer — a quiet, reliable man with a small press tucked between Mama Oche’s tailoring shed and a dilapidated barbershop that had more chairs than customers. But to those of us who knew him — truly knew him — he was a collector of sounds, a curator of emotion, a man whose soul was forever tuned to some invisible radio station only he could hear. He’d often say, “If I hadn’t held a gun in the war, maybe I’d have held a microphone. But one way or the other, the rhythm would have found me.” You could tell a lot about his mood by what was playing in his shop. On days when the machines were misbehaving and the ink wouldn’t hold, he’d blast Fela loud enough for passersby to hear, his lips tight, fingers smudged with frustration. But the beat would center him. And by the time “Water No Get Enemy” played, the press would somehow be humming again. But it wasn’t just background noise for him — music was the pulse of everything. It guided the rhythm of his work. He’d sync his foot to the press pedal like a drummer finding tempo. Sometimes, he’d pause halfway through typesetting just to close his eyes and catch a line from Sunny Ade, or rewind the radio cassette to hear a particular trumpet solo again. He didn’t care if the ink dried mid-page — that note had to land right in his spirit.