n the mid nineties through the early 2000's, Nigerians with the aid of the Visa Lottery literally invaded the US. Those who could not win the visa Lotto sold their personal and family belongings in order to escape to America. Visa applications, interviews, approvals and denials at most foreign embassies in Lagos and Abuja, were the order of the day. Men and women, young adults and children slept at the American embassy building on Eleke Crescent for the sake of US visas. Anywhere but Nigeria, was good to live in!

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In America then, it was a thing of joy to hold one welcome party/seminar or the other for newly arrived Nigerians. If Mexicans, Indonesians, Indians and Filipinos could get into America at will, why not Nigerians? In fact, Africa AIDS Watch, an organization which I was its Executive Director organized Seminars for newly arrived immigrants in collaboration with the Ethiopian Council.

This period also coincided with the hectic (SAPpy) days of Generals IBB and Sani Abacha. It was a period when many Nigerian Andrews checked out in droves - to look for Greener pastures in foreign lands. It was a period when even bank workers and high ranking military personnel who visited the US on official duties simply stayed put. It was a time when living abroad, particularly in the US was a thing of pride. It was a period when girls inexplicably abandoned their high school sweet hearts and long standing males to whom they've been betrothed for the unknown Nigerian male - from the USA and the Europa!The period so loomed and boomed that Nollywood romanticized it through Home Video Movies such as Omugwo and American Dollars.

Sensing the rush for the jandeds, (slang for the newly arrived males from abroad) Nigerian cab drivers, Security men, Nurses AIDES, Office Messengers, Administrative Assistants and Social Workers, in the US, in their unbridled greed, returned home to Nigeria to marry above their pay grades and American social status. They married Nigerian female medical Doctors, Nurses, Lawyers, Engineers and other well sought after high paying professionals - all products of the very good educational policies of the Nigeria of those days. Where the professionals were not the target of economic-induced marriages, pretty, educated Nigerian ladies of other academic disciplines and of good parentage, who ordinarily would not have married these men where they not from America, fell head over heels in their scramble for everything Americana and its almighty Dollar.

What the ladies did not bargain for was the sudden discovery of social in-equilibrium between them (highly trained female Nigerian professionals) and their US-based Nigerian male counterparts many of whom were at the lower totem of the American social stratum. Reader, it is important to note that you could be at the lower end of the America social strata and still act big in Nigeria. All you needed was your dollar and ability to mimic the American accent. In the days gone by, men usually married ladies they could at least have some measure of control. A university graduate at least looked for an NCE holder. A medical doctor looked for a university graduate of "inferior" discipline and so on and so forth. The American experience was a wacky role reversal.

With above scenario, the stage had been set for a turbulent ride through marriage and as a couple. Most of these marriages consummated with fanfare, (after a few thousand dollars accumulated through tax refunds and other sundry savings made the returned Nigerian American male loom larger than life) from the date of the lady's arrival from Nigeria, endured many painful "had I knowns". Soon the newly arrived Nigerian female begins to associate with "Native Americans" whom they either meet through social interaction or at work place. Social interactions or workplace, you may ask? Yes, because the newly arrived in spite of his/her educational accomplishments back home must first acclimatize. If income defined social levels, which is the case in America, then those the newly arrived Nigerian meets at workplace inevitably became his/her soul mate and social equal. Those who are professionals begin to mingle with real equals and those they could discuss with intelligently or on professional pedestal. They now come to terms that they have been defrauded or bamboozled by the razzmatazz of the American.

Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The bubble is bursting. There is a new fang of social upheaval in many Nigerian-American homes. The wives' eyes have been 'opened.' What they bargained for originally, are not what they are now seeing, leading to an unbridled escalation in matrimonial disharmony. And, now, unfortunately to the untimely deaths of many Nigerian-American wives through homicide.

Statistics available have shown that more Igbo men have killed their wives in the US than their counterparts from other parts of Nigeria. Before then, many Igbo men had suddenly slumped and died - most of this happening in the Texas area of the US. During the period under consideration, (late nineties), a story line began to make the rounds. It was weaved and presented thus: a certain type of stockfish. Yes, Okporoko was the curse/cause! Igbo men being stock fish lovers, it was easy to believe the storyline. "A certain consignment of Okporoko from either Norway or Cape Cord was the cause of this sudden collective death of men from a certain stock/race. Some mocked that the gods of stockfish were taking vengeance on the grandchildren of a race who massacred its own forbearers! That many more Igbo men in America would die before the stockfish gods were appeased." There was palpable fear in the male Igbo community everywhere in the US then. Whose turn would it be amongst the Okporoko consuming Igbo men Igbo?

However, it did not take long, before this stockfish conspiracy theory was debunked. Experts after some researches and autopsy on the dead came to the conclusion that more Igbo men slumped and died of cardiac arrest and other related sudden death syndrome because of the pent-up wahala being perpetrated on them, usually. A closer look revealed that most of those who died had one form of domestic problem or the other. There was a loud murmur in town to the effect that the deaths of these men may have been occasioned by their significant others - their wives! Their imported wives who have quickly wizened up to the American realities were the cause. The men were being confronted with a new brand of wahala which they too had not adequately prepared to cope with having been brought up in Nigeria, nay in Igboland. A land that produced the dreaded Okonkwo of "Things Fall Apart" fame; a land where it was a taboo for a man to be seen kowtow to the audacious manipulations of a "woman"; a land where the male ruled and controlled their households with iron fist; a land where women until that moment were largely seen rather than heard.

Before some Nigerian men slumped to their deaths, most had slumped in court rooms before ruthless US Judges or slumped in jail houses before no-nonsense correctional officers. Some had slumped paying child support and mortgages. Yes mortgages of home they no longer lived in. Before the stockfish-occasioned slumping, there had been heartbreaks occasioned by the newly arrived Nigerian wife's new found freedom - a new freedom she had not been equipped to manage. A freedom emanating from the fact that she had mingled and co-mingled with liberated African American Women who essentially should not have been her social equal - if everything were to be equal. The newly arrived Nigerian woman finding a liberated life and letting the new found freedom enter her head began to experiment with the husband. Feminism must begin from home.

After a while, the situation ebbed only now to be forcefully replaced by a reversal of role. Nigerian men particularly the Igbo in the US suddenly have been jolted into consciousness. Trying to reclaim manhood hitherto consigned into perpetual throes in a most dastardly method. As they tried to reclaim their waning glories and lost dignities - more Igbo men began to kill their spouses in America. It was news everywhere in the US.

Pause. Yesterday, I got a text from a Nigerian journalist living in the USA. It read in part: "….another Nigerian has murdered his wife somewhere in Georgia…." What made this latest development newsworthy for me is that this time a man from a tribe other than the Igbo did it. A Yoruba man had killed his wife. Filled with grief by this reoccurring decimalized malady in the lives of Nigerians living in the USA, I began to introspect on that subject the whys and how's of spousal killings in the USA by Nigerians.

Why is spousal killing attaining a high pitched proportion amongst Nigerian in the Diasporas, especially, in the US? If you are forty years and over, you'd recall it never used to be so in the not too distant past. Why has this heinous crime, now become rampant. Why has it moved from an Igbo ordeal and is fast spreading to other tribes of Nigerians in the US? Can Nigerians at home do anything about it before it gets out of hand? Answers and suggestions coming your way. Soon.

Godson Offoaro who lived in America for 20 years, wrote from Havensgate, Owerri Offoaro@yahoo.com 07025161236