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I was sixteen, a rebellious child, stubborn and full of trouble. In one year, I broke our neighbour’s windows, killed a few of their chickens and bloodied up at least four of my classmates so badly that I was suspended the first couple of times, and then expelled the fourth time. This was a rejection that hurt and affirmed what I had thought about myself for so long — that I was not worthy of love, not worthy of happiness. After all, my mother had taken off like the wind away from me, a crying child, eyes still glossy and twinkling with the hope that one only had at birth.

My father, frustrated, had exhausted his options in handling my behaviour. He employed routine beatings and punishments that involved me staring at the sun for long hours, walking with my knees through gravelled grounds, and being locked up in a room for days with food slipped through a small opening in the door that he had personally crafted,like I was in prison and he was a prison guard.   

Every time I was let out  and released into the world, and the scent of trees, and flowers that lined our neighbourhood, I would run till my legs ached, till I got to the bank of the stream where little boys went over to swim and play against the warnings of their parents. That brown-coloured stream flowed right through the forest and the sacred Òrìṣà grove that was just a few minutes’ trek away. It was here I first met the prophet and where I would see the last of him, the man who changed my life. He would take me, gracefully, from the hands of my father, who finally felt at peace enough to take another wife, something he had put off for so long because he feared no other woman would want to handle me, a troublesome child, one whose mother didn’t even breastfeed.  

The night before I met the prophet, I had not slept inside the house, not because my father had punished me with that, like he sometimes did, but because the open-air rooftop terrace was the only thing I loved about my father’s house. It was where I found some peace in the chaos that reigned. I slept up there on a raffia mat with two wrappers draped over my body to fight off mosquitoes. I was obsessed with enjoying the view of the moon and stars above, looking back at me, wishing that I could be among them. They looked so far away and yet, so close. So clear and yet so dull when plumes of cloud sailed across. I was still in this dreamy state when I was woken up early the next day, before sunrise, by the loud voice of my father, who towered over me with fire in his eyes, asking why I had not slept inside the house. 

“Why are you so given to rebellion, you this child?” he had asked.

He had then raised his hand to bring down on my figure the belt that he clutched tightly. One lash across my back, another over my shoulder, I screamed and ran, easily going round him back into the house, then out of it onto the street. I headed towards the stream as I usually did after such encounters with him.  

On my way to the stream that morning, feeling the sting of the belt on my flesh, I slipped on a muddy patch, and a speeding bike missed me only by a hair’s breadth as it passed. “You must be a mad boy!” the rider had yelled after he had almost killed me. 

The heavy morning dew settled on my feet as I disturbed the grass lining the path towards the stream. The trees towering above created a canopy over the entire path and made it darker than it should have been, so I struggled through the overgrown weeds till I stumbled upon the bank. I inhaled the cold air of the morning, hearing the excited chirping of birds from the surrounding trees. 

The stream was devoid of the voices and empty of the sight of the lean bodies of little boys that usually soaked in it. Instead, my eyes met the sight of a lone man clothed in white, standing in the middle, submerged up to his waist. He had his hands raised high up to the heavens, his head was shaved clean, and I could see his mouth muttering and moving while his eyes were shut so tight that folds formed beside them.  I stood mesmerised by this man.  The man and I were the only humans present at the stream that early morning, accompanied only by the rhythmic patterns of nature. I watched this figure for what seemed like hours.  

“The stream used to reach up to where you are standing,” a voice said, stunning me back to reality. It was the mysterious man who had spoken. His eyes were open, and he was now wading his way back to the bank where I was. 

I immediately began to take steps back in fear.  

“Don’t run, no need to do that,” he said, stopping me in my tracks as he got closer, and I could make out his face. His thin figure looked imposing in the white garment. 

Just before he finally stepped out of the stream, he bent over, pushed his cupped palms into it and scooped some of the brown water over his face. 

 “I’m sorry,” I said, watching the man before me, his face drawn into a friendly grin, and that, in a way, soothed my fears. 

“Sorry for what?” 

“For watching you, for disturbing you.” 

“That is a foolish thing to say. I don’t own this place; anybody can come here. You did not disturb me at all. I was just done with prayers,” he explained. “People call me Alàgbà.” He stretched out his hands.

