Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  ‘Definitely for the whole world to see, and

  sometimes even refusing the wife a ride,

  if he should pass her on the street.’

  ‘Opokuya is just spoilt.’

  ‘She is really spoilt.’

  Opokuya didn’t know that she was supposed to be spoilt. She did not feel spoilt. Each morning’s argument ended with one of them giving in. The winner drove the car. When it was Kubi, which was most days, he would deposit Opokuya at the hospital and then take the car, whistling all the way to the regional administrative offices. If Opokuya won, she would deposit Kubi in front of his office and drive away from there, humming all the way. Then once she had found a good parking place, she would park, remain seated in the car, mentally look through her day, and quickly make a list. She always knew that even in a week with the car there was no chance of her being able to do half of what she had put down for the day. But she would put everything down anyway.

  One area of relief for both of them was the result of a decision they had made quite early in their life together. They would not make a habit of dropping their kids at school and bringing them home in the evening. They would do that only when the children were in nurseries and kindergartens. But not after. So the children daily made their way on the city buses, just like most of the other kids from the neighbourhood. It was different when the bus broke down, which was uncomfortably often. On such occasions, they did take the children to school, and brought them back home at the end of the school day.

  ‘So what is it that you absolutely must do today?’ Kubi asked with his ‘I-am-trying-to-be-sensible-and-you-must-also-try’ voice. Opokuya refused to take the bait.

  ‘Kubi, you know quite well that there are at least a dozen things I must “absolutely” do today,’ she replied with her, ‘this-morning-I-don’t-have-the-time-to-treat-a-fully-grown-man-like-some-mother’s-spoilt-boy-voice’.

  ‘Opokuya just name me one,’ he commanded.

  Opokuya decided to comply, patiently, ‘Do you remember that you and I had agreed that while I am away visiting my mother, the children would go to your sister’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kubi agreed, rather cautiously.

  ‘Well, we cannot just go and dump the kids on her on my way to the bus depot the morning I’m leaving. It won’t be right even though Connie is the most reasonable of all your sisters. We have to warn her.’

  ‘M … hm,’ Kubi was getting more and more cautious. Apart from the fact that he had not really agreed with himself that it was necessary for her to go and visit her mother, years of having a clever woman in his home and an unbroken chain of rather stupid heads of department in his place of work had taught him not to take anything for granted in a discussion.

  ‘You see,’ Opokuya continued, ‘I thought I would have the car for today, so that I could go by her place from the hospital and discuss it with her.’

  Kubi relaxed. He could win this one. In fact, he would. Opokuya was starting her accumulated leave the next week. She was planning on going to spend the bigger portion of it visiting her family. But between that morning and the first day of her leave, there was at least a week within which there was nothing she could not do if she put her mind to it. With, or without the car: including going to ask the sister to take the kids on …

  ‘Listen, it looks like I’m already going to be late for our budget meeting this morning.’

  Opokuya knew she had lost, and there was no point in asking him how it was that the Regional Survey Department had a budget meeting every morning of every week. Without saying another word, she picked up her handbag and her basket, and went to sit in the car. After elaborately checking on the tyres and the water level, Kubi went to sit in the driving seat. During the four good kilometres’ journey from Sweet Breezes Hill to the city’s main and general hospital, they did not speak to one another. Another of the patterns of the mornings when she lost the car. Since she refused to start a conversation, and he was sure she would not even join in if he did, they both kept quiet.

  When he parked by the hospital gate, he asked a little guiltily, ‘We’ll meet in the house this evening?’

  ‘No,’ she snapped back, ‘I shall not come home with the hospital van. I’ll find my way to your sister’s anyway.’

  ‘Shall I come and get you from there then?’

  ‘You don’t have to bother,’ she said again, barely managing to suppress her fury. ‘You know it’s too far out. And you should be feeling tired if it’s going to be one of your exhausting meetings.’ ‘So how are you going to get back home?’ said Kubi, genuine concern joining guilt, and neither escaping Opokuya’s notice.

