I was born in 2000. I began primary school in 2003, moved to secondary school in 2011, and entered university in 2018. And so, somewhere inside the chaotic, bewildered tumult of the 2000s, I stepped into my otherwise auspicious twentieth year. Which, I suppose, makes me a typical child of the twenty-first century.
Generation Z: the first cohort never to know a world without the internet, one that values diversity and the pursuit of self-driven, distinctive identities, or so Stanford scholar Roberta Katz says. Whether this diversity is something to celebrate doesn’t quite settle with me. Perhaps it never will. My brother Jude tried to pursue his own identity, and it cost him everything.
I was fifteen when he left home. He was eighteen. None of my family has laid eyes on him since. He told me he was leaving for Italy with a friend named Dennis. Then, silence. The rumours came in fragments after that. Someone claimed he drowned. One of his mates told us we should still hope. Another insisted he was shot. After a while, I stopped trying to uncover the truth in any of it. Later, one of his friends said they didn’t fly; they changed plans and travelled by land, a treacherous route, something like the one in the film Òlòtūré. Even so, something in me believes he is gone. I grieve him every day.
My father gathered all his photographs into one small album and tucked it away in his old leather box, as if sealing something he didn’t wish to revisit. That was how my chapter began — pulled out of art class mid-term and thrust into science because my father believed my generation was the digital era, and that his first son, Ekemini, not Jude anymore, must study computer science. Only this time, he vowed, he would scrutinise more closely the friends his first son kept.
I didn’t get a choice. I had two younger siblings who looked up to me now, and a mother who operated a thrift shop in the heart of Supa Market in Abule Agba, Lagos.
After Jude left, she stopped saying his name. But I would find her standing in doorways — his bedroom, the kitchen where he used to sit with his journals, the veranda where he kept his birds. Just standing there, staring at empty spaces. Then she would see me watching, and her face would change, harden into something like resolve.
Her grief moved through the house like weather, and I learned to read the signs — which days she would weep quietly while folding clothes, which days she would corner me with her plans to remake me into what she had lost. “After everything we invested in your brother, he still decided to leave without informing his parents. No problem. My God will not let my sweat or your father’s go in vain. We have you, Ekemini. You must dry our tears.”
I think about the weight of that often, how I became the answer to their grief.
Jude was the most brilliant person I knew. Let me describe what I mean. My father worked as a Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) official, directing traffic near Computer Village in Ikeja, and he spent his entire salary making Jude computer literate. A Grade-A system from Computer Village. Home lessons with tutors who specialised in programming. After Jude was done with WAEC, whilst awaiting admission, he sent him for computer training. It was during that interval that my brother travelled, or, as my father once said, absconded.
Jude had seven distinctions and one B in his WAEC result. The B was in Technical Drawing, the one subject I could have assisted him with. He scored 350 in JAMB. He applied for Computer Engineering at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). He never sat for the post-UTME because he was gone. He could dismantle the various components of a radio and alter its configuration. He constructed websites on WordPress even as a teenager. Viewed in that light, he was a generational talent.
But he also possessed this strange affinity with nature that my parents never quite understood. He gathered flowers whenever he spotted them. Then insects. Then pigeons. One day, he brought home a snake. My mother never mentioned this to my father. She simply looked at Jude and said, “Get your priorities right and stop behaving like a madman.”
But there was another side to my brother I have to talk about, one that had nothing to do with his Gen-Z mind, always making an effort to forge its own identity and embrace a diversity liberated from the shackles of our perpetually religious and morally rigid world. He collected fashion magazines, pages full of men in beautiful garments. He would sit with his pencil, trying to recreate what he saw, the images spread across the floor. Sometimes he would get frustrated and call me over. That was how I honed my craft, because he wanted every detail captured. Every crease in fabric. Every angle.
The week before my brother disappeared, he received a gig to build a website for a writer. The writer offered to pay quite a huge sum. He didn’t tell me the amount, but he remarked, “It’s enough to take me abroad.” He was sitting at the dining table when he uttered it, his journals open before him, that flawless handwriting filling the pages.
