About

I'm Gershom Umar. I write from Jos, Plateau State.

My father grew up a Muslim boy in the core north, devout enough that he once told the man who walked him to school every day that he did not deserve to live. Nathan — that was his name — listened, took a razor blade from his pocket, handed it over, and offered his arm. My father was twelve. He used it.

The next morning Nathan turned up on time, said hello, and walked him to school as though nothing had happened. I forgave you before I handed you the blade, he said, when my father finally asked. I still love you the same.

My father told me that story more times than I can count, and his eyes went wet at the same place every time. He called it his first encounter with grace — years before he had a word for it. I still get angry at the boy in that story. I have never fully gotten over it, and I have stopped trying to.

So I write about grace, and about what it costs to refuse what everyone has agreed to call normal.

A night on the floor of a police holding cell in Jos, after a motorcycle left its lane and ran into my car on mine — and what I learned there from nine boys who had been held for a week without charge. A checkpoint on the road home, where a driver refused a bribe, drove off, and had a rifle pointed at our windscreen for it; and the young man beside me who said the driver should have just paid. My father in a hospital bed, singing in Hausa that he was not afraid, comforting the woman who had come to comfort him.

Then there is the argument. Why the Middle Belt war is badly named, and what the naming is for. A National Assembly that is seen but never heard. The Nigerian youth as a political bloc that has not yet worked out what it is. Why you cannot summarize a revolution, and why the people in power are always the last to know one has begun.

And once, a straight-faced guide to giving up, which spends two thousand words teaching you how and then declines to.

I read Business Management at the University of Jos after an engineering application went nowhere, and served my NYSC year in the finance and accounting department at ITF Calabar — relearning from scratch the ledgers I had spent secondary school refusing to look at. My Business Studies teacher had warned me. My people have a saying: if the ear refuses to hear, the eye cannot refuse to see.

I write for organizations as well as for myself. That has meant newsletters and appeals for Carry Them Ministries; communications work for Call to Obedience Ministry Nigeria; writing for H.O.P.E. USA — Healing the Oppressed and the Persecuted through Education; and governance and policy documents for G4G Cooperative, a member-owned financial institution. I'm also the author of Skill to Business: How Nigerian Entrepreneurs Can Build Profitable Small Businesses. A number of the essays here were first published in ILLUMINATION.

I write to brief and to deadline. I would rather be edited hard than published loosely, and I check what I quote — the attributions on this site are verified to source, and where I have got something wrong I correct it in the open.

My father spent his boyhood certain he could earn his way to righteousness and the rest of his life insisting he could not. He took me from my cesspit of sin, cleaned me up, gave me a brand-new life, and I didn't have to do anything for it. Most of what I write is an argument with that, or for it.