‘Take off your shoes,’ he whispered.
I slipped off my platforms and bowed my head. When I looked up, the King was smiling.
‘Our sister,’ he said quietly.
‘Our sister,’ the man with the staff repeated.
I looked up at Kojo, who took my elbow, pulling it slightly. I slipped back into my platforms and we continued with the handshakes. I looked into the faces of the men and women I shook hands with. Some smiled at me, some seemed bored and barely acknowledged me, some looked at me with disdain. I wondered at the histories that linked us, at the hostilities between our mothers and our mothers’ fathers and our mothers’ fathers’ mothers that now manifested in a smile, a nod or a frown. Even though I did not know their faces, and despite the strangeness, I felt somehow safe in the knowledge that they knew my ground.
We got to the end of the semicircle. I was about to shake hands with a man bent and withered as the trees that lined the palace courtyard, when the horn players in striped togas began to play in short bursts, as if talking. The drums behind the King echoed the horns. Back and forth. Horns to drum. Drums to horn. Until he rose. And the whole room rose with him. The withered old man, who was wearing large red-and-black leather bracelets on his arm, pulled me in next to him, out from the middle of the room. As the King walked out, the gold on his arms clinked, the horns and drums played, the assembly followed.
I looked at Kojo.
He was looking at his watch. ‘Stay here,’ he said.
‘What? Where? Who with?’
‘Wɔfa, Kwame Asiamah,’ he said to the withered, braceleted old man, whose skin was the colour of burnt umber, ‘look after our sister. I will be back.’
‘I want to come with you,’ I said to Kojo, suddenly afraid, but he ignored me and followed the throng out.
I looked over the balustrade after Kojo and saw him talking to Gideon. I was surprised; he had not mentioned him once.
Kojo was waving his arms. I could hear the edges of his anger all the way up on the balcony. His face was close to Gideon’s, who had his arm on Kojo’s shoulder trying to calm him down. Kojo threw him off and walked away. A young woman with a long Afro wig followed close behind him. I had seen Kojo’s wrath before. It was deep and rumbling and epic, and it was usually directed at his wife. Gideon pulled up his left sleeve with a sharp efficient tug, looked at his watch. Its platinum reflected the naked sun and reminded me of how uncomfortable I was in my tight chiffon sleeves. A crowd of people was pushing past him, and he had his arms held in front of him as if he had been asked to hold them up by the police. He was standing almost flat against the wall, but not quite touching it, as if not to sully himself with it or with the people around him. I watched him walk out of the gates, his hands held above his head now, weaving and wafting through the crowd like a man hula-hooping or playing a strange game of pass-the-people-but-don’t-touch. I watched him until all I could see were the gleams of sun bouncing off his platinum watch and off the beads of sweat on his hairline head-high above the rest. He reminded me of English comedians playing at the colonial tourist in far-off places. I laughed and heard the echo of a chuckle next to me. The withered man. I had forgotten him.
‘You are ready?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Then come.’
‘But Kojo—’
‘He will find us.’
He led me out of the back of the building and away from the crowds, through the quiet, paved streets, into the compound of a one-storeyed white-painted house. There were children playing Ampe, jumping up and down rhythmically, clapping on the third offbeat, tapping one leg forward to the ground. We walked to a building at the far end of the compound, where the old man lifted the curtain and looked in. It smelt of food – fufu and abenkwan, palm-nut soup. In the dark room, my eyes adjusted, I was able to make out a woman, with layers of fat rolled over the cloth she had wrapped around her, eating out of a large black bowl.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘you are invited.’
I shook my head. ‘Good afternoon. Thank you. I am full.’
‘This is Yaa’s daughter,’ my guide said.
The woman put her clean left hand to her head. ‘Aich,’ she screamed, ‘is this Maya? Little Maya? Whose hair fell out until she was naked like a coconut. Yesh.’ She got up, still screaming, enveloped me into her folds.
