Africa39 (47 page)

Olujimi waited for me to finish with Mama. I called him by his name. He looked like his mother. I embraced him and my tears rolled down his back. He told me not to cry. He took my hand and led me into the house to see Baba.

My father lay on a low wooden bed. He was thin and shorter than I remembered. Death had darkened him. I checked his hand and saw that his left hand was still as it was.

I stared at him for a few minutes and imagined that if I widened my ears enough, I would hear his voice. I thought how small, how helpless he looked, how death was more merciful than life. Light and life together, gone from the egg of his eyes. Why, Baba? I asked. Why didn’t you wait for me? His spirit could not have gone far. He could hear me. I asked him why he did not come to meet me. I asked what I had done to make him abandon me. I told him that it had been too long but I was happy to see him whole again. I reminded him to dazzle his ancestors with his butterflies. Spider-hands. I touched his hand and swore that no one in our home would hear of poverty or pain again.

I celebrated my father’s funeral in a way Ilara will never forget. Every masquerade came out to pay homage. Every reverend in the diocese came to the church service. The party that followed the burial was a carnival. I invited my friends and they came from Ibadan, from Port Harcourt, Ilorin, Kaduna and Lagos. Old friends, new friends and forgotten friends. They all came to set my father’s feet on his journey.

I have lived a full life, a life with tales worth telling, tales that women will hear and remember. I have known love. I have felt passion. I have seen poverty. I have had riches. People have passed through my life. Some have come with bad heads but my
eleda
has made us strangers. Some have come with goodness and they have stayed to dine with me. Some have found their purpose and some have lost themselves. Some whom I had forgotten, I have found again. Who can judge whether a life was worth living except the person who has lived it.

from the forthcoming novel
¡Azúcar!

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Arroz Azucarado

Aguana

In 1959, the year Fumaz, our great, green, island country, freed itself from the tyranny of churches and colonial impositionists, no one would have believed you if you said that our president would become a victim of his own decree that the person – for he was nothing if not a man who believed in equality for all, and we all know women grow beards too – with the longest beard would be the ruler of the land. But to see him now, bent double with the weight of a waterfall beard that he hired more and more people to help him clean, you couldn't help but feel that he, Guerrero Candia Rosario Austral – Guerrero Rosario for short – had enslaved himself. Guerrero was a peopleist who had aligned himself with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans, much to the annoyance of the United States of the Americas, who felt their half-decade colonial subjects should at least show some loyalty to those who first exploited their land and labour. I pause here to point out that for the people of Fumaz, the Fumazero, there was great entertainment found in arguing about the aforementioned states (USSRs and USAs) as they sounded the same when abbreviated – something along the lines of USERs.

In any case, I only mention Guerrero Rosario because his actions had a direct impact on the genesis of the history I am to recount. His choice of fraternal nation led to the USAs enacting an embargo on Fumaz imports in 1962, which meant that there was plenty of sugar with no buyer. For a few days after the announcement reached our island, it was not uncommon to see young Fumazero farm folk, covered in sweat and sugar, dancing in protest along the same country roads they had jubilated on with drum, song and dance following Guerrero Rosario's ascent to power. Pursued by flies, and assaulted by ants when they stood still, they created an almighty buzz. Still, the fuss was soon calmed when the USSRs stepped in to buy the surplus sugar – to annoy their eternal rivals in trade, arms and exploitation. It is when the idea first took root in the head of Diego Soñada Santos, already in his distinguished years, of watering his rice paddies with sugar solution so that his rice would be sweeter than any of his competitors' harvest.

Isla de la Inocencia

His name was not Yunior; it was Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr. When the Spanish tutor first asked for his name, he had said it clearly, but Profesor Hernandez had forgotten, and the next time he wanted to call Oswald to conjugate a verb, instead of pointing and asking him what his name was, as he did with some of the other students – mainly boys from Angola, Southern Sudan, Cape Verde and a sprinkling of girls – Profesor Hernandez snapped his fingers and blurted out, ‘Yunior.'

Overwhelmed by the newness of everything; the fertile green of the vegetation he could clearly see from his seat by the open window, the weight of concentration it took to follow what he was being taught, he responded, ‘Si.' He was never called Oswald after that.

Playing football in the open yard between the teaching and boarding buildings on his compound, shouts of
Yunior
rang out whenever he had to pass the ball; or dribbled past two, three, four opposing players; or scored one of the spectacular goals he would become known for, his team mates piling on top of him in celebration, cementing the name in myth and reality.

Yunior's Escuela Secundaria was one in a cluster of five lettered A to E. In spite of their separate identities, they were enclosed by a perimeter of barbed wire, anchored at intervals to pillars of solid concrete. When Yunior first arrived, he felt as though he had been sent to a prison. The carefully trimmed bushes lining the enclosure, for all their order and occasional flourish of rogue papaya or mango trees bursting oranges, yellows and reds like lanterns in the uniform green, did not conceal the barbed wire. It looked like the military barracks he had passed by in trotros near Cantonments in Accra. It wasn't what his mother had described; a safe, secluded environment where your child will learn Spanish and all the required secondary level subjects before progressing to sponsored higher education of a world class standard.

Yunior had jumped at the chance. He didn't like the secondary school he had started in Accra; Christian Methodist Secondary School had a uniform that consisted of brown shorts and a deep purple shirt, which he detested. At twelve, he had been the youngest in his first year of secondary school and was teased and picked on continually. Some of his classmates were starting secondary school at fifteen and sixteen – they had had hard lives selling groundnuts, coconuts, air fresheners, puppies, newspapers and sweets as hawkers on Accra's roads to pay their meagre contributions towards their education, already world weary before they started to learn about the world from books. Yunior's mother, Naa Okailey, had protected him from that. A food trader herself, she worked at the central market close to their home in Adabraka, and earned more money than his father, a minimally skilled government clerk. She had invested faithfully in Yunior's education, but with two younger kids, she was relieved when her husband came home with the application form for the Fumazero scholarship. Her relief wasn't because she didn't think they could afford to continue to scrape enough together for Yunior's education. Working under an increasingly hot sun in the market, she had seen the ground turn harder, bereft of rain; heard the prices of food, shouted across zigzagging walkways, shoot higher; smelled the despair in the air as, even she, for all the friends she had who sold bread, had to send Yunior to queue for bread.

