Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  13

  One Sunday in the month of July, which was also the Republic Day holiday weekend, Ali look the deputy manager of Linga Hide A ways with him and drove to Esi’s village. They were going to see her people. When they got there, Ali discovered that he had brought trouble to Palaver Town. Esi’s fathers proceeded to grill him mercilessly. To some questions they found his answers quite satisfactory: to others not at all. Two points engaged their attention more than any others, and it became clear fairly early in the discussions that on account of one of them or both, they would send him packing back to Accra. One was on whether his wife knew of his intentions in connection with Esi, and the other was this business of having no-one in the whole wide world to take along there except someone from his own firm.

  ‘How much can any man’s employees know about him?’ someone asked.

  ‘And even more important, you don’t just take anybody to be a witness at your marriage negotiation!’ a second added.

  ‘No,’ a third answered him. ‘You take someone who by age, kinship, social standing or wealth is in a position to stand firm in all matters to do with the well-being of that marriage. Above all, he or she must be one who in a crisis must be respected and deferred to by all parties concerned. Your own employee? No-no.’

  In the end, it became clear that as far as they were concerned, it all boiled down to who was backing the marriage from All’s side. To which Ali had confessed that he could not produce anybody. All his people were up north.

  ‘So exactly to whom are we supposed to give our daughter in marriage?’ Esi’s fathers wanted to know. After all, in the world they knew, a marriage involved the two families. Each group thoroughly vetted the other, to the extent that sometimes either or both sides employed the services of paid spies who went through everything with a fine-toothed comb: people’s histories, their social reputations, their known enterprise or lack of it. Each family took pains to examine main and branches of family trees for any unfortunate signs of criminal records, traces of physical and other deformities. And if found, anything that could bring out the slightest frown on any face stopped discussions immediately. These included plain old laziness and suicide. As Esi’s fathers and mothers reminded one another that Sunday afternoon, that was the only way to guarantee the health of future generations. They were ordering him to bring them solid people they could talk to or he might as well forget marrying their daughter.

  Ali sat and listened polite-faced or repentant. When necessary he supplied answers in an ‘I-too-can-play-a-very-good-boy’ voice, as they queried, complained and scolded. So what else is new? he wondered. Nothing. North, south, east and west, clearly it was the same procedure everywhere. He only hoped that at the end of it all they would let him marry their daughter.

  What Ali had told Esi’s fathers about all his people being up north and therefore he not being able to produce anyone from his side was only half the truth. What he could not tell them was that he had not had the courage to ask any of his one or two close friends or his very distant relatives in Nima. He was convinced that none of his friends would want to have anything to do with the affair. He didn’t have that many friends anyway, but of the few he had, he could not think of one who would willingly back him. Because, whether they were northern, southern, Muslim or Christian, one thing he sensed in all of them was an open respect and liking for Fusena. To an extent which sometimes made him feel a little jealous. As men they were all naturally engaged in different forms of ‘away matches’, as they self-indulgingly described their sexual adventures. But they also seemed to treat their wives with respect. A second wife? They wouldn’t know how Fusena would take it. What they knew was how their wives would have taken it, in her place. And that was enough to advise them.

  As for All’s relatives in Nima, these were the various fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters with whom his father had stayed on his business trips to the south during the years he, Ali, was growing up. So he knew them from when he was still young enough to go around with his father. And over the years he had stayed in touch with them. But life in Accra is full of mad and conflicting demands on everyone, so he had not been able to give too much time to his relationship with them. But people of his age or younger plainly couldn’t care. They too were into living their own lives and had their own friends. And as for the older generation they understood. After all, they could not have made the long, hard and often humiliating journey from home to so far south without learning — either because they had been old enough then or even as children travelling with parents — that in this life, we often have to do what is necessary and not what we would prefer. Even when they later became big people in the community, and food and shelter ceased to be daily burning issues, these were some of the lessons of life they never, never forgot. And the result of all this was a general understanding of other people’s problems and a tolerance of their shortcomings. For the patriarchs of Nima it was enough for them that Musa’s boy had grown up well. He had finished all his education and even gone overseas and come back a decent young man. Allah is great.

  So when Ali went to tell his elders in Nima about his wanting to marry Esi, the reaction he got shocked him. Contrary to all his fears, no one raved about how a good Muslim boy would bring in contamination in the form of a daughter of the infidels. No. What they first fretted about was the fact that he had originally tried to do the marrying behind their backs. They roundly scolded him for that. Next, they asked him to look around properly. Hadn’t they all committed the crime he was also planning to be guilty of? Most of them had married women of the south and daughters of the infidels. It was survival. How can anyone go about, eating the heads of cows, and also manage to maintain that he is afraid of eyes? How could he be that hypocritical? Hmm? What really surprised them was that a scholar of his standing and a modern young man would want to have a second wife. They had thought that such desires only lived in the breasts of people like them: old and with only a few years of Koranic education. No, no, no. He should not even try to tell them that he was not different from them. He was. They had no time to tell him how much. But the matter at hand was this business of his proposed second marriage. What was important was that if he kept it as a secret from his wife, it would be no marriage. Again if he just told his wife about it when it was already done or even before, but without her consent, it would be no marriage. Of course, no woman agreed to this sort of thing willingly. There was a time — maybe up to the days of their grandfathers — when women understood the necessity a little more. Since then, they have been understanding it less and less. Now, school or no school, no woman understands.