‘Kwesi, Abena, Afia, Kofi,’ she called out into the courtyard and the children came running in. ‘This is your Auntie Maya from Abrokyere. Say good afternoon.’
‘Fine afternoon,’ they chorused.
I turned to the old man. ‘Ofa, Uncle, I don’t remember.’
He laughed. An old-river laugh. ‘No matter. You were younger than this one when we last saw you. You were like this.’ He put his thumb to his forefinger.
‘You are my uncle?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, yes, something like that.’ He waved his arm. ‘Go and get some Pepsi-Cola for your auntie,’ he said to the oldest boy, taking some cedis from the shorts under his toga.
‘Sit down. Please.’ He beckoned to me.
I sat on a chair. The room was bare except for a plastic table and chairs and some aluminium cooking pots. In the room next door I could see a large bed covered in clothes.
I turned to the man. ‘Where did he go? Kojo.’
He wiped his hand over his face, as if cleaning it with water. ‘Your brother is very troubled. Very troubled. He is taking some very unnecessary measures.’ He looked out towards the curtain through which the children had disappeared again. ‘Did you see the men wrapped in white, whose heads were marked with chalk lines?’
I shook my head.
‘They are osofo. Fetish priests.’
The woman had come back; she was holding a bottle of Coke.
‘He is in turmoil, and he thinks they can help him,’ he said.
‘When he should be putting himself at the mercy of the Lord Jesus our Saviour,’ the woman said, clapping her hands to punctuate her words, ‘washing himself in the blood of Jesus. Oh help us, God.’
‘He thinks he is being attacked.’
‘Attacked? Kojo?’
‘Spiritually attacked. He had a dream that affected him, of a lion ripping his body. You may not take these things seriously. You, from Abrokyere with all your science and book learning, but there are some things that cannot be explained by the book alone. Watch over your brother.’
‘There are so many things I don’t understand. Things about the festival. About Kojo. I came here to learn, I’m just getting more and more confused. I—’ The curtain moved and Kojo walked through. The children had followed him. One was clamped on his leg and three others were jumping at him shouting, ‘Bra Kojo-o, Bra Kojo-o.’
‘Good afternoon, Wɔfa, maame. We must go, Maya, the curfew will begin soon and we will be stuck.’
‘Eh, Bra Kojo, will you come to my house and insult me like this? The Aburokyire, the white girl, will not eat my food, but you –’ the woman clapped her hands, as if rubbing flour off them ‘– never. Never.’
‘Oh,’ Kojo said, regaining his smile. ‘How can I say no to fufu? How? Quick. Quick. Give me my bowl so I can eat before I go.’
The woman giggled and ran out into the courtyard, her fat jiggling as she went.
21
By the time we drove out into the streets, the town was deserted. Every light in every house was extinguished, and there was silence, except for the noise of the gong-gong being beaten.
‘Why so quiet?’ I whispered to Kojo.
‘They are washing and feeding the ancestral stools and no one must be on the streets.’
We left the town behind. Kojo was driving more recklessly than before. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, what I could see of the road looked unfamiliar.
‘Where are we going, Kojo?’
‘We will spend the night in Kaba. Did you bring a toothbrush?’
‘No, you didn’t tell me to.’
‘We will buy one at the petro
l station.’
‘Was he related to us, the King?’
‘Mm-hmm. He is our small brother. Our King sent his younger brother to help the Akwapims fight the Akwamus. When he defeated them, they asked him to stay and protect and rule them. Since then, he has been our younger brother.’
‘And the old man you left me with?’
‘One of the court drummers. He is a great historian and traditionalist.’
‘Is he our small brother too?’ I asked.
Kojo did not smile, but only shook his head.
‘Why were you so angry with Gideon?’
Kojo looked at me, smiled slightly. ‘Always so many questions, Maya.’
A car behind us tried to overtake, but Kojo accelerated, driving almost in the middle of the road.
