King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  “I can’t hear you,” Peggy said, feeling like a teacher. “If you have something to say, let us all hear it.”

  Uncle Moses turned to her and said, “The late king in the fridge hadn’t paid attention to financial matters for years. Look at how he let the royal palace run down.”

  Isaiah the Treasurer added, “He had been unwell for such a long time, Nana,” and here he flashed Peggy a quick nervous smile, “and he was so very old, that he stopped attending to such matters.”

  “So no one collected the fishing fees for several years?” she asked. “The fishermen have been living on our land and fishing in our waters for free? Not one person who owns a house or farm has paid the annual land tax? ”

  Silence. “If they haven’t paid the fees, and refuse to do so now, I will kick them off Otuam land,” Peggy said threateningly. The elders shifted uncomfortably.

  “I also want to know who has bought stool land in the past couple of years,” she continued. “What plots they own, how much they paid for it, and what happened to the money.”

  “I don’t think anyone has bought stool land,” Tsiami said, shrugging. “Probably not for a very long time.”

  “Nobody has bought land?” Peggy asked sharply. “For the past few years, no one has wanted to clear a field to plant crops or build a house for his children? No one?” Just trolling up and down Main Street chatting with people, Nana Kwesi had learned of two land sales in recent months.

  “If you dig for bones in the dirt,” Uncle Eshun said softly, “you may find a ghost.”

  Peggy wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but it sounded like a warning to stop meddling. “I am digging for bones in the dirt,” she said, “and if there are ghosts I want to meet them. Now, I hear that the late king kept an account book of land records,” she said. “Where is it?”

  The silence in the room was deafening. Some elders shrugged, others studied the tablecloth or the ceiling. Tsiami was suddenly fascinated by the large orange chickens printed on his bright blue cloth and started plucking at the ones on his lap.

  “I WANT THE LAND RECORDS BOOK!” she said so loudly that her elders looked up in alarm. They had probably never in their lives heard a woman speak like that.

  “If you want the land records book, go and find it yourself,” Tsiami said petulantly. Peggy realized that he had a whininess about him, the whininess of a naughty little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “You shouldn’t be asking such questions.”

  During the silence that followed, there seemed to be a collective intake of breath. Peggy wanted to slap Tsiami, but instead she sat up straight and stared at him hard, a royal stare, the kind imbued with the wisdom of the stool.

  The entire room suddenly erupted in a flurry of outrage. “You can’t talk to her like that!” cried Aggie, approaching Tsiami with her spatula raised threateningly as if it were a sword. “She’s the king! ”

  “The ancestors will be mad at you, Tsiami! You are disrespectful!” said Baba Kobena, slapping his black hat on the table.

  “Such behavior is not kind!” Uncle Eshun admonished, shaking his head in disapproval.

  “I bet you know where the account book is, Tsiami!” cried Nana Kwesi. Tsiami studied his long, thin fingers in silence.

  “In my absence, I want you to find the land records book,” Peggy said, glowering at her entire council. “I want you to keep an exact record of all land sales. I want you to collect all fishing fees and keep these funds for me until I tell you what to do with them.” There was no bank in Otuam, but someone could hide the money under his bed or in his floor, which is where most people kept their savings.

  The council nodded dutifully, but Peggy thought they were very relieved to hustle her into Kwame Lumpopo’s car and out of the country. As the car lurched forward, she turned back to wave at them and saw that her elders were grinning a bit too widely, considering they were saying good-bye to their new king. They should have been a bit sadder.

  On the way to the airport, once they had passed all the potholes and were on the smooth tarred road to Accra, she remembered what she had wanted to ask Kwame Lumpopo. “Do you have that one hundred and forty dollars that Kwadwo Boateng gave you yesterday as my enstoolment gift?” she said.

  “Oh, Nana!” he cried, looking at her with an apologetic smile. “I forgot to bring it! I am so sorry.” Then he looked forward at the road.

