The setting sun, a huge red ball in an explosion
of vivid crimson and golden rays, hung over the tops of the giant mahogany
trees to the east of Kumasi. Its brilliant light etched out the sharp-angled
outlines of the tall Ministries buildings in the business district of Odum
separating our area Bompata from the residential zone of Nhyiaeso beyond whose
colonial bungalows tropical jungle forest stretched into the distance. The
rusty-brown zinc roofs striding over the walls of our whitewashed house like a
cowboy’s outspread legs threw long shadows across the beaten red soil in front
of the house. Beyond the laterite soil began the pebble-tarred Station road.
My father, whom we called Papa, a
tall, scrawny man with a wax printed cloth thrown over a smudged singlet and
thick khaki shorts he had gotten as a gift for good work done from
one of the
expatriate living in the bungalows of Nhyiaeso, stood at the edge of the road
and squinted up the Albion truck where the
distended muscles twitched on the thick arms and the broad backs of the
driver’s mates straining to load bulky furniture and other voluminous luggage
onto the rack.
Our neighbors, who had appeared at
the arched entrances of their houses, stared a while in embarrassment and with
compassion at Papa. Soon, some whispered to each other and then one approached
Papa like a cock stalking a corn seed beside someone’s leg.
“Papa Anwona—“Anwona was the
local Twi word for our Ewe tribe“—where are you going?” Baba Musa, the muezzin,
asked in a surprise tone in his voice rendered loud and mellifluous by calling
the Moslems to prayer five times a day.
Papa lowered his long face and
smirked through his thick moustache scattered with grey hair. “I’m not
leaving,” he assured in his voice made husky by incantations, smiling to reveal
teeth colored with cola nuts and cardamom seeds. “I’m taking these home and
then I’ll be back.”
A broad smile split Baba Musa’s
round, withered-leather face. “That’s relieving to hear,” he breathed. “I
thought you were leaving for good.”
“No,” Papa shook his head; “I’m not
leaving for good.”
Baba Musa fingered his forehead and
chest—the way the Moslems do at the end of prayers—and then shook hands warmly
with Papa, patting his arm. “Please don’t leave,” he pleaded. “And let’s see
who’ll come to arrest you here,” he yelled in a truculent tone. Baba Musa was
feared in the community. A World War II veteran, he single-handedly arrests
armed robbers. People rumoured he used charms. Baba Musa went back in his
short-legged gait and whispered with the neighbors who grinned and shook each
other’s hand. They felt
relieved
that Papa—one of their oldest neighbors—was not leaving in compliance with
their government’s expulsion order against African aliens. Many had asked him
to pretend to be a Ghanaian Ewe from Keta, which is where our ancestors left
for present-day Togo a little over three centuries before.
For months now our parents have been
whispering about whether to brave the government’s order with its risks of possible
attack by mobs or arrest by the police or to go back home and face other risks
of unemployment and misery. I scrutinized Papa’s face for any signs of anxiety
but all I saw was the usual blank gaze, twitching to accompany the loading of
the goods onto the groaning, dangling truck. Then I turned to look at my mother
whom we call Nagan—elder mother. She
was a short, fair-colored woman with deep dimples which gave her a perpetual
smiling look. She sat serene like an adventurer overseeing the final
preparations of his ship about to sail for a famed treasure island. To the
other side, my father’s other wife whom we called Navi—younger mother— sat pensive on a stool; her work-thickened
arms thrust into her lap and watched the packing as if it was the casket of a
loved one being hauled onto a hearse. She was a tall, dark-colored woman with
thick eyebrows.
Suddenly Papa threw a gaze behind
him; his deep-set eyes narrowed into slits and his face hardened into a scowl.
He stared hard at Navi for sometime, munching his thin lips.
“Are you still sitting down there
like a peacock instead of lugging your things here?” he barked at her. “This
truck isn’t going to take any more luggages once the rack is covered and the
tarpaulin tied.”
Navi smirked. Nagan stood up at the
same time as she.
“No, I didn’t mean you,” Papa said
with a sweet smile to Nagan. “Yours can be loaded at any time.” He waved gently
to Nagan who sank back proudly into her wide chair, stretched the right leg and
crossed the left onto it; folded her lean arms over her huge chest and smiled
like a happy queen.
“Biased husband,” Navi grumbled loud
enough for Nagan to hear but not loud enough for Papa to catch. Those were the
days when wives couldn’t openly express their disapproval of their husbands.
I stared at Navi in a surreptitious
manner and immediately took off my gaze. Those were the days when parents hid their
weaknesses from their siblings who also pretended not to have noticed anything.
Navi’s small eyes had been sucked in like the antennae of a disturbed snail and
her medium-sized lips were thrust forward and moved tensely but wordlessly. “Wouldn’t you hurry up?” Papa howled.
“Why are you shouting at me as if I
were a child?” Navi retorted; my eyes widened and my mouth fell open. I had
never seen her challenge Papa.
The lids of Papa’s eyes tightened and his lips
were compressed together. “Did I hear right?” he yelled, cocking his ear. The
mates stopped the work and stared at them.
Mamie Dufie, the elder of our two
landladies, a dried woman with ebony complexion, bright round eyes, and a kind
smile talked while she hurried in our direction: “Papa Anwona, this isn’t a
time for quarrels. All of you are under pressure, why add more trouble?”
Papa glowered at Navi. “Efoevi’s
mother gives me a lot of troubles,” Papa spluttered. He calls his wives by their
first children’s names.
“It’s more important to pray for
this storm to be over instead of tearing at each other.”
“I’ve heard,” Papa said, gave Navi a
long, hard look and turned his attention to the mates again.
Mamie Dufie joined her younger
sister, Mamie Akosua, chocolate-colored, plump and reserved, and their
children. In their quests for daughters, both of them had remarried several
times. I had never seen any of their husbands. Our parents explained that
Ashantis being matriarchal, their women often didn’t need their husbands except
for giving them children.
“Papa Anwona,” Papa Kwamena, a Fante
co-tenant, a railway ticket inspector called jokingly, “aren’t you feeling the
heat? Wouldn’t you take off your singlet?” He tittered.
Papa peered at his singlet, nodded
quietly and smirked.
The remark jarred me back to class
four at A. M. E. Zion Primary School at Asafo. We were taking our end of year
class photograph. While the Ashantis throw cloth over their bare chests, we
Ewes wear a jumper underneath it. Whenever our people went drumming and dancing
at the patch of land facing the railway workshop, amused natives would remark:
“Strange Anwona people, why can’t you choose between wearing a cloth and a
shirt?” I would never think of wearing a cloth over anything more than a bare
chest. I still don’t know what came into me that day, but I had my rich,
multi-colored, woven kente cloth over
my singlet and presented myself to the photographer to fit me into the group.
“Hey you,” Mr. Otoo, my class
teacher, shouted in his teacher’s voice, “this isn’t an Anwona show; take off your
singlet!”
I jumped and stared at my chest
while the whole class burst into hilarious laughter.
The Ashantis were so culturally imperialistic
that we felt ashamed to speak our language even among ourselves at home. The
Ewe syllable contains a series of gb, kp
which sound like explosions or gun shots; our local friends made fun of us by
imitating explosions
and guns
going off. Somehow Ewe is to Twi what German is to English. So ashamed were we
of our heavy-sounding language that we couldn’t master it well—although that
was the only language our parents spoke to us at home—till we went back home
and stayed for many years.
“When will you master your own
language?” was a remark our parents often hurled at us.
“Are you out of your mind?” they
would curse and bite their lips when we answered in Twi.