His fingers were very wrinkled, and I wondered how long he had been in the water. I knew who he was; he led the church that stood on a hill nearby, where people rode bicycles without pedalling, allowing the slope to take them as fast and as free as it could.  I took his hands and felt the coldness of them. 

“My father is Akanni, he teaches at the public school,” I said.

“Tell me your own name.” 

“Me? My name is Kolade,” I said.

He sighed. “Kolade, you look like a disturbed boy.”

“Did God tell you that?” I asked, surprised, wondering that perhaps he could see everything I had done in my life — my lies, fights, thoughts, my sins. He was a prophet after all. 

“No, I don’t need anyone or anything to tell me that. I know you are disturbed because you are here alone at this time without your father or a friend.” He sat on the grass and looked across the stream. “Two years ago, this place would have been part of the stream, but it has continued to grow small.”  

“The stream?”

“Yes, I want to restore it to its old glory. That is what I came here to pray for.”

“But how can a stream grow small?”

He laughed. “You don’t know much. What are you looking for here this early? I have stated my mission here, so you should state yours as well.” 

I blinked, unsure of what to say because I did not know what exactly had driven me to the stream that morning, except that I had just escaped my father’s rage. I feared he was going to take me back to my father so I could be punished. I gave thought to making a run for it, away from the stream and this mysterious man, but I was fascinated by him, the way he spoke, and the twinkle in his eyes. I wanted to hear him speak all the time in that low voice that barely echoed but caressed the grass around and relaxed me. 

“Maybe God led me here,” I blurted out. 

He looked at me for a moment. “That is a bold claim, invoking the divine so carelessly. Perhaps you were driven by the whims of your age, your restlessness.”   

“Maybe it is you I came looking for, maybe this means I should follow you,” I had said. 

 “Follow me? What will your father say?”  

“He doesn’t like me that much. He will be happy if I leave the house.”  I shrugged.

“To follow me, one must give up his family and the things of the world. You must seek only what is right and good. You seem ready to fulfil the first part, but will you fulfil the second?”  

“I want to follow you,” I said to emphasise my readiness, barely giving it a thought. 

The prophet stood up, grabbed me by the hand and led me into the stream where he asked if I was ready for a new life, washed clean, set aside and different from what I was before, disturbed or not, abandoned at birth or not.   

“I am ready,” I declared as he held my head above the water and muttered words of prayer.

“Hold your breath,” he told me before dipping my head into the stream three times. “Kolade, welcome into the fold,” he said, pulling me into a hug against his wet garment.  

My new life, my rebirth, began just as the first rays of sunlight enveloped the sky, signalling that the start of a brand-new day had reached fulfilment. 

*

With that embrace, I was drawn into life at the top of the hill where the church stood. My father came around twice in the first few months to check up on me and realised I had found my peace with Alàgbà and his cohort, so he let me be. He was relieved that I had found a place where I was no longer a problem for him to deal with; I was free from him. I began wearing a white garment myself, joining the services that were held in the church led by the soft-spoken Alàgbà.    

His services were unconventional. They were different from what I had known and experienced in the churches I sometimes went to with my father. Alàgbà had no separate elevated podium from where he should usually stand and preach sanctimoniously to the rest of us. Instead, we all sat in a circle of chairs, and he spoke to each of us like friends, like brothers, like lovers. 

“We are all equal. The fact that we all have different roles here doesn’t mean I am greater than you, no matter your age, no matter how you lived in the past, whatever they do outside in the world is not our business. Within these walls, we are equal,” he would say, eyes going from one person to another, his voice reaching out to us all. 

 Every single one of us in the fold was taken by Alàgbà and his strangeness, his kindness, how he opened his arms and pulled you into an embrace to make you feel the love you may have been deprived of before meeting him. 

We went to the stream often for prayers and to baptise new converts into the fold, and every time we went there, Alàgbà would take a close look at the streambank, watching the muddy edge before commenting, “It has gotten smaller again.” It was only then that he seemed to express sadness and anger, for he was a man who smiled all the time and laughed quite a lot too. “We are running out of time. Before we know it, there will be nothing left here.” 

“What is causing it, the stream shrinking?” I asked him once. 

“I don’t know, but I have prayed and prayed. You know some people believe this stream is supposed to be the manifestation of an Òrìṣà, no?” 

“Yes, Alàgbà.”

