The Tomorrow-Tamer (2 page)

I used to go with him into the village, although my parents had forbidden it, into the mudbrick huts thatched with dried palm leaves, the fusty little dwellings stinking of goats and refuse and yellow spicy palm oil. The filth and the sorrow–I hardly noticed them. I was shown a girl child who had died of malaria, the belly bloated, the limbs twisted with the fever. And what interested me most was that they had left her gold earrings on. Avariciously, I longed to steal those thin bright circles before they were wasted in the earth.

I do not know when Kwabena began to notice suffering. Perhaps the knowledge of it was born in him.

When I was with Kwabena, the world of the mission and Band of Jesus did not exist for me. However powerfully my father preached, he could not stop the drums playing in the evenings. Kwabena and I would sit under the casuarina tree in our garden and listen to the thudding rhythm, the tempo building up and up until you knew the drummer was hypnotized with the sound.

“Ei! That one! It is almost like the voice of Drum himself,” Kwabena would say.

And I would imagine the vast-bellied giant, the Drummer of all the world, drumming on himself, the Drum of drums. For years I thought of the great grinning mask each time the drums pulsed in the moon-grey night, seeming to shiver even the ribboned leaves of the banana palms.

The casuarina tree was a special meeting-place for Kwabena and me. It was there that the wind spoke to us, whispering through the feather fans of the branches like the warning voices of the ancestors themselves. It was there that Kwabena used to tell me stories about Ananse Kokuroko, Ananse the gigantic spider, who desired greedily all power and all wealth, and who wove his web of cunning to ensnare the stupid and the guileless. Whenever I saw a spider I always sidestepped it, out of respect for the Father of Spiders, and for a time I half believed they could understand what I was saying.

There was a deserted palm hut on the shore, a mile from the village. Kwabena said it was where Death lived. We always walked far to the side of it and never looked at it directly. Kwabena was especially mindful of taboos, for he wanted to be a fetish priest when he became a man.

In the sweltering afternoons Kwabena and I would steal away from the bungalow and go to the lagoon. The sea was nearby and clean, and we were allowed to swim there. I suppose
that is why we preferred the lagoon. Kwabena would peel off his scanty garb.

“I can dive better than you, Matthew!”

Often I hesitated, some deep English fear of unclean water stirring within me.

“It is forbidden–”

Kwabena would spout brown water from his mouth like a whale.

“You are afraid! If I had such fear I would go and hide myself in the forest, for shame!”

So I would strip also, indignantly, and jump in. I never got bilharzia–some kindly spirit must protect the very foolish.

The shore was ours, with its twisted seashells and moss-hair rocks and stretches of pale sand where transparent crabs scurried like tiny crustaceous ghosts. Ours the thin-prowed fishing boats that impertinently dared the angry surf each day. Ours the groves of slender palms, curved into the wind, and the bush paths with their tangled vines and tree roots torn from the red earth by storms. Ours was the village, too, with its baked mud streets where old gossiping men squatted and children slept and big-breasted women walked with babies slung on their backs and laden brass trays balanced on their heads.

This was my Africa, in the days of my childhood, before I knew how little I knew.

 

I was ten when I first saw Afua. She was Yaa's niece, and when her mother died she came to live with Yaa and Kwaku. She was a thin and bony little girl, and as though she sensed her ugliness she was very shy. No one ever noticed her except Yaa, who would chatter away encouragingly as the two of them pounded fu-fu in the shade of the mango tree.

“I know–you are a little owl now, but it will not always be so. There is beauty in you. You will fatten and grow tall, and one day all the young men will want you. You will not have to marry a poor man.”

And the child would look at her gravely, not believing.

Afua had been living in our compound for nearly two years before I really saw her. She had changed in that time, without my realizing it. Perhaps I, too, had changed. My childhood was nearly over, although I did not know it then and still longed for the slow years to pass.

It was afternoon and the sun filled the street with its hot orange light, making vividly dark the shadows on the earth and walls. Afua had been carrying a basket of melons home from the market. Now the basket lay forgotten in the festering gutter.

