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souslejaune · 5 years

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Auntie Dee Dee’s living room... (Folio 1: Part 2)

Auntie Dee Dee’s living room had the best view of an Accra sunset I had ever seen. Through the hand-polished clarity of her first floor sliding doors, beyond the fragrant haze of the flower-filled porch, the day performed its bedtime rituals.

Amorous cocks strutted their seduction in circles around hens as dust rose from beneath them. The cry of roving fishmongers rose to mingle with the faint smell of bougainvillea – orange and yellow. “Red fish. Last for the day. Cheap red fish.” Shrewd housewives emerged from their homes for these last minute bargains that made chop money last a little bit longer. There was sweat on their bead noses. They had been cooking.

Cooking is why I loved going to Auntie Dee Dee’s. I didn’t go there to see the sun give one last jaundiced wink before it turned steadily red as it submerged itself in the sea. I went there because Auntie Dee Dee was a sorceress whose spells lay in the texture of chopped onions, the mildly singed smell of fried plantain, the spicy tongue of chilli, the slippery kiss of oil… The food of her fingers was edible temptation.

In Ghana, it is understood that such a woman can have any man. A woman who befriends her is said to open the door of her marriage to discontent. But she was my mother’s best friend. They had known each other since they were knee high and my mother insisted that Dee Dee had never stopped eating in all the time she had known her.

Every Friday at 4pm my mother would yell, “Kids, are you ready?” From obscure corners of the house, my sister and I would scream, “Yes.” My father would already be in the car. His pride and joy. A navy blue Datsun 120Y gleaming in the relentless afternoon sun. Polished from roof to tyres. He closed his shop early on Fridays so that he could come home and wash it. He said he didn’t trust me to do it then – maybe later. Naana, my sister, liked to tease him about the car.

“Ei Daddy! Are we using the car today?”

My father would raise his arms in a mockery of prayer. “Dear God, let my next daughter be intelligent! Teach her what it means when I sit in my car and start the engine!”

Our mirth would explode in synchronised chaos. My mother holding her side, my sister shaking her head, me stamping like a victim of soldier ants.

It is not unfair to say my father was protective of his car, but it would be wrong to say he was miserly with it. Although he only used it on weekends he let my mother take it shopping every Wednesday. Women drivers were a rare thing so my mother was a minor star. She was the envy of the market traders who sat outside the main walls of Kaneshie Market and she liked the attention. She took pains to walk round the car, roll all the windows up and lock the doors as the traders chattered.

“O wu sumɔɔ o sane. What a man he must be! Will you buy some tomatoes?”

“Madam, me adamfo, how beautiful you look in your car, my friend. Do you want some Gari today? Only two cedis for one america.”

One america is a uniquely Ghanaian measurement that is equivalent to one full tin of an acceptably large size. It is standardised by neither weight nor volume. I learnt this on my first trip to the market with my mother when I noticed that some traders battered their tins so that they would contain less produce, which they sold for the same price. When I pointed this out to my mother she laughed, jingling the car keys as her dimples caught the attention of the sun.

“The trick is knowing whom to buy from.”

The traders in Kaneshie market shouted out their prices with competitive sideways glances at their rivals. Never missing an opportunity to sell, they could convince the smallest hunchback of their incredible height; such were their powers of flattery. My mother always came home on Wednesdays beaming with childlike smiles. Fully gorged on sweet words.