I laughed. I thought he was joking.
He glanced up at me and smiled. “Eke, if I had your talent, I would freeze the world and sketch its nooks and crannies.”
I should have known he meant it.
Jude wanted to reach a place where he would be welcomed. Where he wouldn’t be judged for what he was — for his feelings towards his own gender, something that could land an adult fourteen years in prison in Nigeria. It was a secret only I and a few of his close friends knew. Perhaps that was why he confided everything else in me, taught me virtually everything I knew until he was no longer there.
His fixation on details was unparalleled. He kept a daily journal with his impeccable handwriting. The only thing I had excelled at beyond him was drawing. I had been the best in my class academically, too. But he attained flawless scores in everything else. Now I sit in science lectures studying for a degree I never chose, and my father observes my friends, monitors my movements, asks where I’m going, and with whom. My mother looks at me sometimes with this desperate hope that makes my chest constrict. My siblings seek my help the way I used to seek Jude’s.
I keep one of his journals hidden in my room, the one my father never got hold of. Sometimes, I read the entries, his handwriting still perfect, still him. There is one from two weeks before he departed: Eke sketched me today. I examined the drawing and saw someone I didn’t recognise, someone who appeared free. I wonder what it’s like to feel that way in your own skin.
I wonder if he ever discovered it, that sense of belonging within himself.
Late at night, when everyone is asleep, I draw the things Jude used to cherish — flowers, the curve of a hand, men in fine suits. I render my brother’s face from memory, over and over, striving to capture every detail he taught me to perceive. Because, if I’m honest, I don’t know if this diversity, this pursuit of self-driven, distinctive identities that defines Generation Z, is something to celebrate. I only know that my brother tried to live it, and I’m left here holding the weight of who he couldn’t be.
…
His entry of October 2013: Ayo purchased a BlackBerry just recently and has already begun to ping. Not long ago, pinging was only for BlackBerry users. Now, even Android and iPhone users can ping. I still use my old Nokia, one of those Symbian phones my father acquired secondhand from Computer Village. So I don’t expect much. But experiencing both Android and BlackBerry has made me think of the bird and the hen. We’re beginning to shift from mere infrared communication to Bluetooth, which offers a wider range. Impressive. All of this transformation is happening in Nigeria. What changes, then, are peculiar to abroad? I can’t wait to discover someday when I’m free like a bird.
I reflected on his obsession with birds and my own passion for sketching Spiderman, both marvels of a mind obsessed with flight. If you look at it, you might dismiss it as having no deeper meaning, but being twenty has granted me the ability to reconsider and recognise that my brother’s thoughts had matured far beyond his age. He spoke of flight, meaning that what BlackBerry once held as its sole competitive advantage, and what Android and iPhone soon offered, might signal the beginning of BlackBerry’s end. It’s a poor business strategy: exclusiveness. The bird’s ability to soar alone is what prevents it from being domesticated like our hens. Perhaps he was talking about cages.
However, my brother didn’t explain why he was comparing nature with the artificial, not in that particular entry. The rest of it elaborated excessively on the technical principles between infrared and Bluetooth, how they were both waves, something a scientist would relish hearing. But I reflect on that Nokia he mentioned, already obsolete by 2013, a discontinued operating system, yet it was what we could afford. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s how he felt, like something the world had abandoned, still functional, still here, but not quite belonging anywhere anymore.
I was in third-year Computer Science when my parents had their accidents. My father died on the spot. The bus conductor said he had stepped into the road without looking, attempting to direct traffic at his usual post near Computer Village, and a danfo bus coming from the opposite direction didn’t see him in time. My mother was at the shop when she received the news. They said she collapsed, just fell straight down, and from the way she landed, something in her spine gave way. She survived, but her legs didn’t.
The funeral arrangements fell to me. My sisters were still in secondary school. Someone had to coordinate things. And my mother. My mother was in the hospital, paralysed from the waist down, unable to even attend the funeral.
