Shrieks and Giggles

 Prologue: The Tree That Feeds on Silence

“When a child cries at midnight and the dog does not bark, the ancestors are the ones rocking the cradle.”- Old Tiv saying

In the far stretches of Taraba State, where the savannah breathes in long sighs and the earth blushes red beneath bare feet, there lies a land shaped more by stories than by time. The wind there is not just wind. It carries whispers, prayers, and warnings folded into its dusty robes. And there, where the ochre light of dusk sits low and patient like an old village elder, you will find Gindin Doruwa, a real place on the edge of forgetting.

The people speak gently there, often in riddles–because words, once spoken, might wake things that should stay sleeping. They say there is a tree in this place, a towering baobab, gnarled like the knuckles of a dying chief, its bark stained deep like old blood. They call it Baobab Ajiyan-Kunu, The Crimson Baobab. It bears no fruit, only bones. Bones of silence. Bones of sacrifice.

Underneath its roots are names no one dares write. Names of children born beneath eclipses, black sunned babies, kissed by shadow, swallowed by the soil before their seventh harmattan. The elders say, “When the moon eats the sun, a life must pay the debt.”

Grief walks softly in Gindin Doruwa. Mothers bury lullabies in their throats. Fathers count their children twice before sleep. Not from carelessness, but fear. Silence is not cowardice here. It is survival. Because in Gindin Doruwa, even the soil remembers. Every buried secret grows back as something twisted.

And the tree  remembers everything.

They say the sky swallowed the sun the day Aondo was born.

At first, the eclipse was seen as a blessing. Women ululated, drummers in the next hamlet beat their leather bound toms to call the gods home. Aondo’s father, Danjuma Yaji, danced with palm wine running down his beard. The joy is brief, because in Gindin Doruwa no eclipse child lives to see their seventh year.

The elders don’t speak of it directly. They say, “The sun casts a long shadow for those who arrive when it hides.”Or, “No leaf falls unless the root shakes.” Everyone knows what they mean: the Crimson Baobab is counting.

It is the kind of knowledge passed not by mouth but by glances and hushes. The kind of truth that slithers through mortar cracks and settles in soup pots. Each generation forgets, or pretends to. Until another child vanishes.

Aondo is four now, and already his mother, Jummai, ties a leather charm bag beneath his arm. It reeks of bitter roots and hot ash. His grandmother whispers verses from the Kwararafa era, clutching her ancient black rosary in one hand and a dried lizard tail in the other. They hope to confuse the spirits. They hope he can be the one who breaks the curse.

But no one breaks the silence here.

One: Eclipse Children

Gindin Doruwa, Wukari Local Government Area, Taraba State 2015

Gindin Doruwa lies an hour’s ride southeast of Wukari town, beyond the Yongo stream and near the border that brushes Donga. The land is open, flat enough to see a goat running half a mile, and dry enough to hear the sound of a broom sweeping ten compounds away. The village’s nickname, Croc Town, comes from an old tale of a crocodile spirit that once lived in a clay well, punishing those who stole what was not theirs. These days, it’s not crocodiles people fear. 

It is the baobab.

It stands in the middle of the old grazing field, huge, ancient, its bark the colour of dried blood. It never flowers, never fruits. Just spreads its limbs like a curse. It is said that no matter how far one runs from it, its shadow always touches them once they’ve been marked.

They say it calls the children back home.

Only the old know the full story. 

Chief Garba Nyam, the village head and descendant of Wukari's royal lineage, was just a boy when the first eclipse child vanished. His compound is the largest. It’s      ochre walls are lined  with cowry shells. A brass gong hangs like a promise. Every market day, he sits beneath the shea tree surrounded by advisers and traders, pretending not to notice when mothers with eclipse children cross to the other side of the path.

He has a scar under his left eye, a long, clean one. Some say he earned it in battle. Others whisper he got it the night his twin sister disappeared beneath the baobab when they were both six.

He never speaks of her.

But the whispers remain.

In a small, smoky compound on the far side of the village, an old woman named Mama Ayatu sits with a rusted brass bowl in her lap. Her sight is gone, but her memory is sharp like freshly split bamboo.

“Children born under covered suns,” she mutters to herself, crushing charcoal into dust, “don’t belong to their mothers. They belong to the old ones…the ones beneath.”

Her granddaughter, Asabe, watches quietly. She’s sixteen, skinny as a reed, with eyes too wide for her face. She doesn’t believe in all this nonsense. Not really. Until last week, when little Tamuno, the eclipse boy from the neighbor’s house, ran screaming into the bush at dusk and never came back. No one followed. No one dared. By morning, all they found was a child’s anklet under the baobab tree     , still warm.

That night, Asabe heard giggles in the wind. Giggles, and the sound of bones clicking like prayer beads.

Three houses down, a stranger arrives from Jalingo, the capital of Taraba: a woman with a recorder, a notebook, and questions sharper than razors. She dug where others turned away. In doing so, she touched the root of a secret older than the baobab itself.

Dr. Halima Adedeji steps off the commercial motorcycle, dusts off her jeans, and surveys the dry landscape. She’s in her mid-thirties, glasses fogged, voice calm but firm. A child psychologist from Jalingo with roots in Wukari, she’s here on a field project to document childhood trauma in remote Northern communities.

What she doesn’t know, what she’s about to learn, is that some trauma doesn’t speak. It watches. Waits. And laughs quietly under trees.

She’s been assigned a guide, Maliki, a quiet boy of nineteen with a bad limp and a father buried in the bush behind the mosque.

“You’ll stay in the guest hut,” he tells her, pointing with a stick. “You hear giggles in the night... just cover your ears. The wind likes to tease strangers.”

