Ama (16 page)

“He came to me as part of the death duties of the late Oyokohene. He is a smart fellow; he has a nimble mind: that is why I call him Frede-Frede. When he has completed his military training I am going to send him to the Treasury. I am always on the look-out for talented youngsters to recruit into the public service, you know. Asante has grown too large for the King to run on his own. Authority must be delegated. That creates a demand for servants of the state who are clever and honest. When I find a lad with potential, I snap him up, even if he is a slave.”

“Is this lad a slave, Nana?” asked Koranten Péte.

“No, no, just an ordinary commoner. But he has an excellent memory and a good logical mind. He knows how to reason and argue. And he can count. I see a great future for him.”

He paused. He squeezed his eyes and bit his lower lip as if in pain. Konadu Yaadom exchanged a look with Koranten Péte. Then the spasm seemed to pass.

“To change the subject,” he said when he opened his eyes, “Nana Konadu, I have been thinking over your kind advice. I know, that if any one has my true welfare at heart, it is you.”

“Nana it is true.”

“I have decided to consult Okomfo Tantani.”

“Nana, I am pleased. The gods speak through Okomfo Tantani. He is a powerful healer. And if any one knows the uses of medicinal herbs it is his wife. Shall I send for them? When will you see him?”

* * *

Esi was short, fat, untidy, irresponsible and irresistibly ebullient.

When she laughed, as she did frequently, her eyes lit up and she showed a mouthful of fine white teeth with the gap between the front two which the Akan regard as a sign of beauty. Incurably inquisitive, she was a repository of all the most confidential and up-to-date court gossip; but there was not a tittle of malice in her. Nandzi lost her heart to her irretrievably at first sight.

“First, let me tell you the sad story of my life,” Esi said as the two of them bathed Opoku Fofie in a brass basin. “Then you will tell me yours.”

“My mother is Asante and so, of course, am I. But my father, bless him, is a Fanti man. That's how I come to have a Fanti name. In Asante, Sunday-born girls are called Akosua, not Esi.

“As a young man Papa was taken prisoner in one of the wars. He was made to join the Asante army and sent to fight in the north. He acquitted himself so well in the first Dagomba war, that, as a reward, he was given some land to farm; and my mother to marry.

“What happened next is a famous event in Asante history. Can you guess?”

Nandzi shook her head.

“I was born!”

The baby chortled as if he had understood Esi's joke and they both smiled at his babbling.

“Hallo my little chuckle-and-snort,” Esi told him and gave him a kiss.

“Well, to continue, though I dearly cherish my beloved Papa, I have to admit that, except as a soldier and as a loving father, he has not made much of a success of his life. You see, in Asante, money is everything. Papa's ambition has always been to make a quick killing, to make his fortune through a single stroke of genius, white man's genius. He is forever talking about how clever the white man is.

“Have you ever seen a white man? I mean a real white man, like those who live on the coast? No? Well, neither have I, but Papa has and to hear him talk of them, you would think they were gods.”

Esi paused as she ladled up water to rinse the soap off the baby. Nandzi was glad to be able to relax her attention for a moment. Esi spoke so quickly that it was a struggle for her to keep up.

“Now where was I? Ah, Papa and the white men. As I was saying, to him the white man is next to God. Then come the Fantis. We Asante follow a poor third. As for northerners . . .”

She gripped Nandzi's wrist with a soapy hand.

“I'm sorry, nothing personal. I certainly don't share my good father's silly prejudices.”

She laid the baby on a soft towel which she had spread across her lap.

“You must be very particular about how you dry grandfather Opoku Fofie's royal bottom. Maame Konadu will give you a proper beating if you leave a single speck of dampness on his aristocratic little body.”

She lifted him up in his towel and gave him a hug. He responded with a gurgle of joy. Nandzi remembered her little brother Nowu.
I wonder whether my mother has had another baby yet
, she mused.

