⬆️Bamidele Johnson.
For the better part of 20 years, I have nursed a rather peculiar curiosity about the men who hang condemned prisoners. I have often wondered what it feels like to kill for a living, to have a job description that includes carrying out legal murder and still look forward to a pension at the end of it. I would give quite a bit to sit down with a serving or retired executioner over dinner and 50 litres of potent liquor, which he might need for a little disinhibition, and have a long conversation about life on the other side of the gallows. This is strictly for my education. I have nothing planned.
For starters, who are these gentlemen or women? I am inclined to believe women do not do this sort of work. How does one become a hangman? Does the Nigerian Correctional Service breed natural-born killers or does it occasionally place vacancy ads for the position, perhaps under some obscure category? Are executioners engaged on a vendor- supplier basis? Are they volunteers? Does anyone actually leave school and decide that executing condemned prisoners is the career path he wishes to pursue?
I am particularly curious about the recruitment process. How is it determined that they have the emotional constitution for the job? What does the first assignment feel like? Is there an induction, a probationary period or does one simply get handed a condemned man and told to get on with it?
Then there is the matter of training, which I find genuinely thrilling to contemplate. I picture a school for hangmen, complete with a crest, a Latin motto, practical exercises involving sandbags and a graduation ceremony featuring academic gowns. I very much doubt that prison officials simply hand a fellow a rope and wish him the best of luck.
Does an experienced executioner, perhaps some distinguished Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Hangmen, take the new recruit under his wing and show him the ropes? Pardon the pun. Does he serve an apprenticeship, watching proceedings from a discreet distance before earning admission into the Institute of Legal Murder? Are there refresher courses or annual conferences? I am keen to know what the professional development programme looks like.
My curiosity, however, extends beyond the prisons into the homes of these men. Take marriage, for instance. Does a hangman’s wife know what her husband does for a living? Does she go about her domestic business in the knowledge that the man who shares her bed is also a professional killer? Does she ask him “how work?” when he returns home after a day’s execution? If he says fine, does that mean he had several people to kill or none at all? I imagine the subject of his day’s activities does not feature when the family has dinner.
What about the children? Do they know that daddy kills people? If they do, what do they tell their classmates when asked what their father does for a living? I am equally interested in the psychological baggage that comes with the territory. Does the hangman ever bring his work home, even if only in his head? Does he sleep soundly? Does he occasionally wake up screaming, “Chi m oooo” or “kneeling down of mothers oooo?
Then comes the part where my levity begins to run out and I am happy to admit it. Does he see the condemned man on the platform as a human being in his final minutes or merely as an item on the rota? Does he hear the man’s last words? Does he look into his eyes? Does one particular face ever return to haunt him at 2am, years after the deed?
Does the employer provide mental health support? Is there counselling or some form of psychological rehabilitation? Or is the expectation that once the execution is completed, the officer simply signs out and goes home to find some means of preventing his mind from becoming scrambled?
We spend considerable time debating capital punishment, the morality of the death penalty, the possibility of wrongful convictions and the right of the state to take human life. Important conversations, these. But we do not spare a thought for the man who must physically carry out the sentence. He is an interesting, if rather neglected, character in the entire drama of state-sanctioned death.
As a subject, I find the hangman fascinating, unsettling and, admittedly, a little macabre. Somewhere, there may be a man whose professional responsibility is to end the lives of condemned prisoners. He probably has a family, a wife who nags him about one thing or another, children who rush to welcome him home and neighbours with whom he swaps pleasantries every morning. He may even be the life of his Community Development Association, the fella who jokes the most at meetings, contributes to discussions and never misses his turn to pay the communal levy.
There is something wonderfully strange, almost surreal, about that picture. The man who goes to work to accelerate somebody else’s journey to his ancestors must still remember to buy bread on his way home.