We wondered why our parents couldn’t
understand us. They had grown up at home and when they immigrated to Kumasi
lived almost exclusively among their kindred so much so that they couldn’t
master Twi. We giggled anytime they spoke broken Twi drawing hilarious laughter
from their Ashanti neighbors and making us bow our heads in shame.
I remember in middle school form
one. Pupil teachers had come on teaching practice. On the last day our teacher,
an Ewe, decided to teach us an Ewe song. I began to tremble while my classmates
taunted me and imitated our out-of-tune way of singing. I asked to go to the
toilet and spent the afternoon roaming Asafo. When I came back during closing
assembly, my classmates pointed fingers at me and laughed their heads off. Some
mimicked our strenuous way of dancing, singing: “Anwona, boto, sikli boto.” How I wished I had a hole to disappear
into! We shunned Ewe drumming and dancing because Ashantis made such a mockery
of it.
While we turned our backs on our Ewe styles and
norms which our parents heaped on us, we adjusted to Ashanti values and styles
which made our parents mad. Except for our names which gave us off, we
succeeded in totally integrating into the Ashanti culture and felt
at ease. We
even found solutions for some of our names. Since some of our names were
similar to the Ashanti ones, especially those of the days, (maybe because of
our common Hebrew origins) some of us did not hesitate to adopt the Ashanti
ones. For example, the brother I come after was called Etsri. To make it sound
Ashanti, he changed it to Okyere. Efoe became Ofori, and Mesan became Mensah.
Those like me who couldn’t find equivalents felt miserable, especially so when
we started school. The teachers couldn’t spell Ewe names and wrote anything
they fancied. Penoukou became Panoku, which still amused the natives. Thus
names had different spellings depending on the locality and depending on
whether one lived in French or a British territory. While finally we were
spelling our family name Penuku in Ghana, Dzagli was writing his Penoukou in
Dahomey. This is even better than other families who were Jalloh in an Anglophone
country and Diallo in a francophone one.
After the loading of the truck was completed,
Papa went into the women’s room of our two-room apartment. I followed him and
peered in at the door between the two rooms. At the far end Papa parted the
white calico partition soiled with fingerprints, blood stains and dirt and
knelt before Odzanogano, his deity.
It was a meter-high terracotta bust with
cowries for eyes and gaping holes for ears, mouth and nostrils. It was decked
with offerings of dried animal blood, food, and palm oil. Around it were weird
objects and smaller deities made of wood, stone, skin, iron, animal skulls and
baked clay. Padlocks, nails, feathers, talismans, bells, and mirrors decorated
them.
Papa took a swig of gin and spat-sprayed it on
the deities. He picked up a six-tongue bell and slapping it on the floor, recited
a prayer. At the end he threw broken halves of cola into the air and read the
message made by the combination of backs and insides.
With a coconut cup he scooped
water from an earthenware pot buried before the gods. He balanced the
cup in his left palm and spoke to Odzanogano:
“Will we have a successful journey and will those to be left behind be safe?”
The cup dangled and tumbled on its
circumference into the pot. Papa scooped the water again and twice the god
confirmed that the journey would be successful and those left behind would be safe.
Papa bent down and kissed the ground and rubbed his palm over his face.
Now that he said it before the gods
I no longer doubted: Nagan and we her children were really to go and Navi and
hers were to stay behind. Why, I wondered and wished the gods had prevented us
from going but then I remembered the lesson from catechism asking us not to send
any requests to gods. That was another aspect of our family: while Papa and his
wives never went to church, they always forced us to attend mass at the St.
Peter’s Catholic Cathedral.
Papa, Nagan and we piled into the
truck, grinning and waving. Our half-brothers and half-sisters ogled us, their
chests heaving. Then the engine roared into life and they burst into tears. The
truck lurched away and Navi waved as if to a dead being carried away for
internment. On this day, I, barely fifteen, faced the realities that the innocence
of youth had made me ignore: that my family’s history was fashioned by negotiation
among four ambivalent worlds: culturally, we were Ewes—otherwise Ge-Mina--, a
dominant tribe in Togo but a minority one in Ghana, living in the dominant
Ashanti one; in terms of nationality we didn’t belong here at all, our country
was elsewhere; thirdly we were part Christians and part animists; and finally we
were a polygamous family apparently living in such perfect
harmony
that I was blind to its shortcomings. My father’s home going opened my eyes
wide to these realities the way childbirth gives sight to a baby.
Nagan, Navi, and Papa were steeped in oral
tradition which they recounted often and this helped me to reconstruct my
family’s history.
Our grandfather, Sedaya, married
late in his forties, to a woman from Keta-Asukope, his village. His only
picture shows a quiet, sad-looking man with sunken-in cheeks and gaunt eyes. Papa’s
mother however, is said to be fair-colored; a complexion Papa inherited from
her. She died at Papa’s birth around 1907, earning him the name Apevienyiku—my
child’s birth caused my death. Sedaya remarried a woman from Vogan. Soon a son
came and was named Dzagli. At this time, Germans, who had colonized the present
territory of Togo and former British Togoland in 1884 and named it Togo from
the Ge-Mina word togodo—behind the
river—when someone indicated the residence of King Mlapa whom the German
emissaries wanted to meet to sign a protectorate treaty with, needed workers
for the other German territory of Cameroon. Grandfather applied and got
recruited as cook. He had to leave his wife and children behind. Apevienyiku
was later enrolled at the German school at the administrative base of Zebe,
thirty minutes walk from Asukope.
Apevienyiku returned from school one
evening to see his father. Sedaya, who had spent barely four years in Cameroon
and who had come home six months earlier on leave, was groaning. He could only
whisper incoherently. He had lost weight and looked smaller than his 1.75 meters.
Apevienyiku’s heart missed a beat to discover his father’s fingers curled into
a fist as tight as set plaster. He sighed and shook his head. The family rushed
to a clairvoyant.
“He’s been charmed,” the wizened old
man said. “People in the village are jealous of him working with white people.
Can a person with curled fingers cook?”
Asukope was a village feared in the
environs for its juju powers. The village was founded by Asu, a twin hunter,
who was one of the Ewe warriors from Keta in present-day Ghana who had
accompanied the Ge emigrating from Accra, capital of Ghana. When going hunting,
Asu whetted his arrow on a rock on the outskirts of the forest of Glidzi.
Anytime he did this, he killed a lot of game. Asu deduced that the rock had a
soul, and he established a village there. Other hunters joined him and the
village grew. Hunting being a risky job, those practising it are noted for
their love for magical powers; hence the village also grew in juju powers. A two-meter
high deity said to walk about at night with thunderous steps and rumored to be
erected on a human sacrifice stands guard at the entrance to the village.
Sedaya knew how dangerous Asukope
was but refused to be treated by the clairvoyant. He had been converted by the
Germans and he believed only Jesus could fight Satan. He therefore spent his
days in the Portuguese style church at Glidzi praying for a miracle. Instead of
that his health continued to deteriorate. Apevienyiku would return from school
and fetch firewood in the moist forest east of the village. Then he would
return west to fish on the Gbaga River, beyond which marshy land stretched
right into savannah grassland. Finally he would attend to his father in the
thatch-roofed, triangular mud hut surrounded by a brick wall.
A year later Sedaya’s condition became
critical. Alarmed, the family asked around and got word that a powerful
herbalist at Agbanto in the neighboring French colony of Dahomey healed such
ailments. Apevieniku was in class four and Dzagli in one. They had to drop out
of
school and
accompany their father for treatment. Dzagli, being young, went back to French
school there but Apevienyiku never stepped into a classroom again.
Agbanto is a small fishing and
farming village hugging a hill. Grandfather was taken into a shrine over the
hill for treatment. After months he was getting better when another problem
surfaced. They had run out of money. The family met and decided to pawn the
family land. A year later grandfather got fit enough to do light work with the
help of his children. The healer claimed he would get him totally cured.
