Where stories come alive....
Nine minutes’ walk from my father’s gate. He could have walked it in the time it takes to boil water, any day, any of eleven thousand days, stood in front of her and said the thing. Instead, he sent money. Thirty years of school fees, a roof, a shop and an old woman on a veranda holding my hands and weeping with gratitude for the man who killed her son.
If I don’t return, Akanda. Not a sentence nor an explanation. A frightened man writing down the only thing that would matter if he became a body that could no longer speak. The name of the person to blame. An arrow drawn by a dead hand, pointing across thirty years at the man they buried on a Tuesday.
A madwoman does not keep a garden like that. Everything tended, everything chosen. Thirty years the town said Iyabo lost her mind waiting for a man who ran to Lagos and she has been sitting in a clean house at the edge of the red road, in complete possession of it, waiting for someone from that family to be brave enough to knock.
“Your father did not kill Bayo.” I had not asked. That is the first thing you should notice. I had not said the word kill and here was my uncle answering the accusation before I had made it, which is what a man does when he has been rehearsing the answer for thirty years. Every word he told me was true.
That was how I knew he was lying.
Chief Akanda Oyelaran was buried on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, strangers were already coming to confirm he was truly dead.
To his town, he was a benefactor. He paid school fees, built boreholes, and funded community projects. To others, he was something else entirely.
When his estranged daughter returns home after eleven years to attend his funeral, she discovers a family drowning in secrets, a locked room everyone fears, and whispers that refuse to die with the man who created them. Hidden ledgers, missing people, forgotten lovers, and buried betrayals begin to surface, forcing an entire town to confront an uncomfortable question:
Were Akanda’s sins his alone, or did everyone share in them by choosing silence?
The Sins of Akanda is a gripping Nigerian mystery drama about power, loyalty, corruption, and the dangerous cost of looking away.
More
