​I move quickly from the warm lights and gentle seats of my apartment into the streets. I am running late, and as I comb my hair and adjust bags and belongings, I am slow to notice the sounds of Lagos that contrast so sharply with the safety of my living room. A man yells as he backs up his car; the woman in the stall thinks I’ve disrespected her because of my half-bow, half-mumbled good morning, while I wonder if I should have said it in Yoruba. I move to the queue for the Keke that will carry me to the morning bus scramble; the woman sharing my compound is there to my left; I ignore her—she’s ignored my last four greetings.

​The Keke driver signals from across the street as he makes an abrupt U-turn, almost hitting an oncoming vehicle. He instantly begins berating the driver he has nearly hit. The passengers in the car emerge with their own retorts and insults. Horns blare as traffic swells around the scene. I observe passively. This is a typical Tuesday, and I just want to get to the Bus stop on time, so I can slip past the agitated people scrambling in their suits, trying to get into a bus or car. Sometimes the drivers are extortionate, and you can only avoid the daily altercation by emptying your pockets.

The drivers begrudgingly forgive each other, and just as I step into the keke, I hear one boy in a group of three, dressed in undersized uniforms, scream at another group, “Ogun go kill you.” I am tense, but it takes added effort to look inward and notice . Every twenty minutes or so, I realise again: I am tense. I sigh and release the tension, but today I am thinking/wondering more than ever about why it is the god of war and iron that is most invoked in these parts.

​In Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he writes that decolonisation is always a violent process. The settler maintains a regime through guns, police, and the bayonet in all its forms. Because the oppression is maintained by violence, only violence can end it. The settler’s aim is to make a sub-human of the native to justify the worst of his actions, and because the native naturally resists this transformation—even if only internally—he carries tension in his muscles. The colonised people are often angry; they are an angry people.

​The settler has many tools for his domination. He constructs a country from a band of disparate parts and tells them how civilisation really works; he dictates which gods are false and pits one native against the other. Colonialists often made the world into simple binaries: black here, white there; us here, you there. The tense native is walled off in neighbourhoods that stand in contrast to the warm living quarters of the “masters”. Fanon’s suggestion is that the native exhausts this tension in his arms upon his brother. He fills his lungs with it and pushes the bile into his legs for fight-like dancing. ​It can be dangerous to seek exact answers in reading, but Fanon holds up a mirror to my daily hum and drum. While the colonised native has not yet avenged himself, he cannibalises his fellow native. He visits dismissal, rage, and whatever horrors he can manage upon his fellow citizens. Fanon suggests that coordinated violence is the path by which the dehumanised native makes both himself and the settler whole again. You can see naturally why you should not ask the man with a gun to your face nicely for release.

​I ask the book in the margins: If violent repression is dehumanising, how redemptive is violent retribution? If someone is standing on your neck with a bayonet in their hand, putting them on their back is sensible and expected. But then what? In a violent, angry world, sometimes the revolutionary act is kindness. But where do we turn to kindness, and who do we put on their backs?

​I’ve found that gods of all forms tie themselves more closely with certain cities, and some people favour certain virtues and, hence, certain gods. The Greeks made a mockery of Ares (Mars), often favouring Athena and more artful and tactful deities (even with their flaws). The Romans eventually came for their throats and placed the god of war at the summit of their devotion; the conquerors favoured the red and brutish butt of Greek jokes. For them, he became even more revered than Jove. Perhaps the descendants of these people’s consciousness mixed the blood of Ares with their spirits and spread his dominion on and on. When the gods were fewer or singular—as with the Judeo-Christians—violent peoples invading or escaping seemed always to appeal to the more vengeful and wrathful aspects of the divine; oppressors and oppressed dancing together for war.

​In Nigeria, the archetypes are just as heavy. Ogun is the god of friction; he is found in the sparks where the brake pads have worn thin, and the Keke’s metal frame groans against the asphalt. He is the aspect of the gears grinding and the machete’s edge, the one invoked in south-western Nigeria. To call on Ogun is to acknowledge, perhaps, that we are already in the forge, being hammered and wanting to hit back.

​Amadioha, by contrast, is the god of the clean break. Where Ogun is the slow heat of the blacksmith’s fire, Amadioha is the sudden, white-hot crack of the sky. He represents a final, catastrophic clearing of the air. When the native calls on the god of thunder, saying “thunder fire you”, they are asking for the sky to intervene where the earth has failed them. It is a plea for a divine “reset”, a hope that a single bolt of lightning might strike the bayonet from the settler’s hand and the greed from the neighbour’s heart. In the aftermath of traditional colonisation, all these forces and factors mould into the shape of an angry nation. Without a common target and with neatly created divisions, no unified fight happens, and the tension continues.

​So the oppressed call for justice from Ogun or Amadioha, or ask God at length to punish enemies and let them die by fire. While the settler keeps a distance in the neo-colonial state of affairs, the native fights in this world with other natives and asks his or her gods to visit opposition, especially from their villages, in the spiritual plane. “Ogun kill you”, “May Amadioha strike you down”, and “Fight my enemies oh Lord” carry the same flavour in my bitter mouth. If I find reason for all this simmering violence, I am still left asking where radical acts of humanity can find their place through the fog—where to fight an enemy who has left your shores and how, after meeting their sword with yours, you can humanise yourself and them at once.

​I’ve been thinking about the rage at the surface of interactions in my country—the antagonisms between village and city, between neighbours, between schoolboys, and between gangs and tribes. “The natives cannibalise themselves,” I often think now. The daily language is laced with rage, the dances are vigorous, the entertainment escapist, and the native sets war gods on fellow natives as the settlers once set theirs upon them; the settlers’ daily routine is drawing divisive lines in the settled land. Nigeria surely still has fights to address within, but I can’t help but feel the neo-colonial step still on our necks even as I release the tension.