“Well, to return to my father and his white-man schemes. Cut down Odum trees and send them to the coast. The white man will pay anything for good wood. Build a dam across the village stream and grow fish in the pond behind the dam. Go to Kumase and bring white man's cloth and liquor to sell in the village market. One thing after another. After a while my mother began to make bitter fun of him and his dream-world. After all she was not only growing the food that we ate, all eight of us (and some more that died young) but also giving him pocket money to drink his palm-wine.”

“Now mister pisser,” she said to the baby as she tucked in the little cloth which she had wrapped around his nether regions, “Will you just try to keep dry while Ama and I have something to eat? Ama, will you please bring the soup and the fufu, while I get this fellow settled?”

“To cut a long story short,” she continued, as she tore a small finger-load off the ball of fufu and dipped it into the palm soup, “Papa began to borrow money to finance his crazy projects. As time went by, he got deeper and deeper into debt. Eventually there came the crunch. The creditors were themselves in debt and they were demanding immediate settlement. To save Papa's skin, I volunteered to be pawned. What I didn't know then was that Papa's creditors owed money to our dear mistress, Maame Konadu, bless her. So Papa's creditors pawned me, in turn, to her. So here I am and here I stay, worse off than a slave like you, until Papa's unlikely miracle happens or until I can find a rich man who will pay off the debt and marry me. End of story.”

She blew on a spoonful of the soup to cool it and then fed it to the baby. He pulled a wry face at the pepper. Then he licked his lips, kicked his little legs and waved his arms about. Esi smiled.

“Now what about you?” she asked, “First, how do you come to be called Ama? Do your people use the same names as we do?”

“My real name is Nandzi but Nana said she didn't like it so she called me Ama.”

“Tchtt! Typical of the woman! You cannot even call your name your own in this place. However,” and here, somewhat out of character, Esi paused to think, “however . . . I advise you to accept it. In our situation we have to take care to choose our battles. Otherwise . . .” and she chopped at the back of her neck with the edge of a flattened hand.

“Do you understand?”

Nandzi thought she did.

“Let's shake on that. I'm Esi,” laughed the owner of that name.

“I'm Ama,” said Nandzi as she took the proffered hand; and from that moment, Ama she became, to others, and, in due course, to herself.

* * *

“I love going to market,” said Esi, “Don't you? Even though I never have any money of my own to spend. Nana said to ‘show you the ropes.' You know why, of course?”

They were standing in the shade of one of the mighty trees which lined the square, next to the stall of a gold-weigher. Lined up on his table was an array of tiny brass castings, each in the shape of an animal or a plant or some human activity. Ama watched with fascination as the man used his brass scoop to pour his customer's gold dust into one of the pans of his scales and added a selection of his brass weights to the other until the two pans swung freely.

“Have you never seen gold dust weighed before?” asked Esi.

Ama shook her head.

“Then remember the weights,” Esi said, counting with her fingers, “Six
ackies
make one
tokoo
; and forty
ackies
make one
peredwan
.”

“One
peredwan
,” she mused, “if I had one
peredwan
I could buy my freedom. Can you count?”

“Of course. In my own language up to a thousand; but in Asante I have only learned up to ten.”

“Never mind, I'll teach you the rest. But remember, it is better to have the gold weighed at home before you come to market. If you have it weighed here you could be cheated. And Nana is very suspicious; she will assume that you have stolen some. Of course, I always do.”

“You always do what?” asked Ama.

“Oh my little innocent,” replied Esi, “I always steal some of her gold dust, of course. I tell her that prices have gone up. She is too aristocratic to go to the market herself, so she can't check whether I am lying. But I never take more than a few
tokoo
at a time. And I hide it well. It is not beneath our mistress to come and search our room, you know.”

Ama needed some time to think about all this.

“Is that right?” she asked, “Stealing, I mean.”

“Right? Is it right that we should work for her for nothing, the mean thing? Last week I showed her this old cloth I am wearing: it is worn right through from washing with cheap soap. Do you think she would give me a small dash to buy a new one? No way! How will I ever find myself a husband to buy my freedom when I have to dress like this?”

“But to steal . . .?”

“Ama, in Asante only money counts. Without it you can do nothing.”

