WOMEN OF OYIN

Chapter Two : Promise Before Birth

In Oyin, a woman’s future was not written in the stars it was negotiated before her first breath. When a man’s wife became swollen with child, he would visit his closest friend, or his brother-in-law, or even a distant elder he wished to honor. With a jug of palm wine and three tubers of yam, he would declare, “If it is a girl, she will be yours.” The other man would nod, accepting the offer. No one would ask the girl when she was born. Her life had already been traded, tucked into a deal made before she could cry.

It was not seen as cruelty. It was called foresight. It was said in Oyin that a man who waits to claim a wife after birth is a man already too late. The elders repeated this like gospel, as if it were linked into the skins of their ancestors.

So it was that Dunni, Adesewa’s neighbor, was betrothed before she was born. Her parents promised her to Pa Odun, a cocoa trader in his fifties, the very day the midwife tied the white thread around her mother’s waist to confirm the pregnancy. When Dunni turned thirteen, she was taken to the trader’s compound, her body still flat-chested and her voice soft as smoke. His other wives women old enough to be her grandmother greeted her with eyes heavy with pity. She became the fourth wife, and the only one expected to still bear children.

Everyone called her lucky. Her mother was given a sack of rice and a wrapper. Her father received a new machete.

And Dunni?

She bled alone in silence, night after night, as her childhood peeled away under a stranger’s touch.

Adesewa watched it all from a distance, the memories crawling beneath her skin. She remembered how Dunni used to run barefoot to the stream, racing her shadow, laughing like the trees were tickling her soul. That laughter had stopped the day she was “given,” as if it had been taken with the bride price.

And Adesewa’s time was coming.She heard it in her father’s sudden silences. In the way her mother avoided her eyes during meals. In how the village women stopped including her in playful gossip and instead whispered about her hips.

She had asked her mother once, softly:

“What if I don’t want to marry the man chosen for me?”

Iya Abeni had not raised her voice. She had only stared long at the fire and said,

“Wanting does not matter here, child. Only duty does.”

That night, Adesewa sat outside their compound long after the lamps were out. She listened to the crickets sing and stared at the moon, wondering if other girls in other places could choose who they loved.

Wondering if she was foolish to believe she deserved more.

In Oyin, a girl could be bought before she was born. But no one had yet figured out how to buy her spirit. And Adesewa, quietly, was learning to guard hers like a sword.