Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

  Yunior had jumped at the chance. He didn’t like the secondary school he had started in Accra; Christian Methodist Secondary School had a uniform that consisted of brown shorts and a deep purple shirt, which he detested. At twelve, he had been the youngest in his first year of secondary school and was teased and picked on continually. Some of his classmates were starting secondary school at fifteen and sixteen – they had had hard lives selling groundnuts, coconuts, air fresheners, puppies, newspapers and sweets as hawkers on Accra’s roads to pay their meagre contributions towards their education, already world weary before they started to learn about the world from books. Yunior’s mother, Naa Okailey, had protected him from that. A food trader herself, she worked at the central market close to their home in Adabraka, and earned more money than his father, a minimally skilled government clerk. She had invested faithfully in Yunior’s education, but with two younger kids, she was relieved when her husband came home with the application form for the Fumazero scholarship. Her relief wasn’t because she didn’t think they could afford to continue to scrape enough together for Yunior’s education. Working under an increasingly hot sun in the market, she had seen the ground turn harder, bereft of rain; heard the prices of food, shouted across zigzagging walkways, shoot higher; smelled the despair in the air as, even she, for all the friends she had who sold bread, had to send Yunior to queue for bread.

  Ghana had fallen under the spell of dry Sahel winds and the ensuing drought was beginning to bite hard. Fewer people were buying the cooking oil Naa Okailey sold in smaller, repackaged units at the market; some of her friends who sold vegetables had stopped coming to the market altogether as they could not reliably make up the daily fee they paid for their stalls. The spaces they vacated, previously as sought after as gold dust, were now covered in common dust. For rice, one had to go to one of the Food Distribution Corporation outlets around the city with a chit. When local corn ran out and some aid finally came from the West, there were queues for yellow corn, a thing so alien that it drove old ladies half-mad – corn was supposed to be white. All things were rationed. The lines of chit-bearing families grew longer and more dust-beaten as the year progressed.

  And then the Agege-Ghanaians – omo Ghana – started to arrive with their sad tales, new dances, and memories of Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey’s wedding song, King Sunny Adé’s velvety voice – Fuji music. Thousands and thousands of them. Deported from Nigeria for no reason that anyone could agree on, they arrived mainly by road, clutching patterned bags to their chests, in trucks hired by the Ghana government. They were mainly teachers and mechanics, a few musicians who were not part of Nigerian-led bands, dancers, nurses, traders – even doctors. They claimed to have lost everything, they said Ifako had been razed to the ground by bulldozers: their houses, their TVs, their VW Beetles, were gone. In time, the bags they clutched in 1983 would come to be known as Agege Sacks or Ghana Must Go bags. With their arrival, the food shortage turned acute. Hunger had arrived and it was staying for a while. It is for this reason that Naa Okailey was prepared to let her son go to Fumaz.

  On Isla de la Inocencia there was food – three times a day – and Yunior was grateful for that, regardless of what he thought of the barbed wire perimeter. He had been living on one full meal a day in Accra – without meat and often without even bones. He also preferred the uniform on Isla – burgundy shorts and a white shirt – a mirror of the buildings, which were painted burgundy on the lower halves of their walls. In time he would answer more readily to Spanish than Ga or Twi; he would learn to play street baseball as the local youths did, wielding a bat with affected nonchalance; he would come to appreciate peopleist philosophy and spend his weekends helping younger children with their homework. With every passing year his body fell more easily into the rhythm of samba, his fingers sought and moulded themselves to the tension of guitar strings and he blended with the countryside; its fertility, its undulating earth, its cycles, the muted music of its flora flourishing and fading, its temper when hurricanes flashed nearby. Losing the city’s pulse inside of him, he became a boy of the countryside – muchacho del campo – his fellow students at Escuela Secundaria Basica en el Campo B – ESBEC B – became his comrades.

