The Hundred Wells of Salaga

by Ayesha Harruna Attah

  Her legs grew weak, as if a sharpened spear had stabbed and twisted her spine. She held on to Aminah and then couldn’t take any of it any more. She turned towards her room. Finally, she understood her father’s disease. It was when the world lost all color, taste and smell, and one realized the heaviness of one’s body, the uselessness of one’s life. Wurche stared and stared at the wall. Would she be dead, too, if she’d gone with them? Would her presence have warded off death? The questions swirled. Sulemana was never coming back.

  She wove in and out of sleep filled with woolly dreams. The only sharp detail that day was the single gunshot that cut through the air. Close, and yet distant. Final, and insistent on its finality. One could think of nothing but the crispness of the sound. Outside, just enough light traced the sky for her to make out the forms of huts and trees and people, but otherwise, it was dark. People flocked outside Etuto’s hut. Had they come about Sulemana?

  “Excuse me.” She was making her way through them when Aminah blocked her.

  “Sister, please. It’s not good.”

  “If you’ve seen it, so can I.” Wurche pushed forward but Aminah wouldn’t budge. “Let me by,” she said, her voice breaking, as if she already knew. She shoved Aminah so hard the girl fell.

  The scene: blood; a mother and her child; a mother and her son. Mma had wrapped her arms around Etuto’s body. The offending rifle lay, indifferent, on a leopard skin. Wurche hugged Mma and Etuto’s lifeless form.

  His heart had been broken, she decided.

  * * *

  —

  Etuto and Sulemana’s funerals were attended by people from all over Gonja and Dagbon, and even several white men from the Gold Coast. Dramani came back from the farm and, as the man of the house, greeted the invited guests and accepted their condolences. The funeral was a blur. It was only after the bodies had been wrapped in cotton shrouds and buried that Wurche realized what was happening. Power had shifted in Salaga–Kpembe and Kete–Krachi. All over.

  “There’s a vacuum here,” said Wurche to Mma, who had never seemed so childlike as in that moment. The old lady had responded to visitors with whimpers and barely spoke. Wurche went on. “The infighting among our people, this struggle between us and the Europeans. It’s all about finding power, exercising power, holding on to it at all costs. The Europeans are a force bigger than our tiny lines. The only way we will mean anything is if we unite. I’ve been preaching unity for a long time, but I haven’t tried to work with anyone. I’m ready to start talking to the women of Salaga. We’ll rebuild together. Tell the elders. They’ll listen to you. Enough people have died. It’s time to work together.”

  Mma nodded.

  Aminah

  She went to the well by Sulemana’s room, dipped a round clay pot into the water and filled it to the brim. She grabbed a broom and approached Etuto’s hut. No one in the family had been able to face the task of cleaning his room. Even though she’d never considered Etuto a father figure, it felt like she was coming full circle, doing what she couldn’t do for Baba and his workroom. Immense, whereas Baba’s was small, but plain whereas Baba’s was etched with beautiful black-and-white lines. She parted the heavy curtain and went into the room. After Etuto shot himself, women from Kpembe had taken the body and wiped away the gore, but the metallic odor of blood lingered. It was even stronger than the leathery smell wafting from Etuto’s hides and shoes. Guns were slung all over the outer room, and Aminah pictured the knives on her father’s wall. One was a den of creation, the other of destruction. But ultimately, both men were no more. Both men had left behind everything they owned. Whatever you did, whether good or bad, death would eventually snatch your spirit away. So what did you do when given a choice? Good or bad? Eeyah used to tell her that if she chose to be bad, her spirit could come back in a very ugly body.

  She shook out the thick, musty cloths that covered Etuto’s bed and folded them. She wiped down his many riding boots, some of which had become nests for geckos. She arranged his empty bottles of alcohol in a corner. She left his piles of talismans and charms, too scared to touch them. They were said to render him invisible.

  When she left the hut, she was filled with such a sense of loss that she had to go into her room to cry. She cried till her eyes felt rubbed raw, till she couldn’t breathe, her chest pushing out hard to let in air.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, Aminah cleaned Bayaba and handed her back to her mother. Mma had taken Wumpini under her wing as if that would replace Etuto.

  “Aminah, you’re free,” said Wurche. “I should have told you this a long time ago, but with the funerals…”

  Aminah saw, for the first time, that Wurche must have liked her, possibly in the way she had liked her sisters, quite possibly in the way men and women liked each other. She reached forward and embraced Wurche, whose matchstick body only stiffened more. Wurche patted Aminah’s back. It was enough, the gesture said.

  “Thank you, Sister,” said Aminah.