She laughs, thinking it’s a joke. Maliki doesn’t.

That night, Halima lies awake listening. At first it’s crickets and the occasional owl. But then, soft, so soft, there’s a child’s laughter. Not one child. Many. Echoing from the fields. As if the baobab is telling a joke only the dead understand.

She closes her eyes.

The baobab tree does not sleep.

Two: Gindin Doruwa Whispers

Gindin Doruwa, Taraba State  2015

At first light, Gindin Doruwa wakes slowly, like an old man stretching cracked limbs beneath his raffia mat. Smoke from the cooking huts spirals into the pink morning sky, mingling with the scent of fermented millet, roasted groundnuts, and cow dung. Roosters crow in uneven tones, while donkeys bleat like possessed goats. Here, time doesn’t hurry. It moves to the rhythm of pestle and mortar, calabash and gourd.

Beneath the warmth of routine lies something colder. Something stiff. Something that stares back when no one is looking.

Dr. Halima Adedeji steps out of the guest hut, notebook in hand, camera slung over one shoulder. Maliki is already waiting by the neem tree, his limp more pronounced in the morning chill. His eyes, however, are sharp.

“You did not sleep?” he asks.

“I did,” she lies.

He nods without pressing further. 

In Gindin Doruwa, people learn early not to poke at silence. It bites.

They walk past children sweeping courtyards with short brooms made from palm fronds. Past old men with tobacco stained teeth gossiping under the shea tree. Past women pounding yam like war drums. Everyone greets Halima politely. Their eyes all carry the same weight: curiosity wrapped in warning.

At the edge of the village, the baobab looms.

“Can I go closer?” she asks.

Maliki stiffens.

“You can go. I will not.”

“Why?”

He points to his leg. “I asked questions once. This is what I got.”

She falls silent. The wind carries the dry laughter of unseen children to her again. Or maybe it’s just the harmattan stirring through brittle leaves.

That afternoon, Halima visits the community primary school. The building is one long, fading block, its green paint chipped and peeling like old scabs. Children sit on benches too small for their growing bodies, copying numbers with charcoal on cardboard sheets.

The headmaster, Musa Gbori, offers her a warm welcome and a bitter kola nut. He’s tall and lean, with a soft voice and heavy eyes.

“We have seventeen children enrolled,” he says, “but three families withdrew their children last month. Said they were sending them to uncles in Zaki-Biam.”

“But you doubt that,” Halima notes.

“I know lies when they dress like concerns,” he replies.

She observes the children. None of them appear to be over six.

“Do any children here reach seven?” she asks. 

Musa's lips tighten. He taps the edge of his desk.

“There’s something this village knows but doesn’t tell. I wasn’t born here. I married a woman from Gindin Doruwa. My first son... he was an eclipse child.”

Halima’s breath hitches.

“What happened?”

“He turned six. Two weeks later, he vanished.”

The silence thickens between them.

“No body?” she asks.

Musa looks away.

“Only teeth. Neatly arranged. Under that tree.”

Later that day, Halima walks around the market square. It’s a patch of dusty earth with makeshift stalls, selling kola nuts, guinea corn, dried fish, and second hand wrappers from Makurdi. The people smile, but they do not linger with her. Even the children keep their distance.

That’s when Halima notices her.

A wrinkled woman with skin like beaten leather, sitting behind a mound of goat skulls and feathers. She does not sell. She watches.

“Who is that?” Halima asks Maliki.

“That’s Mama Ayatu.”“The one who speaks to the ancestors?”

He nods. 

“Some say she never stopped mourning. Others say she never stopped listening.”

Halima approaches.

“Good afternoon, Mama.”

The old woman doesn’t reply.

“I’m here to learn. About the children.”

Mama Ayatu blinks slowly, then mutters, “Some things are not for learning. They are for surviving.”

“I don’t believe in spirits,” Halima replies gently.

“Good,” the woman rasps. “That’s how they find you quicker.”

At dusk, Halima visits the village borehole. Women queue with yellow jerry cans, gossiping in hushed Tiv and Jukun. She hears the name “Aondo” slip through their lips.

She steps closer. One woman, with tribal marks shaped like twin commas under her eyes, hushes the others and steps forward.

“You’re the one asking about the tree?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful, aunty. That tree doesn’t like attention.”

“What do you mean?”

“It chooses. It marks eclipse children. They hear things in their sleep. They walk in dreams. My niece was one. She began drawing circles in ash, saying ‘they’re calling me.’ One night she just walked out. That was ten years ago.”

“Did you find her?”

The woman looks at the ground.

“Her slippers were under the baobab. And… giggles.”

Halima shivers.

“Do you know why it happens?”

The woman shrugs. “Ask the royals. This thing didn’t start with us.”

That night, Halima returns to her hut. She rereads her notes: Eclipse. Age Seven. Vanishing. Giggles. Royal Family. Tree.

She begins digging through local archives she downloaded before arriving: ancient Kwararafa beliefs, Wukari oral histories, eclipses in Northern Nigeria. S     he stops at  a 1981 article from The Gongola Gazette reporting a mass mourning in Gindin Doruwa. Seven children vanished after an eclipse. All of them from families tied to Chief Nyam’s lineage.

The article was never followed up. No investigation. Just buried.

Her skin crawls.

Outside, the wind shifts. This time the giggling is clearer. Closer. It weaves through her hut like thread through cloth.

She grabs her torch and notebook, flings open the door, and sees nothing but dry air.

Then she looks down. There is a trail. Faint chalky white footprints. Small ones. Leading toward the baobab.

Halima does not follow. Not tonight.

But the whispers in Gindin Doruwa are getting louder.