Remembering Aisha Bugaje
ThaHoodScholar Teecube@tersootsafa488152
2 days ago
It is harmattan season in Zaria, as it is across most of northern Nigeria. The weather is usually cold and windy, accompanied with dry and dusty air blowing in from the Sahara. Harmattan is part of the northeast trade winds, and it generally lasts three to four months, beginning in late November and sometimes stretching into early March.
Northern states like Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Maiduguri usually experience it more intensely than the southern parts of the country. But in my experience, the cold is most piercing in Zaria.
There is something distinct about the harmattan here that sets it apart from anywhere else up North. I say this not idly but from a fair share of time spent across the region. Zaria's harmattan is its own thing entirely.
Having lived in Zaria for most of my life until I left sometime in 2010, and having stayed away for long stretches without visiting, I have found myself missing the Zaria weather; particularly this season. But I am not moved to write this piece because of my recent reunion with Zaria's harmattan. I am moved, rather, by something far more sobering: a single line written in a eulogy, penned by a father for his departed daughter, my late former schoolmate, Aisha Bugaje. In a tribute authored by her father, Professor Idris M. Bugaje. A line about the harmattan. A line that reached into me and brought back memories I had not visited in years, and with them, the memory of Aisha herself.
Aisha had joined us at Demonstration Secondary School, ABU Zaria, in our senior class. She was among the youngest in our set; petite, strikingly beautiful, and quietly commanding in the attention she drew from the boys on our block. Demonstration being a mixed school where boys and girls shared classrooms and moved freely among each other, I recall how many of my mates were swooning over her with their juvenile intentions. She was the shy type, an introvert, reserved and soft-spoken, moving through the noise of adolescence with a calm that, looking back, carried a depth none of us understood then.
After secondary school, she gained admission to study Mass Communication at ABU Zaria, and our paths rarely crossed even while I was still at the university. Many years after graduation, I heard of her passing. The news pained me. I had known nothing of her private battle with sickle cell disease, she had never shown it while we were in school. It was only in death, through a tribute her father wrote in her honour, that I came to understand what she had lived with all along. The tribute was titled:
"Nana: A Life of Enduring Pain"
"Every harmattan season is a frightening time for sicklers and their parents. This current harmattan is the last for our most beloved Nanuwa. She was the second born in the family, and as Allah willed it, she was born a sickler, but a very determined one. After her primary education, she attended five secondary schools in six years, due to the dynamic nature of her parents' jobs, and graduated from the Ahmadu Bello University in 2008 with a degree in Mass Communications, against all odds. She even added a Masters in International Relations later.
Married at the age of 23 in April 2012, she subsequently had a baby girl in 2015, and finally returned to her Lord at the age of 28 on Thursday, December 29, 2016. That is a short summary of the life of this Sickle Cell Anemia patient, Aisha, popularly called Nana. She led a quiet life, though always struggling to be fit and healthy. She was occasionally writing short articles, but all the time concerned about her younger ones, guiding and mentoring them on their careers.
When she lost her immediate elder sister, Amina, in the 2012 Dana Air Tragedy, Nana became the most senior among her siblings, and she never failed them in her unwavering concern for their studies and future careers. She was doing this throughout her life. She endured pain, from one Sickle Cell Crisis to another… Nana, may you now rest in peace, and may Allah forgive you and join us together in His Garden of Bliss (Firdaus)."
That opening line, "Every harmattan season is a frightening time for sicklers and their parents" - struck me with a weight I was not prepared for. Here I was, back in Zaria, breathing in this same harmattan air that I had once simply known as cold and dry and characteristic of home, and I was only now understanding what it had meant to another family entirely: dread. Vigil. Prayer. The harmattan that for me carries nostalgia had, for Aisha and those who loved her, carried fear with every gust.
Experiencing this season again in Zaria, I found my mind drifting to her, to the quiet girl from Demonstration, to the woman she became, and to the silent war she fought for twenty-eight years without once making it anyone else's burden. The harmattan will return every year. But Aisha will not.
May her gentle soul rest in eternal peace.
#rememberingAishaBugaje
#harmattanseason #zariapeople #nostalgia #demosa #ABUZaria
#SickleCellAwareness #StoriesThatMatter #teecubethahoodscholar
