by E. C. Osondu
The next night the money people came in their suits and shiny quiet cars. They knew that money was a subject best discussed under the cloak of darkness. They began to speak to the man and his wife in the language of money.
The language of money was a new, if not strange language to them, but they loved the way it sounded and they loved the musical sound it made in their ears.
“What you have here in your garden is extraordinary, and we think that the first thing we should do for you is to package a little loan to tide you over while you plan on how best to monetize it,” they said.
They used words that in his past life always came with charts.
Monetize.
Amortize.
Collateralize.
Instruments.
Float.
Even the words that he had some familiarity with had new meanings in the mouths of the money people.
He only nodded gently while his wife nodded so vigorously that he was afraid that her head was going to fall off.
At the end of the conversation they brought him a thick sheaf of papers to sign.
He remembered that at his last job it was the fact that he had signed a big sheaf of papers without reading the small print that had put him in trouble. He had spent five days in a police cell and months going in and out of lawyers’ offices and courts until all that was left of him was this little house with a garden that he had built with his savings.
That weekend they threw a party, the kind of party the weekend tabloids referred to as a Talk-of-the-Town party. There was food, lots of it. There were all kinds of drinks. There was music and there was dancing.
No invitation cards were sent out. It was that kind of party. Everyone was welcome because there was enough to eat and drink, and then some.
Those who did not know of the good fortune that had come to them by way of the garden talked about them in tones filled with wonder.
“They have arrived. And look at how fast they arrived. One minute they had nothing to eat and the next minute they are feeding the entire street. Isn’t that something? That is truly something I tell you,” one said.
People came to pay obeisance to them like subjects in a drama before a king and his queen. Their voices were filled with admiration and their tones dripped with awe even as they picked meat off their teeth with toothpicks.
The man and his wife sat in elevated decorated chairs smiling and waving at their guests—not saying much, as was the habit of the rich. As silence was the currency of the rich, loquaciousness was one thing that was freely available to the poor, and they spent it without looking back.
Now it was the turn of a smallish man who lived down the road. You could tell that he was a man on his second bottle from the way his words rushed into and after each other.
“It is not because I have eaten your food and I am drinking your wine. Ask anybody, I always said it each time you walked down our street with a newspaper folded neatly under your arm. I always pointed at you and told people—that is a man with a plan. Trust me, I know someone with a plan when I see them and I could tell you had a plan, though the exact nature of the plan I didn’t know. But see what has happened now—I have been proven right.”
The speaker paused as if waiting to be contradicted by someone, but all were smiling and nodding their heads in agreement including the celebrant and his wife. The speaker walked away in self-congratulation.
Another came forward and stretched out his two hands towards the celebrants.
“I congratulate you and I congratulate myself” was all he said, and went back to his food.
The woman who came after him went straight to the man’s wife.
“Do not forget me, my friend, now that heaven has smiled down on you. Remember that I was always there for you when it was rough,” the woman said.
The man’s wife was a little confused. She could not remember seeing that face before in her life. But she continued to smile as more people came forward, greeting and thanking them.
“Well done.”
“Thank you for deciding not to eat alone.”
“May the heavens who did this for you also do the same for us.”
“One with God is with majority.”
“We know today, but no one knows tomorrow.”
“This life is not hard. It’s us humans that make it appear like it is hard. Look at you people now. Look at how you have decided not to hide the good that has come into your lives, but to share it with your fellow humans. Why would it not be well with you? Who says you could not have decided not to share with anyone and kept it all to yourselves?”
Many were the salutations and congratulatory messages that began this way:
“To be honest with you …”
“Heaven knows that …”
“Truth to tell …”
“I cannot lie to you …”
“Between you and me and heaven …”
Again, the man was touched by all the outpouring of good wishes and kind words. He had no idea that people thought so well of him. But he also wondered if it was not the new him that they loved. The old him barely received a nod of acknowledgment from some of the folks that were coming to bow before him today.
When he whispered this to his wife, she frowned at first then quickly recollected herself.
“This is who we are now. We must not overthink things. We must learn to enjoy it all,” she said.
It was well past midnight before their last guest left. The wife wanted to go to bed, but the man held her hand and led her to the thing in the garden. It glowed phosphorescently, throwing a halo around the man and his wife. They both held hands and went down on their knees like worshipers before a religious icon. They bowed their heads together, and yet again they bowed before it and continued to bow even as dawn approached. The thing in the garden glowed down on them even as their own faces glowed with pride.
On the Lost Tribes of the Black World
Since Professor Dekalb published his much talked about and celebrated paper on the lost tribe of Koma in Black Anthropology Review there has been a sudden spike in interest concerning some of our beloved continent’s less known civilizations.
What many do not know is that there are quite a few past African civilizations of which scholars have little or no knowledge. They do not know who they were and how they lived. Much of the information about them is lost to antiquity and the mists of time. This is therefore an attempt to bring to the notice of the world—or to exhume if you will—one of these lost civilizations.