  Although they dispersed like wind-blown silk cotton seeds after their secondary education, they kept in touch by hearsay and letters. Those who, like Yunior, had learned to play an instrument occasionally ran into each other at university music events, or at concerts in Aguana where their idols from Fumaz or neighbouring islands, such as Alberto Sanchez (who had been born not far from ESBEC B) and Elena Burke, were playing with big bands in which all the players were – to their ears – perfect. Soon their letters were referring to shortages of canned goods from USSRs, which formed the basis of most diets in Fumaz, and it became steadily clear to Yunior that they were heading for a food shortage like the one he had escaped in Ghana. But this shortage was different; in Ghana, deprived of water for months, the soil could not support new growth so the solutions for their food shortages had to come from outside, or from adaptations. In Accra, they had begun to eat the b?k?b?k? leaves that grew wild – along walls, in the cracks that lined open gutters, atop the wide walls of the rich, down back streets where gangsters congregated to split their loot, and at the edges of wells that mocked searchers with reflections from their almost-empty depths – instead of kontomire, which had all but disappeared with the cocoyams that formed its roots. Here, the soil was fertile, there was rain and there was manpower, but for years they had only farmed en masse for export, never planting to feed themselves.

  With his realisation of what was coming, by the time half-time arrived in 1991, Yunior, by now at the Universidad Agraria de Los Cien Vientos del Oeste, in Bana, Western Provinces, was already keeping a plot of varied food crops. He had made arrangements with a nearby sugar-producing family, the Gonzalezs, to cultivate a section of their plantation based on organic agricultural production methods, as the price for sugar began to drop. Once the real shortages set in, in mid-1991, he was able to help the Gonzalez family and the neighbouring farms to switch their output from cash crops to local consumption based crops. It was not a straightforward process; most of the farmers were used to the convenience of using tractors, combine harvesters and mechanised irrigation and struggled to adapt to manual methods. However, the decline of the USSRs’ economy and its subsequent division into new nations meant that the petroleum that Fumaz used to get in exchange for its sugar was no longer forthcoming. The farmers had no choice but to adapt. Stories of how their grandfathers used to farm became the order of the day as they trekked to and from wells and standpipes. To sell produce outside of Bana, the eleven horses in the town were called into action – they were haltered, saddled, bridled and attached to carts. Their crownpieces were pulled into place behind their ears, their breast collars checked, they were patted on the head, and put to work. But several of the farms, their soil decimated by years of planting cane and sustaining volumes by using fertilisers, took years to produce a good harvest.

  It was the Gonzalez men who told him the perennial joke about his name.

  ‘Do you know what Yunior is?’ asked Julio, the father.

  ‘Yeah, it’s my name.’

  ‘No,’ Julio laughed, ‘it’s the name of a one-night stand. You know why?’

  Yunior shook his head.

  ‘There are so many Yuniors, and they are very hard to trace – unless you know the full name. So, when a girl is asked out and her date says he’s called Yunior, we assume he just wants a good time – there’s no plan beyond one night, for how would she trace him?’

  This is how, on Yunior’s first visit to Aguana to play in a live band, he was able to tell the joke to the drummer, one of only two native Fumazero in the quintet, whose brother shared Yunior’s name. Warming up absent-mindedly, his hardened fingertips skimming guitar strings, he overheard the man lamenting how his brother, resentful of the way Guerrero Rosario’s policies had curtailed their wealthy family’s
influence, had decided to migrate to the USAs.

  Yunior cut in with the joke and added, ‘At least over there his name may be less of a code for a one-night stand and more of an identity.’ He extended his hand. ‘I’m also Yunior, by the way. By accident, but that’s my name now.’

  ‘Marcos,’ the drummer replied. ‘Manjate told me a lot about you, Yunior. You sing as well, yes? Like a Fumazero?’

  ‘I am Fumazero.’

  Bana

  Marcos was the reason Yunior started taking food from his farm to Aguana at the height of half-time. It was never planned; it just happened once and grew into something that could no longer be ignored.