I returned home to Egbeda that weekend to collect documents, to locate my father’s work papers, to do what first sons were supposed to do. That was when I had to break the padlock on my father’s leather box. I told myself I was searching for insurance papers, pension documents, anything that would help us survive what was approaching.
My sisters would go live with my mother’s younger sister at Iyanera. My mother would be transported to our village, where relatives could care for her. I would carry us forward somehow.
But underneath the documents, beneath the album of Jude’s photographs, I discovered more of his journals. Older ones I had never encountered. I began reading without intending to. Just a few entries. Just to hear his voice again.
And that was when I noticed it, repeated throughout the pages, year after year: A, blew air into my rear.
The first time, I didn’t comprehend it. The second time, I thought it was some kind of code Jude had devised for something technical, the way he always did. But it kept appearing, followed by descriptions that made my skin grow cold, descriptions of how two males shared intimacy. Jude was a skilled writer. He had created a kind of concealed language within conventional English. It was probably why I had never fully grasped most of his entries until my mind had matured.
He never referred to either male directly as “him”, the way he typically did in the rest of his journal. But from phrases like: His flesh had grown out of his belly, and A hoarse voice that reverberates in his stomach, one could discern there was an age gap between them. The elder had to be someone of authority — a father, a teacher, someone the younger one couldn’t refuse.
I sat on the floor of that vacant house, journals scattered around me, and felt something shift in my chest. The younger one had been groomed, I realised. I didn’t quite comprehend what was being done to him. Because as manipulative as the older one sounded, he still valued the younger, probably because the younger was his son.
I stared at my father’s obituary again, lying on top of the box: Samuel A. Adube. I had known his full name my entire life, had written it on forms, had heard it called at family gatherings. But that day, as bleak as it seemed, the pieces fell together.
A.
Jude was a genius in creating obscured language inside ordinary language, or perhaps he had been so traumatised by what our father did to him that his mind had stumbled upon the language of madmen. There was no way anyone else could decode his entries at first sight. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps he needed to record it, but couldn’t bear for anyone to read it clearly.
I kept searching through the box, my hands trembling now, and discovered one more piece of writing tucked behind a family photograph. The paper was different from his usual journal pages, thicker and more deliberate. His final words before he left: I suppose you gave me life, but not the reason you kept evaluating my body. I didn’t have too much difficulty adapting to it because you took me gently. I must confess, you did everything you could to make it up to me. You fuelled my curiosity in every aspect. But you shouldn’t have, in that aspect. Like the way a lion cripples a hyena so it’ll not feed on its kill, you crippled my way of seeing the world. I just hope Ekemini will not receive such treatment, even though I tried to introduce him into such an act. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to him. It seems not all men in our family have that trait. He seems untouched by this, more fascinated with art rather than curiosity, like you and I, Father. I have much to say but nothing less than thank you. Thank you for the sickness you’ve passed to me. I hope it stops with me.
I read his letter three times before the words settled into something I could hold. My brother had been inquisitive, curious about everything. He wanted to decipher systems, how things worked, why they functioned the way they did. Our father nourished that curiosity in mathematics, in technology, in nature. But he fed it in other ways, too. Ways that transformed my brother. Ways that made him believe what happened to him was part of who he was, that the attraction our father cultivated in him was somehow inherited, genetic, a family trait that could be passed down like our father’s nose or his handwriting.
Jude thought he was sick. He thought I might be sick, too. I recalled then the times he had made me draw male models, first with shirts, then gradually without. How he would scrutinise the drawings, comparing proportions, asking me to adjust the shoulders, the chest, the waist. I thought he was being perfectionist about art. Now I understood he was struggling to understand himself, trying to determine if what he felt when he looked at men’s bodies was the same thing our father had made him feel. He was studying himself through my work. Testing to see if the sickness had spread to me.
