Yefon: The Red Necklace (3 page)

This always ended the same way: with the worm shriveling up like a vampire once Sola put salt on its delicate skin and me receiving a good snake beating, which I had become accustomed to by now.

When I was getting beat, I used to smile no matter how painful the beatings were. I’d rather cry after, when no one else was watching than to display such weakness in front of these people. Yenla would watch, planting quietly in a dark corner until her portion was over.

She hardly ever spoke, and I was infuriated by her fear of everything, but I couldn’t blame her. She was the “cursed” child, and my other half sister Kadoh later told me that ritualists hunted albinos for magical spells.

Kadoh would have been a great farm companion when we were very young, but her mother couldn’t farm with us, since she was of slave blood. Children like them would split away from us once we arrived at the farm. They stayed at the edges of the farm while we harvested in the heart of it.

After a long tiring day, we would hang our hoes and
nwa’s
on our backs and trek home, our nails filled with red soil. As we walked, we sang maiden songs loudly and off-tune, but we didn’t care, we were young! The boys would be on their way back from school. Only this time, their shirts were flying out and their feet were as dusty as ours.

Mysterious-looking owls perching behind the kola nut trees replaced the youthful indigo birds. An occasional hoot reminded us that they were watching and people doubled up their speed. Owls were said to be a bad omen.

In spite of seeing the boys head off to school every day, I never really gave any thought to what really happened there. I was a woman and couldn’t go to school. If I did, no man would marry me. That was what Ma drilled into my head whenever Pa was away on business.

Other people also said many bad things about the school. I even heard that if a woman went to school, she would not be able to give birth because she was despising the wisdom of the gods. The gods had made women from the rib of a man and if we were meant to be equal, they would have manufactured us from their shoulder.

Ma and her friends always alleged that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, and she had to master household tasks to make her agreeable to her husband.

I was already ugly she explained, and Yenla had too many problems, and we did not need any more hindrances to finding a husband when we grew up, especially since being an unmarried woman was tantamount to having HIV and AIDS in present-day time. It was a deadly plague that all women had to run away from; at least, that was how we were raised.

Family was more important. Regardless of whether your husband slept with your sister or used you as a punching bag, it was your job to hold your family together or else you had failed as a woman. Where would you even go if you tried to leave? The man had all the financial power, and you were nothing but a childbearing cook with genius farming skills. If you tried to return to your kinsmen, they wouldn’t take you back. You would be the joke of the tribe, and the mere fear of what could become their reality would cause many a woman to accept their husbands’ malicious ways.

On a typical day, we washed outside the compound and ate supper with our cousins by the fire when we arrived home from the farm. Some of us removed splinters from our fingers while others dyed their hair or nails with red or blonde henna called “African lily”. My older female cousins were very fond of this. It seems like everything they did was to gain attention from
menfolk and find a husband. Didn’t other things excite them, I wondered. Didn’t they wonder what lie beyond the four walls of this village? Didn’t they want to own a nice house and to wear beautiful clothes? I could never understand them.

One didn’t curb boredom by lying on a comfortable couch and turning on a 42-inch flat screen TV to watch Keri Washington fix things on
Scandal
. It’s not like you could log onto Yahoo news to see Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs either! These are the sorts of things that my grandchildren are now obsessed with. In my time, you sat by a massive hearth, alongside twenty other skinny black rustics, to hear your grandmother tell stories. I don’t know what we would have done without the vibrant storytelling by the three-stone fireside each night. This was how our creativity stayed alive in the 1940s!

-2-

SHEY BANKA LABAM

My village formed part of the two emaciated strips on the Eastern border of Yola, separated by a stretch of land south of the Benoue River, where the Nigerian borderline bulged to the East. This region used to be called Southern Cameroons, and Pa’s legacy reigned throughout these lands.

My Pa, Shey Banka Labam, was a tall, kind-eyed man who was also the only person in the world who got me.
Pa was quite the gentleman! He could afford a huge bride price of ten pounds for his list of never-ending wives. Yes, my father had four wives and eleven legitimate children, but he took very good care of all of us.

As a matter of fact, my siblings and I were one of the few non-Christian families that actually owned more clothing than a mere
te’
around the genitals. We owned loincloths all the way from the Eastern lands of Yola. Because of my father, we stood out effortlessly, and for a titled man, that only seemed deserving!

Pa was the most respected businessman in the Shisong area! He was the only rich man at the time who wasn’t Catholic, Presbyterian, or worked with the Caucasians. He was an autonomous trader who sold kola nuts with his sons in Yola, which, at the time, was administered by British colonial rule, though part of neighboring Nigeria.

He would in turn purchase white sugar which was only reserved for the crème de la crème of Nso society and sell it at the Shisong local market on Ntangrin, a small market day. My older brothers, Fonlon, Vedzekov, Nsame, and Ndze, assisted him at the market and came back home tired each time. Then it seemed they would each heap their plates with giant mounds of fufu so tall that they couldn’t see each other.

On the biggest market day of the eight-day Nso calendar, also known as
Kaavi
, Pa sold his products at the Mbve market. Pa soon expanded, and began selling sugar and matches in the neighboring villages like Foumban and Nkambe. He was the first man from our whole village to trade kola nuts all the way to the
country of Yola, and for a long time the only person. Young men would flood our house trying to learn the tricks of the trade. Their mothers would send gifts of fried grasshoppers, eggs, or
bvey
milk, but Pa didn’t need any such bribes from these poor people to give their children some wisdom. He was generous in his lessons but still no one could come close to his expertise.

