We never get to know a person until a certain thing happens. This is the story of this Kano-Borno-Delta girl but who is now an eaglet Madam. There was a time Maiduguri town became uniquely dangerous for women. As with all spaces of violence, the town was filled with all manner of operatives – runaway Boko Haram commanders and deserters, troops, civilian members of the Joint Taskforce, policemen and what have you.
As with all such huge concentration of men, women became additionally vulnerable to men separated from wives and partners and desperate for biological expression. In the circumstance, women designed all manner of ways of escaping being accosted by any set of the desperadoes. But it was never possible for all the women to evade coming in contact with one group of desperadoes or another.
So, Ra’ida Abdulqadir (the name of the lady in the above picture) came in contact with one such group one evening on her way home from the University of Maiduguri where she was then an undergraduate. What she did that the men picked race is the mystique we are still researching. It is possible she borrowed from her father’s socialist vocabulary, sufficiently intimidating the desperadoes who must have been thinking that it would not take more than a few minutes before they are rounded up should they try anything funny with the girl in their front.
She could equally have benefitted from her mother’s roots: the toughness of the women from around Delta who are good in breaking barriers in enterprise, culture and education. Her mother is a good example: a woman with Delta roots married to someone with Kano and Borno roots.
But the geist of the story is that this young Madame is brave and is creative. She was obviously not intimidated into crying and begging the hoodlums. She opened eye for them, to go pidgin. It could have been costly for her in that atmosphere but she was clearly not ignorant of the snake and snake-killer nexus. When a snake encounters a human being, it is as afraid as the person. Both are afraid and who wins depends more on who manifests less fear.
But creatively escaping danger is only one manifestation of her stuff. Many girls, it is understood, are so one-dimensional that they do not realise that there is a latent essence in being an undergraduate: it is a husband fetching ground too. Not being minded, they miss signals from potential husbands among their course mates. This one didn’t miss it although this is not quite a case of course mate but both she and Salisu Sa’id Shettima, her husband now, all inhabited the University of Maiduguri at one point.
More important than all the foregoing is that Ra’ida Abdulqadir is a Nigerian. Whether you are speaking the North, South, Islam or Christianity, she is involved. The signs are that it is people like her and her family who will be the face of the new Nigeria because they will speak a new nation!
Wishing the new pair a happily married life!
