SHE WAS ONLY FOURTEEN WHEN SHE CLAIMED MY BROTHER HAD MADE HER PREGNANT

After completing SHS and while waiting for my results, I didn’t want to remain idle, so I applied to teach at a private school nearby. That was where I met the girl. She was much younger than me, but she admired me greatly. Whenever she saw me in the neighborhood, she greeted me respectfully, calling me “madam” or “sister.” I felt a sense of responsibility toward her and took it upon myself to guide her the way an older sister would.

Sometime later, my younger brother mentioned that the same girl had also been approaching him, trying to strike up a friendship. She would call him “mekunu” whenever she saw him around town. My brother was about seventeen at the time. According to him, he made deliberate efforts to avoid her.

Then the unimaginable happened. At just fourteen, the girl became pregnant.

My father was away when the situation came to light. Upon his return, the girl’s mother came to our house and formally reported that her daughter was pregnant and had named my brother as the responsible person. We confronted him immediately. He denied it without hesitation.

In front of everyone, he dipped his index finger into his mouth, touched the earth, raised it toward the sky, and swore, saying, “I know nothing about what this girl is claiming. I have never spoken to her intimately, never proposed to her—nothing.”

My father, trying to act responsibly, said the family would take care of the situation but insisted that a DNA test would be done after the child was born.

From that moment, we all braced ourselves for the storm that was yet to come.