Beneath The Yellow (a novel): 4

iii

During the food shortage my sister and I spent our hours reading. In the rainbow world of the written word we found holes in which to hide from the reality of our existence.

On the news we saw flickering images of flat bodies steamrollered by hunger.

People dotted the city waiting for rations of flour and yellow corn. We had never seen yellow corn before the drought, but it was the colour of the corn the American government finally sent us as aid. Ronald Reagan’s yellow reaction to humanitarian pressure. The Americans didn't owe us anything but because the corn was yellow, our gratitude was measured.

Kenkey, a national staple made from fermented corn: milled, rolled into balls, wrapped in corn husks and punctured in the middle to hold the husks in place and provide better heat transfer; changed its colour from white to yellow like a chameleon. No amount of boiling could make the shade fade. We could no longer identify with our food.

Grandma’s chronic need to consume kenkey before she declared herself sated meant that she was never full during the drought. Yellow kenkey was a hollow statement.

Men wandered around with bloodshot eyes seeking answers. The parched ground offered nothing. Even priests and witchdoctors queued for food. There was an air of persistent mourning. Richer families crossed the border to Togo or La Côte D’Ivoire to buy food that had been shipped in from France. The entire West African sub-

region was hit by dry Sahelian winds that came to steal moisture from plants and render them barren. Across the region, breezes played a new kind of music – no longer did we hear the harmonious chorus of green shoots; instead a harsh rattle of brown stalks making sticks of themselves invaded the air, assaulting us, striking a frantic rhythm that left dancers spent. France supported its former colonies with vital food shipments. Although they remained hungry in those countries they thinned slower.

My father drove out into the villages and farming communities where there was still some food, and brought sacks of food home. Plantain, cassava and yam.

Tomatoes were scarce. Out of season, they festered like wounds across the nation.

There was no infrastructure to process them and our people didn’t like sun-dried tomatoes. Our Uncles and Aunts heard about my father’s haul quickly. Faster than the sweep of bush fires across the farmlands. They came for their “share” of the spoils and later conveniently forgot about us when they managed to get a store of food. My mother told my father that he was too kind-hearted, even though her sister, Stella, was one of the Aunts that came to take our food away.

All through the drama Naana and I read. We fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside Hemingway’s heroes Anselmo, Pablo, Pilar, Maria and the tragic Robert Johnson. We watched them plot and double cross and fall in love and die. We ached with them. We cried with them until the bell for our single meal tolled.

In 1984 a Japanese philanthropist called Ryoichi Sasakawa brought food aid to Ghana and started to consult with West African governments on finding a lasting solution to our sensitivity to drought. I immediately read everything I could about

Japan. It wasn't easy reading. While I admired them for Judo and for Walkmans, they had a terrifying history of violence; in Malaysia, in the Philippines, in China – even in Russia. They were just like the British in South Africa and India and Kenya. Still, I decried the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and got mad at the United States for putting over 100,000 Japanese Americans in captivity at the end of World War II. The anger came easily. We were still eating yellow kenkey and Grandma was developing a permanent look of hunger.

That year – 1984 – was an especially difficult year for my sister Naana. She was studying for her A-levels and had to deal with hunger at the same time. Rations at her boarding school reduced dramatically. Her workload increased in an inverse relation to the rations. Predictably, her head appeared to grow ahead of the rest of her body. She looked like a stick drawing by a talented five-year-old. Still, Grandma said she couldn’t afford to weaken or stumble. The exam questions were oblivious to the question of hunger amongst the masses. Universities the world over would still rank us by the same criteria as everyone else, because modern society has no sensitivity to life. I tried to help. Anytime she was home, I read her notes to her when she started doing something that prevented her from reading herself. I read outside the bathroom door. I read in the kitchen and by the ironing table. She began to speak to me like a friend rather than a little brother. We talked about everything and made jokes about our hunger.

“Don’t hold your finger too close to my face,” she’d say. “It looks too much like food and I might bite.”

“If you bite, I might think you’re a big fish. Perfect for kenkey.”

We’d laugh a pained laughter that involved as little motion as possible, although Naana’s head still shook involuntarily anytime she laughed. Every time I made a comparison with something from Great Expectations, which had become my habit after reading the full version that year, her head would shake silently.

We were as close as twins until our parents decided that GeeMaa – my father’s mother – should come and live with us, since living alone in hard times is doubly hard. Naana automatically lost her bedroom and had to share mine. I did my best to make it easy for her but I was very untidy, and I refused to move my mounted spider, which gave her the creeps. Sixteen is a terrible age to lose your privacy. Particularly if you are female. Hormones kick in. Unfamiliar cycles become bedmates. Changes occur almost daily. You need time and space to adapt. Apart from the obvious sexual differences, I was a curious boy with a penchant for reading. Her diaries, letters, notes and schoolbooks became targets. She had no inclination to share the soaked blood of her growing pains and concerns with me. I was too wide-eyed. My questions too detailed. We grew apart.

Nevertheless I think I was good for her. I asked her endless questions about her schoolwork; asked until she could reel off answers without thinking. I also pestered her with information from my favourite information trove – the encyclopaedia – and what I had gleaned from old magazines.

“Naana, did you know that Somoza Garcia’s dictatorship in Nicaragua was supported by the US?” Impatiently, “No.” “Twenty years. Then his brother took over, then his son…”

“Ebo, I’m trying to study.”

“Oh, OK. What is it today? I didn’t understand the differentiation thing you explained yesterday.”

“Ebo!” “OK. Just give me the book.”

She threw it at me.

When I wasn’t with her, I spoke to GeeMaa. GeeMaa liked to go for walks. We left our house in Tesano and strolled.

Sometimes to the Industrial Area. Sometimes to North Kaneshie. She bought me groundnuts on the way when we could find some. The dusty roads had become dustier still. With fewer traders lining the banks of the open gutters along the roads, the city had become a faded monochrome of its former self. GeeMaa seemed impervious to the despair that clung to the city like grey blight on trees. She told me fantastic stories. Water maidens, sorcerers and the living dead. Being the student I was, turned on by basic science and its neat explanations, questioned her stories. She always smiled when I doubted her. “Mi bi, there are two sides to every story,” she would say. “More than two sometimes.”

It was the same thing she said when I asked her about my grandfather, FatherGrandpa, whom I had only met twice. She said it with a tender smile. With the quiet assurance that Mr. Wemmick from Great Expectations had when saying “portable property.” The clear air of those who have tested the truth of their statements. On the way home she often recited her favourite poem Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Alone at home with her one afternoon, I told her about my Dee Dee dreams.

It was a Friday and I was helping her slice onions in the kitchen. I chopped onions so regularly that I no longer cried when I did. GeeMaa had taken over in the kitchen since she moved in with us. She insisted she had nothing else to do and she didn’t want to be waited on. Her intervention was well-timed. The drought had pushed prices up and, although the food situation was improving, prices showed no inclination of easing down. With GeeMaa living with us my mother didn’t need to be home as much so she went back to work as an accountant. Business was slow in my father’s hardware store; sales of farming implements had reduced to a trickle. He continued to sell cooking utensils and specialist items like laboratory equipment, but his income was not enough to support the family. Undeterred, he contemplated importing irrigation devices from China. He revealed this while we were cleaning his well-kept Datsun.

“It will be the next big thing,” he announced with a smile. “The drought has taught everyone that rain is not a reliable servant.”

My father’s optimism always made me smile.