Emma-Radnitz Elabor

May 12

TWO GIANTS. ONE LOAF. A KINGDOM BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES.
I was there the day the mountains themselves seemed to hold their breath.
They called them Ogom and Duru — brothers born of the same storm, raised on the same soil, feared by the same villages. Each man stood as tall as five warriors stacked upon one another's shoulders. The ground cracked beneath their feet like dry clay in harmattan.
Nobody remembered how the war started.
Some said it was land. Others whispered it was a woman. But the elders — the ones who had seen enough harvests to know better — they said it was hunger.
It is always hunger, old Mama Chidinma told me, stirring her pot without looking up. A man with nothing in his belly will fight his own blood.
That morning, I saw it with my own eyes.
The battlefield stretched wide across the valley, littered with fallen shields and broken men who had come to serve these two giants. Armies had clashed. Blood had soaked into the grey stones. And in the end, when every soldier had fled or fallen, Ogom and Duru stood face to face.
Between their enormous fists — barely visible, almost laughable in its smallness — was a single loaf of bread.
One loaf.
I watched from behind a boulder, my heart hammering in my chest, as the two brothers screamed into each other's faces. The sound shook birds from their trees a mile away. The mountains echoed their rage back at them like a scolding ancestor.
"It is MINE!" Ogom roared, his voice like thunder rolling through a valley.
"I found it FIRST!" Duru bellowed back, his grip tightening until his knuckles turned pale as bone.
And I wept.
Not from fear — though I was terrified. I wept because I understood what I was watching. Two powerful men. Two mountains of flesh and fury. And neither of them realised that while they fought over one loaf, there was a bakery in the village below with enough bread to feed them both for a year.
Their pride would not let them put it down.
Their pride would not let them look away from each other long enough to see abundance waiting at their feet.
The elders say the battle lasted three days.
They say the loaf crumbled to dust in their hands long before either of them won.
They say both giants walked away with nothing — bleeding, exhausted, alone — each returning to opposite ends of the valley to nurse wounds that never fully healed.
And the village below?
They had bread every day.
The man who cannot share will always fight for scraps. The man who cannot let go will always end up with dust. Do not let pride make a giant out of your enemy and a fool out of yourself.
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