Soon came time to pay to reclaim the
family land from the pawn. When they couldn’t do so many months after the
deadline, the pawnbroker threatened to sell the land. There was no greater
shame than not having an ancestral land. How can one prove that one’s ancestors
were one of the authentic members of the village and on which land would future
generations live?
Like many colonized Togolese, the Gold
Coast fascinated Apevienyiku. A British colony, gold, timber and other
resources had spread its fame. The British colonialists were not so hard on the
indigenous people. This contrasted sharply with either the Germany colony of Togo
or the French-colonized Dahomey which later became Benin. Both territories
boasted no resources. The Germans wanted to turn Togo into a model colony. The forced
labor used to achieve this obliged many Togolese to emigrate to the Gold Coast.
The trend got worsened with France’s harsher colonial policies when the United
Nations placed Togo under their protectorate after the German’s lost the Second
World War.
Besides, the immigrants who came on
holidays either during their leave period or during the annual Yeke-Yeke
festival brought home money, expensive clothes, golden trinkets, and talked of
work readily available in the Gold Coast. Above all they rebuilt their
family
houses with thicker mud walls and roofed them with zinc. One didn’t have to
worry about repairing the roof at each rainy season which came twice a year from
February to May and July to September. But what really knocked people over was
the colonial helmets the returnees wore to go round and greet people. Colonial
administrators used them.
Apevienyiku knew that money was needed to
continue the treatment for his father. They also needed to redeem the family
land. Where else to realize those dreams than where the money was?
Apevienyiku sent a letter to a maternal uncle
who was head of the southern Togolese community in Kumasi. The reply came three
months later. The uncle promised to send him money when someone was coming
home.
Two months later Apevienyiku received a letter
from his uncle. It contained money for his father and a message for him to see
a kinsman in the village who will take him to Kumasi. He informed his father.
“Go,” he said, “and save the family
land.”
Apevienyiku didn’t want to leave his
father in Agbanto and he didn’t want them to lose the family land either. But
between the two the choice was clear.
A week later Apevienyiku hugged his
father and brother and set out for Asukope. Two days later, he and the kinsman
left for Kumasi. When they crossed the Volta River into Gold Coast territory
Apevienyiku felt like kissing the soil. They continued to Accra. Apevienyiku’s
eyes widened. He had never seen such a big city before. Cars and trucks rumbled
about and people milled on the sandy sidewalks. Many houses were large and
painted. He felt glad to have made the journey to the Gold Coast. Soon a Bedford truck was
rumbling them through a
tropical
rainforest towards Kumasi.
The farther they went, the denser and the colder the forest became.
In Kumasi Apevienyiku found a city
not as big as Accra but nevertheless impressive. The green city was vibrant,
some roads were tarred, a few had street lights; the houses were large and
whitewashed, some even stood one or two storeys high, the top floors fashioned
out of wood. Back home Apevienyiku was used to seeing people shabbily dressed
clutching cutlasses going to farm in the morning. In Kumasi he found people in
pressed clothes hurrying to work in sawmills, factories, and even offices. He
bit his lips for not completing his studies.
Uncle Eklu, a huge man with smiling
eyes and a fluffy royal cap thrown over his large bald head, took him one
evening to Anloga where the Togolese community had established a flourishing
carpentry estate. Apevienyiku was apprenticed to a Mr. Senaya, a carpenter who
worked with the United African Company—UAC—and had a prosperous private
workshop there. Like Uncle Eklu, Mr. Senaya lived in one of the big, solid,
storey buildings being put up in new areas of Kumasi by wealthy cocoa farmers.
It had a big, cemented courtyard and large glass windows.
The work at Anloga was hard. The apprentices
worked from sunup to sundown and ate once a day, at noon. Mistakes and
insubordination were not tolerated. The chief apprentice flogged one for those.
Then, in the evening when Mr. Senaya came, he administered the coup de grace
which sometimes consisted of standing still while holding boulders in the hand
for hours. Although customers came to the workshop to buy, often in the
afternoons the apprentices carried tables, chairs, boxes, and other artefacts
to the Kumasi Central Market to sell.
The market was about five kilometers
away. The apprentices passed by Amakom—where Apevienyiku lived with Uncle Eklu,—Asafo,
then he branched through Bompata—where he was to stay for years—and then got to
the market. The first time he saw the Kumasi Central Market, the white of Apevienyiku’s
eyes showed above the iris. It was twenty times bigger than Asukope. The market
stood in a valley. The maze of stalls and hangars dazzled Apevienyiku. One
could easily get lost in there, he thought.
They would sit at a corner of the market displaying
their wares to passers-by. They never went back with a single item, for that
was forbidden. They had to sell everything by all means. If they managed to
sell above the boss’s price, they shared the difference with the chief apprentice.
This way Apevienyiku grew not only in carpentry skills but also financially.
On Sundays the Togolese Ewes met in
front of the railway siding and organized the funeral of departed members
through drumming and dancing. Apevienyiku, coming from a family of drummers,
soon became the beater of the royal drum, used only on special occasions such
as the funeral of an elder. He was soon to distinguish himself in juju powers
and became a protector of the group.
Mr. Senaya was
impressed with Apevienyiku’s intelligence and by his exemplary conduct. After three
years he became the chief apprentice. Two years later Mr. Senaya found him work
at UAC as a junior carpenter. Mr. Senaya had presented him as a relative and so
Apevienyiku took on Senaya as a surname. He was now 22. Apevienyiku sent a
letter to his father, wishing it would raise his morale.
Each morning Apevienyiku boarded a
small Morris bus with a wooden body from Amakom roundabout to Odum, and then he
walked to the UAC carpentry workshop not far from the present-day Kumasi
prisons. He had two colleagues, a fat, kind-looking Fante—the
Head of the
workshop—and his assistant, a lean Togolese with a shrill laugh. The place had
three work benches pushed against the walls. The colleagues welcomed
Apevienyiku and showed him what to do. Apevienyiku proved himself up to the
task, so much so that when somebody was needed three days later to do some
repairs on one of the expatriate’s bungalows at Nhyiaeso, the Head did not
hesitate to designate him.
At Nhyiaeso Apevienyiku stared at
the expatriate’s bungalow. He had never seen a house so big. It stood on
pillars. The bungalow had a lot of large rooms provided with wide windows. A
large, walled compound, planted with ordinary and fruit trees, especially mango
and pawpaw trees and flowers in bloom, surrounded the house. All the leaves
were shiny green. It was the rainy season characterised by stormy showers.
The British occupant appeared at the
sitting room door and waved Apevienyiku in. He was a tall, thin man with a
balding head and a tuft of blond hair. His moustache was somewhat greyish. His
skin was pale and he smiled a lot, showing tobacco-blackened teeth. If
Apevienyiku had felt badly at ease when the company van deposited him at the
gate and the watchman had directed him to the veranda where the houseboy kept
him company, now that he faced the expatriate he tried hard not to tremble. He
had never been close to a Whiteman before. He had seen Germans at Zebe and the
French later on but it was always from a distance. He felt a paralyzing chill run
through him. The Whiteman said something and Apevienyiku smiled. The more he
talked the more Apeveinyiku smiled.
The expatriate shouted and the houseboy came
rushing in and crossed his hands behind his back. The Whiteman explained
something to the houseboy who, head bent down, nodded profusely.