  Peggy sighed. The $140 had, evidently, disappeared down his trousers.

  Part III

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  October 2008—September 2009

  11

  In her first few days back at the embassy, the ambassador treated her a bit stiffly, hesitating before issuing instructions, as if asking himself, Can I tell a king to get me coffee? Other employees, too, who needed something from his office, seemed embarrassed to ask Peggy for it, and she found she had less to do. Perhaps they were afraid she would scowl at them and say that kings didn’t do office work, which was ridiculous, really, because she was still a secretary. Did they expect her to sit there all day and do nothing but look regal? With the discomfort growing rather than diminishing, and a lack of busyness that bordered on being boring, Peggy realized she would have to put her colleagues at ease.

  Finally, one day she told the ambassador, “I’m a king in Ghana, but a secretary here. I’m paid to do this work, so please don’t hesitate to ask me to do my job.” After she had said this to several people, things went back to the way they had been.

  Peggy had returned to Washington at the tail end of September, the height of the U.S. presidential election, which she followed closely. A few weeks later, on election night, November 4, she sat before her television prouder than ever to be an American. Black men had first come to American shores in chains, she thought, stacked next to each other in coffinlike spaces on the slave ships, wallowing in their own filth. Now a black man occupied the highest office in the land, the highest office in the world, actually. We have come so far, she thought.

  Because President Obama’s father had been Kenyan, suddenly Kenya was in all the American newspapers, and many Americans found a new interest in Africa. This pleased Peggy, as she had found that even well-educated Americans were often quite ignorant of the continent. A presidential candidate, Peggy had read, actually thought that Africa was a country, but surely that was an extreme case.

  It was true that not even Peggy could name all fifty-three countries, and certainly not a fraction of the two thousand major languages, but it was absurd to think of Africa as having a president you could meet, the president of Africa, living in an enormous presidential palace located in … Where would the president of Africa live? Lagos, perhaps. The industrial and commercial center of Nigeria, awash with oil money, sinking in corruption, choked with traffic, devoured by crime, drowning in poverty, it was a microcosm of everything that was wrong with Africa.

  But Nigeria was also exemplary of Africa’s rich creativity; its art, fashion, and music were enjoyed across the continent, as were its films. Nigeria was the Hollywood of Africa; it was even called Nollywood. Sometimes Peggy watched Nigerian videos she bought at the African food store, dramatic tales of illicit love affairs, babies switched at birth, and mothers-in-law like avenging harpies from hell.

  In catering school Peggy had learned to make a reduction sauce, which was simply boiling the water of a particular substance away until you were left with a concentrate. And if you boiled Africa in a pot, sure enough, you would be left with a spicy Nigerian-tasting reduction sauce of crime and creativity, equally mixed. Lagos would, therefore, be a fitting capital of the country of Africa.

  Ever since Peggy had lived in the United States, the headlines about Africa had never been very positive, except perhaps when they let Nelson Mandela out of jail to become president. He was probably the only African president who had been in jail before he was president rather than afterward, as so many ended up behind bars when their successors incarcerated them for siphoning off billions of
dollars into Swiss bank accounts. The jailbird presidents were often joined a few years later by the very successors who had put them there.

  Ethiopia had made the headlines in the 1980s because of the famine. There was the genocide in Rwanda in the nineties where they chopped off people’s arms with machetes—there had been a popular American movie about that called Hotel Rwanda—and the new genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, which the government protested was not an imposed starvation; some tribes were merely going on diets. There was Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda in the 1970s, who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people for no reason other than paranoia, and Hollywood had recently made that, too, into a movie, called The Last King of Scotland. Today there was the cholera epidemic and the total collapse of everything in Zimbabwe engineered by a president who was a lunatic.

  Peggy sighed. It seemed all the news coming out of Africa and into the American press was bad. As if Africa were indeed one big, bad country that everyone in their right minds should stay away from. Don’t go to Africa! It’s very poorly run.