He was the one who taught me how to tie a tie and buckle a belt. I remember how his hands once held my waist to demonstrate the correct posture for wearing a blazer — a firm grip, instructive, the way an older brother should teach a younger sibling. But then, I felt his fingers loosen suddenly, felt him take a sharp breath and step back as if he had touched something hot. He had laughed it off, said something about me being too skinny for the blazer to fit properly. I had laughed, too.
Now I grasped what that moment was. He had caught himself. Whatever our father planted in him, whatever he thought was growing in him like a weed, he refused to let it touch me.
I sat on the floor of our house in Egbeda, that letter in my hands, and something broke open in my chest. Not anger. Not yet. Just this awful, hollow grief that filled every corner of the room. My father was dead. There was no one to confront, no one to demand answers from. And Jude was gone, probably dead too.
…
The university granted me a leave of absence to manage family affairs. I spent three months travelling back and forth between the hospital and the village, arranging for my mother’s care, watching her learn to accept that she would never walk again. Eventually, when the hospital bills became overwhelming, we transferred her to the village where relatives could assist directly.
My mother didn’t ask what I had found in the box after I told her I had opened it. Maybe she thought I had only discovered photographs, pension papers, the ordinary remnants of a life. Or maybe she knew there were other things and couldn’t bear to speak them aloud. I attempted once to talk to her about the journals I found.
I sat beside her bed in the village, the afternoon heat pressing down on us, and asked, “Mama, did you know why Jude really left?”
She looked at me for a long time. Then, she said, “Your brother was confused. The world confused him. It’s better not to dwell on such things.”
“But did you know—”
“Ekemini.” Her voice went hard. “Your father is dead. Your brother is gone. What good does it do to dig up bones?”
I wanted to ask if she knew how our father had been with Jude. I wanted to ask why she had called my brother a madman for collecting pigeons and snakes, when perhaps he was just struggling to figure out the world in ways that felt safe. I wanted to ask if she had ever questioned why Jude flinched sometimes when our father touched his shoulder, why he locked his bedroom door at night, why he was so desperate to leave. If she had ever wondered why she collapsed so completely at the news of our father’s death — was it grief, or joy, or guilt? Whether a part of her had always known what kind of man he was and couldn’t bear to live with that knowledge anymore.
But she turned her face away from me, towards the window, and I knew the conversation was over. Perhaps she had decided that certain things were better left unsaid. She passed away two years later, in early 2023, still immobile.
I visited her one last time before she died, and she held my hand and told me to be a good man, to make the family proud, to finish my degree. But she never mentioned Jude. I think she chose not to see what was before her. Perhaps that was easier than facing what it would mean if she had known. What it would mean about her, about the choices she made or didn’t make.
…
Between my mother’s death in 2023 and my final decision to leave, there was a semester where I tried to continue. I attended lectures. I submitted assignments. I pretended that discovering what my father had done to Jude hadn’t fundamentally altered who I was.
I returned to UNILAG for a lecture on Computer Architecture, one of those core courses my father would have been proud to see Jude excel in. All about how processors execute instructions, how memory hierarchies work, the physical logic of computation. The kind of systematic thinking Jude had mastered before he disappeared.
The lecture hall was half-empty, as it usually was by final year. The air conditioner had been broken for months, so the windows were open, letting in the noise from the department’s generator and the heat that made everyone’s notebooks stick to their forearms.
Professor Oguntona was at the whiteboard, drawing pipeline diagrams, talking about instruction cycles and data hazards. I had my notebook open. My pen was in my hand. But I wasn’t taking notes. I looked around the room, at Chidi in the front row, always engaged, always asking questions that made lectures run long. At Blessing and Tunde in the back, sharing earbuds, trying not to laugh at whatever they were watching. At Emeka, two rows over, copying diagrams with the same meticulousness Jude used to employ.
These were the approved friends. The safe ones. The students who would graduate, get good jobs, and make their parents proud. I was supposed to be one of them. But all I could see was my father standing in this room instead of Professor Oguntona, pointing at the whiteboard, saying: “This is what your brother should have learned. This is what I paid for. This is what you’ll finish for him.”
