Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  “Ei! Me kaa sε ma hyε b sε mennware de dii agor Kεkε.”

  “Paaaa!”

  “Yo, tsk, tsk.” One of the men shook his head in disgust, affirming the mood of the others at the table. Was he Kwame? Kofi? Kojo? What with the beer, the mind-numbing humidity, and the conflating of names that begin with the letter “K,” I struggled to keep it all straight.

  “Ah, yes, Steven,” Yaw Brobbey began. All eyes turned expectantly toward me. I nodded. “You know the meaning of kwesi ’broni?” Dad Brobbey asked. This was the setup for what was becoming the longest-running comedic performance in Brong-Ahafo—a sort of doppelgänger minstrel show where I performed in whiteface.

  I smiled and nodded with a look that said, “Do I ever!”

  The other men thought this was hilarious and perhaps even highly unusual—though I was bombarded with kwesi ’broni in every public space, including twice by the waitstaff as I sat right here at this very table. You’d have to be an idiot not to pick up what kwesi ’broni means within the first fifteen minutes of arrival in Ghana.

  “Ei, ’broni, ’broni! You are too clever-o,” one of the men hooted.

  I was vain enough, and desperate enough for attention, to take this as a compliment. The conversation quickly reverted to Twi and continued without me. Yaw Brobbey was in his element. Talking business and football, expounding on politics with friends, drinking cold beer, and showing off his newest son, his obroni son, child number 22. Soon to be number 23. My forearms were pleasantly wet from the puddle of cold beer on the table, a sort of makeshift alcoholic air conditioning. Slouching down in the lawn chair, I wallowed in the recklessness of the evening. I caught the word “cedi” as the conversation veered unexpectedly into English. The friend laughed and bent forward in mirth.

  “Like ‘Bugs,’ yes?”

  “Oh yes, Bugs Bunny!” Dad Brobbey answered. “Twenty-thousand cedis for a rabbit farm. Bettah than chickens-o. I should like that very much indeed!”

  “Ei, I tried to get a loan from the Agric bank to plant yams and yo …” The friend’s voice trailed off sadly before he said, “They want 43 percent interest on the loan.” He sighed, nodding dejectedly. “Forty-three percent! That is too hard. I tell the banker, ‘Ei! Forty-three percent? How can I pay you back? I should plant diamonds, not yams!’”

  Afterward, Dad Brobbey helped me into the back seat of the Toyota. The plastic seats were still warm from the late-afternoon sun, and they cracked softly as I settled in. The sky was dark. Too many stars for one sky. I pulled my knees to my chin, a now-familiar posture that helped relieve the dysentery stomach cramps. I turned my head so I could better see the azure glow of the dashboard. Dad Brobbey lit up one of his Dunhill cigarettes—one of the few imported items that found its way into the local market—and I dozed off to the soft crush of bald tires on the dirt road.

  Some days, Dad Brobbey took me to Techiman, about forty miles from Sunyani. I looked forward to these business trips, trips that got me out of the house, with its exasperating lack of privacy. I wondered whether my host siblings resented my time with their father. I did the math. If he were to devote just five minutes alone with every child and with each wife just once a day, it would consume a full two hours. I got several hours a day with Yaw Brobbey, and that must have had consequences for the family and my role in it. But I could not discern even a whiff of jealousy; the family’s domestic dynamic comprised complacency, resignation, and a sort of gender-specific inevitability, with the girls tending the fire and cooking, and the boys lolling about, gathering wood, and finding ways to pass the long afternoons, waiting for the next meal.

  Techiman was a typical town in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. The ever-present, cocoa-colored dirt imparted a foppishly pink hue to many of the mud-brick or concrete houses, paint faded, dusty. Dad and I walked around the market, and he bought me a kebab of goat meat, crisp with pepper and ginger, one of my very favorite Ghanaian treats. The butcher, working behind his brazier, wielded a broad cleaver, hacking a dark slab of meat, effervescent with flies that alit as the blade hit home. A boy, presumably his son, coated the cubes of raw goat in a dry rub of spices by rolling the meat in a calabash.