“Come,” the houseboy said in Twi and
led Papa behind the house and pointed to loose gutters under the sloping, tiled
roof. Apevienyiku nodded and leaned his ladder against the wall. In no time at
all he got the gutters back in order. When the company van came to pick him up an
hour later, the houseboy tended him a small parcel. Apevienyiku opened it at
home to find tinned food. He opened the prepared beef soup, made a face at it,
took a small bite and retched. “What a villager I’d been in those days,” was a
favourite story he told, accompanied with a wheezing laugh. “Later on when I
developed a taste for white people’s food, I wouldn’t allow anybody to touch a
bit of it.”
Soon a reply to the letter he had
sent to his father arrived. Sedaya raved for the good news, asked him to be
obedient and hardworking. Dzagli was now working as apprentice to a retired
health worker. Apevienyiku sent him money to come and see him in Kumasi. Dzagli
came two months later. He went back with money for their father, to pay a part
of the pawn, and to get married. He took Efoegan with him. Apevienyiku asked Dzagli
to come every three months and he did. On the third visit he told Apevienyiku
their father was slipping back into ill health. Apevienyiku’s first leave took
him home. He brought generous gifts of cloths for family members and money for his
father. He settled a large part of the pawn also. Now that they had redeemed a
large part of the land, they decided to lease it for farming. That was a fatal
error. In those days, people used trees to mark the boundaries of their lands.
Apevienyiku came home two years later to find the coconut trees on the
boundaries hacked down. Something strange also happened. The land he had
redeemed appeared smaller. When he complained, owners of neigboring lands told
him not to forget his father’s condition. He left quietly for Kumasi.
Two months later Apevienyiku was
busily planing a piece of mahogany plank for a cupboard when a telegram came
for him. He shook as his Togolese colleague opened the message. A telegram
hardly brought good news. His colleague took a look at the message and his lean
shoulders slumped.
“What’s it?” Apevienyiku asked,
trying not to tremble at the answer.
The colleague sighed.
“Is my father gone?” Apevienyiku
asked.
His colleague nodded quietly. “You are asked to return home immediately.”
Apevienyiku lowered his head for a
long time and when he raised it tears hung in his deep-set eyes and rolled down
his hollow cheeks. He obtained a leave of absence and went first to the
village. Due to the cost of repatriating the body, the family decided to bury
it at Agbanto. Then, as tradition demands for those who have to be buried
elsewhere, he sent clippings of his father’s hair and nails to be buried at
Asukope.
“You’re head of the Penoukou family now,” extended
family members told him after the funeral ceremonies and he felt a big load on
his young shoulders. “It’s therefore important that you be protected.”
Apevienyiku had been thinking of that,
especially when he had been threatened over the boundary of the land. He went
to Agbanto to thank the healer and to ask him for protection.
“There’s no better protection than to have your
own deity,” the old man advised.
When Apevienyiku left for Kumasi, he carried a
powerful deity with him. Like his father Dzagli accepted Jesus and even became
a catechist at Agbanto, a work which was to make his first son and Efoegan
become Catholic priests.
Without his father Apevienyiku felt lost. Sedaya
was the reason for his journey to Kumasi. Of course, once there, he found other
reasons to stay in the Gold Coast such as bettering his life; besides, the
vibrant Togolese community in Kumasi didn’t make him feel homesick and also
there was still the land to be paid for.
Back to Kumasi Apevienyiku moved to Asafo and hung
charms and talismans all over his room. He now observed lots of taboos such as
not whistling at night, not eating pork, not keeping dogs, and not eating food
prepared by a menstruating woman.
If his father’s death disoriented
him, however his orders guided him.
“One of dad’s last words to me was for us to
get married and have a lot of children so that the Penoukou family wouldn’t
disappear,” Dzagli had told him after the funeral.
Now he had two tasks to fulfil:
finally reclaim their family land and help enlarge the family.
If the first admonition was finding a solution
before his father’s death, the second also didn’t wait. Apevienyiku had been
eyeing an aunt’s daughter at the neighboring village of Glidzi-Kpodzi. Anytime
he had the opportunity he sent her and the mother gifts. They knew a man doing
this would one day ask for their daughter’s hand. Apevienyiku had been thinking
of asking his family to do that when news of his father’s death came. Now that
his father had been laid to rest, he could go ahead.
“Dope is a good girl,” they said.
“The mother is quiet and the father kind.”
Dope’s parents had no objection when
Apevienyiku’s family asked for her daughter’s hand. “She’s going into her own
family,” the mother said.
Apevienyiku gave the bridewealth of
cloth, drinks, and money and the marriage was blessed by a feast. But his Uncle
Eklu went into a rage when Apevienyiku brought his wife home.
“Why didn’t you consult me before
taking a wife?” he fumed.
“I didn’t intend getting married so
soon,” he replied. “I was obeying my father’s instructions.”
“What about me who brought you to
Kumasi?” he said. “Don’t I count anymore?”
The truth was that Uncle Eklu wanted
him to marry a niece of his.
Seven months later, Dope had to go
home to deliver. Normally when a woman gave birth to a baby she stayed with her
parents who helped her take care of the child and teach her more childcare.
This also forced the couples to space births as the couples would be separated
for up to a year and more.
Apevienyiku discussed the
possibility of taking a second wife with Uncle Eklu.
“Have you informed Dope about it?”
he asked.
“Not yet,” Apevienyiku said. “I
thought I’d contact you first.”
Uncle Eklu smiled. “You know how
hardworking Kayissan is.”
Apevienyiku nodded.
“What about Kayissan as a second
wife?”
“I’ll talk it over with Dope.”
That evening Apevienyiku told Dope
after meals: “I’m thinking of taking a second wife,” and peered at her. “You
know, my father’s exhortation for lots of children.”
Dope turned away her face, thought
for a long time and sighed. “What can I say if you want to take a second wife?”
“You know I can’t do so without your
consent.”
A brief smile flitted across Dope’s
medium-sized lips. “Do you have someone in mind?”
“Uncle Eklu suggests Kayissan.”
“Is Agbodrafo not too far from our
area?” Dope remarked quietly.
“The mother is from Zowla.” That was
the village after Asukope.
Dope shrugged.
With Uncle Eklu acting in lieu of
Kayissan’s parents, Apevienyiku performed the marriage ceremonies and Kayissan
joined him a month after Dope had left. A month later a telegram came that Dope
had given birth to a boy and as custom demands he would be outdoored in seven
days. Apevienyiku had rescheduled his leave to coincide with the event and he
rushed home.
“Send my greetings to Dope and her child,”
Kayissan said at the lorry park.
As custom demands, the baby had
remained indoors for seven days.
“Dope, get the baby ready; I’ll wake the others
up,” Apevienyiku said on the eighth day and slipped into the dim courtyard.
On his arrival the day before, he had chosen
his eleven-year-old cousin, Ayite, to be the first person to carry the child
outside. Babies are believed to copy their “bearers” so parents choose
carefully. Ayite had an exemplary character.
Dew hung in the dawn sky and a lantern threw
creeping shadows on the mud walls. The gathering stopped chatting when Ayite
and Apevienyiku’s stooping uncle strode in.
Uncle Dosseh picked up a calabash of water and
snapped afla tovi leaves into it. Afla tovi is an herb believed
to bring peace to children on such occasions. Next he dropped
charcoal
into the water. Charcoal signifies fire and it is water which puts out fire, so
the child should not face hardships in life but have peace.
“Let’s release our prisoner now,” Uncle Dosseh
said.
Ayite hopped in and gathered up the baby.
Pinching his thick lips in effort, he waddled out. Uncle Dosseh counted, “One!”
and Ayite lumbered back into the room. When he staggered out the seventh time,
Apevienyiku picked the baby from him. The child has now been shown “light”
seven times for its seven days of “darkness.”