The Konga
All that is left of this tribe of great warriors, musicians, and dancers is the Konga drum—misspelled Conga by quite a few scholars—which is rightly named after them. They were unique in the use of drums to communicate with each other. Husbands had their drums, wives had female drums, and children had their own baby drums. It was these drums that every person used to communicate with each other. The Konga never once opened their mouths to speak, but rather let their drums speak for them. For this reason they were known as the tribe who used their drums as their tongue.
They were as dexterous at using their drums for communication as they were for using these same instruments to entertain during feasts, burial ceremonies, naming ceremonies, and so many other festivities.
The beauty of the Konga culture was that women and men considered themselves equal and this was because at birth each person was given their own set of drums to beat. Neither of the sexes was better at pounding the drum than the other since they both started learning to beat and caress the instrument at the same time.
There were hardly misunderstandings among the Konga because drum sentences were precise and tended to make their points easily without wandering or digressions. It was difficult and complicated to tell lies with drums—the hands tended to tremble, the sound that emerged became feeble and it was almost as if the drum itself was reluctant to cooperate with the owner. The Konga were honest people, they were fearless and courageous and pe
rhaps one should add that they each marched to the sound of their own drum. Ideas of truth, honesty, and right conduct were drummed into the ears of the young at a tender age. A Konga saying has it that the feet do not resist the tune of a drumbeat that they heard in infancy.
Did the Konga have quarrels among themselves? Hardly, if any, because it was often difficult to keep pounding out in anger, the palms began to hurt, the arms grew weary, and soon each party began to beat a reconciliation beat and then the feet had no choice than to obey with dance steps.
Some people have questioned the Konga habit of sleeping with their drums—cuddling the drums while asleep the way babies in modern times cuddle their teddy bears for comfort. For the Konga people, though, the drum on the bed served more the same function as the telephone by the bedside, within easy reach to send and receive messages. Do not forget that their drums served as their mouths, and while it is expedient to keep the mouth shut while asleep, it was also necessary to have it with you just in case you wanted to scream at an intruder.
And the Konga habit of burying their dead upright while holding their drums? They believed and rightly so that one should march boldly into the next world while announcing themselves with their drum. This may be the reason why they never placed their drums lying face down, but always had it standing erect at all times.
We owe all that we do today regarding the humane treatment of animals to the Konga tribe. Because the Konga used all kinds of animal skin in the making of drums—no animal was considered too lowly, from the bat to the elephant—they made sure that they killed the animal while doing as little damage as possible to the skin. They also believed that the skin of an animal that died unhappily would lead to a drum that sounded mournful no matter how vigorously you played it.
It is not possible to talk about the Konga people without talking about the phenomenon of the Silent Drum That Must Never Be Beaten. This giant drum which stood in a grotto surrounded and shaded by coconut trees was revered and venerated. People knew about its existence and where it was housed, but nobody dared to go and touch it. The name of this drum was known to be invoked on different occasions. If someone wanted to vow about their honesty among the Konga, it was not uncommon to refer to the Silent Drum That Must Never Be Beaten as their silent witness.
When in danger the Konga people have been known to cry out to the Big Drum That Must Never Be Beaten to come to their rescue. An ancient prophet and seer of the Konga people once prophesied that the day the Silent Drum would sound would mark the end of the Konga people. She also said that as long as the Silent Drum remained silent the Konga would continue to flourish like the frangipani.
To modern ears that are used to hearing nonstop talk and speech and the ever constant flow of word-lava, it is rather difficult to imagine how the Konga managed to say all that they had to say using only their drums. The truth with the Konga was that they hardly ever wasted words. Note that there is a vast difference between a refusal to waste words, which suggests precision, and a paucity of vocabulary. The Konga for instance had over fifty different words for drum, but it was rare for anyone to use more than the basic word for it.
There are a lot of reasons why we should study the Konga and their civilization. What they did for the humble drum is much more than what the Inuits did for snow. They took a lowly instrument like the drum and made it their mouthpiece. They provided the DNA for the text message. All the things that the text message thinks it invented, like the use of abbreviations, were of course first used by the Konga.
The Konga taught us to treat all people as equal and with dignity. The man who could speak had no advantage over the person who couldn’t. Have drum, will communicate, was their mantra.
You only need to look around you and listen hard and you’ll hear the beat of the drum of the Konga people resonating and sounding off in our language. There are traces of it though you might miss them if you don’t listen carefully.
We drum things into people’s ears to make them remember.
We drum up support for all the things and people that we support.
We bang and beat the drum for our ideas.
We drum up excitement for all the little things that excite us.
We sometimes beat like a drum when we become tired, old-fashioned, and boring.
We occasionally hit the back of the drum, jumping around with old information that we think is new.
