The Tomorrow-Tamer

M
y father thought he was bringing Salvation to Africa. I, on the other hand, no longer know what salvation is. I am not sure that it lies in the future. And I know now that it is not to be found in the past.

The mission where I was born was in a fishing village between Accra and Takoradi, on Africa's salt-steaming west coast. I lived there all my early boyhood. A missionaryâhow difficult it was to live down my father's profession. I almost wish I had not tried.

A missionary had to have a genuine calling in those days. Nothing less would have withstood the nagging discomfort of the place. Our bungalow was mudbrick, dank and uncleanable. Our lights were unreliable hurricane lamps, which my father always forgot to fix until the sudden surging arrival of night. Our bath was a cement tub where grey lizards flattened themselves for coolness. A green fur of mould grew over everything, especially over my father's precious books, irritating him to the point of desperation. Diarrhoea was a commonplace, malaria and yellow fever only slightly less so.

I did not notice these things much. For me it was a world of wonder and half-pleasurable terror. Our garden was a jungle of ragged banana palms and those giant leaves called “elephant's ears”. In front of the bungalow, the canna lilies stood, piercingly scarlet in the strong sunlight. Sometimes the nights were suffocating, and the mosquito net over my bed showed scarcely a tremor of breeze. Every lizard nervously hunting for insects, every cockroach that scuttled across the floor, seemed to me the footsteps of
asamanfo
, the spirits of the dead. Then the rains would come, and at night the wooden shutters would slam against the house like untuned drums, and the wind would frighten me with its insane laughter.

The chief thing I remember about my mother is that she was always tired. She was very pale and thin, and often had malaria. In a sense, she even welcomed it.

“It is God's way of trying us, Matthew,” she would say to me. “Remember Job.”

She never gave in. She went on, thumping the decayed hand-organ in the little mud church, chalking up the week's attendance, so many black souls for Jesus. I think she would have been happier if she had even once admitted that she hated Africa, hated the mild-eyed African women who displayed in public their ripe heavy breasts to suckle their babies, and the brown-skinned men with their slender fingers, their swaggering walk, their bare muscular thighs. I suppose she must have realized her hatred. Perhaps that is why she worked herself to deathâtrying to prove it was not so.

When I was young I had an African nurse. She was old Yaa, the wife of Kwaku, our cook. I don't suppose she was really old. Her second son, Kwabena, was my age, and the younger ones kept coming for years. But she seemed ancient
as stone to me then, with her shrewd seamed face and her enormous body. It was Yaa and Kwabena who taught me Twi, taught it to me so thoroughly that by the time I was six I could speak it better than English.

Kwabena and I used to run, whooping and yelling, beside Yaa as she walked back from the market, her great hips swaying under the thick folds of her best green and mauve cloth, and her wide brass headpan piled high with mangoes and paw-paw, yams and red peppers.

“Ei ei!” she would cry, as the goats and chickens scattered out of her way on the narrow street. “Another week of this walk and I am finished! The bottom of the hillâthat would not have suited God, oh no! If the master had less worry about my soul and more about my feetâ”

When Kwabena and I stole eggs to give to the fetish, she whipped us. I would have died rather than tell my fatherânot for shame, but for love of her.

“A hen treads on her chicks,” she would tell us the old proverb, “but not to kill them.”

In the rains I used to lie awake, listening to the thunder that seemed to split the sky, and thinking of Sasabonsam, the red-furred Great Devil, perched on his
odum
tree with those weird folk of witchery, the
mmoatia
who talked in whistles. Then I would hear the soft slapping of Yaa's footsteps in the passage, and she would come in and rock me in her arms.

“Do they think he is a man yet?” she would demand angrily, of no one. “Sleeping in a room by himself! Listen, little one, shall I tell you what the thunder is? In the beginning, when Odamankoma created all thingsâ”

And soon I would be asleep.

I found out accidentally that Yaa had suckled me at her breast when I was a baby. My mother never knew.

“I asked what day I was born,” I told Kwabena. “It was a Tuesday.”

His face lit up. “Then we are brothers in one wayâ”

Kwabena's name was given to the Tuesday-born. Yaa laughed.

“You are brothers anyway,” she said.

And then she told me. I do not know why that should make a difference to me, even yet, when I think of her. Perhaps because her love, like her milk, was plentiful. She had enough to spare for me.

My father was an idol-breaker of the old school. He hated only one thing more than the heathen gods and that was the Roman Catholic Church.