On Fridays however, we only had one destination – Auntie Dee Dee’s. Usually my father talked politics with her husband, Johnny, who was the Minister for Education, whilst my mother discussed sports and cuisine with Auntie Dee Dee. My mother and Dee Dee both sprinted for Ghana in the 1960s. At the 1965 All Africa Games – the first ever – Auntie Dee Dee made history in the 200 metres semi-finals, becoming the first athlete not to compete for dietary reasons. The food supplies she'd packed from Ghana had run out by then and she couldn't find the right kind of groundnut paste to make the 'reviving' soup she ate with rice or gari at least 10 hours before her race day began. She had hoped to make up for missing out on a medal in Bamako in 1969, but when the games were cancelled because of the overthrow of the socialist government in Mali in 1968, she retired. Often, while catching up with my mother by the earth coloured stove, Auntie Dee Dee would beckon me to her side, put her heavy arm around my neck, and smile down at me. She called me her little husband and liked to play with my unruly Afro, occasionally poking her little finger in my right-side-only dimple. From my vantage point beside Auntie Dee Dee, I could reach out and pilfer some achɔmɔ – sweet fried dough snacks that Auntie Dee Dee never seemed to run out of – and watch Uncle Johnny talking to my father. Uncle Johnny’s parabolic eyebrows made it seem like he was always asking a question. I didn’t talk much. I was six years younger than my sister and I loved to listen to people speak. I liked the sounds of some of the big words they used; like imperative and amralofoi. Sometimes, when I wasn’t enveloped by the mango- and cinnamon-fragranced body mass of Auntie Dee Dee, I watched the sun set with Naana and Uncle-and-Auntie’s son Junior. When the smells started coming from the kitchen, we went to Junior’s room to play games. We needed to. Our parents didn’t like us to run around the kitchen and we always seemed to lose our minds when the smell of fried onions started to waft.

._.

In the first few years of my life that was Friday for me. Sunsets and full stomachs.

I got an early birthday card for my seventh birthday. It came on November 15, 1981 – a week early. It was in a textured cream envelope with a glittering red star stuck on the V of the seal.

I had been in a low mood for a few days; I couldn't explain why and my mother had been worried about me. I was lethargic and completely disinterested in things which usually excited me – like football and throwing stones. She asked me if I was ill and checked my temperature – normal. But it was clear that did not satisfy her. Her round face had a pinch in it, like a balloon in the clutches of a clothes peg. Naana always said Mummy looked as though she was in labour every time one of us got hurt, or got into trouble – as though she was reliving the moments of our birth. With no clear symptoms for my condition, she forced me to take an aspirin just in case. A few minutes after she gave me the tablets, I got heartburn and she panicked.

“Oh, Kojo.” She turned to my father with a hand on her mouth, her voice shrill. “Have I poisoned him? Should we call your mother?”

My father, son of a nurse, responded with the calm of his mother. “Relax, Sarah, he probably took the tablet too quickly. He’ll be fine.” He turned to me. “Ebo, does it hurt a lot?”

I shook my head. Trying to be brave.

Naana and my father tried to cheer me up by making funny faces, but my laughter had lost its energy. I wasn’t even ticklish anymore. Eventually they all gave up.

However when the early birthday card arrived a day later, my eyes lit up; so, although my mother wouldn’t normally have given the card to me until my actual birthday, she handed it to me. I ripped the envelope with a fork from our kitchen and pulled out the card. It had Pink Panther on the front and one hundred cedis inside. It was signed, Your favourite Auntie, Dee Dee.

“Mummy look! One hundred cedis!” I came alive like a fanned fire. For the first time I noticed the red serial number on a hundred cedi note.

“Ooh, lucky boy, let me keep it for you.”

My mother snatched it from me with a smile.

She had a trick with money. You always managed to spend it before she was due to give it back to you. It faded into the background like a country's history. If it were in a forest, it would be one amongst the leaves that cushion the forest floor – you would know it was there, but who could find it? The money became the last pack of sweets you had, or the cost of the new socks you were wearing; I knew I’d lost that money forever.

“Mummy, can I call Auntie Dee Dee to thank her?”

“Of course.”

The telephone rang and rang. No one picked up.

My father came home crying that day. Within minutes my mother was crying too. The news and its companion tears soon spread to Naana and I.

Auntie Dee Dee had had a heart attack whilst cooking. She was alone at home and died. The next day my mother gave me back the money Auntie Dee Dee had sent me. She mumbled something about last wishes and how the dead always knew things. Blowing her nose with a tear-sodden handkerchief, she took out the battered address book she kept by her side of the bed, called the friends she and Dee Dee had grown up with, and started planning the funeral. With every call, she cried again, as though Auntie Dee Dee had just died. She relived her devastation with each memory of Auntie Dee Dee rekindled by another friend. By evening my mother looked five years older; she could barely do anything without sobbing, so my father became her. His grief was a warm silence. He served us food, held our hands and made our mother endless glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice with lime. It was all she wanted. The sight of food intensified her grief. Naana and I grew red-eyed from watching our parents cry, wondering what our playmate Junior would do without a mother. We went to bed with headaches.