My hand started moving across the page. I wasn’t drawing pipeline diagrams, nor data hazards. Instead, a jacket. Single-breasted, narrow lapels, the kind of cut that would make shoulders look broader without adding bulk. I drew it quickly, instinctively, the way Jude used to code, like his hands knew what they were doing before his mind caught up with them. I added details. Contrast stitching along the seams. Pockets at an unexpected angle. A collar that would stand up slightly, giving structure to the neck.
I was designing a jacket for someone who didn’t exist. Or maybe for someone who did exist but never got to become himself.
“Ekemini.”
I looked up. Professor Oguntona was watching me from the front of the room.
“Can you explain the concept of cache coherency?”
I stared at him. I had no idea what slide he was on, what we had been discussing for the past twenty minutes. The room was silent, and everyone was waiting.
“I…” I started.
Then I looked down at my notebook, at the jacket I had drawn instead of the notes I should have taken. At the careful details, the way I had shaded the fabric to show how it would drape. At the figure wearing it, rendered in quick strokes — a man standing with his shoulders back, unashamed.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Professor Oguntona studied me for a moment, nodded, and called on someone else.
I should have felt shame. I should have closed my notebook and forced myself to pay attention. But, instead, I turned the page and started drawing again. Another jacket. Then, trousers with an unusual taper. Then a full suit, the kind Jude would spend hours studying in those magazines, his pencil hovering over the page as he tried to get it right. He would pull me over to help him see what he was missing.
But this time, I wasn’t squinting at someone else’s photograph. I was building something from nothing.
When the lecture ended, I gathered my things slowly, letting the other students file out first. Professor Oguntona was erasing the whiteboard when I reached the front of the room.
“Ekemini,” he said without turning around.
I stopped.
“You’ve been distracted all semester. Is everything alright?”
I could have told him about my mother, still fresh in the ground. About my father. About Jude. About the journals and the letter and the awful knowledge I carried now.
Instead, I said, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”
He turned to look at me. “In this lecture?”
“In Computer Science.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, he said, “I knew your father. Computer Village, directing traffic. He was very proud when you got admitted.”
“He had two sons who could have studied computers,” I said. “I’m not the one who was supposed to be here.”
The notebook slipped. I grabbed for it and missed. It hit the floor and opened, pages of sketched suits and jackets spilling across the floor. Professor Oguntona bent down and picked one up. He studied the sketch for a long moment before handing it back to me.
“What are you supposed to be doing?” he asked.
I looked down at the drawings, at the jackets and suits, and the careful attention to how fabric falls, how garments transform the body, how clothing can make someone feel free in their own skin.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But not this.”
He nodded slowly. “Then I hope you discover it soon before you waste more time living someone else’s vision.”
Someone else’s vision.
That phrase haunted me for days because I had been living two visions that weren’t mine — my father’s dream of a computer scientist son and Jude’s fear that I carried the same sickness he did. But here is what my brother didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known when he wrote those words: It seems not all men in our family have that trait.
I had stayed away from the opposite sex, too, just like him. I found myself drawn to my own gender. But not the way he thought. Not because someone taught me or hurt me or made me see bodies as puzzles to solve. I see men and envision the different pieces that would suit them — the cut of a jacket across shoulders, the way certain fabrics would drape, the colours that would make their features stand out. I’m not fixated on seeing them undressed. I’m fixated on adorning them.
When I sketch a man, I’m not studying his body the way Jude studied those models. I’m imagining him transformed, elevated, made beautiful through design.
That difference, that one small difference, is everything.
It was this realisation that eventually propelled me towards learning fashion design alongside my studies at UNILAG. It wasn’t to escape anything, nor to prove anything, but because when I sketched well-dressed men, I felt the same thing Jude must have felt when he coded his journal entries or constructed his websites or collected his pigeons. The ability to view the world on my own terms.