  ‘So we have to work a little harder to convince them. But the convincing has to be done.’ Ali would have to do things correctly, in the way they should be done. So to begin with, had he gained the consent of his wife?

  The question hit Ali with the force of a fully loaded timber truck that was rolling down the Kwahu mountains towards Nkawkaw. He looked down. And since that was an even louder answer to their question than if he had spoken, the elders just went on to give the necessary advice. They wanted their son Ali to understand this clearly. They knew all this from experience. Of course, they would go with him to his new woman’s people; to whatever hole they lived in. But not before Fusena agreed — however reluctantly. So he had better go tell her and come back to them. He could see them some other day. They were not going to disappear.

  After all that, Ali looked so unhappy and so reluctant to get up and leave, his elders had to put their heads together and come up with some fresh ideas. And they did. They themselves would undertake the business of getting Fusena persuaded. Ali couldn’t believe his ears or his luck. He literally jumped up, to shake their hands in gratitude.

  Ali had not known it then, and was never to know, that in fact it was to these same elders that Fusena had gone to complain and to weep, the morning she drove so furiously from the house and later from the kiosk. So that the elders had just been biding their
time, certain that their quarry would appear sooner or later.

  A day or two after the meeting with Ali, the patriarchs of Nima had asked those among their wives and sisters whom they trusted had the patience and the wisdom to do the job properly, to talk to Fusena. The ladies had in turn sent a message to Fusena to come and see them. When they met, Fusena was quick to realise that if the men had asked the women to talk to her, then of course, they were not going to get Ali to give up the idea of marrying his graduate woman. She really could not believe that the beautiful journey that had began on the teacher training college campus was ending where it was threatening to. As she sat in front of the group of older women trying so diligently to listen to them, she knew that all was lost. Besides, what could she say to the good women, when some of them were themselves second, third and fourth wives? And those who had been first wives looked dignified, but clearly also so battle-weary? She decided to make their job easier for them.

  ‘Yes, Mma. Yes, Auntie. Yes … yes … yes,’ was all she said to every suggestion that was made. The older women felt bad. So an understanding that had never existed between them was now born. It was a man’s world. You only survived if you knew how to live in it as a woman. What shocked the older women though, was obviously how little had changed for their daughters — school and all!

  14

  While Ali was trying to sort himself out in Accra, Esi had decided to go home one weekend and be with Ena her mother and Nana her grandmother. She had set out very early from the city and arrived to find them getting ready to go to church. So she was thinking that after the usual commotion that greeted her arrival had died down and everybody had gone she would just go and get some sleep. But that’s not how things worked out. When her grandmother was all dressed in her starched cloth that made the most intriguing noises when she walked, she came to ask her, ‘Please let us sit down, my lady.’

  Esi’s heart sank. She realised that her grandmother had decided that this was the morning to get some confessions out of her. And she was not going to wait until after the morning service was over. She was familiar with the line. So exactly what was it about Oko that repelled her so much, and what was it about Ali that attracted her? So far, she had succeeded in not yielding much at interrogations. Not because she hadn’t thought those issues through. Deep down in her being, she feared that whatever her reasons were, they would not be considered respectable enough to tell anybody else about. But then, throughout her reasonably long life, Nana had never before given up on anything. She was determined to get something out of Esi, and this morning she did. Esi told her that Oko had been the only man in his home, or at least, one of the few men there. So there were too many women around him who did not like her. They hated her, she told the old lady. Who were these women, her grandmother wondered? According to Esi, it was his mother, his other mothers, his sisters. What the old lady said:

  ‘My young lady, today you came here asking me a question. I shall try as hard as possible to give you an answer. I shall also try to make it my truth, not anybody else’s. For in a world where lies are pampered like the only children and nephews of queens and kings, all we can do is to hold on to our own truths. It used to be possible to talk and know that you and everyone else knew what you were talking about. It has stopped being like that for some time now. These days, we are getting used to people saying big things when they mean so little or nothing at all. They talk of pretty things when they intend ugly, and carry dangerous deeds home that properly belong to the bush.

  ‘You are asking me whether you should marry this Ali of yours — who already has got his wife — and become one of his wives? Leave one man, marry another. What is the difference? Besides, you had a husband of your own, no? You had a husband of your own whom you have just left because you say he demanded too much of you and your time. But Esi tell me, doesn’t a woman’s time belong to a man? My lady Silk, that one is a very new and golden reason for leaving a man, if ever there was one, and if you are truly asking for my opinion. As for you and your stories, they cheer the heart of an old woman who has not found anything in this life amusing in a long time.