We applaud achievements with a resounding drum roll.
It is the Konga who gave us these expressions that resound through our language.
There were no thieves among the Konga. Yes, you heard that correctly. The Konga never stole from each other. It all started with the fact that if you stole someone’s drum, of what use was it going to be to you when you were not able to beat the drum? Would you hide it under your bed? Would you hide it in your room? Would you secretly beat it when you thought the entire community had gone to sleep?
When it was realized that it was pretty pointless stealing a drum, the idea became applicable to every other thing. There was no need to steal. Simply ask to borrow the item from your neighbor and you will get it.
Backbiting?
None.
Gossiping?
None.
Conspiracies? None.
There was really no way to do all of these things in secret as long as the drum was the instrument of communication.
But one day a new generation began to grow up and, as new generations do all over the world, they began to ask questions.
We have legs and we use them to walk.
We have ears and we use them to hear.
We have two hands and we enjoy using them to beat our beautiful drums.
We have our nose and it helps us to breathe and keeps us alive.
We have our mouths, but we do not use our mouths to do anything. Our tongues are stuck to the roof of our mouths.
Our tongues dormant and unused. Why can we not put them to use?
They asked these questions and many more. They were impatient for answers, as the young are wont to be.
The older people tried to calm them down, but they wanted answers and they wanted them now.
Mouths mean talking and talking means trouble, the Elders said to them. Talk means gossiping and backbiting and rumors and lying and bearing false witness. Look at how peaceful our lives have been all these years. We don’t have any trouble among ourselves because we keep our lips sealed and let our drums do all the talking.
But the young people would not be appeased. They wanted to talk with their mouths. Soon even the sound of the drums became cacophonous. Each side tried to make itself heard.
Finally, the Elders got tired and gave in to the young people’s demands. That was how the Konga slowly began to lose their innocence. Though they had control over the drums they did not quite know how to control their tongues.
The Silent Drum That Must Not Be Beaten watched over them and was very sad.
It is not possible in a short paper such as this to go into details about the decline and fall of the Konga. Let us leave that for a symposium discussion in the future.
Love Affair
Finda was leaving Providence. She was moving back to Delaware to live with her father. Her grandmother had suffered a stroke. Her grandmother was in a bad shape and could barely control the saliva that dribbled down the corner of her mouth to her chin. Her grandmother cried every day. She would say, “Look at me, Finda. My God in heaven, why do you leave me to become like dis. My God, why you lef me for pipu to laugh at me? Take ma life, le’me come and be with you an’ res’.”
Finda loved her grandmother and even in her present condition she did all she could to make her comfortable. She cleaned her with a warm towel and sat by her, helping her to clean the spittle with a clean white wash cloth.
This was despite the fact that grandmother had told her that when it was time for God to destroy the earth, as he promised that he would in the Bible, the first people he was going to destro
y were the le’bians.
“You Finda ma chil’, you come to America and you see all the fine fine things and profession in America. You don’t say you want to be a nurse or doctor or school teacher. The only thing you say you want to be is this thing they call le’bian in this America. You are lucky, if we were back in our Lofa County back home in Liberia, they would have given you to a chief or king to be his junior wife, who knows maybe wife number eight.”
“Grandma, I don’t like men,” she would tell her grandma when she was in the mood to argue.
“You think me I like men?” her grandmother asked her.
“Nobody like men. All men do is take, take, take. They take your beauty, they take your body, they take your money and when they take everything from you and they have nothing else to take they take another woman as they wife or girlfriend.”
“So if you don’t like men why did you marry, grandma?”
“You this chil’ you make me laugh. So if don’t like something, does that mean you don’t do it? Look at me, I don’t like the cold in this Providence. Rhode Island too cold for me, but what do I do? I stay here and manage myself. I wear many clothes for winter and look like masquerade and people laugh at me but I don’t mind them. I even tell them, if you have more coat to give me, I’ll take it and add it to mine.”
“Yo, grandma.”
“Don’t tell me yo. You keep going yo yo yo like the African American kids. All the time I tell you not African American, you African from Lofa county in Liberia. We all come here because of the war, if not for Charles Taylor, Prince Yormie Johnson and all the strong men who fight the war in Liberia you will be in Liberia and maybe by now you would have more than two children that I can carry.”
“OK, grandma, but you mean there are no people like me in Liberia?”
“What you mean people like you? You are jus’ confused. If you were back in Liberia and you tell your family you le’bian, you know what they gonna do? All your uncle gonna gather together and tie you up and invite some strong and powerful young men to lie with you after which they pack all your stuff and give you to a king or chief to marry. By the time you get to your husband house you forget all the foolishness and you think of your children. You think there are not many women who don’t like men in Liberia? But you know what the women do? They work so hard and they become rich like the men. They build they own house and they have many stalls in the Waterside Market so the men come to respect them and the men cannot be able to kick them around like football.”