5 Popular Nigerian Myths Debunked

Nigerians are great storytellers. Storytelling is a core part of our culture and has become a part of our lives. In most cases, as they are told and shared from person to person, a lot of these stories we are told as kids tend to devolve into myths.

In this article, we will analyse some of these myths and debunk them. These ones were mostly made popular in primary and secondary schools. Whether you attended a day school or a boarding school I’m pretty sure you have heard most, if not all of them.

In fact, if you attended school by the time these myths were flying around, your first child should be getting married by now.

Let’s get into it!

The ‘Legendary’ Miss Koikoi

If you didn’t hear about this one, did you even attend a Nigerian school? 

In boarding schools, this story was used to dissuade students from going to pee at midnight. It was said that Miss Koi Koi haunted the halls of the school and she wore red heels and the click of her heels against the floor gave the rhythmic ‘koi koi koi’ sound, hence the name.

There are various versions of this story but it was alleged that if you dared venture out of your room in the dead of night to relieve yourself or something else, then Miss Koi Koi would grab you and eat the flesh of your face and other parts of your body. There’s even a whole movie on Netflix based on this myth. 

This story caused sleepless nights for a lot of students, especially the Junior students. I mean, which one of us would like to have our face eaten? Students went as far as claiming that when morning came, they had found the bodies of students with half-eaten faces and these were victims of Miss Koi Koi. Of course, these are all rumours. None of it was true. 

Think about it, If Miss Koi Koi really existed, how  possible is it that she would be present in all the boarding schools in Nigeria at once? I mean how does she keep up? Does she run shifts or maybe she cloned herself? Perhaps she has some type of super machine with location trackers that told her when a child came out of their room at night and in what boarding school in Nigeria the child stayed. 

This myth doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it but that is exactly why it’s a myth. 

The Sweet That Became A Thumb

Who else heard of this? 

Well, the story goes like this: A girl went to a birthday party and the celebrant was sharing sweets. While everyone else ate their sweets, this particular girl didn’t eat hers. She put it in her bag to show her mother but on getting home, she forgot. The next day, when she opened her bag to show her mother the sweet, there wasn’t a sweet in her bag anymore.

What she saw was a human thumb. It was said that the birthday celebrant was a witch and she was trying to initiate her classmates into her cult. By eating the sweets, every attendee had become initiated. However, because the girl chose to show her mother before eating the sweet she was saved from being initiated into the cult.

The story has a good moral lesson for small children. It teaches them that whenever they’re given something to eat outside the home, it’s important to let their parents know before eating it. Still, this myth has no truth to it. 

First of all, if the birthday celebrant was really bent on initiating all her classmates couldn’t she have insisted that the girl eat the sweet in her presence? And if she knew that the sweet would eventually turn into a severed thumb, why didn’t she try to take out the sweet from her classmate’s bag when she wasn’t looking so that she and her cult would not be exposed? 

Then what happened to disguising the thumb as a chicken drumstick instead of a sweet? Drumsticks usually have a shorter lifespan than sweets and would be consumed immediately. That’s definitely more effective than a sweet. It’s either the coven didn’t think it through or this didn’t happen.  

If You Pick Money From The Road Your Body Would Freeze or You Will Turn To Yam

The reasoning behind this myth was to discourage children from stealing. It was said that if you saw money on the ground and it didn’t belong to you and you tried to pick it you would freeze where you are, that is, you wouldn’t be able to move any part of your body or you would turn into a tuber of yam or goat.

Or even worse, you would be initiated into a cult and witches would come to your bedroom window at night. 

There are a thousand versions of this particular myth yet, it hasn’t stopped people from picking money on the road. And I haven’t seen any yam in the middle of the road except maybe the one that falls from the wheelbarrow of a yam seller.

I also haven’t seen anybody who froze in the middle of the road when they tried to pick up money that wasn’t theirs  from the floor and  have seen many people pick up money from the floor

What l often see is that they pick up the money, dust it, put it in his pocket and walk away. They’re usually fine. Nothing happens to them. This myth needs no debate. It’s simply a scare tactic for kids and not true.

Lekeleke Bamboo, Give Me Water Finger 

This was common among young children, especially in primary school. It was said that if you see the cattle egret bird popularly known as lekeleke in Nigeria, you should raise your hand to the sky and chant ‘lekeleke bamboo, give me water finger’ and a white spot would appear on your nail overnight. 

This myth is not true. According to Cleveland Clinic, ‘White spots usually mean that your nails have experienced some sort of stress.

The stress could be from an injury, like hitting your nail against a hard surface, an infection or an allergic reaction. White spots are sometimes the side effects of medications’. 

From this, we could infer that no bird has the ability to give you a white patch on your finger.

If You Flip Your Eyelids And A Fly Perchs On It, You Will Become Blind 

The heading for this says it all but it’s not true. 

Medical research has shown that causes of blindness include but are not limited to cataracts, glaucoma, refractive errors, diabetic retinopathy, and macular degeneration. Nowhere has research and scientific studies shown that flipping one’s eyelid inside out can cause blindness.

Besides, what are the chances that a fly would perch on your upturned eyelids?

What myths did you hear in school that are not included in this list? Please let us know in the comments.