“So now what does it mean if it is drying up? That the Òrìṣà has ended its life? I don’t think so. We use this stream for many things. I used to come here a lot as a boy, and my mother had washed my face at the grove when I was just a baby. All I want to do is to save this stream and what it means to everyone in this town,” he explained to me. 

“How can you do that?”

“Prayers have not worked,” he said. “There is more to this thing, Kolade. People see this stream as having healing qualities, so they drink it and give it to their children, but some government people have come to tell them that there are dangerous things in it now, and it can kill, but who believes that? Nobody, now I am waiting for them to tell me why it is drying up. I am waiting.”

Once, when we were holding a baptism ceremony for a girl my age who had been brought by her mother, there was great noise coming from up the stream in the direction of the sacred grove, and Alàgbà asked us to get out of there because the Òrìṣà devotees were holding a festival of some sort and were using the stream. I had marvelled at the man, wondering why he cared for such things. 

 “We have no right to point at another and say heathen! I have seen many things over the years, Kolade. This world is more than we take it to be, but we destroy it by feeding hate into each other. One man reaches the supreme being through one means, some through other means, but we are all seeking the same thing,” Alàgbà had explained, leading us through the path from the stream as the noise from the sacred grove grew louder and louder. 

In my third year living on the hill, Alàgbà woke me up one gentle morning, asking me to go with him to the stream just as early as the day I had met him. The morning was hazy, and fog hung heavy in the air. Looking down at the town below us, one could barely see anything, but I followed behind him as he disappeared into the fog like a ghost, the white of his garment being my only pointer to where he was as we went down the hill. When we arrived at the stream, the slightest drops of dew sent shivers down my spine because of how cold it was.

“You remember when you first came to me here?” he asked me. 

“Yes, I can’t forget the day that changed my life.”

“It has been three years since then. On that day, you were standing at that point.”  He pointed at a spot behind us. “Where we are standing now used to be water, you understand?”

And I looked around, observing that indeed the bank had a little more slope to it, that we were standing inside the stream and yet outside it.   

 “I first began to notice it eleven years ago when I returned from Ibadan, where I used to work as an electrician. I have remained in town since then, trying to find answers to this problem,” he said. “I have devoted myself to many things, hoping to save this stream, but nothing has changed. Now you see me as a prophet still searching for answers, but I think I know what to do now, I think I do.”

 Alàgbà had slowly walked away from me, back into the fog of the morning and disappeared like an apparition.  

*

On the night before he sent us on an errand that led to his end, Alàgbà had spoken to us as he usually did, out under the dark sky, staring down at the dimly lit town below us. 

“The world is changing, you know. There are wars, extreme floods, poverty, foolishness and wickedness. People are experiencing famine, and rivers are drying up. The world is spoiling, and we are doing nothing about it.” 

He was only interrupted by coughing from a couple of people as we listened with rapt attention. I observed the fiery pairs of eyes walking around in the background that belonged to the cats that usually came out at night. 

“Abi, Síméónì, what do you think?” Alàgbà had asked one of the older members. 

“End times are here, Alàgbà,” Síméónì had replied. 

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Alàgbà shot back. “Kolade, do you agree? Do you think we can’t do anything to stop these evils? Are we to believe it is simply the end times, so things can’t change?”

“I… I don’t know, Alàgbà.”

He smiled at me. “I think the world will be here long after we are gone, dead and swallowed up by the earth we fail to respect. Imagine the birds flying free, the grass and trees swaying, and no human being is there to see it?” 

“Alàgbà, what do you mean?” another member asked. 

“Hope, belief, and love, the world has poured into you these things, so you must pour back into the world to help it in your own way,” he said, and laughed. “First, we have to start from what is around us, so listen to me, tomorrow we will go and finally fix our dying stream. I know what to do to it tomorrow!” 

Above us, a full moon was shining bright, illuminating the questions on our faces at those words, and the smile permanently fixed on Alàgbà’s as we all returned to our quarters. 

By morning, he woke us all up with excitement, ringing the church bell more times than usual. I noticed he was wearing a new garment as well. After morning prayers, he gathered us around and then sent us on an errand that drew the whispers of madness from each of our mouths.

“Today, we heal the sickness that has plagued our dear stream for years. Today, we change the world even if only a little bit,” he began. 