  By late morning, I began to feel the familiar queasiness in my stomach. I was anxious now to return home. We started back in the car, only to stop at what seemed like damn near every village on the road between Techiman and Sunyani. Dad had friends everywhere. He expounded enthusiastically on business matters with animated hand gestures; he was the Toscanini of the tabletop, pausing only to take a swig from his Tata beer or to declaim, sotto voce, a furtive recitative on Ghanaian politics. Dad Brobbey’s dynamic range was impressive. So was my gastrointestinal distress. I repaired to the back seat of the Toyota, doubled over with cramps.

  Yaw Brobbey found me there. I tried to compose myself, but he saw that I was in agony. He crossed himself. “Steven, you are unwell?” he asked.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said, half-tempted to cross myself, too.

  I wondered how Dad Brobbey’s three wives squared with pontifical doctrine, but I already knew the answer: it didn’t matter. This is Ghana. To an outsider, it might seem that rules were bent, ignored, or enforced with no sense of outward consistency—but, once you’d been here awhile and gotten culturally attuned a bit, you saw that the approach to rules bore an internal calibration that makes perfect sense. Besides, Yaw Brobbey was a generous man, both with his money and his amorous affections; so as far as I was concerned, the world needed more people like him.

  * * *

  One day at the Littlewood Grocery, I didn’t feel like sitting quietly, respectfully, while Dad Brobbey and his friends talked politics. Interrupting them, I spoke up: “We’ve sent a man to the moon.”

  “Ei! Kwesi, you are too funny-o.”

  “Several times,” I asserted.

  “Why do you say these things, Steven?”

  Adjei-Frimpong, sucking on a betel nut, translated my claims into Twi for the amusement of his two compatriots, who were passing another somnolent morning at the Littlewood Grocery. It struck me that the name of the store bore a comic, sexual irony, given my father’s philoprogenitive accomplishments. “Littlewood” indeed.

  “I am serious, Steven. Ei! Why do you say these things?” Adjei-Frimpong looked hurt, gesturing palms up.

  How to answer his question? If I’m honest, I should admit I started making these indecorous claims about the United States’ astronautical superiority to shift attention back to me. (Far from my most mature act, I admit, and I am ashamed to this day for my behavior.) But on this particular day, having battled dysentery for several weeks, I was exhausted. And I was upset, frustrated that my capacity to communicate in Twi was good enough only to give me the communication skills of a two-year-old. I could no longer keep up appearances. I was … tired. Tired of the unrelenting heat, tired of the singsong cadence of Twi. Tired of sitting for hours in polite silence, waiting for my comic pantomime turn—The Kwesi Obroni Show. Tired of the aggressive fluorescent fixtures that harshly lit every home, kiosk, and rest house in the entire country. Tired of the spavined, broken-winded Binatone air conditioners whose unrelenting drone makes human speech such a chore that every conversation becomes an exhausting echolalia of “I beg of you, can you repeat that?” Tired of amoebic dysentery. Tired of television sets turned full volume to compete with those crappy, plastic oscillating fans, dashing any hope of holding a coherent conversation. And don’t get me started on what was being shown on television. Most of all, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

  But I kept all of this to myself, and when Adjei-Frimpong asked, “Why do you say these things?” I replied simply, “Because it’s true.”

  “Kwesi, how do you do all this?”

  “We launch men into space using huge rockets—rockets much taller than anything I see here.” I scoured the landscape, my eyes finally resting on some palm trees lolling in the heat, their narrow trunks framing a radio transmitter far in
the distance.

  Adjei-Frimpong regarded his companions with wonder. Had he been making fun of me? Did he, perhaps, understand liquid oxygen propulsion and telemetry far better than I, but was he questioning me for his own amusement? Who was rising to whose bait?

  “I am sorry, Steven,” he smiled modestly, “what you speak of is magic.” Adjei-Frimpong gestured toward me and asked, “Kwesi, here, would like a cola nut?” as one miraculously appeared from within the folds of his robe.

  * * *

  In the early part of the summer of 1978, Ghana’s military dictatorship was on friendly enough terms with the Ivory Coast that the two countries planned a paved, multilane interstate motorway, crossing the border at a designated, mutually agreeable site. The Ghanaians told apocryphal stories of motorways in Africa that stopped abruptly at a border, one country unwilling to link its road at a site selected by their neighbor. They were stuck with two roads that did not connect at all, laying waste to the entire transnational enterprise.

