THE TRAGEDY OF ITONOZA: WHEN DESIRE DEVOURS LIFE
By: Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ámos
In Esan land, the elders tell of Itonoza, a maiden whose beauty was like the first light of dawn—radiant, delicate, impossible to ignore. She was betrothed to Isiuwa, a man of modest means, simple but sincere, whose heart knew no guile. Songs were sung, drums were beaten, and when she entered his home, the village rejoiced. Yet, in the midst of the celebration, a shadow fell. For Itonoza, seated in her new home, refused to eat.
“What will the newly wedded wife eat?” the voices rose in wonder and anxiety. Mothers pressed her, maidens whispered, elders urged. Her lips parted, and she pronounced her desire: Anuanua—the rhinoceros. A creature fierce, rare, and deadly. Her hunger was not for yam, not for meat from the village hearth, but for the impossible.
In desperation to please his beautiful wife, Isiuwa set out into the wilderness. His love burned into madness; his loyalty became his undoing. Against reason, against caution, against the quiet warnings of nature, he hunted the beast. Fortune smiled and cursed him in the same breath—for he killed the rhinoceros, but the creature, in its dying strength, tore his flesh. Isiuwa never returned to his hearth. Those who went searching for him found only his broken body beside the slain beast. And so they brought home to Itonoza the rhinoceros she demanded—alongside the corpse of the husband who sought it.
What a tale of irony! What a lament! Itonoza gained her craving but lost her companion. She tasted desire, but it was salted with death. Her beauty remained, but her household was emptied.
The story of Itonoza is not ancient dust; it is the portrait of today. For every Isiuwa who falls, there is a demand, an appetite, a desire clothed in beauty but sharpened by danger. Look around, and the modern world is filled with Itonozas—cravings for luxury that crush integrity, appetites for power that bleed nations, lusts for wealth that devour generations. Like Isiuwa, men and women fling themselves against the rhinoceros of ambition, only to return broken, if at all, while those they sought to please inherit their trophies and their graves.
Fyodor Dostoevsky would have recognized Itonoza’s tale instantly. In The Brothers Karamazov, he warned that desire without restraint makes slaves of men, and in pursuing pleasure, they destroy both themselves and those who love them. Likewise, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would call it the tragedy of a society enslaved by appetite—where beauty, wealth, and status are exalted, while the cost in blood is ignored. And Toni Morrison might whisper that beneath every demand for “more” lies a quiet funeral waiting, for desire is never innocent; it always asks for a sacrifice.
What then is the meaning of Itonoza’s tale for us? It is this: that unchecked desire is a beast, and those who chase it without wisdom are wounded by its horn. Modernity has dressed our appetites in finer garments: instead of rhinoceros meat, we crave oil and gold, status and spectacle, influence and indulgence. But the beast is the same, and the wound is the same. Too many families today carry home rhinoceroses—cars, houses, promotions, fleeting pleasures—alongside coffins of fathers, mothers, children, and futures sacrificed in the hunt.
Many children have been driven into yahoo fraud by the inordinate cravings of their parents for quick money. Many are floating on the seas of Libya, clutching at broken boats on their way to Europe, only to be swallowed by the waves or sold in the slave-markets of Tripoli. Many young girls, in search of greener pastures, end up in brothels under the chains of traffickers. Many youths, in their desperate hunger for wealth, sniff the powder of drugs and are buried long before their time. Fathers collapse in the chase for promotions; mothers crumble under the weight of appearances. And nations themselves bleed, their leaders mortgaging generations unborn in the pursuit of luxury palaces and vain glory. All these are our modern rhinoceroses—and every day, we slay them only to return with empty eyes, broken homes, and silent graves.
And so the story endures, not as entertainment but as indictment. It asks us: what rhinoceros are you chasing? What life are you risking? Who is waiting at home for a husband, wife, parent, child—only to be handed a trophy and ill-news? For the tragedy of Itonoza is not only hers; it is humanity’s. Until we learn that some desires are fatal, and some appetites not worth their price, we will continue to drag home our possessions with our perished dreams.
Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ámos is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Uromi and a Lecturer at CIWA, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
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