  “Take one of the hens,” said Wurche.

  “Thank you. Can I come back and see Wumpini?”

  “Yes.” Then a beat later, “Where will you go?”

  “To Moro.”

  Aminah cleaned out her room and put her things in a sack—clothes inherited from Wurche, money she had saved from selling eggs. When everyone was sleeping, she took the hen and left the palace. She didn’t want everyone staring at her as her back grew smaller and smaller.

  She walked the path to Salaga, and once there, went past the big mosque, towards Maigida’s hut. She stopped to contemplate what would have happened if someone else had bought her. If it had been Moro or if she hadn’t met him at all. Where would she be? Her life had been treated as if she were no different from cattle or kola nuts. Stripped of control.

  She continued past more huts, the two markets, now dead except for scavenging dogs. The Germans had killed the town. Even in her short stay in Salaga, she’d been intrigued by how much was sold there. Her heart felt weighed down but then, almost a heartbeat later, light. This was a new start. She started dreaming of a shoe workroom, one that she and Moro would build, that she would decorate to remind herself of Botu. She would make shoes to sell, while Moro worked the earth, and their children would grow up learning to create and live with the land. And then, one day, her father would come by on his albino donkey and say he lost his way home.

  Gratitude

  To my family for always saying yes, no matter how far-flung my dreams. ARHA, NYA, RHA, PAP and ESPA, you rock. To the Gee, to the Hot Gyals: thank you for your friendship and support.

  To the Pontas Literary and Film Agency for constantly pushing hard for me. Anna Soler-Pont, Marina Penalva, Maria Cardona, Leticia Vila-Sanjuan, and Jessica Craig: thank you.

  To my editors, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Jeremy Weate, and Lauren Smith, and the Cassava Republic team, thank you for the close reading, for keeping me on my toes, and for believing in my project.

  To my first readers: Jakki Kerubo, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Anissa Bazari, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Max Lyon Ross.

  To Pierre Poncelet, for the beautiful map. Mille mercis.

  To the Africa Centre and Instituto Sacatar for the time you afforded me to write and for the magic of Bahia. To Natalia Kanem for beautiful KSMT, for the magic of Popenguine.

  And, finally, to my late Uncle Muntawakilu, my guide to Salaga. My gratitude knows no bounds.

  Q & A for The Hundred Wells of Salaga

  1. What inspired you to write The Hundred Wells of Salaga?

  Some years ago, I learned that my great-great-grandmother had been enslaved and ended up in the Salaga slave market. Attempts to find out more about her led to obstacles. People either simply didn’t know much about her or they didn’t want to talk. Writing this book was a chance for her to finally speak through me. I calculated that she might have lived in Salaga during a turbulent peri
od in the region’s history. Not only were different families—known as gates—competing to rule over the area, but Europeans also wanted access to Salaga as their link to the interior of West Africa.

  2. We know so very little about internal slavery in Africa compared to the transatlantic slave trade. How did you carry out your research for the novel? Did you have to visit an archive in Salaga itself?

  I first visited Salaga in 2012. A late uncle of mine guided me through its slave market, now turned into a lorry station; to its ponds where slaves were washed before they were sent to be auctioned off in the market; to the hundred wells that dot its landscape, now watering holes for livestock; and to its museum, which houses some of the chains that held people captive as well as the guns used in capturing them. Most of the sites were covered with weeds. The museum was run-down. It was obvious not many people knew about this aspect of history that took place in Ghana. I did a lot of reading, spending several days at the Schomburg Center in Harlem and the Balme Library in the University of Ghana. Some useful guides were J. A. Braimah and J. R. Goody’s Salaga: The Struggle for Power, Braimah’s The Two Isanwurfo’s, and Marion Johnson’s The Salaga Papers, which was a treasure trove of accounts spanning decades of Salaga’s history, written by missionaries from the Gold Coast and European travelers.

  This novel focuses on a period right before the war in Salaga in 1892 until the downfall of Salaga to German forces in 1897. It was a dramatic era because not only were different families vying for the throne of Salaga, but also because the Europeans (British, French, and Germans) were making their way into the zone, following the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The area had initially been declared a neutral zone, but European powers breached their own agreement and started signing treaties with the local chiefs.

  Through my research, I learned a lot about internal slavery in Africa. By the time in which this book is set, slavery—both internal and transatlantic—had been legally abolished; however, as the book shows, it was still a thriving business. People like Samory Toure and Babatu became infamous figures because they refused to succumb to colonial forces, but were also fiercely tied to the institution of slavery. The royals in The Hundred Wells of Salaga, much like Toure and Babatu, benefited from the drawn-out struggle to abolish slavery. In the Gold Coast, for instance, slave-owning families wanted reparations from the British government for losing their slaves.