  The Ghanaian-Ivoirian road, however, was to be a real Western-style motorway with comfortably wide shoulders and gleaming rest stops. Visions of a first-class autobahn lit up the imagination. It would demonstrate that two African countries could, at long last, work together on a public works project. It would show they could surmount their realpolitik trade policies—small-minded, protectionist policies curiously at odds with the grand Pan-African socialist theories that underpinned nearly all the continent’s independence movements. Finally, a step forward! And it would come through Sunyani.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  As luck would have it, Dad Brobbey’s friend Mr. Danso-Manu owned a suitable piece of property on the outskirts of Sunyani, adjacent to where the new motorway was supposed to be built. The enterprising Ghanaian intended to cash in on the new highway, and he was constructing a seven-story hotel.

  “Yes, I shall be very happy when the highway is finished,” Mr. Danso-Manu said, arms akimbo as he surveyed the outlying savannah. The construction site lay at the end of a makeshift utility road surrounded by brilliant bottle-green vegetation. I didn’t see any sign of the highway.

  “When will the road be finished?” I asked, wondering silently, When will the road be started? The bucolic landscape gave no hint of road construction, not even a lone surveyor’s flag.

  “Ei! Things are very bad here, now, Steven. Ahaaaa …” His voice trailed off in a particularly Ghanaian exhalation—part sigh, part ellipses—that invites commiseration. “Everything is being rationed.” Mr. Danso-Manu stood scowling at the rough-hewn, gray lattice of concrete pillars that might someday be his hotel. “You cannot get concrete at-TALL! Come, I will show you my hotel. Would you like a beer?”

  “No, thank you.” It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, and my digestive difficulties hadn’t improved.

  “I will drink, myself, then, if you don’t mind.”

  “Please, go right ahead. I’m not feeling too well.” I grimaced, patted my stomach, and debated whether to try and add my own “Ahaaa.” Maybe that way, he’d understand how I felt; maybe he’d even feel sorry for me. But it wasn’t an easy decision. Ever since my first hours in Ghana, I’d been trying to mimic the cadence, inflection, and timbre of Ghanaian English, in the hope it might help me culturally fit in. Ei! Too soon to tell how this might play in public. It might not work at-TALL, and I would only embarrass myself and my host family-o.

  Mr. Danso-Manu seemed perturbed that I didn’t wish to join him in a drink. No doubt I had committed another social faux pas. To my young eyes, Ghanaians lived by a bewildering set of social conventions. Every day, I stumbled over such simple social graces as how to shake hands with several strangers (start on the right—but my right or theirs?) and the way the Ghanaians poured out a bit of a libation before drinking any of it, whether it was a glass of water or a tumbler of scotch. The trick was to pour a few precious drops, not spill your beverage and make an unseemly puddle, but it was yet another trick I hadn’t mastered.

  “Here will be the disco.” Mr. Danso-Manu stretched out an arm like a vaudeville emcee introducing the next act. He gestured to a section of floor checkered in black-and-white linoleum. It was the only finished floor in the building. The rest of the ground floor was simply poured concrete. A pile of rebar rusted in a corner.

  “You can see how bad the economy is. Look, no walls.” Indeed. The entire building was open to the elements. Only concrete columns and poured floors had been completed. There weren’t any fixtures, save for two gleaming toilets that reposed off to one side.

  “Ah, yes! Here will be the facilities. One for the gents and one for the ladies.”

  Two toilets. For a seven-story hotel. Well, it’s a start.

  I saw no workers anywhere, and I asked Mr. Danso-Manu if he was overseeing construction himself.

  “Oh yes, Steven. I am making sure things proceed smoothly. I studied in the UK, you know. Three degrees.” He set his beer down on the toilet seat and, with studied deliberation, presented his business card as if he were a barrister revealing the key exhibit to the jury:

  K. DANSO-MANU

  M.A., LL.B. (CANTAB), B.L. (GRAYS INN)

  I never doubted his degrees. I put his card in my wallet.