  ‘I could come into town with the bus, and wait at the Hotel Twentieth Century for you

  ‘Okay,’ said Kubi. He hated having to stop in town after work. But he was aware that he had to make some concessions.

  ‘From about half past five,’ Opokuya reminded him. They both knew what she was talking about.

  Opokuya was already out of the car. In fact, the last bit of the exchange was done with her holding the door of the car, ready to bang it shut. She now shut it and turned to walk towards the hospital. Kubi reversed left, turned right to face the road and then turned right again. He was on his way to work. Whistling, of course.

  4

  How people described the stature of Ali Kondey depended entirely on where they stood in relation to the Gulf of Guinea. Right on the coast and in the forest regions he was considered tall. In the sparse grasslands of the middle belt, they thought of his height as ‘medium’. In the upper regions and Sub-Sahel, he was seen as not being so tall. In fact, in such areas some could say he was short. But there was no such doubt anywhere about his skin. It was smooth and black, and not a layer of fat between that skin and his flesh. His teeth, which he occasionally, deliberately and fashionably discoloured by chewing kola, were beautifully even and white. He wore kohl around his eyes, moved like a panther, and was very good looking. He knew all this himself, including the fact that he was the most effective advertisement for Linga Hide A ways, the travel and tourist agency he had established soon after his country became independent.

  All’s country? Which one was that?

  Ali was a son of the world. He had dropped out of his mother’s womb absolutely determined to come and live this life. As his other mothers on both sides of his family would later let him know whenever they had the chance, the burden of bringing him into this world had been too much for his mother. Poor Fatimatu.

  ‘Was she not fifteen when Ali was born?’

  ‘That was all she was.’

  ‘Then how could she have lived?’

  ‘She could not live. She did not live.

  I saw it all. She looked at the baby Ali very well.

  You would have thought she just wanted to be sure that everything was fine with him.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Ah my sister, may Allah preserve us. She sat quietly and bled to death.’

  In the commotion that had followed that catastrophe, Ali had been nearly forgotten. Indeed, the only one who seemed to have remembered his existence had been himself. He yelled and kept yelling until someone had picked him up, cleaned him and found him some breasts with milk in them. He never forgot the experience ever! And for months he never really stopped crying, completely convinced that if he stopped, he would be forgotten again.

  Like most men everywhere and from time immemorial — who have been able to pay for the luxury — Ali’s father preferred his women young and tender. They had to be virgins, of course. And he had acquired one such woman for a wife in each of his eight favourite stops on his trade routes. At the time, and at fourteen, Ali’s mother had been his youngest and his current favourite. He had tried to have her travelling with him, something he had not done with any other woman before her, and she turned out to be the last. For, much to his disappointment, she soon became pregnant and there had been nothing he could do about it. What he had done, however, was take
her to his sister, who was living in Bamako and married to a tailor. She was known as Mma Danjuma, after Danjuma, her oldest child, who was about two years old when Ali was born.

  Ali’s father left him with Mma Danjuma, and for the first eight years or so of his life, Mma Danjuma looked after the orphan so well, people did not think they should even try to find out whether he really was her son, or whether what they had heard was true. Ali was Mma’s child. That was why, when he had come to choose a home, he had decided on Bamako. Not just because that’s where he had been told he had been born, but that was where Mma lived. Bamako was home. Then, having settled that question for the convenience of his heart, he had proceeded to claim the entire Guinea Coast, its hinterland and the Sub-Sahel for his own. In any case, since he had learned that his grandfather’s house had stood on the exact spot where Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo met, he had assumed the nationalities of Ghana, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Togo. Naturally, he carried a passport to prove the genuineness of each.

  Ali’s father had lived, travelled and traded through them all: Ghana when it was the Gold Coast, Burkina when it was Upper Volta, and even earlier, from the days of Trench West Africa’. He had gone on horseback; camels; deathtraps that called themselves taxis; the back of ancient lorries and all other things that moved and could carry a fully-grown man — including his own two feet.

