Emem woke up suddenly. She didn’t know what startled her out of sleep. She sat up and could hear movements. Was there a rat in the house? Then she listened again. It was water falling on a hard surface. But it was not raining. She pushed aside the window blind and saw the most traumatic, strange and confusing sight of her life. Her husband of 20 years, the father of her twins boys who were undergraduates, was there bathing naked, chanting something. Incarnations? Prayers? Well, the covered calabash he was scooping soap, black soap, from told the rest of the story.

When we say or hear that a wife should step back from a marriage that has become life-threatening, what most of us think is that it is about physical abuse, wife battering or husband battering. Well, there are more things than kicking in the teeth of a spouse that can be life-threatening. One of them is resort to diabolical or fetish ways to manipulate or even eliminate your spouse, for whatever reasons.

Like Emem found out to her shock and dismay that night. She was too scared to confront Emeka when he finished his ‘black bath’. Indeed, she dived right back under the duvet and pretended to be fast asleep. Of course, she didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. Who would? She didn’t know if the sight she just beheld would be followed by beheading. She didn’t know if her husband was going to continue the diabolical session in some other way in their room.

Emem couldn’t look at the husband in the eyes the following morning. She became afraid generally around Emeka. She couldn’t eat if the food was bought by Emeka. The usual suya and barbecue chicken he bought every Friday on his way home suddenly became suspicious, dreaded and some sort of sacrifice in her imagination, even without tasting it. She simply couldn’t leave her drink with Emeka.

‘I became extremely cautious around him. I searched through his wardrobe and found a lot of fetish stuff. I noticed he had fresh incisions just above his buttocks. I started paying more attention to his conversations, movements and habits.

‘I found out a lot of things I never thought possible in my marriage. But the camel’s back broke the day I saw him shaking hands with two of his friends with his left hand. I was born and bred in Ibadan and I know what that meant. They didn’t know I saw them and I pretended all was well, but after that I knew my marriage was in trouble. The children were in school most of the times, leaving me alone with the domestic staff. I was afraid to let my husband make love to me. What if he has incisions on his dick? I was afraid in my own bed, in my kitchen, everywhere. The only place I felt safe at was in my office.

‘Emeka started making strange demands that coincided with the few times we had sex. Right after, he would ask me for huge sums of money or to see my will or to be made Chairman of my company. If I refused, I fell ill, got hospitalized.’

Emem described a very evil pattern that left her without much choice but to step back.

‘I kept asking myself why it was only Lagos that I fell ill. Never in Abuja or Port-Harcourt.’

So, was Emeka trying to harm or even kill his wife to take over her wealth and business? Do men do it too? Of course, women adapt to things like that. We are witches, wealth grabbers, gold diggers who marry for money, trade sex for money, kill our husbands to inherit their wealth. Which is why there are more widows than widowers. Isn’t that the evil brush the society and little-minded people use to tag women? Or have you heard of widowers being subjected to head-shaving and drinking water used to bathe their wives’ corpses? Do you hear of widowers being thrown out of their homes so their late wives’ families could strip and pillage and generally make the widower miserable?

If you do not have at least 10 examples of husbands who are wizards or widowers as victims, begin to believe when I say men, still just a handful of them, do juju to inherit or to dispossess their wives. They connive and conjure. They charm and chant. They consult evil diviners to harm and disarm their wives so they can take over their wealth and lives. These few evil men put things on their tongues to command their wives to hand over their hard earned money or businesses to them. They blow ‘dark powder’ over their sleeping wives to turn her into ‘mumu’.

You don’t believe me? Well, may it never happen to your daughter. You think I’m exaggerating? Ask victims! And in any case would you still believe me if your sister has three cars but hops on okada to work so her husband could pick and choose which of the cars to drive to work and return to take which one to take to the club to hang out with his friends? Yet, he has no business address.

My point? Marriage does not just become life-threatening when a man starts slapping his wife around and beating her till she goes into premature labour. Marriage does not only become life-threatening when a husband verbally abuses his wife until she does not know whether she’s going or coming, lazy or hard working and loses herself, her self-esteem and self-confidence.

There is physical abuse, emotional abuse and spiritual abuse. The last one, if not acted upon quickly, is usually fatal and irreversible if the victim and her family realise it too late or explain it away with stuff like ‘juju is not real’. ‘juju is bullshit,’ and ‘I don’t believe in such rubbish’. This is a different clime, and as one of my friends, an ambassador’s wife would say, ‘our spiritual environment can be very toxic.’

Thinks about these things.