  He pointed out what one might, with considerable imagination, suppose to be an elevator shaft. It was empty. “I am trying to get a lift,” he explained, “but they are very costly.”

  No doubt his lift would be installed and his hotel would be completed long before the laborers started clearing a path for the new motorway. “Is there any chance that the plan will change?” I asked. “What happens if the government decides to move the road to the other side of town?”

  Too late, I realized that I had just raised a delicate subject, one that Mr. Danso-Manu probably didn’t want to think about, much less discuss with a teenager.

  “I do not think that would be wise,” he said calmly. “The road will be built here. I have a cousin with the ministry in Accra. No, the road will pass right by here.” He meticulously pointed out the projected route, his elegant finger tracing a line in the air.

  What ministry? I wondered. Even this American schoolboy knew that Ghana was burdened with nearly two dozen ministries, including the Ministry of Roads and Highways and the Ministry of Transport—either of which would, at first blush, seem to bear responsibility for a motorway project. Who was in charge? Plus, there were the ministries of Trade and Industry, and Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, both of which could either promote or frustrate the planned highway to the Ivory Coast.

  I hoped Mr. Danso-Manu’s cousin was well placed. I wondered if he was really a cousin. In Ghana, it’s common to refer to a close friend or business colleague as “my cousin,” if they are your age contemporary; “my uncle or aunt,” if they are your senior; and “my brother,” if they are particularly close and especially when there is a favor to be begged—even though in each case, there is no actual consanguinity. “My cousin, I beg of you, please understand that I cannot pay back the money this week.” “Ei! My wife is too cross with me. Can I stay with you, tonight, my brother?”

  Mr. Danso-Manu and I stood in silence, and I found myself beginning to share his optimism. Despite the rationing of concrete, intermittent water, and unreliable electricity, Mr. Danso-Manu wrested enough material from God-knows-where to build a seven-story hotel frame in the middle of a cassava field on the far side of Sunyani. Two toilets, a disco dance floor, and space for an elevator—quite an achievement, even for a man with three degrees. If he could pull off this much, why shouldn’t he succeed?

  * * *

  By my fourth week in Sunyani, it became unavoidably clear that I was not going to get over my dysentery on my own. If wishful thinking were a cure, I’d have felt better the second or third day. And I couldn’t bear the sense that I was disappointing Yaw Brobbey, that my illness was a form of weakness that somehow reflected on him. He never said as much, at least not out loud, but I saw it in his eyes.


  Matters weren’t helped by the fact that I’d been eating so much fufu. Fufu is an Akan staple, a gelatinous starch made from pounding together boiled plantains and cassava, served in a calabash and covered with the most delectable goat or fish stews. You don’t chew fufu so much as you swallow it whole, without chewing at all. The Brobbeys ate fufu at almost every meal. What was I supposed to do? Ask the family to cook something else, just for me, when the rest of them—two dozen people—were perfectly content to eat this starch-heavy staple? If I were an exchange student in Ireland (or Wisconsin, for that matter), would I ask my host family to stop serving me potatoes? But I couldn’t help it. In my current state, there was no way I could digest fufu, day in and day out.

  At last I said to Yaw Brobbey, “Can I see a doctor soon?”

  “Yes, Steven. We will go inside and see a specialist, Dr. Sarwar.” A specialist? In diarrhea?

  The clinic in Sunyani reminded me of an old railroad depot. Long, wooden benches filled the main waiting hall. On each end of the waiting room were examination rooms. One small boy clutched a rubber sandal in his hand, his dark eyes following my every obroni move. The enameled blades of a slowly turning ceiling fan sifted together the sounds of whining children, the percussive maternal rebukes, the wailing babies, and the braying infirm. I took stock of all this and immediately felt better. Comparatively, I had little to complain of.

  “Steven, here is Dr. Sarwar.”

  “Hello, Dr. Sarwar,” I said with a meek smile, my stomach beginning to cramp for the umpteenth time. I started conducting my minute-quick toilet triangulation, a calculation of just how far the nearest lavatory might be and what obstacles might prevent quick access. An obese man blocking an aisle? A small child awkwardly using crutches like huge articulated locust legs to negotiate his way? An elderly woman incapacitated by some physical handicap? All would require an alternate route.