Uncle Dosseh sprang to his feet and hurled the
calabash of water unto the roof. As it thudded on the rust-coloured roofing
sheets, Apevienyiku laid the naked child on the floor. The child clawed and
kicked the air and began to whimper. But as the water dripped from the eaves
onto it, it let out a sharp, shrill, piercing wail.
“Amii!, Amii!” the participants cried
with joy. It is considered a bad omen if the child does not cry out.
“This is the first male child of the couple,”
Uncle Dosseh said, “And as custom demands, it’ll be called Efoe.”
The group nodded.
Uncle Dosseh fetched fresh water. Throwing a coin
into it, he said, “I’m buying this child this name.” The others did the same,
repeating Uncle Dosseh’s words as their coins plopped into the water. So now
the name Efoe belonged to Apevienyiku’s child just as something becomes yours
when you buy it.
Uncle Dosseh poured libation with water. “Now
the child has become a man,” he said. “May the ancestors protect him.”
Before
this prayer only the parents and some close relatives could touch the baby. But
after the libation the participants shuffled in turns to Efoe snuggled in his
mother’s lap, sucking breast milk. They shook his hands, pinched his cheeks and
joked about him being a glutton.
Apevienyiku began a song in a deep voice. His
guests joined in, beating their chests. Soon they burst into dancing. They
feasted until the rising sun began to get hot. Then they shook hands and drifted
from the house.
When the last person left, Dope laid Efoe on a
sleeping mat and sighed with happiness. Now she could carry her baby
everywhere.
“Mmm, the baby’s growing.” Apevienyiku returned
to Kumasi three weeks later to find Kayissan’s stomach protruding. “Are they
twins?” he joked.
“Your Dope didn’t give you twins, am
I the one to do so?” Kayissan joked. “Anyway, how are they?”
“Alright,” Apevienyiku said. “He
looks just like me. Dope sends you greetings.”
Six months later Kayissan also left
for home to deliver. Apevienyiku went to outdoor her baby too. It was a boy so
they renamed Dope’s child Efoegan—Efoe Senior—and Kayissan’s Efoevi—Efoe
Junior. Apevienyiku returned with Dope and her child to Kumasi to continue the
task of procreation. It was in this way that he had a child almost each year.
At the end of five years he called
his wives.
“We’ve five children now,” he said.
“More will certainly follow. There’s the need for each of you to be financially
independent to take care of the kids too.”
The women nodded, staring at their
fingers they twitched in their laps and not at their husband’s face because
that was considered impolite.
“I’ve arranged with UAC Consumer
Goods Department to sell me goods against my salary for Dope to sell cloth and
cosmetics.”
Nagan smiled and stared at Apevienyiku
with moist eyes. Kayissan breathed hard and waited for her turn.
“As for Kayissan, I’ll find a loan
for you to sell cooked food.”
Kayissan’s head jerked up; her eyes
were wide and her mouth fell open. “Why should I not sell imported goods too?”
“Who is the elder wife?” Apevienyiku
said, containing his anger. “And who decides here?” His voice rose now.
“As you wish,” Kayissan said in a
hurt tone.
Apevienyiku knew that if he didn’t
kill that rivalry then it would grow into an intractable matrimonial headache.
“The decision I’ve taken is in the interests of all. I want everybody to accept
it in good faith. But should anybody go to the contrary--” He cast a stern look
around. “—I’ll deal ruthlessly with that person as any self-respecting husband
should. Okay, you may go.”
Dope thanked Apevienyiku but
Kayissan sighed and rose slowly and sidled out. Apevienyiku sighed too when
both women left. He dropped his head into his palms. He knew the competition
had begun. But he also knew that he would be the winner. Neither divorce nor
rebellion was a solution women envisaged then for marriages they no longer felt
happy in.
The children came in quick
succession and soon the house got full of Efoegan, Efoevi, Djatubegan,
Djatugbevi, Mesan, Sasu, Hanu, Anani, and Etsri. Now the house at Asafo was
becoming too small for the family of twelve so in the early fifties Apevienyiku
moved to larger rooms at Bompata.
Apevienyiku continued to progress in
his work with the UAC, much to the chagrin of his co-workers but they dared not
show it because of his juju powers.
One day Apevienyiku was chosen to
undertake some repairs at the home of the Managing Director. This was a task
normally reserved for their supervisor. But Apevienyiku later learnt that word
of his good work had reached the boss’s ears so he had been chosen.
“The Whiteman says he’d have liked
to appoint you head of the carpentry shop,” the cook who served as interpreter
told him when he finished building a kennel for a bulldog, “but a literate
person must hold this post.”
Apevienyiku bit his lips and wrung
his scrawny fingers.
“However he says you deserve a
salary increase.”
The Director shook hands with him.
Apevienyiku had never felt palms so soft, as soft as foam. His calloused ones
embarrassed him. Apevienyiku swore to himself that none of his children will
miss school. But soon Ashanti King Prempeh II died and rumors of people being
killed to accompany the king were rife. Apevienyiku withdrew his children from
school. When calm returned, he allowed the boys to go back but kept the girls
home to help their mothers.
“I want Djatugbevi to be able to read
and write,” Navi said.
“I stand by our husband’s opinion,”
Nagan cut in.
“Thank you Efoeganon,” Apevienyiku
said. “A good wife does not challenge her husband’s judgement.”
Years later, Apevienyiku felt
remorse for that decision. Only Djatugbegan and Djatugbevi remained illiterate.
Apevienyiku continued to hug the dream of
redeeming the family land, perpetuating the Penoukou family and living the Gold
Coast dream. Dzagli continued to come down for money. More children came,
including me on May 6, 1953 and then Anumu to be followed by Akolise, Asion,
Alugba, Afansi, and the last born, twins called Asu and Ese. Nagan had eleven
of them—eight boys and three girls and Navi six—four boys and two girls. Maybe coming
from neighboring villages and the large number of children Nagan gave Papa made
her the favourite wife. This went contrary to polygamous marriages where the
younger wife was doted on. Papa opened a private carpentry shop at home, behind
the house, on a vacant lot. He gave money to a kinsman going home who brought
him two distant cousins to become apprentices. During the weekends Efoevi
joined them. They would fashion tables, stools, and benches out of Wawa and
Odum wood. They would carry these to the market and sell them. The best
business came prior to the reopening of schools after the long vacation. Many secondary
schools were boarding ones and the students took along provisions and other
food items such as shito—fried pepper
stew.
Papa’s private practice was booming,
but one problem worried him. He still felt the weight of illiteracy. Although
he could read the meter rule and measure wood, he couldn’t write. Some customers
brought diagrams of what they wanted and Papa would stare at the paper and nod
as the customers explained something to him. But he understood nothing. When
they left, he would call Efoevi to interpret the diagram for him. Often Efoevi
couldn’t.
“Schwine,”
Papa would mix the German and the English words, “why did I send you to
school?”
“I wasn’t seeing the diagram when
the man was giving the explanation,” Efoevi would say.
Papa put his hand to his lips,
shushing Efoevi up, who scowled and murmured, being careful to hide his face.
Other times some customers asked
Papa to give them receipts for the down payments they gave and full receipts
for jobs delivered. The worst was when demanding customers went away because
they couldn’t wait for him to find someone to write the receipts for him. Papa
would curse the person who charmed his father forcing him to drop out of
school.
Those were not the only difficulties Papa was
facing at that time. As the fight for independence of the Gold Coast colony
from Britain heated up, the rivalry between Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s
Party (CPP) and Dr. J. B. Danquah’s United Party (UP) deepened. This was
translated into violence which included physical attack and the throwing of
Molotov cocktails. Bompata was adjacent to Zongo which harboured CPP
supporters. These comprised mainly people from the north who were fearless and
warlike. The locals inhabited Bompata. They also came from a tradition of
warriors and supported the UP. Station Street separated our house from Zongo. Our
home stood on the war front.