  ‘Leave one man, marry another. Esi, you can. You have got your job. The government gives you a house. You have got your car. You have already got your daughter. You don’t even have to prove you are a woman to any man, old or new. You can pick and choose. But remember, my lady, the best husband you can ever have is he who demands all of you and all of your time. Who is a good man if not the one who eats his wife completely, and pushes her down with a good gulp of alcohol? In our time, the best citizen was the man who swallowed more than one woman, and the more, the better. So our warriors and our kings married more women than other men in their communities. To prove that they were, by that single move, the best in the land.

  ‘My lady Silk, remember a man always gained in stature through any way he chose to associate with a woman. And that included adultery. Especially adultery. Esi, a woman has always been diminished in her association with a man. A good woman was she who quickened the pace of her own destruction. To refuse, as a woman, to be destroyed, was a crime that society spotted very quickly and punished swiftly and severely.

  ‘My lady Silk, it was not a question of this type of marriage or that type of marriage. It was not a question of being an only wife or being one of many wives. It was not being a wife here, there, yesterday or today. The product of the womb of my womb’s product, it was just being a wife. It is being a woman. Esi, why do you think they took so much trouble with a girl on her wedding day? When we were young we were told that people who were condemned to death were granted any wish on the eve of their execution. By the way, was that ever true? Anyhow, a young woman on her wedding day was something like that. She was made much of, because that whole ceremony was a funeral of the self that could have been.

  ‘In any case,’ said Aanaa, ‘I have had four children, and I know that each time a baby came out of me, I died a little. Somehow, my sister, there is a most minuscule fraction of time when the baby is tumbling out of her womb when the woman in labour dies.’

  ‘Women die in too many ways anyway, my sister.

  ‘They say it was not always like this. I mean about women and men. They say that a long time back, it was different. But it has been as it is for far too long for it to matter how it was in that far away yesterday. Besides, no one remembers what it was like then. Certainly from as long as even our ancestors may have been able to remember, it seemed to have always been necessary for women to be swallowed up in this way. For some reason, that was the only way societies were built, societies survived and societies prospered.

  ‘That was the only way, my grandchild. Men were the first gods in the universe, and they were devouring gods. The only way they could yield their best — and sometimes their worst too — was if their egos were sacrificed to: regularly. The bloodier the sacrifice, the better. Oh yes. There are other types of gods. No less bloody, and equally implacable. We Africans have allowed ourselves to be regularly sacrificed to the egos of the Europeans, no? So that, among other things, they can build strong machines of fire to burn us all and then go to the moon … Ah, ah, ah, let me spit!

  ‘Do I think it must always be so? Certainly not. It can be changed. It can be better. Life on this earth need not always be some humans being gods and others being sacrificial animals. Indeed, that can be changed. But it would take so much. No, not time. There has always been enough time for anything anyone ever really wanted to do. What it would take is a lot of thinking and a great deal of doing. But one wonders whether we are prepared to tire our minds and our bodies that much. Are we human beings even prepared to try?

  ‘Otherwise, it is very possible for life on this earth to be good for us all. My lady Silk, everything is possible.’

  ‘Aha?’ Nana asked.

  ‘Yes, Nana?’

  ‘And your man from the Grasslands, doesn’t he have sisters and mothers?’

  Esi told her that to the best of he
r knowledge Ali had been an only child. No brothers. No sisters. The people from his extended family were far, far away. That was one main reason why she was thinking of agreeing to marry him. At that, Nana nearly fell off her short stool.

  As for Esi’s mother, she stood legs akimbo, stared hard at Esi and called her a witch. ‘How can I call you my daughter when you hate people?’

  ‘Ena, I don’t hate people. It is just that

  The two older women would not even let her continue. Why? Destroy a perfectly good marriage because your husband has too many people around him? Ei. In the old days wasn’t that one of the big reasons why any family gave their princess to any man in marriage? And how can you tell yourself you like some man because you don’t know a single relative of his? Ei. But wasn’t that a good reason to avoid a man in the old days?

  ‘So tell me, my lady,’ said Nana very seriously and slowly, ‘if you are with your man of the Grasslands and something happened to him whom would you run to?

  Esi too thought about the question, and brought out a reply.

  ‘Nana,’ she began, ‘when he comes here to ask for my hand, he would have to bring somebody. This is the custom, no?’

  ‘Nana nodded her head.

  ‘Nana,’ Esi continued with her answer, ‘whoever he brings with him then, to meet you and my fathers, it would be that person I shall run to, if I’m with Ali and something happened to him.’ It had been a rather cool reply; the social scientist and statistican speaking.

  Esi’s mother murmured, ‘Ei, Esi,’ and ran off. Her grandmother hadn’t exclaimed. In fact, she was silently pleased at the sharpness of her granddaughter’s mind, and deliberately allowed herself to be overcome by the new wisdom of a young woman who had let herself get well into booklearning.

  When the older women left for church, Esi remained in her grandmother’s chamber. At first she sat in a chair for a long time; she had to admit that she was suffering from a mixture of emotional and physical exhaustion. So she gave up thinking, went to lie down on her grandmother’s bed and fell into a deep sleep.