People converged on Auntie Dee Dee’s funeral in migratory bird fashion. In shining red and black mourning plumage. Wax prints so fresh that you could still smell the ink on them. Dutch prints quickly learning the language of African sun as they soaked up the sweat of grieving bodies. The women had quarter pieces of cloth show-boated into elaborate headgear, which they bore as heavily as their grief. The men carried themselves with a grace that belied the casual toss of dark Adinkra cloths over their left shoulders. I looked for Junior in the dark forest of tearful bodies but he was nowhere to be found. Uncle Johnny sat by the dead body; shoulders bent, clad in black, fossilised by sorrow, his eyebrows at odds with his tears.

My mother made me file past the dead body. Not caring for my seven-year-old sensitivity. Ostensibly for my own good. The waache seller down our road, who was single-handedly responsible for daily lunchtime pilgrimages of men from the Industrial Area, explained it to me later.

“If you don’t see a dead person in their coffin, there is a possibility they will visit you.”

Actually, I wouldn’t have minded a visit from Auntie Dee Dee. I had questions for her.

Anyway, I filed past the body; keeping my eyes down, trained on the gleaming black traditional slippers the adults were wearing. I only got a glance. She was adorned in all her finery, gold rings and a stiff smile. There was a red handbag trapped under her left arm to match the red dress she had been stuffed into. Red was her favourite colour.

“Quel gachis!”

It was the first time I heard French spoken properly. Auntie Dee Dee’s grandfather was French, and one of her cousins had travelled all the way from Paris to demonstrate his love by shaving his armpits to wear cloth the Ghanaian way.

Quel gachis! My father translated it later. What a waste! It sounded so much better in French. English just didn’t have the right sound for it. I resolved to learn French.

—–

continued >> here << ... | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez

#novel #series #fiction #niiayikweiparkes

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ikegt020 · 4 years

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Parts of Ghana shaken by earth tremor

Parts of the Greater Accra, Central Region and their surrounding areas have experienced earth tremors.

The phenomenon which took place at about 10:40 pm Wednesday, June 24, 2020, occurred three times in the space of 10 minutes.

Some residents of Osu, Ablekuma Manhean, Kaneshie, Achimota, Adenta, Circle, Kokomlemle, Accra New Town, Legon, Dansoman, Kasoa, Haatso, Kwashiman, Teshie, Nungua,…

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dreamwidegh · 4 years

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Earth tremor in parts of Ghana

Parts of the Greater Accra and Central Region have experienced earth tremors.

The phenomenon which took place at about 10:40 pm Wednesday, June 24, 2020, occurred three times in the space of 10 minutes.

Some residents of Osu, Ablekuma Manhean, Kaneshie, Achimota, Adenta, Circle, Kokomlemle, Accra New Town, Legon, Dansoman, Kasoa, Haatso, Kwashiman, Teshie, Nungua, McCarthy Hill among others said…

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#Earth tremor

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hypercitigh · 5 years

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Man with funeral cortège arrested for assaulting traffic warden

One person has been arrested following the assault of a traffic warden who tried to stop a funeral cortège from blocking the main road leading the Obetsebi Circle to the Awudome Cemetery on Friday morning.

Confirming the arrest of the unidentified man, the Kaneshie Divisional Commander, ACP Faakye Kumi said the suspect has been sent to the Kaneshie Police Station for questioning.

He said…

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newssplashy · 6 years

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Good life in Ghana

Smart-travelling through Accra, Ghana’s capital city requires a know-how

Musa Jibril

While growing up, there used to be a popular Yoruba saying with regard to Ghanaians: Kos’arugbo n’Ghana––to wit, “There is no unfashionable person in Ghana.” The statement still rings true today. I won’t explain any further. Find out yourself.

Ghana hardly changes. There is not going to be much gap between the experience of someone who lived in the country in the 1960s and that of someone who lived there in the new Millennium. They are not easily amenable to change, the Ghanaians. Even the physical layouts of their cities are still as identifiable as the days of Nkrumah.

