After his father's untimely death in the early nineties, Charles' mother, Benita had been left to fend for her three children all by herself. He was the second child, he had an older and a younger sister. It was uncanny but he had seen it coming. He was too young to understand it all but he had seen it coming. He always saw things happen before they actually happened and now that people called him a Seer, he laughed at the incredulity of it all.
They gave a name to what he couldn't understand himself. His mother had tried to explain how he could have gotten his powers but she was only guessing it herself, she didn't know for sure how it came to be. He knew that he wasn't a true Seer as the Holy Scriptures paints it but as the Holy Book advises, he had only been profiting from his many gifts even if he was not being scriptural with his actions.
None of his church members knew of his secret lifestyle and because he was always giving them prophecies of what would happen to them in the future and told them of their pasts lives, they readily called him their Pastor and Seer.
He was one of the wealthiest and most sought-after Pastor in his country, Nigeria, and the fact that he could see issues before they happened and proffered lasting solutions to intricate problems had made him have the listening ears of the high and the mighty. He received dignitaries into his posh home and his name was on several lips because he was the one to talk to when a solution was urgently needed.
Despite being very young at the time his father died, he couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. He remembered how helpless he had felt at the travails his mother, Benita had gone through after his father passed. She was the only one of his indivisible early-year nuclear family of four that still remembered how his father really looked like. His father hadn't been too poor to take pictures of himself while he was alive, he didn't just see it as necessary.
He had money to spend at the bar and on strange women but he never had a single picture to his name. He was a man that lived and died in deep penury because he refused to care for his wife and children; he would rather spend his money outside his home and it was a daily battle for him to drop some money with Benita, his wife for the daily running of their home.
As far he was concerned, his father's face had become a very faint memory as there was no picture to help keep his face familiar but Benita often recounted stories that had made his memories of him intact. It was later she knew that side of him seeing things before they actually happened in real life. As Benita later said, "Even if I or your father had known of your strange gifts, would he have listened to you? Your father was a very strong-willed man and you took that from him to some extent".
Benita had had her fair share of marital turbulence as a result of his father's numerous extramarital affairs but his sudden death had made it clear that she hadn't seen the worse yet when she thought she had seen it all. A huge gap had been left for her to fill and she had been grossly inadequately prepared to fill up that huge space. She had been a full-time housewife all through her married years and had had very little education, so she couldn't pursue a career after her husband's death.
Her deceased husband had also married her for that very same reason, his favorite lines were, "The stark illiterates have no use for big big grammar". His father had had a secondary school education but his family's archaic traditions had held him back from actually portraying his literacy by his actions. That he was the only educated man his family produced could have also contributed to his unwillingness to be less traditional.
He seemed very willing to fit in with his families' expectations of him. He had been a police officer killed in the course of his active service to his nation: he had made his only beloved sister, their auntie Anne his next of kin when he was still unmarried and hadn't seen the need to change it when he had gotten married. He was a go-lucky guy that never knew that death could come calling for him sooner than expected.