Soon 1957 came and three events marked it in
our house. The first one was unique: the attainment of political independence
by the Gold Coast which became Ghana and the second was the annual purification
ceremony for Papa’s deities in August and four months later Christmas.
I remember the last two events vividly because
they were annual events. At four I was too young to remember what happened at
Ghana’s independence on March 6, the first by an African country south of the
Sahara. But my parents say the jubilation was astounding. Finally the parasitic
colonialists were going and Africans were going to make life rosy for their own
people.
Five months later Papa brought home
drinks and two- and four-legged animals. On the first Saturday a large number
of Togolese met in our house. The elders went in and poured libation before the
deities and slaughtered the animals whose blood they sprinkled on the gods. This
renews the powers of the gods. The participants sang, drummed, danced, and
feasted till the evening. This ceremony made me discover my allergy to mutton.
Much as my parents forced me, I just couldn’t eat it. So every August, I had a
pigeon or a fowl all to myself.
A day after breaking for Christmas
holidays, we and our landladies’ children trekked to the woods behind the sawmills
at Timbermu. Using cutlasses and being on the lookout for mambas which often
slithered through the thick bamboo, we cut the trees which we tied together and
carried home. Then we levelled a patch of land beside Papa’s private workshop
and erected a two-room Christmas hut covered with thick cartons we fetched from
the shops at Odum or from the rubbish heap behind the Kumasi prison walls. Then
we hung the ceiling with paper decorations and the walls with photographs of
stars such as Gordon Scott, Elvis Presley, and John Wayne.
We would shout ourselves hoarse to
films we showed with figures cut of paper which we brandished before candle
lights to throw images on the walls. At night we slept at home but when Baba
Musa cried for the 5 a.m.
prayers we rushed to the hut to sleep till the bells of the St. Peter’s Catholic
Cathedral chime at 6. We spent the night of 24th December in there—apart
from the midnight church service—and on the 25th our parents brought
us food and drinks. We felt proud to receive them in our house.
A cold war atmosphere reigned
between Nagan and Navi each Christmas. It seemed Papa lavished Nagan and us
with gifts whilst Navi and her children received something symbolic.
After one Christmas, Papa asked us
to attend catechism lessons at the St. Peter’s Cathedral. This concerned Anani,
Etsri, me, Alugba, and Akwele, Dzatugbgan’s daughter who was staying with us.
We jumped and jumped. Going to church was as civilised as going to school.
Besides, we dreaded going to hell. Soon we were learning Catholic dogmas in Ewe
on the veranda of the St. Peter’s Middle School. The lessons were in pure Ewe
which, compared to the Ge-Mina our parents spoke at home, was like ghetto slang
and the Queen’s English. No doubt we had difficulties absorbing the lessons. Unknown
to us, the more difficult was to come. When we had to be tested orally for
baptism, the Ewe priest, Father Kugblenu, was transferred. It was an Ashanti
priest who received us. He asked me only two things: to recite The Lord’s
Prayer and Hail Mary in Twi.
“Father, we learnt it in Ewe,” I
stammered.
“I know,” the priest said. “You
speak Twi, don’t you?”
“Yes, father.”
“Then you can tell me in Twi,” he said and
stared at me.
I tried to recite those prayers silently in Ewe
and translate them in Twi but felt I would make a fool of myself.
“Wouldn’t you talk?” the priest said.
“I can’t do it in Twi,” I said, almost crying.
The priest shrugged, wrote something down and
nodded me out. The world whirled. I regretted for attending only Ewe mass
service; another requirement of our parents. Outside we all criticised the
priest. When the results were announced a week later, only Alugba passed.
“Look at these old fools,” Papa roared. “How
can your younger sister pass and you fail?”
We abandoned catechism.
In addition to geomancy Papa became proficient
in herbs too. After receiving people in consultation each evening for love
affairs, jobs, litigation, marriage, promotions, and chieftaincy disputes, Papa
would prepare herbs. I was still in primary school when Papa took me as his
secretary. I didn’t want to have anything to do with juju.
“You want to become a doctor?” Papa said.
I nodded. It had been a childhood dream.
“Learn herbs,” he advised.
Each evening Papa showed me herbs and how to
prepare them for various ailments. I took them down merely to please him. At midnight
some people came for ritual baths and special prayers. This disturbed my sleep.
On weekends we drank herbs, especially an infusion of the bark of the mahogany
tree. It had a crimson color and Papa claimed it was a blood tonic.
“Keta people, are great drinkers of herbs,” our
mothers sang to handclapping to encourage us to drink the bitter potion.
“Great drinkers of herbs,” they continued.
We shut our eyes, cut off our respiration, and gulped
down the drink.
Papa went home on leave in 1960 to witness
Togo’s
independence on April 27. Sylvanus Olympio became the President. On his return
Papa brought a new powerful god. The more deities he brought home the more
powerful Papa became. His fame reached important Chiefs who invited him to
their palaces to perform ceremonies for them, especially for protection against
evil. But the place Papa displayed his powers most was at the weekend Ewe drumming
and dancing.
The Togolese Union had broken into
two factions, that of inhabitants from villages around Glidzi—the Ge royal town
behind Glidzi-Kpodzi—and that of the Xulokoe group from other villages. Uncle
Eklu depended on Papa for protection against evil from the Xulokoe group.
On Sundays the groups drummed and
sang at the same place separated only by a thirty-meter stretch of land. They
used the drums to send messages to each other. Then they would burst into songs
full of acrimony for each other. When that did not disarm a faction, they now
resorted to juju powers. It consisted of making the skin on the drums to tear
in action. So each group brought reserve drums which were changed with jeers.
When that happened, they “called the rain” for the rival group. The sky darkened
and then showers fell only where the other grouped. Papa had the power to call
the heaviest rainfall, disrupting the other group’s party. Sometimes they sent
emissaries secretly to him at night. Papa told them not to throw any charms
their way and all will be alright. But easier promised than done. One day the
Xulokoe group hurled tsakatu at
Papa’s group. This charm mystically wedges pieces of broken bottle in an enemy’s
body, bringing death within hours. Papa’s uncle had received it. Papa removed a
deity lodged into a cow’s horn, blew on it and pronounced some cabalistic
words. Instantly his uncle was on his feet and the leader at the other side got
paralysed. The
Xulokoe
people had to see Papa to heal him. From that day the splinter group went
elsewhere for their drumming sessions and Papa became one of the influential
members of his group. No major decision was taken without consulting him.
Nagan, Navi, and we the children not only felt proud of Papa but also feared
him.
By now Efoevi had completed
elementary school which consisted of six years of primary and four of middle
school. He decided to become a tailor and was apprenticed to a master tailor.
Papa had many children in school now. The grown-ups worked at his private
workshop on weekends. He now had people to help him interpret drawings, draw up
contracts, and write receipts. His business grew.
But Apevienyiku faced a dilemma. For the least
occasion the natives reminded him that he was a foreigner. And foreigner at
this time did not necessarily mean a non-Ghanaian but anybody who was not an
Ashanti. I remember the day Papa gave a portly customer adorned with golden
trinkets the estimates for a king-size bed.
“Papa Anwona, you like money!” he
exclaimed. “Do you want to take all the money in Kumasi to your place?”
Papa hardly answered such
provocations.
What hurt us most was when Papa had
an argument with an Ashanti. “I know you’re provoking me to kill me,” the native
would say.
“Kill you, are you a fowl?” Papa
would retort.
“Killing is an Anwoma sport.”