‘It was with him we were planning to restore the kingdom to its former glory, and put Ghana at the centre of the world.’ He said this as if repeating something he had learnt off by heart. It had always been his way, to reel these lines off as if he were playing the part of Conscious Rememberer in a play, but this was now more pronounced than ever. Underneath, I could see in his eyes a turbulent, raving pain that threatened to spill out, and which he struggled to contain.
I laughed.
‘You laugh, but it is no laughing matter. Our most important sword, our crown, our stool – all the keys to the power of the kingdom – have been rotting in the dungeons of museums, of collectors, somewhere in Abrokyere with no notion of their spiritual value. And you think it is any wonder that our power has dwindled? That our country is chomping on its own tail?’ He was shouting now and the level of his voice and the speed of the car was making me nauseous. A pair of headlights came towards us, one much brighter than the other. The oncoming vehicle blew its horn in one incessant beep and Kojo swerved to the side of the road.
‘God,’ I said.
‘You are afraid?’ he asked. ‘With me?’
‘Tell me again about the Odwira, Kojo,’ I said now, wanting him to calm down.
He pressed his back against his seat. ‘The Afahye, the festivals, mark the end of one period and the beginning of a new one. Their rites cleanse the state of all the disorder and chaos of the year before, restore all balance and harmony.’
And yet, underneath, I could see in his eyes a turbulent, raving pain that threatened to spill out, and which he struggled to contain.
‘Do you still believe that?’ I asked, to lead him back to the surface.
‘The world in which you grew—’
‘You grew there too.’
‘—teaches you that the material world around you is all there is. Here, we know our forefathers live with us, that the line that separates the living and the dead does not exist.’
‘And you don’t think it’s a bit old-fashioned, all the bowing and kowtowing to one person?’
‘Old-fashioned? You think history is old-fashioned? You think foundations are old-fashioned? You think cultural legacies are old-fashioned? People come home. They resolve their arguments. They meet and begin to know themselves, and each other, again. They learn. The elders pass on all their knowledge to the young. I learnt almost all I know at Afahye. You know this. They tell us we have no history, that we are trees that grew from the earth with no roots, and here we are declaring it to the skies, stretching our branches to where they should not be able to go. You call this old-fashioned?’
In the distance, I could see and feel the stillness and the dark outlines of the tree-covered hills and dense forests. ‘Do you know why we don’t perform Odwira any more if it’s so important?’
‘We see new ways of being, forget our old gods, forget our old ways. When you are told again and again that your origins are the making of the devil, you begin to believe it.’
We were driving into Kaba. I had missed talking to Kojo. I looked up at the coconuts clustered in the eaves of the tall palm trees that my grandfather had planted along the main road of the small town.
Kojo looked at me. ‘Our grandfather fought hard to align the new Christian ways and our old Akan ones, but today people see them as incompatible, but they still believe. They are so confused in their self-deception.’
I said nothing. Unlike my mother, Kojo drove with the air conditioning off and the windows open. I felt a calm breeze from the mountain plains and the deep wet green from the rainforests around Kaba.
A chalky silence hung in the air. The sky was almost black. I looked out at the one-storey houses that lined the streets. Kojo pulled in at the Total petrol station to buy a toothbrush and paste. As he came out, those walking past on night-time errands stopped to greet him; it was twenty minutes before he arrived back at the car. We drove the five metres into the family compound. Since the last time I had visited, two more houses had gone up in a semicircle next to the small one my grandmother had built.
‘Akwaada Nyame,’ Kojo said, ‘welcome home.’
I nodded.
‘This is my house,’ he said, pointing to a raised white structure with a balustrade running the length of it. ‘You can stay with me or in your mother’s house, as you wish.’
‘With you, of course,’ I said. ‘Whose is the other one?’
‘Your auntie’s,’ he said, ‘the witch.’
‘You’re becoming more and more like our mother. And the King. Is he here?’
‘No. The King has deserted his palace. And prefers to stay in Accra.’ He was already unlocking one of the doors of the house. ‘This is your room. And that door is mine. Goodnight. Tomorrow is an early start. Tomorrow we will talk, and we will reveal all to each other.’
