Who abducted the concubine?

Who abducted the concubine?
FUNKE ADETUTU

Never, it couldn’t have been! It’s just impossible for the concubine to be kidnapped. How could it be, that a 75-year-old concubine is stolen from the comfort of his home in a country with rulers and chieftains? It was just unbelievable but it’s true what my television was telling at this hour of the night when the cockerel has gone home to roost.
The newscaster read from the news bulletin in front of him that the renowned author of The Concubine, Elechi Amadi, was kidnapped last Monday night in his home in Port Harcourt. His abductors must have realised that they went for the wrong person after their ‘successful’ operation. What could an author whose royalties have not been paid for years by the publishers has to offer kidnappers except for the ransom they are likely to place on his head. He wasn’t the kind whose father works in a petroleum company or whose mother was given a ministerial appointment. He was just a faceless man who hailed from Aluu in Ikwerre Local Government Area of Rivers State. His pen gave him a face that had become popular the world over. He worked hard at his pen to make the golden name he now had, Elechi Amadi.
This brings to mind, the words of late poet, Christopher Okigbo in one of his famous poems, Hurray for Thunder that “the eyes that look down will surely see the nose.
Amadi surely looked down with pen for his eyes to catch a glimpse of his nose. At the time he wrote, it wasn’t easy to have one’s name as a writer listed on the African Writers’ series. It was just too competitive.
For a renowned Nigerian author who has authored three African novels: The Concubine, The Great Ponds and The Slave to be abducted for no genuine reason is a shame. Amadi’s novels are known the world over and they bother generally about African village life, customs, beliefs and religious practices, as they were before contact with the Western world. He was one of those who championed the African course at the time when The Concubine, which is one of his classic novels of modern African literature has been made into a film.
Amadi had a stint with the Nigerian army and fought on the Nigerian side during the Nigeria-Biafra War. I’m sure those stints must have worked for him when he was kidnapped. I can imagine sitting among his kidnappers as the wise one telling them about the revolutionary steps he took with his intellect. His personal experiences in the war have been recorded in his autobiographical non-fiction, Sunset in Biafra which I would expect that the kidnappers to read. If they had read Amadi’s works, it would have been an eye-opener and humbling experience for them. They would have known that real men are not usually violent but their intellect speak for them. After the war Amadi left the army to work for the Rivers State government in Nigeria.
“The carcass of an elephant is indeed not a load is for the back of a camel” to use the words of Akeem Lasisi. The kidnappers’ act already has bent their altruist's spine which made them release Amadi within a short time. They had carried an ant infested wood which was too heavy for them what more could they do but to release Amadi on the same day he was abducted.
The finger that fits should be used to pick the nose.
What Amadi’s abductors failed to understand is the fact that during the author’s hay days, they fought authorities with their pens and not by engaging in kidnapping. Amadi and his fellow African writers were not extortionists or opportunists who infiltrate the arena of nay struggle. Their fight was commonsensical. The kidnapping of innocents in any conflict should never be condoned. It’s important that government get to the root of this aberration.