In effect some Ewes had appeared in
the news for murdering people to use their blood or their hearts for ritual
purposes. Ashantis harped on this to brandish us blood-thirsty. This made us
hate our tribe.
“We don’t kill the people to
accompany your dead chiefs,” Papa once retorted to a native who continued to
taunt him.
“You’ve insulted
the whole Ashanti nation,” the riled native cried and called on the patriotic
sentiments of his fellow Ashantis. Although the days of Ashanti war-hegemony were
gone with the disappearance of Kingdoms, they didn’t hesitate to threaten
people with the terror their name evoked in tribes in days past. Papa also knew
their weak point: their fear of Ewes as people with juju power.
“I’ll charm you dead before your war
breaks out,” Papa swore and the native burst off, casting fearful glances
behind him as if Papa meant what he said.
Rivalry between Nagan and Navi had
reached its height and they avoided each other as much as possible, especially
when Papa was away. Let the least argument break out between us the siblings
and they would tear at each other. When Papa learnt about this he attacked
Navi.
“You’re the younger wife,” he would
say. “Why don’t you wait for me to come home to complain to me?”
“I’ve a heart of flesh as your
preferred wife,” Navi would retort.
“How can you talk back to me?”
“Be partial, at least once!”
“Nobody is on my side,” Nagan would
say.
“Who feels it know it,” Navi would retort and
tempers would fly.
After neighbors had diffused the tension Papa’s
hands flew in Navi’s face. We would hide behind objects and tremble.
One vacation Efoegan who was in the major
seminary in Benin
came on holidays.
“What are all these?” he cried,
pointing to the charms hanging in the rooms.
Papa scowled.
He told Papa about Jesus being the
only way. Papa only nodded.
By this time we the children spent
more time with our Ashanti friends. The more we mixed with them the more we clung
to their ways. And the more we showed their mentalities at home the more our
parents got crazy.
Papa now returned from work often
tired. He worked mainly at the expatriates’ bungalows. He would learn of
trouble between his wives or children, sigh and say: “I need my peace now.” He
laughed when the locals taunted him. And as for us, he got tired of using the
cane to make us true Ewes. “It’s not your fault,” he would say. “If I’d stayed
at home would you have become strangers?”
Tired of feuds between his wives, Papa
informed Uncle Eklu who summoned them for mediation. Papa rode in silence in
the same truck-taxi as his wives. Uncle Eklu’s wife received them in their wide
hall furnished with large sofas with red vinyl cushions. Soon Uncle Eklu
waddled in.
“Have you drunk water already?”
Papa and his wives nodded.
“You’re welcome,” Uncle Eklu said on
sitting down. “What matter has brought you here?”
“Neither death nor war,” Papa said
while his wives lowered their heads and wrung their fingers. “I came to see you
the other day about troubles in my family.”
Uncle Eklu nodded.
“We’ve come to search for
solutions.”
“You’re welcome,” Uncle Eklu said
and turned to Dope. “You’re the elder wife, what’s happening in the house?”
“Misunderstanding,” she said shyly
and peeked at Papa.
“What misunderstanding?” Uncle Eklu asked.
“I think my number two can’t accept
that an elder wife has more privileges.”
“Is that all, Dope?” Uncle Eklu asked.
“Yes.”
The uncle turned towards Kayissan.
“What’s happening in the house?”
Kayissan sighed. “I heard her say
misunderstanding. It’s none of that.”
Uncle Eklu and Papa stared at each
other. Dope sighed. Kayissan scowled.
“What’s it then?” Uncle Eklu asked.
“Bias.”
Papa groaned.
“Can you explain that?” the uncle
asked.
“I’m not made to feel like a wife.”
She burst into tears.
“Apevie’ku,” Uncle Eklu said. “I see
the solution to your problem: find the same capital for each of them. The one
who does better in a year will get more. Besides, with that capital each wife
takes care of herself and her children.”
“I’ve more children to care for,”
Nagan protested.
“Your husband isn’t going to abandon
the children altogether. Only you wouldn’t have to ask him for every small
thing.”
Papa put the suggestion into
practice and some peace returned to his house.
If he found marital peace, the same wasn’t true
for the behavior of his children. Papa’s fear now that he had adolescent
children was for them to get married to Eblus—Ewe
word for Ashantis. He was not worried about the girls who already had marriages
arranged for them with their countrymen; but the boys who had more freedom of
movement and of choice. He began to take us to singing and dancing rehearsals. When
we were called to dance, we rubbed our teary eyes with the backs of our palms
and ground our toes into the soil.
“Dance!” Papa would howl.
We burst into tears.
“Which stupid children are these?”
“You should’ve trained them as Ewe children
from birth,” somebody observed. “It’s too late now. They’re Ashantis.”
“Ashantis?” Papa screamed. “I’ll give
them away!” Then he shoved us by the back of our heads and we slunk away in shame
and tears.
Back at home Papa tried to solve
this problem otherwise. “I know you can’t dance and you’re ashamed to show it
in public,” he said. “Here, there are no inquisitive eyes and cruel mouths to laugh
at you.” Then, slapping his palms, he burst into song.
We crouched, stamped our feet and
bending and twisting our backs, fanned our arms beside our bodies. There was no
feeling in what we did: we smirked and stole looks at each other.
“Put in some fire,” Papa cried.
We bent down lower and danced
harder.
“Tsa!
Tsa! Tsa!” Papa encouraged.
We danced harder still but in an
uncoordinated manner.
Papa burst into laughter. “
Efoeganon, Efoevinon, come and see your children!” he yelled.
Nagan and Navi appeared at the door;
this time we danced in a lethargic way, the breath wheezing out of our noses.
Our mothers burst into laughter too. We laughed and hugged each other.
Papa tried on other times, those
times accompanied by Nagan beating a gong and Navi rattling a castanet but the
more he tried the more irritated he became till he gave us up for lost Ewes.
Then it occurred to Papa that if he didn’t
often take his children home he risked losing them altogether. He was so
attached to the homeland that when I started secondary school and he learnt
that we were to learn French, he went wild.
“Take it as serious as if it was your life,” he
said. “One day you’d need it back home.”
Papa took us home in turns, the way
he did with Nagan and Navi. My turn came at the end of secondary school form
one.
“How would you like to go to Lome?” Nagan
asked me one evening.
I sprang into the sky. If before we
had repudiated our land, now we were eager to see it. An army coup d’état on
January 13, 1967 had overthrown President Olympio who lost his life. At a
French lesson we had read a chapter on a visit by a student to Lome. That
endeared the city to me. The day before the journey I couldn’t sleep. My
parents prepared boxes of gifts of clothing, cloth, jewels, footwear, and cash
for relatives. Nagan prepared beef stew to be eaten with rice on the journey.
I sprang to my feet before Nagan
could shake me awake. My sisters helped us to carry the bulky luggage to the
railway station down our street. The brightly lit station milled with
people.
While Papa joined the queue to buy the tickets at the entrance, we went to sit
on the hard wooden benches. I ogled the dark train before me. Beyond it morning
traffic slid on the road cut on the waist of a hill on which the Yaa Akyiaa
Girls School stood. Soon Papa came; minutes later the lights blinked on in the
coaches and we scrambled aboard. I stared with moist eyes at Papa and Nagan.
They conversed about home. Soon the train whistled and lurched forward.
Jumping, I waved hilariously to my sisters who grinned back. All along I stared
through the windows at the changing vegetation, till the train, which got more
and more crowded at each stop, reached Accra. The journey by bus from Accra to
the border was uneventful until we got to Aflao. The waves of the sea crashed
against the shore. The booming and somersaulting waves a few meters away from
the border post threw fear into me. I clutched Nagan’s rough hands.