In addition to being a titled man, he was nicknamed
wirotavin
or strong man amongst his associates. The traditional title for the subfamily head was the Shey label and it wasn’t easy to come by among a hardworking people who judged a man by the work of his hands.

The other reason why Pa was respected was because in addition to his entrepreneurship, he was also able to maintain discipline among his four wives, including Sola’s mother, Ya Buri. She was Pa’s third wife and the most troublesome woman I have ever met in my entire life. Pa’s last wife, Kpulajey, was a witch and people said she had eaten all her offspring. This was because her children often died precisely three days after they were born, and people whispered distrustfully about the coincidental nature of these deaths. Some said it was Pa’s punishment for marrying an outcast dedicated to the chief priestess.

I didn’t think much of the accusations against her, but Ma made sure we never ate anything she cooked because Ma thought she would poison us. Kpulajey did have this mean scowl in her eyes, though. It also didn’t help that the interpretation of her name trivialized death. The name Kpulajey actually implies that all men would die so no death is different. She also had the odd custom of cooking at night when everyone was already in bed. Her food smelled so enchanting that it could make a dead man walk. I think that was why Pa fell in love with her.

Also, her
taav
always smelled of roasted bush meat, which she would eat alone in front of it. She did this a little bit too lavishly, as if she intentionally wanted us to beg from her. My mouth used to water all the time watching her eat, and I had to hold myself back from going to beg her until my half sister, and favorite young person in the world, Kadoh, told me that she had seen Kpulajey put a human leg into the pot. That was enough to deter me from that
taav
forever.

One good thing was that pa didn’t live with any of his wives; so one could sit with him without being distracted. His
taav
was a square mud block building with a thatched roof, and special tribal characters in the front. He resided with some of his older sons, and his
taav
was one of the most remarkable, not only in our compound, but in Shisong, as well.

He often entertained important guests in his
taav
. All the
taav’s
in our compound faced a master courtyard where we did all the cooking and storytelling. Small firewood kitchens and orchards surrounded by plantain trees and the dark cooling shade from kola nut trees, mostly owned by my family, were scattered throughout the compound.

Our compound had about thirty huts, second in size only to
Fai wo Ndzendzev
that had about one hundred and three huts, extending over about four acres of ground.

Unfortunately, Pa’s job caused him to be away for long periods of time, ranging anywhere from three to five moons, but whenever he came back, he would bring calabashes of red oil,
mbav
, and bush meat for all his wives. These were serious luxuries at the time. He would always bring his special daughter a special gift, and I remember waiting up all night to see what exotic gifts Pa had brought for me each time he returned from a trip. He never failed. Not once.

I can’t think of anyone else that I loved or respected more than Pa. We were very close, and he used to call me
kisham ke kingha
, which means green frog in Lamnso. It was a bit of an inside joke because I used to be very insecure about my appearance when I was younger. I was short and ugly with bulging eyes like a frog. My eyes used to be so big that when I slept, they would open on their own and flicker so many times that people would literally think that I was awake and playing pranks on them or possessed by a dark
Juju
. I think my eyelids were smaller than my eyeballs, and my family didn’t help me feel any better.

If I woke up late, they would insult me—
kisham ke kingha
; if my gourd broke at the river—
kisham ke kingha
. The other girls at the stream would point at the goliath frog and call it Yefon, and my sisters did nothing to stop them. If anything, they laughed along with the rest.

These foot-long, three-pound anurans were large, with
eyes like the full moon. Every time people called me
kisham ke kingha
, it was a reminder that I was ugly and had big eyes. It made me cry myself to sleep many a night, and had pushed me to the lonely path of treetop hunting. The ugly duckling syndrome is not a good one, but Pa reversed my low self-confidence.

One night, when everyone was asleep, I was outside, under the tranquil shade of the kola nut trees that lined up in front of our compound. I had refused to speak to anyone all day because I was bitter with life and fed up by the insults.

“The witches will catch you out there,” Ma warned loudly, hoping to frighten me back into bed, but nothing worked. She asked Pa to beat me up, and most fathers would have done it because it was believed that when you spared the rod, you spoiled the child.

As I sat there, I wondered why Ma used corporal punishment to correct even small mistakes like accidentally breaking a plate when you were doing the dishes. Whether it was a bad habit inherited from the heartless colonialists during the slave trade, or just the result of demonic possession, I couldn’t understand how people could beat up their children like animals. Didn’t our neighbor Ba Joker tie his child up like a goat, or
bvey
, and beat him to death? But my Pa had NEVER EVER beaten me since I was born, and that night was no exception.

It was a cold night, and even though the crickets were singing in a choir beneath the green shrubs, I felt afraid. My maternal grandmother, the reticent, almost blind, Ya Ayeni, had just told us by the fireside during story telling that if you went out at night, you would meet a man whose head kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I asked what happened next but she just gave me a hard knock on my head and said “Loh!” which pretty much dismissed me.

As children, we were not supposed to ask questions, especially, if we were women. It was a sign of rebellion. Utter that three-lettered word “why” and you were declared a public enemy. “Watch your daughter, Tarawoni,” Ya Ayeni warned Pa several times. “A stubborn fly follows the corpse to the grave,” she cautioned, her almost blind left eye shining in the fire.

Kadoh told me that Ya Ayeni had been involved in an accident years ago. Her eye burst in the accident so it was replaced with the eye of a
bvey
. I was too afraid to verify this though. She
would respond with a hard knock, and grandma’s knocks were as painful as slingshots. In these parts, curiosity DID kill the cat.