The night was quieter than any night I had known, so that I fell into a dreamless rest. I was so used to dreaming that, when I heard the screams, it was a while before I realised they were not a part of my sleep. I sat up with a start and listened into the silence the screams had left behind. I put on my pink dress and walked out onto the verandah. A grey-blue haze hung over the rainforests in the distance. There was a crash from Kojo’s room. ‘Kojo? Was that you? Kojo?’ I listened at his door. I could make out gasps and strangled breaths. I opened it. ‘Kojo?’
He was lying diagonally across the bed his left arm dangling down.
‘Kojo!’ I rushed across, put my ear to his chest. His heart was beating, quick and irregular. I ran out into the courtyard and tried the doors of the other houses. They were all locked and there was no answer when I knocked. I was finding it hard to breathe. I knew there was a hospital nearby, or should I run to the palace? Would they recognise me? I looked across at the Total filling station. It was closed. I bent over, my hands on my knees. There was a high-pitched sound floating through the air, the sound of birds or of the bats that congregated around the palace. I stood up straight and strained my ears to the sound, then ran across the courtyard and through the long grass towards the small church not far from my mother’s house. Inside there was a man on tiptoes with his back to me. He was pulsing his body and waving his hands above his head. Facing me was a group of young children dressed in light-red pinafores. Their singing was high-pitched and unnatural.
‘Help me,’ I said as I approached them.
The children began giggling behind their hands.
The choirmaster still flailed his long arms across his torso.
I tried hard not to cry. He could not hear me. I got to the front of the church and one by one the children stopped singing, until finally the choirmaster turned around.
‘Kojo,’ I said. ‘He is not well. Please help me. I need a doctor.’
He looked for a moment as if he had not understood, then went to shake a young boy who had fallen asleep by two large carved wooden drums and told him something. The boy began to beat the drums in a way that did not sound church-like at all. The children clapped in time and began to sing more tunefully.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go to the hospital.’
‘Should I stay with him?’ I asked as we were running down the main road. I stopped. ‘I’m going ba
ck. Please hurry.’ I turned just as a car behind me blew its horn.
‘Mind yourself,’ the driver shouted.
I ran into the grass, but the horn kept blowing. The headlights were stinging my eyes. I ran past the oncoming car. A door was opening. I did not want to hear their insults now. I kept running. The car was reversing back. I ran faster, until the car caught up.
‘Maya. What are you doing running around the street in that dirty dress at this time of night? Have you gone mad?’
‘Mama.’
She had come to look for me.
‘Kojo. His heart hurts. He was holding it. He was sweating, Mama—’
‘Get in. You go to him,’ she said to the choirmaster. ‘To the hospital. Now,’ she said to the driver.
I was holding my breath.
‘You see what happens? You see? You don’t understand what you are dealing with. Oh God.’
We pulled up at the brown concrete hospital. My mother got out of the car. I followed in her wake.
‘I need a doctor immediately,’ she said as soon as she entered, announcing it to the receptionist as well as the few people waiting to be seen, ‘by heaven or hell. I am Oheneba Yaa Agyata.’
‘Madam, please sit down and wait. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘I will not wait. You will not see. A doctor must come with me now!’ My mother banged on the reception desk. ‘My son is dying and you want me to wait? You damned fool.’
The receptionist pursed her lips and went into a closed room.
‘As long as my name is Yaa Agyata, I will not wait here for some shabby, shabby nurse to wipe her nose before she calls a doctor. I said I need a doctor now!’ She was shouting, and I could see it was not just her usual dramatics. She leant on the reception desk, groaned as if she had a stomach ache. She was trying to stop herself from crying. She pushed herself off the desk with both hands and headed towards the closed door.
A young man in a white coat came out into the corridor.
‘Oh, Doctor. Thank God. You must help me. My son is dying. I am Oheneba Yaa Agyata. His name is Kojo Frempong Agyata. You must come with us now. In God’s name, I beg you.’
The God Child Page 13