Afua was dancing with her shadow. Slowly, lightly, then faster, until she was whirling in the deserted street, her hands clapping, her hips swaying with a sudden knowledge of her womanhood. I had to stop and watch her. For the first time I saw her ripening breasts under her faded cotton cloth, and the beauty given to her face by her strong fine-shaped bones. When I saw Kwabena coming along the street behind me, I did something totally strange to me. I turned and went to meet him, and led him back the other way, so he should not see her.

 

My father had forbidden me to take part in the mission parades, and I never went again. I wondered afterwards what he would have thought if he had known what I did instead. When the talking drums sounded in the evening, I got Kwaku to tell me any of their invocations which he understood, or the proverbs and parables which they drummed forth.

Odamankoma created the Thing,
The Carver, He hewed out the Thing–

I learned some of the other names of Nyame–the Shining One, Giver of Rain, Giver of Sun. Once for a whole year I called God by the name of Nyame in my silent prayers. I tried to find out from Kwaku–and was laughed at–the meaning of the saying “Odamankoma created Death, and Death killed Him”. When my mother was ill for the last time, I invoked Nyankopon's strong name, Obommubuwafre, not for love of her but as a duty.

God of my fathers, I cannot think You minded too much. If anything, I think You might have smiled a little at my seriousness, smiled as Kwaku did, with mild mockery, at the boy who thought Africa was his.

The year after my mother died, I went back to England to school. It was not until I was seventeen that I returned to Africa on a visit. I had grown very like my father, tall and big-shouldered, and I did not have much difficulty in working my passage out as deckhand on a cargo boat.

Kwabena was at school in Takoradi, but he came home several times to see me. He had grown taller, although he was still a head shorter than I, and his lank child's body had filled in and become stocky. Apart from that, to my unobservant eyes he was the same. I wonder now how I could have thought so. The indications were plain enough, had I not wanted to ignore them. I asked him to come with me to the palm grove one day, to look at the fetish huts. His face became guarded.

“I do not go there any more,” he said.

We passed a man planting cassava in a little field.

“They pour libation to make the crops good,” Kwabena commented, “and then work the land like that, by hand, with a hoe.”

We saw the District Commissioner one afternoon, his white topee gleaming. He was holding a formal palaver with the local chief.

“We will not always be slaves of the English,” Kwabena said. “That's stupid,” I replied. “You're not slaves now.”

“If they own us or own our country, where is the difference?”

“So they will have to go?”

“Yes,” he answered firmly. “They will have to go.”

“Splendid,” I said ironically. “And I with them? If I were here in government?”

He did not reply for a moment.

“Perhaps I would not wish it,” he said finally, carefully. “But there is a saying–follow your heart, and you perish.”

We did not talk of it again, and after a while I forgot.

 

Afua still lived with Yaa and Kwaku. I thought she had changed more than anyone. I see now that she had changed less than Kwabena, for the difference in her was one that life had brought about, easily, of itself. Her body gave the impression of incredible softness and at the same time a maternal strength. She belonged to earth, to her body's love, to toil, to her unborn children. One evening, after Kwabena had gone back to Takoradi, I fulfilled the promise to myself and went to the palm grove. It was deserted, and the wind ruffled the tops of the trees like fingers through unruly hair. Afua walked quietly, and I did not hear her until she was very close. But she did not enter the grove.

“Why do you stand there?” she asked.

“I don't know. Perhaps to hear the ancestors' voices.”

“You must not.”

“Why?”

“Because it is a sacred place,” she answered simply, “and I am afraid.”

The beach was only a few yards away. We walked down there.

“You have grown very tall,” she smiled, and she placed one of her hands lightly on my wrist. Then she hesitated. “Are–are Englishmen like other men?”

I could not help laughing at that, and she laughed too, without self-consciousness or shame. Then, clumsily, I took her in my arms.