He observed all of our faces one after the other, smiling, shaking our hands, patting our backs, and then, Alàgbà asked each of us to fetch buckets of water from the well in the church compound and walk all the way down the hill to the stream to pour those buckets into it in an attempt to revive it. The irony was not lost on us that a place where people fetched water from was where we were pouring water into. A fruitless act that didn’t escape anybody else but Alàgbà.

 I wonder why we carried out that task without question. Perhaps we all trusted him too much. We respected him enough to indulge him. But it didn’t last too long because I had walked up to him after the third exhausting journey back from the hill with a bucket of water. 

“How long will this go on for?” I asked him, panting. 

“For as long as it takes to restore this stream’s glory.”

“But… But Alàgbà, that is not possible, we can’t fetch enough water to replenish this stream.”

“That is what you think,” he said, inching closer to me. “Oh, Kolade, don’t be like those who say it cannot be done, that the world cannot change. It starts from little things like this, like bringing a stream back from the dead.”

I watched him speak, his voice still as soft and as entrancing as the first time I heard it. “This is…Alàgbà, this is madness,” I had said, voicing out the word that had travelled amongst everyone while we went up and down the hill to the stream bearing heavy buckets.  I watched his eyes darken at that word. 

The others were now standing around us, ceasing to carry out the fool’s errand he had led us on. 

“Get back to work, all of you!” he screamed at me, at us, at everyone staring back at him, but nobody moved as we watched him thrash around on the bank, and then he walked into the stream.

“Alàgbà, this can’t continue, please,” I said as I watched him trudge further into the stream, submerged up to his waist in his new garment, reminding me of that morning I had first seen him doing that. Some of the others threw their buckets down and walked away from the stream, murmuring. Few others hung around, watching. 

Alàgbà covered his eyes with his palms, then scooped some water into his mouth and washed his face. The overwhelming anger that only reared its head when he spoke about the stream was now present on his face, in his voice, and enveloped the air. 

“Why do you people do this? Why do you run away from fixing things, from taking charge?” He stared directly at me, almost drilling a hole in my forehead. “All we ever do is stand and watch, like you are doing now. This stream is living. It has life, and I know that to save a life, you need a life. You leave me no choice,” he said, his hands dancing and drawing circles in the water around him. 

“Alágbá, we can keep praying,” one person said. 

“Why don’t we wait for the coming rains to do this job?” another said. 

Alàgbà ignored the chatter as he pulled out something that glistened under the morning sun from his garment, drawing gasps from everyone around. 

“They say that a life was given to redeem mankind a long time ago. Today, the life of a man shall redeem this stream. A life for a life!” He raised his arms to the sky, and before we recovered from the shock of seeing him brandish a knife, Alàgbà drove it deep into his chest in one hard stroke.  

Screams came from our mouths as we all rushed into the stream to reach him as he collapsed in a splash. The water around him was starting to redden with his blood when we got to him. Alàgbà was breathing slowly, smiling and staring up at the sky when I grabbed his hands as we tried to pull him out of the stream, crying and asking him to stay with us, to keep breathing till we got help. 

“It is finished,” he had said faintly just before we reached the bank and his hands in mine went heavy, stiff and as cold as they were on the morning I had first met him. 

*

The days after Alàgbà’s death were like a dream. The news around town was harsh: “CULT LEADER COMMITS SUICIDE”, a few local newspapers had reported. We were termed a doomsday cult that had gone to carry out mass suicide at the stream, but having seen our leader kill himself, we decided against following suit. 

Alàgbà was far from who they painted him to be, but nobody cared to understand that he was a man who saw something different. His death was not a sacrifice out of cynicism. It was a sacrifice of hope. 

Many years since Alágbá’s death, his heavy words continue to reverberate in my head. I see him speak to me in dreams. I hear him when the wind blows ever so softly. And once, when I saw a man walking barefoot through traffic, wearing a white tunic, his head clean-shaven, I had broken down and wept like a child, thinking about him all over again, a man whose legacy was reduced to the ramblings and actions of a madman.  

Now, I cannot help but wonder who is truly plagued by madness. Those who stand by and watch the world dry up, go up in flames and die off? or a man who gave his life in hope that he was redeeming the world, or at least a small part of it? And in my eyes, Alàgbà ultimately reached apotheosis and became the patron saint of all dying waters whose replenishment I continually pray for in his sacred name.