She continued, “You didn't answer my question. Do you know why Nana wants me to ‘show you the ropes'?”

Ama shook her head. They were wandering amongst the meat vendors. Fowls and guinea fowls, dead and alive, were on display, deer meat, dried and smoked; spiced monkey flesh; great forest snails strung on grass ropes.

“Well, she is dissatisfied with me. ‘Esi is stupid, Esi is lazy,' et cetera, et cetera. She wants to use you to threaten me. If she finds she likes you, she might have me dispatched at the next royal funeral. I hope you won't play her game. We must stick together.”

“What do you mean, she'll have you dispatched?”

Esi stared at her in disbelief, but the innocent, questioning look remained on Ama's face. She took her hand and led her to a quiet corner. They sat down with their backs against two buttresses of a silk cotton tree.

“Ama, it is time you learned the facts of life in Asante, the facts of life and death. Tell me first, in your country, do you worship your ancestors?”

“Of course.”

“And when your kings die, do you not send slaves to serve them in the world of the ancestral spirits?”

“Esi, in my country, we have no kings; and no slaves either.”

“No kings? Who rules you then? I thought every country had kings.”

“We have no rulers, only Elders and Priests of the Earth.”

“So that is why you seem so innocent! Well, now you are going to have to grow up. For your own good, you are going to have to hear the truth. Listen to me well.

“In Asante, as you know by now, we do have a King; and many other royals too. No Asante royal goes into the next world alone or empty-handed. We dress our dead in the finest cloth and provide them with gold, food, anything that might be useful in the land of the ancestors. We commoners do that too. But the royals fear that the ancestors will not recognise them as important people unless they arrive with many servants. So when a royal dies, they kill, kill, kill. They slaughter at random. If it is a king who has died, they can kill as many as a hundred slaves, even a thousand. When a king dies, no one is safe. They use some of the corpses to line his grave. Look across the valley there. That is what they call the Bush of Ghosts, where they dump the surplus bodies. All they keep is the blood and the head and sometimes, they say, the internal organs to make medicine.”

For a fleeting moment she thought that Esi might be pulling her leg. Then she recalled the execution she had witnessed in Yendi, and the human jaw bones and thigh bones and skulls she had seen in Kumase; and she remembered too how frightened the populace seemed to be of the giant Chief Executioner. It all fitted. Esi could not be lying. She thought,
if they kill me, I shall refuse to serve their King in the next world. I shall escape and search for Itsho
.

She said, “Esi, the King, Osei Kwadwo, is ill. He will die soon. Do you mean that they will kill us when he dies?”

“How can you know when the King will die? Take care. If you tell that to anyone else but me, you will be called a witch.”

“I am not a witch. But I read the sickness in his eyes the first time I saw him.

“The other day, the day I came to the palace, when you were out: Koranten Péte was visiting Nana and they were talking about the King. Nana said Osei Kwadwo was seriously ill and that she thought he wouldn't live another year. Wait! Hear me out. Then the King himself came to visit and before he left he agreed to consult an
okomfo
, I forget his name, but Nana said that this
okomfo's
wife was the best herbal healer in the country.”

“Ei! My father and my mother! I am sure you are right. Ama. I am too young too die. I will run away before they kill me. They say it is an honour to go and serve the Asantehene in the next world; but, as for me, I have served the Asantehemaa quite enough in this world. Ama, Ama, Ama. We must plan. We must prepare. We must find a place where we can hide when the day comes, a place where they will never find us.

“You know, it is as if they all go mad. There is such an orgy of bloodletting. Yet once the burial and the funeral are over, they act again as if nothing terrible has happened. They forget it all as you forget a dream when you wake up. But I wonder, I wonder sometimes whether the horror of it does not come back to haunt them after dark, when they are asleep. Sometimes one hears strange screams in the palace at night, as if some one were afflicted by a nightmare.”

Esi was sobbing.

“Ama, trust me,” she said when she had pulled herself together. “We shall find a way. Together we will find a way. I am glad you have come. You give me strength. Let me think about it and then we will talk again. Ei, my dear father!”