Accra, the capital city, is still a melting pot it was during Nkrumah’s time when it was the epicentre of pan-Africanism. Half a century after the Alien Compliance Order sent other nationalities out of the country, today’s Accra has a mélange of foreign nationals: Nigerians, Burkinabes, Togolese, Ivorians, Sierra Leoneans, Liberians and Guineans. This diversity adds colour and zing to the everyday life in Accra. It engenders a cosmopolitan culture that imbues the foreigners with a sense of belonging.

There are many facets to the Ghanaian life and the briefest of stay in the capital leaves you with indelible impressions. A Nigerian staying beyond a few days will need to make some adjustments, though. Truth is, we are different in many ways, the Ghanaians and us. They are not loud. They don’t like loud music. They don’t brag. This is especially important if you are a Lagosian.

I love their sense of enjoyment. Ghanaians abhor stress. They make an effort not to complicate their lives. Unlike Nigerians who work nonstop, Ghanaians, if they work in an office, strictly observed the one-hour midday break. In the evening, they take time off to enjoy. On holidays, they stay indoors. It took me awhile to get used to it.

If you are doing Accra as a tourist, you need to have a head for the good time and a taste for good music. Remember, Ghanaians have a claim to being the exponents of highlife music before Nigerians usurped it and turned into something bigger. Ghana still has a hold on live band music, and +233 Jazz Bar and Grill is the place to have a taste of the real thing, especially whenever Gyedu-Blay Ambolley comes to town. Ambolley has a jazz ensemble that included a terrific horn player that is a Nigerian. The Ghanaian jazz-highlife maestro usually caps his performance with a rendition of one or two of Fela’s song.

Still on music, activities at the Alliance Francaise every month bring a cocktail of cosmopolitan melodies and performance from Francophone countries and other faraway places. The Ghanaians maintained a modicum of the European entertainment culture that will appeal to the bourgeoisie in you. Once in a while, a stage play comes up at the national theatre by seasoned playwrights such as Ebo Whyte or versatile entertainers like the musician Okyeame Kwame whose repertoire includes opera-like plays. Downtown Accra, at Nkrumah Circle, Vienna City, a bar-club-restaurant outfit that is the centre of gravity for fun seekers, sizzles in the evening.

The city has no shortage of clubs––from Hotgossip Night Club to Django Bar to Club Onyx––they are as good as they come. Neat, not seedy; organised and upscale, and good places for a nice evening timeout. There is no negative ring about clubbing in Accra.

If you have a day or two to spare, it will be a great idea to familiarise yourself with the popular sights of the city. Start with Mokola market at Accra Central. It is a sprawling market where you buy anything and everything, and tarry at Tudu, the neighbourhood of moneychangers that has a whiff of Lagos’ Idumota and a slice of Tudun Wada in Kaduna. Nearby Jamestown, with its lighthouse and its famous Wesley church where Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe tied the marital knots on April 4, 1936, is another place to visit. One of Ghana’s oldest town, it is peopled by the Ga whose cultural practices are related in some respect to the Yoruba. Nearby is Bukom, the centre of Ghana boxing culture.

Beach bums will find the Labadi Beach okay, but I have to tell you this: the best beaches are not in Accra. If you are the “jolly good fellow” type who treasures a timeout in a bar over a bottle of beer or two, Ghana is your nirvana. There is a bar every one kilometre on the street. And beer is plenty and cheap and comes in varieties, from rice beer to cassava beer and Alomo to Akpetesi.

Bars, especially those on the road sell from tanks into tankards. If you are a teetotaller, ask for Alvaro or Club’s soft drinks, and soak in the fizzy aura of the bar.

You might have a little difficulty with food. Nigerians and Ghanaians are a world apart in their cuisines. Coming from a Nigerian background where there are varieties of local foods, you might have to make some adjustments to the ‘limited’ culinary options. Not every Nigerian will find Waakye or Kenkey and Banku good substitutes for Apu, Gari or Amala.