For a year, after I discovered that letter, I drew until my hands cramped. Filled sketchbook after sketchbook with designs — suits with unexpected cuts, traditional agbada reimagined with modern silhouettes, casual wear that made movement look like dance. I captured men the way Jude wanted to be rendered — whole, unabashed, not crippled by shame or secrecy.
I didn’t show anyone at first. I kept the sketchbooks concealed the way Jude kept his journals hidden. But one night, sitting in my room at my uncle’s house in Iyanera, where I had relocated after my mother went to the village, I reflected on that Nokia in Jude’s journal entry. Obsolete. Discontinued. Still functional, but not belonging anywhere. I didn’t want to be obsolete.
That night, the night after Professor Oguntona’s lecture, I opened Instagram, an app Jude never got to use, a platform that didn’t exist when he was learning WordPress. I uploaded my first design. The jacket I had drawn in class. Then another. Then another.
For weeks, nothing happened. I kept uploading anyway, kept drawing, kept imagining men transformed by fabric and colour. Then one morning, I woke up to a message from a fashion brand I had never heard of, based in Amsterdam. They had seen my work. They wanted to know if I would be interested in an apprenticeship, a chance to learn from their design team, a contract if things worked out.
I stared at that message for a full hour. It felt too convenient, too easy, like the universe offering me the exact thing Jude had wanted and never got. I almost deleted it, convinced it was a scam. But then, I thought about Jude sitting at our dining table, saying, “It’s enough to take me abroad,” and I knew I couldn’t let fear make my decisions.
I wrote back. We conversed for months. Video calls, portfolio reviews, contracts sent back and forth. They were legitimate. They wanted me.
Three months before graduation, I signed the contract and bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. I didn’t finish my degree. My father was dead, my mother was dead, and the path they had laid out for me had always been meant for someone else. I was done living Jude’s interrupted life.
I’ve been in Amsterdam for eight months now. The atelier where I work has north-facing windows and clean light, nothing like the Lagos heat that made fabric stick to your skin. Yesterday, a Dutch-Nigerian man came in for his final fitting, a suit for his wedding to his German partner. He kept adjusting his collar until his fiancé reached over and stilled his hands. When he looked in the mirror, his whole face changed.
“This is me,” he said, and I thought about Jude sitting at our dining table with his journals, dreaming of a place where he could say those same words without it costing him everything.
I still carry one of his journals. Sometimes, I read the entry about the Nokia phone, about birds and cages. I understand now what he was really saying: the bird that can’t be domesticated dies alone. Jude chose to fly alone because he had no choice.
But I’m designing clothes for men who walk freely down the streets he never saw, who hold hands in public, who get to be whole without fear. Every suit I make, every line I draw, I’m building the world my brother tried to reach.
I don’t know if this Gen Z diversity, this pursuit of self-driven, distinctive identities, is something to celebrate. The cost is still too high. My brother paid it. But I know this, I’m not trying to decode myself the way Jude decoded systems. I’m not trying to escape a sickness that was never genetic, never inherited, just cruelty wearing the mask of curiosity. I’m just making men look the way Jude wanted to be seen — whole, adorned, elevated.
Every stitch, every seam, I’m telling him what I couldn’t tell him when he left. It stops here. The fabric doesn’t lie, and neither do I.
Jude wanted to fly. I learned to make wings.
Haliru Ali Musa is a Nigerian writer and power engineer. He believes that before problems can be solved, people must first care about them. Whether working on Nigeria’s electrical grid or crafting narratives, his goal remains the same — connecting people to causes that matter. He is an alumnus of the Nigerian Academy of Letters’ Creative Writing Workshop and the winner of the inaugural Alexander Nderitu Prize for World Literature 2024. He is also the winner of the 8th African Writers Awards (for the Short Story category). He is a columnist with Naira Stories Magazine. His work has appeared in Naira Stories Magazine, Chestnut Review, The Kalahari Review, The African Griot Review, Akpata Magazine, Farafina Blog, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Lagos.