  But that was how the news worked. No one would write or produce a news story that said, “Joshua Ampah gave his last bit of food to his sick neighbor,” or “Ruth Gyamfi is working three jobs to send her dead sister’s children to school.” Hollywood would never film a movie about the beautiful stories happening in Africa every day, small stories of goodness, faith, friendship, and family. One only saw news articles and movies about catastrophes, and heaven knew there were plenty of them in the big awful country of Africa.

  In December Ghana’s own presidential elections were held. Among the ten contenders, the two most popular were President John Kufuor’s candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, and the challenger, John Atta Mills, who, strangely enough, came from Otuam. Akufo-Addo tallied a few thousand more votes than Mills, but still less than the 50 percent required to win the election. During the runoff between Akufo-Addo and Mills that followed, out of nine million votes cast, Mills won by just fifty thousand.

  Many feared that violence might erupt, as had happened a year earlier in a disputed election in Kenya when the results were extremely close. The ruling Kenyan party announced victory despite accusations of fraud made by international observers, and supporters of the opposition rioted, looted, and murdered. Old ethnic rifts ripped open at the seams as tribal groups killed and maimed one another; policemen shot demonstrators on live television, and Kenya’s tourism and economy tanked as a result.

  But the orderliness and peacefulness of the transition of power in Ghana showed the world that it had come a long way from the days of the violent coups. It was now a stable democracy. The international press hailed Ghana as a symbol of what other African nations could aspire to.

  Though Peggy was delighted at Ghana’s increased stature on the world stage, she knew the election results meant that Ambassador Bawuah-Edusei would lose his post. He had been a friend and supporter of President Kufuor, and now President Mills would surely want one of his own supporters in such an important position. It was with great sadness in February that she bid farewell to the ambassador. President Mills didn’t announce a replacement right away, and with no ambassador to work for, Peggy was given a new position, in the press office. As Peggy learned her new duties and the gray, cold winter tightened its grip on Washington she became more and more frustrated with her elders. She spoke to them often about what was going on in Otuam, usually in the wee hours of the morning, and each time she also asked them if they had collected the fees from the fishermen, or found the land records book, or if anyone had recently bought land. But she could never get a straight answer.

  If she asked Uncle Moses, he would suggest in his blustering walrus way, Well, I certainly don’t know! Why don’t you ask Isaiah the Treasurer? And if she asked Isaiah the Treasurer, he would say, all obsequious toadying, Nana, my king, your devoted servant—that would be me—respectfully suggests that you ask Tsiami. And if she asked Tsiami, he would say, Hell, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Uncle Moses?

  She realized that during her visit she should have asked to meet with the major fishing bosses and told them to save their fees for her until she returned. They should have exchanged phone numbers so the fishermen could call her if any elders were bothering them for money. But it had been such a quick visit, with so much excitement, that she hadn’t thought of it and had, naïvely, simply told her elders at their last council meeting to collect the fees and hold them for her.

  When she called Baba Kobena, he explained in his deep, gravelly voice, “Nana, there is a reason I have nothing to do with town finances. Not that I want to point fingers at others, you understand, but given my religious beliefs I stay out of such things myself.”

  After a lengthy conversation in which Peggy tried to persuade him to tell her more, she did manage to drag a few bits of financial information out of him. All uninhabited land belonged to the stool, and it could be sold for anywhere between $220 and $1,800 an acre, depending on the quality of soil and its proximity to the beach. For the bill of sale to be legal, the king’s signature was required, or the signature of his elders if he was incapacitated or in the village for good. All land in the hands of private owners was taxed at an annual rate of eight dollars to twenty-four dollars an acre, depending on its quality and location.

  Peggy continued her investigation by calling Uncle Eshun, who told her that he charged only a few dollars for recording deaths and issuing death certificates. This money he kept until someone came begging for funds to buy a coffin for the deceased, who otherwise would rot in a shed while the family borrowed the money or have to be thrown into the ground without a coffin like an animal. Eshun kept excellent records of these transactions, he said, and would gladly show them to her the next time she came.