Whereas you are used to Egusi, Ogbono, Ewedu and Afang, what Ghanaians offer is okro soup, groundnut soup, palm nut soup and light soup. I love Ga Kenkey––because I was used to it in Nigeria. I lived on it. I love Waakye too, perhaps because both are served with Shito. Those days, whenever we were driven to appease our palate with Nigerian cuisine, House of Ovations Restaurant, owned by Otunba Dele Momodu, was the place to grab a plate of Gari or Semo and vegetable soup.

In general, life moves at a lazy tempo, quite unlike the turbo-charged living of Lagos. I guess that is why Ghanaians live up to 100 years. In Ghana, funeral is fun. The city empties at the weekend as they burrow into the hinterland for funeral ceremonies that easily become an assembly for Old Money families and the nouveau riches, whereby you get the Who’s Who of Ghana in one gathering. Nana Acheampong, my editor, took me to a few. The most memorable was in Ada. Those days, we would to travel with the boot of his Toyota Camry loaded with hundreds of copies of Weekend Sun, which we sold at the events. The strategy was to get the people hooked on the obit pages and subsequently increases next week’s copy sales in those remote areas. We took off early on Saturday morning and on the evening of Sunday, we’d be back in Accra. That way, I got to know a lot of Ghanaian cities and towns across the Western and Central regions. You can never be lost in the crowd in Accra if you are a Nigerian. Nigeria has a significant population in the city, the elite in East Legon, the masses in Kasoa.

There is no shortage of activities in the Nigerian communities. The Igbos maintained a strong presence numerically, commercially and culturally. I attended a few Igbo occasions, especially those organised by the Eze Igbo Ghana, and witnessed the riveting enactment of the tradition of breaking Kolanuts and the ‘rite of the garden eggs and groundnut.’ Good friends make Ghana groovy. I made lots of friends, but most of my friends were in Cape Coast. It is easier to make friends of Fanti, my opinion anyway. My friends were many. A few deserved mentioning––Edith de Vos, a German who runs the Baobab Home, she had lived in Nigeria, but didn’t really like the Lagos life and consequently swapped it for the serenity of Cape Coast; Augustine Addison, 70-year-old boxing buff and a Muhammad Ali fan, we became good friends and he gave me access to his mini-museum and library; James Biney, the newspaperman who all his life lived of selling dailies. There was David ‘Kalusha’ Abban, who became like a brother, and Stephen Forson, a father raising his two daughters singlehandedly; Forson, while studying in Germany, refused to take German history course because of Hitler. In Accra, I lived in Kokoase, North Kaneshie. My neighbours––Jerry, Portia and Esenam––all young and single at the time; living among them was the easiest way to attune my ears to the Twi language.

You don’t have to miss church services if you are visiting Accra. A few Nigerian churches have made an in-road into the capital. While Ghanaians are largely Presbyterian, a slew of Pentecostal varieties, similar in character to those in Nigeria, are all over the city.

I have to tell you this: you have got to be comfortable with seeing signposts advertising the services of witchdoctors. Kwaku Bonsam, the most famous of them all is a celebrity of sorts, and he lends his voice to national issues. Consider him like Nigeria’s Sat Guru Maharaji, but he is more vocal. He talks about everything that is a burning issue. He even offered to help the Black Stars during the last World Cup, when he claimed to have bewitched Portugal ace, Cristiano Ronaldo, to stop him from scoring against Ghana in their group stage match.

You have to be aware of this: Ghana doesn’t treat crime with kid’s glove. It is a society of rights, built on efficient rule of law. And their criminal justice is as effective. Drink driving attracts six months imprisonment. Rape is not bailable. Operating a brothel or soliciting for sex is a grave offence. Smoking wee, a common vice, is unforgivable.

Let me also add: Accra might seem like a paradise, it has its hell as well. As a reporter, I had seen the underbelly of Accra. It’s not nice. It is as unkind as you can get in any mass society. Young girls who ran from home, especially from the northern region, lured by the attractions of the big city, ended up as Kaya yoo (porters), homeless, sleeping in the open. You would find them and other misfits in such slums like Sodom and Gomorrah (before its demolition) or Agbogboloshie, both digital dumping grounds, that make Lagos’ Ajegunle look like a mini London.