  The quintet Yunior played in with Marcos, Los Puntos Estelares, were offered a fortnightly slot at one of the leading salsa clubs, Verde, a place where, regardless of local conditions, foreigners still visited and spent good money on alcohol, cigars and the promise of love. Knowing the difficulty of getting good food in Aguana once supply from USSRs dried up, Yunior travelled to the two-night engagements of Los Puntos Estelares with some basic supplies – three carrots, a head of cabbage, a handful of frijoles Negros that swelled to three times their original size when soaked overnight, and two red onions. The first time he travelled east, mindful that Marcos had a young daughter, he harvested an identical mix of vegetables for him, making a mental note to add some frijoles from the sack he kept on his kitchen table. Then, surveying his half-acre plot, its boundary marked by a thigh-high chicken run that held six clucking red- and brown-feathered hens, Yunior shrugged and uprooted carrots and onions for his other band mates. Peopleist philosophy was now almost instinctive. In a break during rehearsals, he handed to drummer, trumpeter, pianist and bass player, roughly-cut sugar sacks sewn into quaint, small bags with visible spirals of twine.

  Marcos, having opened his makeshift bag, stared at its contents almost without recognition, then he jumped up to fold Yunior in a bear hug. ‘I haven’t seen cabbage for so long, brother. So long.’

  The rest of the band converged on Yunior, mumbling their appreciation and light-heartedly describing the wonderful meals they were going to cook, until they heard Marcos’s bass drum ringing with the beat of their first song. They still had to rehearse.

  Yunior took his position at the front of the quintet and prepared to sing their signature song, Vivimos Juntos. He lifted his guitar strap over his head. As he lowered it on to his left shoulder, he noticed his shirt was wet with Marcos’s tears. Yunior hadn’t realised how bad half-time was until that evening; everyone was being stoic, managing their struggles in silence.

  It was soon after he started adding eggs to the rations he packed for his band mates that he was approached by the owner of Verde about supplying produce to his brother’s grocery store on a side street close by.

  ‘I don’t produce much,’ said Yunior. ‘Only a half-acre, and I only come here twice a month.’

  ‘It’s OK. Even a little will be helpful to the locals.’

  Gente had already lost the right to be called a grocery store. Its shelves swept bare by the lack of imports from USSRs and the direct-to-hotel trade of fresh produce, it only held a supply of locally-produced cigars in a cabinet to the right of the till. The shelves, painted in alternate greens and yellows, that appeared to have been borrowed from the same palette that created the Fumazero flag, looked like wings abandoned by small planes that had lost the desire to fly. Flor and Tomas, the owners, had kept it open by taking in laundry from the same hotels that had severed their lines of vegetable supply from the farmers. In fact, it was a launderette disguised as a place where one could go and find the means to end hunger, and it remained a launderette after Yunior arrived with his first delivery.

  ‘You won’t display the vegetables?’

  ‘No,’ explained Flor, ‘we cannot sell like this. It is not official. We will tell the people at home and they will come.’

  Boxes of onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes were packed in a back room, and before Yunior left, he was relieved to see a bare-chested boy walk in with a note for Flor, hand over a clutch of pesos, and leave with a bag of potatoes, onions and a head of cabbage.

  Yunior charged Flor and Tomas no more for the vegetables than he made at government-backed produce markets in the Western Provinces. They only had to cover the extra cost of his transporting the hundred-kilo assortment of vegetables by horse and the converted military trucks that ferried hordes of people along the same route that Western Province traders and mercenaries of old, such as Diego Soñada Santos, used to build their empires of influence. When he arrived from Bana for performances with Los Puntos Estelares, Yunior always spent his spare hours lost in theses on crop rotation, subsidence and the long-term effects of fertiliser use; papers on efficient farm-layout, wild medicinal herbs that were threatened by large-scale agriculture and low-cost irrigation. He was still a student; he had no time to visit produce markets in Aguana, so he wasn’t aware that vegetables, when available, fetched far higher prices there. When the locals, who still saw him delivering crates and sacks to Gente stopped waving at him, calling out hermano, he didn’t notice. The growing, striped flamboyance of Tomas’s shirts and the sparkle of Flor’s new shoes when they visited Verde to dance, didn’t catch his eyes. Yunior loved seeing them happy, embraced them with customary exuberance, shared in the laughter that lit their eyes like diamonds.

