A Look at Territorial Behaviour

Let me tell you something that happened to me when I was 18. I was already an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan.
 We went on strike, and I had some time on my hands. At the time, to make extra money, I used to participate in exam racketeering fraud by collecting contracts from the principals of special centers to write exams for Art Subjects. The pay at the time per center was 300,000 naira, I will write 8 papers, minus Mathematics, and distribute the answers to the other students. So I got to the special center two weeks before papers would start. Usually, some of the indigenous students would be doing tutorials by this time. One week before the exams, the external students would start arriving. Anyway, I got there way too early I decided to attend the tutorial classes at the village school. When I got there, I realized their teachers didn’t really know much I liked to teach, so I began to teach the tutorial classes. By day three, the most beautiful girl among the indigenous students was my girlfriend I didn’t have to toast her, it happened simply by the natural selection process. I was the sharpest guy in town, and she was the only student with permed hair who also attended secondary school at Ibadan but had failed WAEC seven times and was rewriting for the eighth time. 

This Tosin babe worshipped the ground I walked on she cooks from her parents’ house daily and brings me a full cooked food basket with fruits etc, without fail. My rented room was very close to the school, so she practically spent all day with me from the moment she arrived in the morning till she returned home at night. I was a virgin at the time, and I was keeping myself until marriage. So this was not a sexual relationship we had been at it for about ten days, talking, singing Jahnimah, and playing Sunita love when I discovered she was five years older than I. She had written WAEC five times and GCE three times and has failed woefully. To be candid, she was not a very smart girl but she knows men, and I didn’t know women. By that I mean, she was life smarter than I, while I was book-smart than her. A few days before the start of the exams, the external students began to arrive I mean, these were city babes some of them were in pre-degree and some in polytechnic already, while rewriting WAEC because of a paper or two that they failed the previous time. One of the ladies landed, and the whole community shook she was driven down in a chauffeured Benz, and a pickup truck brought all the food and other provisions she would ever need. I heard the boys talking about her (Male external students also arrived, and they were all handsome and whatever, but they were hunters, and so was I. We were all hunting for females, and the prize was who would be with the most beautiful girl.) The competition was an unspoken one among the males, but the top guy must get the top babe. I didn’t waste any time, I went to this beautiful new babe's house I greeted her and we got talking I told her I wanted to walk her through the town of Iroko, where we would be writing the exams I didn’t have fancy clothes, but I always made up for that with my good brain. We walked and talked, she told me she had a boyfriend at OAU. She was also studying Chemistry in OAU but wanted to switch to medicine and needed to pass her Physics in WAEC. We became fast friends. This new babe was seventeen I was 18 the other babe was 23.

 Later that evening, I got back to my room and found the 23-year-old waiting for me. For the first time since we met, she insisted she was not going home that night, she was sleeping over Ha! "My mummy will kill me.” I didn’t say that, but well... One day will be the first of something new. It is part of growing up so I didn’t argue. Of course, she was the one who then began to initiate sex and all and I was the one saying "Stop it, oh, ah, stop it, please stop". Somehow, I survived that day without having sex with her. She left in the morning to change at her house I thought about it and realised she did what she did because she sensed a competition and wanted to keep me at all costs. So after the tutorial that second day, I went with the seventeen-year-old to her room and stayed there till the night the next day. Like me, she was not interested in sex that much, yet when I told her I would be sleeping in her room, she just said, "Okay". No fear that he wants to try anything I did this because I wanted to avoid the 23-year-old who I knew would come back with vengeance that day. I didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore, but I also didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to be the boyfriend of the seventeen-year-old, too I would rather just be friends with her than be the boyfriend of the other lady. I lived like this for several days until the day of my birthday, the 23-year-old spoke with some guys about how this new babe had snatched her boyfriend. The guys were known to me they were from Ire Poly, and they were cultists, we were all living in Bodija Estate, they were in their twenties, and they were always doing drugs I avoid them like the plague. So these two guys came to me after the tutorial that I taught and said they wanted to see me I didn’t want to take them to the new baby’s house, so I took them to my room. When I got there, I met the 23-year-old with cakes and drinks and a subtle message, "If you want her, you can have both of us, i don’t mind, but I don’t want to lose you to her.” I was 18 years old Eighteen!!! I just wanted to live my life in peace and be friends with girls. These cult guys then told me that the 23-year-old is the only girl they approve of me to be with in that school if I didn't want them to treat my "F" Bad language* Up". I slept in my room that night out of fear, and the 23-year-old was with me all night. 

The next morning, I got to the school and realized I needed to break up with the babe formally. I needed someone to help me achieve that purpose I realized she was smarter than I, and I hated the fact that she made me sleep in one room when my mind wanted to sleep in another. And I did it out of fear. Later that day, after the tutorial, the 23-year-old showed up again, and this time she said she would like me to come and see her house (I had never been there). When I got there, I met her Uncle and her Aunt, who were based in that village (I thought she was living alone and rented an apartment too) The uncle then said to me, "She said she is bringing her fiancé, I am happy to meet you. Take care of each other. Silver or gold I have not, but what I can give you is my blessings. I realized I was in soup. I went to the seventeen-year-old who had missed me sorely and was angry that she couldn't find me anywhere, all that had happened. She listened and laughed She said, "Move in with me. Let us see who would dare threaten you when I am around.” Seventeen years old! Oh my. Neither of us had seen life, but she was way smarter than I She went to the same cult guys and gave them some money. She also bought them drinks. That was how she rescued me.

 The twenty-three-year-old had to let go when she realized she had lost her hold on me. We wrote the exams, we passed, and everybody moved on. I lived with her till we finished the WAEC session for that year. I write this to draw attention to human behavioral patterns that I noticed, when there was no competition, the two most similar in the environment teamed up. When competition came, the two split up as one tried to find a more appropriate companion. The one left behind felt she deserved the one that left, and even though she couldn’t keep him with her feminine wiles, she resorted to external support. This is human nature, it is the same with other beings, lesser than humans, too Birds—and Territory.

 A man and his Dad designed a house for a wren family when he was ten years old. It looked like a Conestoga wagon and had a front entrance about the size of a quarter. This made it a good house for wrens, who are tiny, and not so good for other, larger birds, who couldn’t get in. Their elderly neighbour had a birdhouse, too, which we built for her at the same time, from an old rubber boot. It had an opening large enough for a bird the size of a robin. She was looking forward to the day it was occupied. A wren soon discovered the birdhouse and made himself at home there. They could hear his lengthy, trilling song, repeated over and over, during the early spring. Once he’d built his nest in the covered wagon, however, our new avian tenant started carrying small sticks to their neighbour’s nearby boot. He packed it so full that no other bird, large or small, could possibly get in. The neighbour was not pleased by this preemptive strike, but there was nothing to be done about it. “If we take it down, clean it up, and put it back in the tree, the wren will just pack it full of sticks again. ” Wrens are small, and they’re cute, but they’re merciless.” The young man’s dad suggested that he sit on the back lawn, record the wren’s song, play it back, and watch what happened. So, he went out into the bright spring sunlight and taped a few minutes of the wren laying furious claim to his territory with song. Then he let him hear his own voice. That little bird, one-third the size of a sparrow, began to dive-bomb. The young man and his cassette recorder, swooping back and forth, inches from the speaker. The wren was a fierce territorial defender even in the absence of the tape recorder. If a larger bird ever dared to sit and rest in any of the trees near our birdhouse, there was a good chance he would get knocked off his perch by a kamikaze wren.