“What’s eating you?” Nagan cried,
flabbergasted.
“I’m afraid of the sea,” I whined.
“An old man like you?” she sneered, pushed
me away and got busy declaring her property to the border guards in khaki
uniforms.
The two month stay got me
disillusioned about Togo. We drank salty water from wells. Not only did I not
know how to draw water from a well but also it frightened me staring into its
depths. I feared I would tumble into it. Only very few streets of Lome were
tarred; most were full of beach sand difficult to walk in. What I hated most
was going to toilet. In Kumasi we had public septic toilets. In Lome we went to
toilet in the bush. I constantly watched for the pigs which grunted at a short
distance away and scrambled to slurp the faeces. I went for days without easing
myself. How glad I was to be back in Kumasi!
Papa was pensioned in 1970. He had
been thinking of moving home after this event. He didn’t want to take his
deities with him. He performed ceremonies for them and we dumped them at the
rubbish heap.
“Don’t look back when returning
home,” Papa warned.
On my way back I fought hard the
desire to look behind me. If I didn’t it was all because of the story of Sodom
and Gomorrah we had learned at Catechism. I was afraid to turn into a pillar of
salt or something horrible like that. I was happy however that Papa was finally
going to be a Christian.
To make his return home possible, Papa began to
build a house at Nyekonakpoe, on a piece of land only sixty meters away from
the Ghana-Togo border.
Age had always posed a threat to people, no
matter how powerful they are. Papa discovered this in his sixties. He became
powerless to act when an argument—now rare—broke up between his wives. Efoevi
brought home a Fante woman he later married to Papa’s chagrin. Now, instead of
threats he would quietly advise us to look for wives within the Ewe community. A
few did so but others still married strangers. While we wouldn’t attend events
such as funerals and rejoicings organized by Ewes, we were present at those of
Ashantis. Some of my brothers even took Ghanaian passports to travel overseas.
Papa shook his head and sighed when he spoke Ewe to his grandchildren and none
was capable of answering in Ewe. Instead they answered in Twi.
A few years after the overthrow of President
Nkrumah on 24th February 1966, tribalism and nationalism began to
rise in Ghana. To give credence to his fight for African unity, the Nkrumah
constitution gave automatic Ghanaian nationality not only to every
African
born in Ghana
but also those who had spent twelve years there. With the suspension of that
constitution, automatically nationalized Ghanaians became aliens.
Now Papa worked at home. He had trained many
apprentices who were working on their own. The quality of Papa’s training
spread his fame at home and every kinsman wanted him to train his child. In
Kumasi Papa’s carpentry craftsmanship brought in the customers, especially
those who knew him at UAC. But he did not have the strength to work as before.
His educated children didn’t want to be carpenters but offices workers.
By now the military had given power to an
elected civilian regime headed by Dr. K. A. Busia, an opponent to Nkrumah who
had returned from exile after the coup. Whether it was the opposition to
Nkrumah and his ideas or plain nationalism, the Busia regime began to bring out
alien-unfriendly policies. Papa knew that he did not intend to spend all his
life in Ghana but he was not prepared for the aggressive way Ghanaians were
pressing for foreigners to leave the country. We now understood Papa for
telling us not to take Ghana as our homeland.
The shock came in 1969 when the
government came out with the Aliens Compliance Order. All foreigners who didn’t
have residence permits or who have not been legally naturalized were given a
deadline to leave.
“Ko wo
krom!”—Go back to your country—became the slogan Ghanaians hurled at their
fellow Africans. The large number of aliens, especially from the West African
countries of Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Upper Volta now Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger,
and Ivory Coast, found themselves in a dilemma. They had received so much
hospitality in Ghana that many had made it their home. Many even had landed
properties there. All of a sudden they found themselves obliged to leave. Some
managed to sell off their immovable properties but many
lost
theirs. All father lost were the rest of his gods which enabled him to become
new born Christian.
Like other West African aliens who had spent
many years in Ghana, we
returned to Kumasi
after the storm of Ko wo krom had
blown over. Our neighbors, who had been asking when Papa would be back, hugged
him and wished him a warm welcome. We felt loved.
But Papa had no good reason to
remain in Ghana anymore. Phosphate boom was allowing Togo to make economic
strides. Lome was developing with tarred streets, street lights, and other
infrastructures. On the contrary the Ghanaian economy was sliding into the
doldrums. This continued right into the late seventies which bred a lot of coup
d’états and counter coup d’états which finally obliged Ghanaians too to
immigrate to other African countries culminating in their being sent home too
from oil-rich Nigeria in 1981.
After welcoming Efoegan from Rome as
a priest in 1972, Papa and Nagan decided to remain in Togo. Papa took his
younger children with him. Many continued their education in English by
crossing daily over the Ghana-Togo border to go to school at Aflao. The rest of
us stayed with Navi, brothers, sisters, or relatives to continue our education.
On obtaining our certificates, only I went back to Togo to continue my
University education. I only took this decision when my application to read
Pharmacy at the University of Science and Technology got miraculously missing.
In Togo Apevienyiku was able to overcome his dilemma
of his family living in four worlds.
He was now living in his country and felt free
of the fear of being asked to go back home. Nobody also felt jealous of him
becoming rich—whatever that meant—in their country. But we the children went
home to find ourselves strangers: our mannerisms were
generally Ghanaian
and particularly Ashanti.
Our haircuts and clothing amused the Togolese a lot. Those were days when we
had “Tokyo Joe” haircut: a clump of hair rising from the back of the head
towards the forehead surrounded by closely-cropped hair showing the scalp.
“Ghana! Ghana! Ghana!” people shouted derogatorily
in the streets as we walked about. “What kind of haircut is that?”
We looked for a hole to disappear into. There
was none and we had to face the jeers on the way back home. Most of us could only
go about in the night when we would be largely unnoticed.
Also we spoke Ge-Mina and French with Ghanaian and
English accents respectively.
“Are you Ghanaian?” people would ask us
scornfully.
We would scowl and not answer.
The jeers as we spoke made us mute and we pined
for Kumasi.
Papa joined cultural groups in Lome. He would
come home flushed. Not only did they enjoy the dance, the spectators joined in
the fun and that encouraged them to excel beyond their possibilities. Papa knew
we wouldn’t fit into that group and didn’t worry us to come along with him. We
had even attained the age of independence and Papa left us alone.
While he remained in Lome, he sent his wives to
their villages. They were now women in menopause and all a pro-birth person
like him needed them for was cooking but he had grown-up daughters for that.
From time to time Apevienyiku visited his wives in their villages or they came
to see him in Lome.
Papa attended mass service at Eglise de
l’Immaculé Conception de Nyekonakpoe from time to time. He would come home
bragging about how people stared at his rich kente or big
royal cloth
thrown over his shoulder with a rich lace jumper under it. That was the rare
thing the Togolese admired about Ghana.
These days a new trend is showing: those of us
married to spouses born and bred in Togo have kids with Togolese mentality and
those kids born in Ghana have become worse than us. Not only do they not speak Ewe
at all—although they understand it—but also they feel hundred percent Ghanaian
and do not envisage returning home. The same is true of Dzagli’s children in
the Republic of Benin.
Thus through our grandfather’s sickness and
cruel death, the Penoukou family has been spread over Ghana, Togo, and Benin
and still spreading elsewhere, including Europe—especially France—and America.
The family is still small compared to others but with the exception of the
women who have given large members to other families the men have limited
number of children. I sometimes wonder how grandfather would feel about it in
his grave; maybe his children should be blamed for not exhorting us to have
large families. But if they had they would have failed because not only is it unfashionable
now to have large families but also economic difficulties dissuade it.
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