  ‘My father bought everything from everybody, and could sell anything to anybody,’ boasted Ali, laughing and touching his heart, while his eyes danced clear in their pools of kohl. And if it ever occurred to Ali that the women he seduced so easily fell more in love with the picture he painted of his father for them, and not so much for himself, it didn’t bother him too much. Ali loved his father completely, and was very proud of the part of himself that met his father’s approval, as well as that part of himself which he knew, secretly, resembled his father. Above all he was aware that establishing Linga was just continuing the family trade, with a little more organisation, modernisation and a whole lot of elegance. Of course, he had offices in all his countries, with the headquarters in Accra.

  The only way in which Ali was not like his father, and did not seem to care, was in the area of women. Ali liked his women mature, and he had no special use for virginity, especially in very young girls.

  Musa Musa had been the name Ali’s father had been known by throughout the whole of West Africa before Ali was born. Of course, after Ali was born, and became old enough to travel with him sometimes, Musa Musa quickly came to be known as ‘Ali Baba’, and that stuck. Musa Musa’s father, Musa Kondey, that is Ali’s grandfather, who was long dead by the time Ali was born, had been quite rich. He had owned an impressive number of sons, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, wives and daughters. All definitely in that order of value. Since he had not been the head of his clan, he could not have owned the largest numbers of any of those commodities. But he had been a minor prince, which also meant that he would have been much wealthier than those of his contemporaries who had not been princes. Musa Musa had been one of several children from one of his father’s middle wives.

  One day, when he was about twelve years old, he had taken his share of the sheep and goats out to graze, as was expected of him. Early in the afternoon he had eaten his packed lunch and drunk his day’s ration of water. Soon after, he had felt sleepy, and had walked into a thicket that had become something of a favourite spot, and dozed. Just for a short while. Sleeping on the job was something his father punished most severely, if caught. On that particular afternoon, Musa Musa had been startled awake by the barking of his dog. He had looked around and realised that what appeared to be a small lion was running away with a goat. He was too frightened even to come out of his thicket until a while later, when the baby lion was long gone. When he did emerge and counted his animals, sure enough one kid was missing. He burst into tears. After the tears, he asked himself what he was to do. He knew that at the end of the day the animals would be counted. He knew the loss would be discovered. He also knew his father and his punishment for losing an animal. So what was he to do? The kid was gone. By evening, when he was ready to return the animals home, he had decided. He drove the animals close enough to the kraal so that it would not be difficult for the dog to take them home. Then he disappeared.

  The next time Musa Musa ventured home, he was over forty and greying from his temples. In the meantime, he had become one of the biggest door-to-door traders of the entire sub-region. There was nothing he did not carry to sell: from safety pins, hair pins and zips to giant funerary masks and statues of gods and goddesses — some phoney and newly created, others old and authentic. These last were stolen by his enterprising contacts from royal mausoleums and sacred shrines. Later, much later, when all the countries had become independent and tourism to that part of Africa was very much in fashion, Musa Musa had set up his own group of carvers. These were his youngest brothers and nephews. The latter were the sons of his numerous sisters, and more than anything else, it was his intention to set them up in business that had taken him back to his village. His father was already dead, so there was no chance of anyone expecting him to come up with an explanation for anything … especially a goat lost over thirty years ago!

  It had been established without doubt that it was indeed him, Musa Musa. His mother, now an old woman, had remembered the tragedy of losing him and cried, and then cried some more for the joy of having him back. The next day a great feast of welcoming had been organised so that everyone could celebrate and have a nice time. A lost person does not find his way home every day.

  Depending on where he himself was heading, Musa Musa’s carvers would make any piece of wood yield any desired image. Sanufu antelope dancing headdresses, Akuaba dolls, Igbo, Yoruba and Baluba masks. He had added to his carver’s skills the art of curing wood in such a way that freshly sculptured pieces felt, looked and smelled more real and much more old than the really ancient pieces Ali used to buy.

