It was not my first time holding a knife.
But it was my first time holding one against a living thing. I hesitated.
The chicken did not scream in English. It did not quote scripture. It did not argue law. It did not invoke God. It did not quote the constitution. It only flapped violently, desperately, its wings beating against my palms in objection. Its eyes locked into mine. There was something there. Not philosophy. Not intellect. But insistence.
A plea.
A protest.
Or simply the raw declaration of a creature that believed its life mattered.
We say it easily. It is just a chicken.
That word “just” has excused many things.
Just one village.
Just casualties.
Just collateral damage.
Just numbers.
But in my hands that afternoon, it was not just anything. It was warm. It was breathing. It resisted.
And I was stunned by that resistance.
No law would punish me. No court would summon me. Slaughtering a chicken is ordinary. It is culture. It is sustenance. It is survival. Life feeds on life.
Yet my hand froze.
Because in that moment, something larger than poultry confronted me.
The wings did not stop. The body twisted. The neck strained away from the blade as though it understood steel. As though it recognised finality.
And suddenly, uninvited, Benue entered the room.
The massacres in Guma.
The night raids in Logo.
The fields in Agatu that have known more funerals than harvests.
In recent years, thousands have been killed across Benue State. Farmers in their fields. Women in their homes. Children in flight. Entire communities emptied in hours. We read the figures in passing. We debate them on television. We adjust to them the way we adjust to fuel prices.
But the grief does not stop at Benue’s borders.
Across parts of Taraba, Tiv communities have also faced repeated violence. Villages attacked and wiped out. Families displaced. Lives disrupted in ways that rarely make national headlines. The silence around them is almost as violent as the attacks themselves. There are communities that feel erased quietly, their suffering too local to trend, too inconvenient to dominate the news cycle.
And that quiet erasure may be the most dangerous thing of all.
Because when pain is loud, it demands response. But when it is muted, it disappears into statistics, or worse, into forgetfulness.
Yet every statistic once flapped.
Every number once resisted.
Every casualty believed, with the same blind urgency as the chicken in my hands, that its life mattered.
I laid the knife against the neck.
And something inside me broke.
I could not do it.
I stepped back. My grip loosened. The wings slowed. The chicken fell to the ground and ran, confused, alive.
What followed unsettled me even more than the hesitation.
I wept.
Not dignified tears. Not theatrical tears. I wept the kind that disorients you. For almost an hour, I wept.
I was not sure what I was mourning.
The chicken.
The act.
The memory of villages razed.
Or the frightening realisation that death has become too easy in our land.
Perhaps I wept because I had, for a brief second, felt the weight of ending a life, and it was heavier than I expected.
We have become fluent in death.
We announce body counts with the detachment of weather forecasters. Twenty here. Fifty there. One hundred somewhere else. We argue about whether the figures are exaggerated. We move on to the next headline.
The normalisation is what terrifies me.
The killers are frightening, yes. But what chills me more is our adaptation. The way we return to weddings and conferences while villages are still counting bodies. The way we say these things happen and continue eating.
What does it take to slaughter another human being and sleep.
What must be numbed.
What must be buried.
What must be rehearsed internally until conscience becomes faint background noise.
The chicken fought with everything it had, feathers against steel. It did not surrender politely. It did not accept fate quietly. It resisted extinction.
If a creature we consider small protests death so fiercely, what must have been the final resistance of a farmer facing armed men. Of a mother shielding her child. Of a child running through darkness.
We rarely ask that question. We prefer abstractions. Security challenges. Ethno-religious tensions. Land disputes. Policy failures.
Our language sanitises horror.
But death is never sanitary.
It is breath leaving lungs.
It is a heart that will not beat again.
It is a name spoken in past tense.
That afternoon, I confronted the violence required to silence even a bird. And I was shaken by how deliberate it must be to silence a person.
I am not claiming sainthood. I eat chicken. I will eat it again. The world is structured around consumption. Survival is not gentle.
But for one suspended hour, I understood something I had only written about before. To take life is to override resistance. To insist that another being’s struggle does not matter.
And that insistence is the seed of every massacre.
Perhaps what overwhelmed me was not pity for the chicken, but grief for a nation growing accustomed to blood.
When did we become people who adjust so quickly to mass burial?
When did outrage acquire an expiry date?
When did empathy become optional?
The most dangerous erosion in any society is not infrastructure. It is not even security. It is moral reflex. The instinct to recoil at unnecessary suffering. The inability to continue normally when injustice screams.
If that reflex dies, everything else follows.
The chicken ran from me and disappeared behind a fence.
I remained, holding a knife that suddenly felt heavier than metal.
Maybe my tears were proof that something inside me is still alive. And maybe that is what we must fight to preserve, the capacity to still be shaken.
Because the day we can lay a blade to a neck, human or otherwise, without trembling, without pause, without reflection, is the day we have normalised what should never be normal.
And a nation that no longer trembles at blood is already in deeper danger than it knows.
Shaakaa can be reached on:
shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