The teenagers are vulnerable and some in a year or two joined the teenage mothers’ brigade. I remember a girl of 19 we interviewed. She was from Yendi. She came to Accra to become a porter so she could raise money to pay her dowry. Let me tell you the story of Louisa Weah. She was 19 at the time we met her while investigating teenage prostitution. She had a one-year-old daughter, Daniella. She kept her with a nanny whom she paid one cedi every evening when she went about the city selling sex. She returned home in the wee hours of the morning with about 30 cedis. She was a runaway kid from Cape Coast. Eight months later after the story, I ran into her at Circle. She was heavily pregnant.

“Who impregnated you again?”

She and her friends laughed.

“Oh, he is Nigerian,” said one of her friends.

“In Ghana, you don’t ask a young girl who is responsible for the pregnancy,” I was schooled.

Accra swarms with battalions of such ‘kids’ who ran away from home.

If you are in Accra in September, make it a duty to attend Chale Wote. It is Ghana’s annual street art festival, a cocktail of art, music, dance and performance on the streets. You are likely to mingle with local and international artists and patrons. It is an opportunity to immerse in a kaleidoscope of visual delights that include street painting, graffiti murals and photography. Other activities, including live street performances, extreme sports, film shows, a fashion parade, a music block party and recyclable design workshops have made Chale Wote irresistible in recent years.

On a day you feel bored, a stroll through Oxford Street in Osu will make your day. And if you are missing the bustle of Lagos, go to Nkrumah Circle and get lost in the stream of humanity milling about aimlessly.

My last visit wasn’t my best. I was locked indoors for 11 days, my head buried in transcribing and writing.

But I did have one memorable moment. A day before I returned to Lagos, I spent the evening with Acheampong in his house at Dansoman. Nana Acheampong is a literary encyclopedia, a creative dynamo––a writer, an academic, a music critic, a humourist, more American than Ghanaian in attitude. We spent three hours in his recording studio and thereafter sat in a bar by the sea.

The breeze was cool. The air tangy. I was filled with contentment, a feeling I have come to associate with Ghana. Once you are content, that’s the good life, man.

The post Good life in Ghana appeared first on The Sun News.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/05/good-life-in-ghana.html

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afroinsider · 6 years

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Brotherhood Of The Cross And Star Holds Centenary Carnival

Members of the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star on Saturday held a carnival in Accra as part of its Centenary celebration which falls on December 30. Members of the Brotherhood walked from Kaneshie Traffic light to Circle 39;Obra Spot 39; clad in all white and barefooted to observe the celebration, hosted by Ghana. Bishop Kofi Agyepong, t …

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#news feeds #West Africa

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souslejaune · 5 years

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At ten a.m. the entire congregation relocated

At ten a.m. the entire congregation relocated to the Osu Presbyterian Church. We travelled in waves of sound and dust: The hearse leading the way with its horns blaring like a faulty ambulance; the family thrown together within the confines of two Peugeot 504 caravans; followed by the guests – some on foot, some in a bus hired for the occasion.

On the bus, the guests sang local spirituals at the top of their raspy morning voices, drawing eyes as the cortège wound its loud progress around Kwame Nkrumah circle and swept down the dual carriageway of the Ring Road. The family was silent. I sat sandwiched between Naana and my mother, my hands stuffed between my legs. Occasionally I glanced in the driver’s mirror to catch my father’s eye and to make sure that my face was as composed as a fourteen-year-old’s should be in a situation like this. I felt no identifiable emotion; every pure emotion was countered by a conflicting one. A giggle of relief burgeoned just below the surface of my grief, a part of me wanted to jump for joy. In the midst of the chaos, I thought of Mr Trabb in Great Expectations arranging Mrs Gargery’s funeral; grateful that we didn’t have anyone like him to push us around. I wouldn’t have refused Joe’s company though. I imagined him saying “she were a fine figure of a woman.” I couldn’t cry. My throat felt two sizes too big. The world felt too small.

