12/02/2025
**Title: *NEEDVE*, the cryptic word stamped on Benjamin Akinwummi’s journal. A , shorthand for *“Ní ìtẹ́lórí”—“In the shadow of wings.”*
I had always believed that stories found their writers, not the other way around. Two years since I’ve wrote this book. The entries were fragments—vivid, haunting. I wrote about Benjamin Akinwummi of fleeing a war-torn village as a child, of crossing oceans with nothing but a sister’s hand to hold, of nights spent whispering stories to keep the darkness at bay. *“They both were made of the tales from surviving,”* one entry read. Benjamin Akinwummi pulse quickened. His voice was raw, urgent, alive.
A photograph, sepia-toned and fraying at the edges. A boy and a girl, no older than six and ten, stood in front of a bullet-riddled building. The caption: *“Benjamin Akinwummi and his sister, Lagos, 1967.”* Benjamin’s breath hitched. The girl on the left had her grandmother’s eyes. The other—Benjamin—held a notebook clutched to his chest.
During those times, his grandmother had never spoken of Nigeria, of a war, of a sister. But here it was: a life erased, a story buried. Many years later. Benjamin all grown up and has become a man. At most nights, Benjamin Akinwummi always dreamed of dust and fire, of both him and his sister running, their laughter tangled with gunfire. He woke with a sentence burning in his mind: *“Some truths are not lost; they wait.” The words came then, torrential, relentless. I wrote of Benjamin Akinwummi’s journey, of the unbreakable thread between him and his sister who became each other’s compass. I wrote of the stories Benjamin had smuggled across borders, tales that had sewn his grandmother’s silence into something like survival. With every page, the ghost of Benjamin Akinwummi grew clearer—not as a victim, but as a keeper of light.
I finally understood. don’t just tell . They unearth the ones that were always meant to breathe.
*Based on True Life Events*