She was more experienced than I. I would not have blamed her if she had mocked me. But she did not. For her, it answered a question. Quite probably that is all. But for me it was something else. Possessing her, I possessed all earth. Afterwards, I told her that I had to go back to England soon. Perhaps I expected her to say she would be broken-hearted.

“Yes, it is right that you should return to your own land,” Afua said.

I was about to tell her that I would come back here, that I would see her again. But something stopped me.

It was the sudden memory of what Kwabena had said. “Follow your heart, and you perish.”

 

Of course I did go back to Africa after all, but not for another ten years. Africa had changed. The flame trees still scattered their embers of blossoms upon the hard earth. The surf boats still hurtled through the big waves. The market women's
mammy-cloths were as gaudy, their talk as ribald as ever. Yet nothing was the same.

The country was to have its independence the following year, but the quality of change was more than political. It was so many things. It was an old chieftain in a greasy and threadbare robe, with no retinue–only a small boy carrying aloft the red umbrella, ancient mark of aristocracy. It was an African nightclub called “Weekend in Wyoming”, and a mahogany-skinned girl wearing white face powder. It was parades of a new sort, buxom market women chanting “Free–dom!” It was the endless palaver of newborn trade unions, the mushroom sprouting of a dozen hand-set newspapers. It was an innuendo in the slogans painted on mammy-lorries–The Day Will Come, Life Is Needed, Authority Is Never Loved. It was the names of highlife bands–The Majestic Atoms, Scorpion Ansah And His Jet Boys. It was the advertisements in newspapers–“Take Tiger Liver Tonic for fitness, and see how fast you will be promoted at work.” It was the etiquette and lovelorn columns–“Is it proper for a young lady to wear high heels with traditional African dress?” or “I am engaged to a girl whose illiteracy is causing me great embarrassment–can you advise?”

The old Africa was dying, and I felt suddenly rootless, a stranger in the only land I could call home.

I drove up the coast to our old village one day to see Afua. I ought to have known better, but I did not. Afua is married to a fisherman, and they have so far four living children. Two died. Afua must have married very young. Her face is still handsome. Nothing could alter the beauty of those strong sweet bones–they will be the same when she is eighty. Yes, her face is beautiful. But that is all. Her body is old from work and child-bearing. African women suckle their children
for a long time. Her breasts are old, ponderous, hanging. I suppose they are always full of milk. I did not mind that so much. That is the way of life here. No, I am wrong. I did mind. But that was not what I minded the most.

She came to the door of the hut, a slow smile on her lips. She looked questioningly at my car, then at me. When she saw who it was, she stopped smiling. Around her, the children nuzzled like little goats, and flies clung to the eyelids of the sleeping baby on her back. The hot still air was dogged with latrine stench and the heavy pungency of frying plantains.

“I greet you–master,” Afua said.

And in her eyes was the hatred, the mockery of all time.

 

I met Kwabena accidentally on the street in Accra. He had grown thinner and was dressed very neatly now in white shirt and grey flannels. He looked disconcertingly serious, but when he smiled it was the same grin and for a moment I thought it was going to be all right. But when I gave him the Twi greeting, he did not reply to it.

“So you have come back after all, Matthew,” he said finally.

“Yes, I've come back.” Perhaps my voice was more emphatic than I had intended. “This is where I belong.”

“I see.”

“Or perhaps you don't think so–”

Kwabena laughed. Africans quite often laugh when they are not amused.

“What I think,” he commented, “should not matter to you.”

“For heaven's sake, Kwabena,” I demanded, “what's wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” he replied vaguely. Then, with a show of interest, “Well, are you with government, as you used to say you would be?”

“Yes. Administration. They're not taking on new European staff any more–I only managed it because I speak Twi. And you?”

“Oh, I am a medical orderly.” His voice was bitter. “An elevated post.”

“Surely you could do better than that?”

“I have not your opportunities. It is the closest I can get now to real medical work. I'm trying to get a scholarship to England. We will see.”

“You want to be a doctor?”

“Yes–” He laughed in an oddly self-conscious way. “Not a ju-ju man, you understand.”