  Flor often held his face and kissed him on the lips, ruffling his growing Afro. ‘Twenty-two. So hard-working, so good-looking. It’s a pity we don’t have a daughter for you.’ Tomas punched his arm and they all laughed. He didn’t know that Flor and Tomas had stopped selling vegetables to all but their closest friends, that they were taking deliveries from him and reselling the produce to the hotels that glowed like enemy posts in Aguana nights – hotels that paid ten times the price he charged them.

  Leaving the club one evening, a dark woman with loose black curls that tumbled to the shoulder of the clinging red dress she wore, grasped his arm and followed him outside.

  ‘Hi, I’m Loretta.’

  He was stunned, both by her radiance and her forwardness. ‘Yunior.’

  ‘Do you have something with that woman?’ She jerked her head towards the door of Verde, still holding on to his left arm, her low heels keeping beat with his strides.

  ‘Flor? No.’ He flashed an amused smile. ‘Were you jealous?’

  ‘You are her business partner?’

  Yunior frowned at the turn the conversation had taken. ‘No. I sell vegetables to her store sometimes. She is a friend.’

  Loretta stepped up to walk ahead of him and mumbled, ‘Come with me.’

  Yunior’s frown eased into a grimace of realisation. His first encounter with the secret police.

  Following Loretta into a Spanish-style villa turned dull by night, Yunior was ushered into what must have once been a lavatory where a young man in tan trousers, a green T-shirt and a flat cap, informed him that they had been observing the counter-revolutionary activities of Flor and Tomas for five months. They had started in May 1991, nine months earlier, when Yunior first delivered vegetables to Gente, but stopped after a month having spoken to locals who said that they were able to get affordable produce from Flor and Tomas. In September, an old lady complained that vegetables were no longer available, although they still saw Yunior arriving with boxes twice a month.

  ‘We went to Bana and saw the good work you are doing there with the farmers. The Universidad say you are a brilliant student too.’

  Yunior nodded, finally leaning back in the low chair he had been given.

  ‘We just had to be sure that you weren’t involved in the black market trade with the hotels like Flor and Tomas.’

  Yunior was to say nothing of his arrest as Loretta would be observing the Gente operation for another month to identify all the counter-revolutionaries. The Agriculture Minister was interested in his organic farming work in Bana and the smaller project he had started recently on a visit to Isla
de la Inocencia.

  It was on his way back home, the Agriculture Minister’s long arm reaching across him to point, that he first saw the Soñada Santos rice estate in Asadon.

  ‘The owner is a good supporter of the Rosario revolution. The family gave half of their land to the local peasants after our liberation in 1959,’ said the minister, pushing his sunglasses further up his nose.

  ‘It doesn’t look very productive.’

  ‘True. I think their yield has been falling for years, but it doesn’t matter. The rice from here is worth its weight in gold – it’s the sweetest rice in Fumaz.’

  Excerpt from Work in Progress

  Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

  For Abednego, the sweats began the day he dreamt of Black Jesus and Farmer Thornton’s wife. The two always followed one another, a seductive sickness which had the effect of curing his erectile dysfunction, an infirmity that started the year he went to Lupane to see the Commission of Enquiry people, near the mass grave where Thandi and his mama lay.

  Black Jesus began to afflict him after the Solomon incident. Solomon and his lofty idealism, which he had imported along with the Syrian woman he arrived with from Cuba in ’91. He had returned a haunted man, Solomon, lanky, with a Fidel Castro T-shirt, a beret worn to the side, and gaunt eyes which seemed to beckon a dismal future. He was sick, sick, sick in the head as much as in the body; hadn’t Abednego tried to tell the family that all that talk about land and revolution and Guantánamo City were the ramblings of a man who had lost his bearings? Well – he scratched his balls – no, he hadn’t, but he should have, because he had suspected it from the very beginning.