  ‘I’m grateful to my old man,’ Ali would later say to Esi. ‘Leaving me that group and their skills is worth more than a million dollars in the bank, you know.’ He would laugh, touch his heart and continue: ‘Besides, knowing my father, he would have hated the tiresome business of having to put a good story together to explain how he could suddenly have come into such money, since all his life he had avoided the banks.’

  ‘Was he into currency deals?’ the listener would ask.

  ‘But what a very rude question. In any case, how do you think people like my father could have managed to keep commerce and other economic activities thriving in this area if they had played in the white man’s bank with their money?’

  ‘But after independence?’

  ‘What are you talking about? … My father keeps telling everyone openly that he will take his money to the bank the day something changes properly. As far as he is concerned, these independences have proved to be nothing more than a trick! You should see him imitating African leaders when they are with the heads of Western governments or their representatives, as they tremble and grin with great effort to please! And Allah, he can do them all! Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, any kind. No, he is convinced that nothing has changed, so he sleeps on his money.’ ‘So he is still alive?’

  Of course. And still marrying the fourteen-year-old girls.’ Ali always pretended great shock at any suggestion that his father might die. He thought any discussion of that subject was in very bad taste, and Musa Musa agreed with him. Indeed the only opinion Musa Musa could possibly have shared with African heads of state is that any discussion of our mortality is treason and punishable, by death of course, if the circumstances are right.

  Allah be praised.

  Ali’s house was a big structure at the entrance to Nima, from New Town. It had been built in the middle of the 1940s by a local man who had made a lot of money in the Second World War. None of the children this man had sent to England to be ‘properly educated’ had bothered to come back. So ou
t of sheer frustration he had driven their different mothers out, and for several years had lived alone. Then, once he knew he was about to die, he had put the house up for sale to spite his family. He knew they were just waiting for him to die to begin harassing one another over the property. The only condition to go with the sale was that whoever bought the house should wait for him to be laid in his grave before taking possession. Which is exactly what happened. Ali had then thoroughly renovated it and built a proper wall around it.

  Early in his sojourn in the south, Ali had decided that he would always live in the zongo of the cities in which he found himself. He had not tried to analyse that decision into its parts except to say that, ‘for one, zongo is the only area in these places where one can be sure of always getting some decent tuo’. If the house he had bought was not exactly in Nima, he could at least console himself with the thought that it was near enough. From his favourite corner on the balcony upstairs, he could hear and see that city- within-city buzzing with maximum activity during the day, and winking all over at night — also with maximum activity. Nima never slept.

  Ali had first come south with his father when he was about four years old. Musa Musa always stayed in Nima, with different friends and relatives, deciding on which household, according to how he felt on each trip. When he began to take Ali with him on a regular basis, there was a routine he always followed — in Nima as well as in all the other cities and towns on his routes. As soon as he arrived, he would promptly put Ali in a Koranic school. By the time he was eight, Ali could recite more than double the verses normally expected from one his age. This worked out to about ten chapters of the Holy Book. From Bamako down through Ouga and Kumasi, from Abidjan across Sekondi, Accra and Lome, all his teachers proclaimed him an exceptionally bright pupil.

  One day, when Ali was nearly nine years old and they were in Bamako, his mother Mma Danjuma did ‘one of her things’. After the whole family had returned from the mosque and her brother and her husband were swearing by Allah that they would surely die any minute from hunger, Mma disappeared into the huge kitchen which she shared with the other tenants’ wives. Then she called her two older boys, Danjuma and Ali — but not, as the boys expected, because she had heated the food and she was going to dish it out for them to take to where the men were. Instead, she just pulled a chair out and sat down. Then she gave the boys some francs and told them to go to Monsieur Abdoulayi’s and get the family some kola. The boys were very surprised. It was a most unusual command. The one thing they never ever ran out of in their corner of the compound was kola. Indeed, every now and then Mma herself sold kola to the other residents, since her brother always brought her a small sackful whenever he came from the south. Musa Musa meant the kola for her and her husband’s use. But it was always a lot. Too much.