  3. This book is as much about the internal feud among royalty as it is about slavery, and it gives us an insight into a certain African courtly society. Why did you think this was so important to write about?

  I wanted to write about this because we haven’t dealt with how a lot of African royal families were complicit in the slave trade. I read accounts that give us a free pass, because “African slavery was benign.” The reasoning behind this thinking is that, unlike in places such as the Americas, a slave’s child would usually not become a slave. However, in indigenous slavery in Ghana, slaves were given names that to this day paint them with a mark. Other justifications for such thinking include the fact that a slave could marry into a family, which made it different from the slavery across the ocean. But families were torn apart. Peoples’ lives were discarded if they were not deemed profitable enough.

  Bondage is bondage and I want us to talk about the past and deal with it. Not dealing with this past means it rears its ugly head every so often. In 2017, when the world heard that people from countries such as Senegal, the Gambia and Nigeria were being auctioned off in Libya for as little as $400, it seemed from another era; one that had been buried, hopefully never to be unearthed. And yet, slavery was still alive and festering. Everyone was outraged, as they should be. But in addition to outrage for me was shame; according to an April 2017 report led by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), these auctions were facilitated by people from Ghana and Nigeria. I wanted to bury my head in shame. But it meant it is time for us to wake up. We have to acknowledge the role we’ve played in slavery—internal, trans-Saharan, transatlantic—and how that has fostered a distrust that persists in our communities to this day. Only then can we begin to stitch together the threads we need to heal and achieve true progress.

  4. The book is from the point of view of Aminah and Wurche, two very different characters who occupy vastly different social positions in the book. Yet you provide a very complex and interesting relationship between the two. What were you trying to achieve when you were writing their relationship?

  History has written about women like Wurche. We know about Queen Aminah of Zazzau, of Queen Nzinga of Angola, of Yaa Asantewa of the Asante, and even earlier, Queen Tiye and Hatshepsut in Egypt. The feats of royals have been written down on stone or immortalized in song and passed on by griots, and because of that, I had material to work with for writing Wurche’s life. There were precedents. Aminah’s story, on the other hand, I had to search for within myself. European explorers barely gave women any space in their written works, so nonroyal women’s stories were hard to find. Even though the royal story has always seemed glamorous, on digging a little deeper, one realizes that women still had a bad deal. For one, we can readily count the number of queens or women warriors the continent has seen. I wanted to highlight that even though they were from different worlds, being a woman meant that they still suffered from similar fates. Aminah comes to this realization and is able to be more forgiving towards Wurche. Wurche, on the other hand, never admits this to herself. The two women grow close, maybe because of this, but it’s a relationship that lives in what is not said; the two women are often quiet around each other. Wurche’s shyness is a complex blend of feeling superior to and being attracted to Aminah, while Aminah’s combines a strong yearning for her freedom with compassion for her captor.

  5. If you had to choose between the two women, who would you rather be friends with, Aminah or Wurche?

  I would probably gravitate towards Wurche just because she’s so confident and does what she pleases, and that is attractive. But if I needed a confidante or a kind ear, I’d go to Aminah. So I can’t choose!

  6. Jaji is Wurche’s teacher, but she is also an intriguing character. Can you say more about your motivation for including her character and was she inspired by any historical figure?

  I love mentors. Having benefited from mentorship almost my whole life, I see Jaji’s character as a nod to the amazing women, and men, who’ve guided me through life so far. And yes, jajis actually existed. In the late nineteenth century, Nana Asma’u was the daughter of Usman dan Fodio, who founded the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria. She trained a group of female teachers who went from village to village teaching women Muslim values and urging them to be good mothers and wives. The jaji often went on to train other teachers. She wore a unique straw hat, so that she could be identified, and used poetry to teach these values.

  7. In literature, imperialists are often villainized, and portrayed as greedy and without regard for the lives of the conquered people. In Salaga, the German character Helmut was presented as a complex and sympathetic figure. Was his character based on a real-life person? What were you trying to do with such a multifaceted portrayal?

  Helmut is a hundred percent fictional. One of the critiques I received from earlier work was how flat some of my male characters came off, so with this book, my goal was to create fully rounded people. I also didn’t want to have outright villains, because even the kindest people are capable of cruelty, and people tagged as evil can do the kindest acts. I wanted a character who was flawed, but who could at least question himself and the way his fellow countrymen were behaving.

 

 

 
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