“Formalism, Latinâall learned by rote,” he would say. “They have no spontaneity. None at all.”

Spontaneity to my father meant drilling the Mission Boys' Fife and Drum Band to play “Nearer My God to Thee” until their mouths were sore and puckered with blowing and their heads spinning with the uncomprehended tune.

The mission had a school. My father taught the boys to read and write; and who knows, in the eternal scheme of things perhaps that is all he was meant to do. But he was not a very patient man. Once when a family of rats died in the well, and the merchant cheated him on the price of cement for a new one, he beat six boys in a single afternoon. I cannot say that I blame him. He worked hard and had so pathetically little to show for his toil and his poverty. He would have been superhuman if the light of holiness had not flickered low from time to time.

For twenty years he tried to force, frighten or cajole his flock away from drumming and dancing, the accompaniments
of the old religion. He forbade the making of wooden figures. I suppose we have to thank men like my father for the sad fact that there are so few carvers of any merit left in West Africa.

He broke idols literally as well as symbolically. Perhaps it was necessary. I do not know. I heard the story of Moses and the Golden Calf so often that after a few years of almost tasting the powdered gold harsh against my throat, I passed into the stage of boredom.

“I have discovered another fetish hut,” my father announced importantly one day.

I nearly betrayed myself and the whole village by asking which one.

“Where?”

“On the shore, between the palm grove and the fishing beach. I am going to break into it.”

I knew the one. The
obosom
there was a powerful one, Kwabena had told me. I stared at him with wide eyes. My father probably thought I was full of admiration for his zeal. In fact, I was wildly curious.

“He willâof courseâdie,” Kwabena said when I told him.

My father did break into the fetish hut, and he did not die. He did not even have indigestion or a fever. The fetish inside the little hive of woven palm leaves was part of the vertebrae of an enormous sea creature, possibly a whale. It was very old, and crumbled when he kicked it. I suppose it was a blow for truth. But I was ashamed.

I still am. Moses broke the idols of his own people.

The parades were something my parents organized and bore with, but never liked. They took place on saints' days or whenever the attendance of the Band of Jesus was falling off.

“If only the girls would just walk along,” my mother would complain, “instead ofâwhat they do. And to the hymns, too.”

“I know,” my father soothed her. “But it's necessary. We will just have to keep impressing them with the desirability of dignity. But we can't cut out the parades. Remember, they're like children, these people. In order to be drawn to the church, they must have the pageantry, the musicâit's better than their own heathen dancing, anyway. Besides, the Roman Catholics have parades.”

My father marched with the parade only once, and that time the District Commissioner's wife happened to see him. He was so humiliated he never went again. I can still see those parades, headed by the mission banner in purple and yellow silk. I wish you could have heard the Mission Boys' Fife and Drum Band playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with a syncopated jazz beat, hot as the forest's pulse. The words, badly translated in Twi, were chanted by the snaking line of girls, their hands outstretched, their shoulders lifting to the off-beat, their whole bodies giving back the rhythm. Dignity! They could no more stop themselves from dancing than they could from breathing. Every sinew, every bone, in their bodies responded to rhythm as to a lover's touch.

One Easter my father discovered that I had gone with Kwabena, as always, and joined the parade at a distance from the church.

“I can't understand,” my father began, more in sorrow than anger, “why Kofi let you stay. I've told himâ”

Kofi was one of the monitors, one of the very few of his flock whom my father trusted.

“He didn't see me,” I replied abruptly.

He could hardly have missed seeing me, turning cartwheels with Kwabena at the head of the parade. But Kofi was the last person who would have tattled. Fortunately for my father, he never found out, as I had done, that Kofi was one of the most renowned fetish priests along the coast.

“We have explained it all to you, Matthew,” my father went on. “The parades are notâproperâfor you in the practice of your faith.”

“Why not?” I was still excited. “It was funâwhy shouldn't I go?”

“Religion is not fun,” thundered my father. “It is serving God.”

How can I describe Kwabena, who was my first and for many years my only real friend? I cannot think of him as he is now. The reality of him is the little boy I remember, slighter than I but more wiry, braver but less far-sighted. Until my mother objected, he used to run naked, his brown body paled with dust. He had Yaa's aggressive spirit and his laughter was like hers, irreverent, deep, flooded with life. He was totally unlike the charming, indolent Kwaku, his father.

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