  This discussion of coffins reminded Peggy that she had been putting off calling Uncle Joseph’s sons in Houston to discuss the funeral plans with them. Auntie Esi had said the children hated their father with a passion, though Peggy thought she was wrong about the girls. Perhaps she was wrong about the boys, too, and, being successful American businessmen, they would help her with the palace and funeral. In a surge of hope, she dialed the number of her cousin Wellington.

  But Wellington lived up to Auntie Esi’s story of lingering resentment. “My brother and I don’t want anything to do with our father’s funeral,” he said, almost spitting the words in anger. “We had to work like dogs to pay our own way through high school and university. We moved to the United States to make something of ourselves, without our father ever lifting a finger to help us. Why should we lift a finger for him now? ”

  Why, indeed? Because he was one of the two people who gave you life and in death must be forgiven, even as I forgave my erring father. Because he was a human being whose mortal remains need to be buried with dignity. Because he wasn’t my father, and I can’t do all this on my own.

  “Well,” Peggy said, trying hard to keep the charm and cheerfulness in her voice, “I know families can be very hurtful, Wellington. I certainly understand that, and in fact my family had a similar situation to your own. It’s just that your father left the palace in such terrible condition I have to rebuild it practically from scratch before I can hold the funeral, and I’m not a wealthy woman. Could you and your siblings contribute something, anything really, to renovating the palace? ”

  There was dead silence on the phone, and for a few moments Peggy thought they had been disconnected. “Hello?” she said.

  “I’m still here.” After another pause, Wellington said, “We’ll pay the fridge fees. That way we won’t let the old man rot. They’re very expensive in the Accra morgue, you know. And since we’ll pay for the fridge, we won’t be able to also help you with the palace.”

  It was something, of course, and something was better than nothing. But that meant that Peggy would have to renovate the palace all by herself.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, there was the problem of Kwame Lumpopo.

  He had never gi
ven her the $140. That could have been a case of forgetfulness. But then, right after her return to Washington, she had wired him $125 to give to Kwesi Cooper, who had loaned her money for the photographer. Months later Kwesi Cooper called her from Ghana and said, “Nana, it has been so long. Why have you not sent me the money I loaned you? ”

  Peggy was shocked. “But I wired it to Kwame Lumpopo as soon as I got back,” she said, “and he said he would give it to you.”

  “He never gave it to me,” Kwesi Cooper declared.

  She called Kwame Lumpopo and asked what he had done with the money. “Oh,” he said, “Kwesi Cooper owed me some money so I just kept it to pay his debt.” Rather than investigate this matter further, Peggy decided she should just wire another payment directly to Kwesi Cooper. It wasn’t fair to make him wait any longer for it, and a king’s reputation for honesty was of paramount importance.

  Given the fact that Kwame Lumpopo had taken money that didn’t belong to him in not one but two instances, Peggy was rapidly coming to the devastating conclusion that he had scammed her. She worried a great deal about it while at the embassy, and at night as she ate while staring blankly at the news, she turned the matter over and over in her head. Was he cheating her? Could it be possible? She had always been so reluctant to trust anyone, and in the exuberance of becoming king she had placed her trust in Kwame Lumpopo despite her misgivings. Had this been an unwise choice?

  Then Peggy began receiving reports from relatives that he had behaved strangely at family funerals. In most of Africa, funerals were a common weekend activity; every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in any town or village you could see dozens of people roaming about or waiting for a tro-tro in their distinctive red and black mourning attire, a ragged strip of red cloth tied around the left wrist.

  Nor could you help but notice the large funeral tents with red and black stripes. In cities without much open space, like Accra and Cape Coast, funeral tents were often erected in the street of the deceased, blocking traffic for three days. Ghana had a funeral culture; walls were plastered with memorial posters, while some families put the notices on highway billboards; people wore memorial T-shirts and carried memorial key chains.