The preacher extolled the virtues of giving. Spoke of the grace that comes from living a selfless life, and then decided to “take advantage of the passing of our sister” to address the “lost sheep” amongst us. “There are no second chances. The good book says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…”

I took a picture of his mouth – a non-symmetric oval with white spittle framing his coloured utterances – and lost myself in the loneliness of things I couldn’t speak of. I thought of the discussions I had had with GeeMaa about my gift – what she preferred to call my sensitivity – and wondered if I had let her down by my unwillingness to embrace it, my isolation when she encouraged engagement. I replayed my encounter with the wide-eyed old man at Kaneshie Market where I went to buy yam for a feast of Otɔ to celebrate my fourteenth birthday. Belatedly. My birthday had come during the school year so I was in the boarding house on the day itself. Still my mother refused to break the tradition that our family had kept up ever since Naana started eating solid food. Generations of my paternal family had done the same thing for years.

GeeMaa supported her loudly. “You can’t be a man if you haven’t eaten your Otɔ.” Her slanted walk was then smoother. Almost seductive. Her curly white hair was a mute admonition for me not to argue any further. The unblemished ivory of each strand glowed with an inner darkness of a kind that defied logical explanation.

I gave in with a smile. “As long as you all remember that I’m a man now!”

Naana stuck her head out from the living room. “Yes, but a little man…”

They all laughed. My mother holding her side, Naana shaking her head, GeeMaa clucking deep within her throat, mother hen style. Three generations of Oppong-Ribeiro women. Shaking like tambourines, but producing the more melodic music of mirth.

I decided to lose the battle to save myself from torture. I took the money my mother had placed on the kitchen table and left the house chuckling to myself. The sky had the look of a pale blue cloth someone had spat on. It was difficult to look at. It seemed to be having a joke at my expense too. As I headed out, I greeted Auntie Aba the waache seller and the shoemaker with his rickety workbench.

“Ayekoo.”

“Yaaye.”

Our ritualised greeting required nothing more to be said. I was warmed by the simple call and response.

I walked with an energetic swing in my stride, staying on the shady side of the street whenever I could. Especially by the cemetery at Awudome with its profusion of well-nourished neem trees. When I got to the market, my feet were dusty. I stamped a few times before going to seek out Sister Joy – my mother’s preferred yam seller. I was almost at her corner when I stumbled and stepped on a tomato. Its sweet juices spread like thinning blood across the dirty floor.

“Bɛlɛoo ei! Wɔsɛɛ e baa tɔ o ŋga. I pity your future wife.”

A tomato seller had dropped some of her merchandise. I apologised to her and offered to pay for the tomato but she laughed it off.

“It’s nothing. I was only joking.”

I smiled.

“Ayekoo.”

It was another voice: familiar yet completely new. I turned to see an old man leaning against a pillar with a box of sweets and lollipops.

I had never seen him in the market before so I frowned before I answered.

“Yaaye.”

He smiled. Offered me a sweet. I hesitated, and then reached out. As my hand reached the box he stopped me and closed the box. I noticed two deep scars on his leathery face. He pointed to a hand-sized hole in the top of the box indicating that I should pick a sweet by chance. I reached in. The belly of the box felt like a damp sponge. It was warm and there was nothing solid in it, yet when I took my hand out I realised I was holding a round black-and-white mint. A solid mint.

“Harmony,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Harmony. A circle. Black and white. There will be some changes in your family to preserve harmony.”

He walked towards an exit.

“What kind of changes?”

“You know.”

I stood in the same spot until a trio of market porters bumped into me.

“Small, why?”

“Are you OK?”

I shook my head apologetically and went to buy the yam.

At home GeeMaa insisted on cooking the Otɔ for me. Said she was getting old and might not have the strength to do it again. She poured some palm oil carefully into a small pan as the yam boiled, lit one of the gas hobs and put the palm oil on it to heat. She seasoned the oil with onions and pepper and some leaves she picked from the courtyard. When the yam was cooked she put fourteen eggs in a saucepan to boil as she told me stories of more soothsayers and medicine women and men in her family. It was a noble calling; there was more pain in watching others suffer than suffering yourself.

“That’s what I was taught. It’s not surprising I became a nurse,” she smiled.

I wasn't convinced.