Ghana had fallen under the spell of dry Sahel winds and the ensuing drought was beginning to bite hard. Fewer people were buying the cooking oil Naa Okailey sold in smaller, repackaged units at the market; some of her friends who sold vegetables had stopped coming to the market altogether as they could not reliably make up the daily fee they paid for their stalls. The spaces they vacated, previously as sought after as gold dust, were now covered in common dust. For rice, one had to go to one of the Food Distribution Corporation outlets around the city with a chit. When local corn ran out and some aid finally came from the West, there were queues for yellow corn, a thing so alien that it drove old ladies half-mad – corn was supposed to be white. All things were rationed. The lines of chit-bearing families grew longer and more dust-beaten as the year progressed.

And then the Agege-Ghanaians – omo Ghana – started to arrive with their sad tales, new dances, and memories of Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey's wedding song, King Sunny Adé's velvety voice – Fuji music. Thousands and thousands of them. Deported from Nigeria for no reason that anyone could agree on, they arrived mainly by road, clutching patterned bags to their chests, in trucks hired by the Ghana government. They were mainly teachers and mechanics, a few musicians who were not part of Nigerian-led bands, dancers, nurses, traders – even doctors. They claimed to have lost everything, they said Ifako had been razed to the ground by bulldozers: their houses, their TVs, their VW Beetles, were gone. In time, the bags they clutched in 1983 would come to be known as Agege Sacks or Ghana Must Go bags. With their arrival, the food shortage turned acute. Hunger had arrived and it was staying for a while. It is for this reason that Naa Okailey was prepared to let her son go to Fumaz.

On Isla de la Inocencia there was food – three times a day – and Yunior was grateful for that, regardless of what he thought of the barbed wire perimeter. He had been living on one full meal a day in Accra – without meat and often without even bones. He also preferred the uniform on Isla – burgundy shorts and a white shirt – a mirror of the buildings, which were painted burgundy on the lower halves of their walls. In time he would answer more readily to Spanish than Ga or Twi; he would learn to play street baseball as the local youths did, wielding a bat with affected nonchalance; he would come to appreciate peopleist philosophy and spend his weekends helping younger children with their homework. With every passing year his body fell more easily into the rhythm of samba, his fingers sought and moulded themselves to the tension of guitar strings and he blended with the countryside; its fertility, its undulating earth, its cycles, the muted music of its flora flourishing and fading, its temper when hurricanes flashed nearby. Losing the city's pulse inside of him, he became a boy of the countryside – muchacho del campo – his fellow students at Escuela Secundaria Basica en el Campo B – ESBEC B – became his comrades.

Although they dispersed like wind-blown silk cotton seeds after their secondary education, they kept in touch by hearsay and letters. Those who, like Yunior, had learned to play an instrument occasionally ran into each other at university music events, or at concerts in Aguana where their idols from Fumaz or neighbouring islands, such as Alberto Sanchez (who had been born not far from ESBEC B) and Elena Burke, were playing with big bands in which all the players were – to their ears – perfect. Soon their letters were referring to shortages of canned goods from USSRs, which formed the basis of most diets in Fumaz, and it became steadily clear to Yunior that they were heading for a food shortage like the one he had escaped in Ghana. But this shortage was different; in Ghana, deprived of water for months, the soil could not support new growth so the solutions for their food shortages had to come from outside, or from adaptations. In Accra, they had begun to eat the b
?
k
?
b
?
k
?
leaves that grew wild – along walls, in the cracks that lined open gutters, atop the wide walls of the rich, down back streets where gangsters congregated to split their loot, and at the edges of wells that mocked searchers with reflections from their almost-empty depths – instead of kontomire, which had all but disappeared with the cocoyams that formed its roots. Here, the soil was fertile, there was rain and there was manpower, but for years they had only farmed en masse for export, never planting to feed themselves.

With his realisation of what was coming, by the time
half-time
arrived in 1991, Yunior, by now at the Universidad Agraria de Los Cien Vientos del Oeste, in Bana, Western Provinces, was already keeping a plot of varied food crops. He had made arrangements with a nearby sugar-producing family, the Gonzalezs, to cultivate a section of their plantation based on organic agricultural production methods, as the price for sugar began to drop. Once the real shortages set in, in mid-1991, he was able to help the Gonzalez family and the neighbouring farms to switch their output from cash crops to local consumption based crops. It was not a straightforward process; most of the farmers were used to the convenience of using tractors, combine harvesters and mechanised irrigation and struggled to adapt to manual methods. However, the decline of the USSRs' economy and its subsequent division into new nations meant that the petroleum that Fumaz used to get in exchange for its sugar was no longer forthcoming. The farmers had no choice but to adapt. Stories of how their grandfathers used to farm became the order of the day as they trekked to and from wells and standpipes. To sell produce outside of Bana, the eleven horses in the town were called into action – they were haltered, saddled, bridled and attached to carts. Their crownpieces were pulled into place behind their ears, their breast collars checked, they were patted on the head, and put to work. But several of the farms, their soil decimated by years of planting cane and sustaining volumes by using fertilisers, took years to produce a good harvest.

It was the Gonzalez men who told him the perennial joke about his name.