From the editor | April 01

It's only fitting that on April Fools' Day and in the midst of a COVID-19 shutdown we go BIG with a deep dive on reprisal killings (pictured), getting your ass kicked in Lagos, sans any kind of reprisal at all, and much more. Like what? Like what life is like when your dad wants you dead.

Eugene S. Robinson, Editor-at-Large

True Stories

The Glory Days of the Reprisal Killing

This Old West legend got his start avenging his father’s murder.

In 1868, six former Confederate soldiers who hadn’t gotten the Civil War out of their system joined a vigilante group and became so-called Regulators. They called themselves the Ferber-Campsey gang and only God knows what they were regulating as they cut a bloody swath through the postwar Western landscape.

Young Frank Eaton’s father had moved his family from Connecticut to Kansas, which is where the Ferber-Campsey Gang shot Frank’s father to death in front of the 8-year-old Frank and his mother.

No reason was ever given as to why Eaton’s father was murdered, though the fact that he had been a Union soldier may have been enough for the killers. A friend of Eaton’s father purportedly told Frank, “May an old man’s curse rest upon you if you do not try to avenge your father.”

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True Stories

Getting Your Ass Kicked in Lagos

In Lagos, while trying to get a Ph.D. from Yale, a student learns a valuable lesson about police politics: Avoid it.

It was not a good time to have an accident.

I was in Lagos, and I needed to be in Ibadan before nightfall, when armed robbers inevitably took over the roads. I was on one of the most dangerous highways in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

My car had been hit by two men who then began arguing with my driver about how much they should pay for the damages. Being notoriously bad-tempered, I decided to stay out of it. After an hour of argument, though, I decided maybe my tendencies were what was required.

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