She mashed the yam with a pestle and mixed it with the seasoned palm oil. Soon she had an orange mountain of palm-oil-coloured yam, which she put in a large wooden bowl. An edible volcano. Then she took the eggs off the boil.

I helped her shell them and place one egg for every year of my life on the orange mountain. When the mountain came down, we couldn’t stop licking our fingers. Naana had two eggs and told us that the rest of us would have flatulence because three eggs each was well over our daily protein requirements. Twelve eggs disappeared like alien moons down our throats. We didn’t care how they came out.

It was hard to imagine GeeMaa gone within two weeks of that meal. I was angry. I was angry when the hearse left the church to lead us back to Awudome Cemetery. I was angry as I tossed dust onto the roof of GeeMaa’s ambulance. I was angry at the sight of the woman wailing and being held back from jumping into GeeMaa’s grave. Producing sounds so outrageous that the over-abundant bats that rested upside-down in close-by neem trees during the day dispersed – briefly darkening the sky. She sounded like a djama chant, two beats out of step, and one note out of tune. I knew she was a professional mourner. My father had told me at Aunt Dee Dee’s funeral when I asked why she was so hysterical. I would recognise that wail anywhere. I was angry when we returned to our house for refreshments: The catering company blocked off the entire road in front of our house to make space for canopies and chairs. They didn’t care that they were causing a minor traffic jam. They revelled in the society’s acceptance of funerals as a reason to do as you please. Live as you wish. For a moment at least. Mostly I was angry because I hadn’t understood the old man at the market. I was angry because the rectangular-lipped earth had just swallowed the only person I could talk to about my confusion. I was angry because on the morning of her death I ran away and missed her last words. I kept a straight face and said little. I overheard people whispering. Saying I was odd.

“There’s something wrong with that kid.”

Of course there was something wrong with me. I had lost my grandmother. And she may have “done her duty on earth,” or “gone to help HIM,” but I wanted my grandmother to be with me.

Night fell and my spirits fell with it. I went to my room and turned off the lights.

My father came in and hugged me and cried.

My mother came in and hugged me and cried.

I didn’t cry. I just stared at them like I was looking at a painting of life.

Naana came and sat by me in my bed. Her eyes were like pimples – pointy and swollen.

“I’m tired of crying,” she said.

I lay down. “I want to cry. I just can’t.”

“Why?”

“I think was my fault.”

“That’s nonsense. She was old.”

“But she was strong.” I didn’t say that I thought GeeMaa had become ill because I went to boarding school and stopped chewing my neem sticks. I didn’t say I thought that GeeMaa had died because I had become a man.

“I know. Did you hear about FatherGrandpa?”

“No. Is he dead too?”

“No, silly. He couldn’t come because he was too sad.”

“Good excuse.” I sat up again. “He didn’t care about her.”

“No. No. Daddy went to see him; every time he looked at Daddy he would start sobbing. He couldn’t control himself.”

Naana had a pained expression on her face. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. All I could see was an image of FatherGrandpa slapping his left shoulder to kick-start his faulty laughter and finding only tears. Naana pushed my head and laughed too.

“Daddy said he just has a great capacity for love. That’s why he never stays with one woman.”

“Poor fool!”

We laughed and laughed. Then I cried. All the tears I’d carried since GeeMaa died came rushing down my cheeks. Then I bawled. Loud enough for the dead to hear.

Our parents came back to the room and sat by Naana and I. The walls were covered with photographs and captions I had put up. Naana’s periodic table had gone when she went to live on the university campus.

“It’s hard…” I tried to speak but felt a fish-bone of grief rising up my throat. By now my whole body was racked with sorrow. I shook like a sapling in a storm.

My mother held me and started crying.

My father always cried when my mother cried.

Naana couldn’t help herself.

Within minutes we were a wet huddle. A rock hollowed out. GeeMaa took a part of us all with her and left us all with a part of her. I was uncomfortable with the part I thought she had left me.

“Mum, do you believe some people can read the future?”

“I don’t know. I suppose there are prophets… Why?”

“Nothing.” There was nothing to be said.

Uncle Sanjit wrote to the family to extend his condolences.

continued next week… | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez

#niiayikweiparkes #fiction #prose #proseseries #novel #novel series #ghana

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