The Hundred Wells of Salaga

by Ayesha Harruna Attah

  “Cheap.” He cocked the bottle in Wurche’s direction and she shook her head. A ritual, even though Wurche didn’t drink.

  “Why do you keep welcoming them?”

  “Our situation is growing complicated. I need all the help I can get.”

  “Is this because of Kete–Krachi? Was it about who will succeed old Kpembewura?”

  In the event of the old chief’s death, succession would either go to the old Kpembewura’s son Shaibu, to Etuto, or to another lesser chief. Each of them represented a different line of the royal family. Etuto’s line had been sidelined for generations and from the looks of things, they would be once again. However, Etuto was convinced that if the white man helped him gain access to kola, he could restore Salaga to its glory and the other two lines would pick him as successor to the old Kpembewura.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “We just got back and the British officers were already here. I need to rest. I promise to tell you about it tomorrow.”

  Wurche’s brothers walked in, as if their father’s words were the password they needed.

  “Shouldn’t we be working with our allies in Dagbon?” asked Wurche. “Instead of these white men. Or fix relations with the Asante?”

  “What?” said Dramani. “The Asante who turned us into their slave raiders, making us raze entire villages to meet their yearly tributes?”

  “At least we were still independent,” said Wurche.

  “How were we independent, when even our market was under Asante control?” said Dramani. He was always going on about how people shouldn’t own other people and it was after one of those speeches that Mma had said he had a woman’s spirit.

  “People shift allies all the time,” said Wurche. “We did it. There was a time when we were enemies with Dagbon. How many wars did we fight against each other? Now Etuto’s best friends come from there. I trust the Asante more than the white men.”

  “Like Etuto mentioned,” Sulemana said, “it’s been a long day. Have you told her?”

  “What?” asked Wurche.

  “We’re moving to the farm,” he said gravely.

  “Why?”

  “I am tired,” said Etuto.

  “He says he needs a quiet place to think,” added Dramani.

  They only went to the farm once a year, for Etuto to rest. Drenched in boredom the day after they arrived, Wurche would begin counting down the days till they returned. There was nothing to do there. None of them farmed. Etuto’s slaves tended the unfruitful land. And, unlike Kpembe, it didn’t have a big town a fifteen-minute horse ride away. Something wasn’t adding up. Why did they have to move, not just visit?

  “Wurche,” said Sulemana, “go and prepare the little ones.”

  She would tell Mma to prepare her younger siblings, and say Etuto requested it. She didn’t understand children. They got in her way. They were unpredictable. And their mothers were still around. Her mother had been from the area around Etuto’s farm, and the people there would not stop telling her how much she looked like this woman she had never had the chance to meet.

  Aminah

  Other caravans arrived in Botu, but none were as spectacular as the Sokoto caravans headed for Jenne. Baba often came back with a Salaga-bound caravan. The number of travelers in it had reduced more than ever, but because Baba could arrive with it, Na made them cook and sell.

  Aminah approached each caravan with a belly tied in knots, frightened of encountering the man from the Sokoto caravan. She made sure the twins stayed at her side, and as they shouted out “Maasakokodanono” in their high-pitched, singsong voices, bits of their excitement punctured her nervousness. This excitement wasn’t about newness; it was about hearing of Baba’s adventures.

  Others, too, were looking for familiar faces, even though some people didn’t miss the chance to steal a glance at a pretty item or two; they searched for familiar clothes, although the people who went away always came back dressed in something that sparkled brighter, something that suggested they had left Botu; everyone’s collective noses seemed to sniff for the smells of their loved ones, but the aromas of cooked food, new spices and novelty perfumes overwhelmed their senses. It was a fight between what the people of Botu knew and what was new. And, always, what they knew won. They wanted their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters back.

  For a month, Hassana, Husseina and Aminah stared and stared until the last beggar had paraded by. After another month, they started asking. No one had seen Baba and his albino donkey. The third month Baba was away, Na told them not to sell anything to the caravans. They had made enough from the previous months to survive, and Na said people would talk if they kept on as if everything was all right. The fifth month Baba was away, Na forbade her girls to wear black or cry in front of others. She said there was no reason to cry.

  Aminah soon found that Na said things only so the neighbors would have nothing to talk about. Na, like Aminah, kept things buried in her belly and needed to be coaxed to let them out. One evening it had rained so hard that Aminah and Eeyah’s roof caved in, so Aminah went into Na’s room to sleep and Eeyah into Issa-Na’s. Aminah was shocked to find tears streaming out of Na’s eyes. Hassana and Husseina lay on the mat, Husseina curled along Na’s spine, and Hassana rubbing Na’s belly. It was only then that Aminah noticed that Na’s belly was as large as the calabash Obado used to drink his millet wine. Her large smocks had hidden this very important detail.

  “Why didn’t you tell Baba about the baby?” said Aminah, remembering that when Issa was born, Baba had not done his caravan trip.

  “It was too early,” said Na. “It’s still too early. I don’t know if this baby will stay or not. Not every baby is meant for this earth. Sometimes, Otienu breathes a spirit into a body and realizes that he wants the spirit back. And that’s the baby’s destiny. But I tried to warn him. I felt it, that he shouldn’t go, but do men listen?”

  Every night, Aminah would return to Na’s room and find her mother weeping. Aminah’s own tears were right behind her breastbone, ready to flow in an unstoppable pool, but she remembered her father’s last words to her, that she should take care of her mothers. Had he known he wouldn’t be coming back?

  The next day, she went to the neighbors and asked their son Motaaba to fix her bedroom roof. She dragged the twins out of Na’s room, undid their cornrows, which were looking wilder than the grass around Botu, and sat Husseina on a stool between her knees.

  “How did Na get the baby in her belly?” asked Husseina.

  Aminah had some idea of how babies were made. Some of her friends were already married and had come back to Botu with their babies, so she knew it involved being with a man, but since she hadn’t had a suitor yet, she hadn’t been initiated into the ways of womanhood.

  “It was a gift from Baba,” she responded.

  “Baba hasn’t been here,” retorted Hassana, arm’s lengths away, drawing stick men and women in the sand. “And he’s not coming back.”

  “Well, he gave it to her before he left,” said Aminah. She turned to Hassana. “And we don’t know that yet.”

  “Why didn’t he give Issa-Na a gift?” asked Husseina.

  Aminah wanted to have answers. She, too, had many questions. She wanted to know how babies were made. Why Baba married Na and then Issa-Na. Why Baba wasn’t back. Why, if she was as beautiful as people claimed she was, she didn’t have a suitor. Yet the person she could talk to was lost somewhere no one knew.

  “Aminah, my question,” said Husseina.

  “Because she’s the first wife, she gets the gift first. When Baba comes back, he’ll give Issa-Na a gift too.”

  “Baba is not coming back,” said Hassana.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” asked Aminah.

  “I dreamt that he was in a room with no doors and windows and he kept touching the walls to find a hole,” said Hassana.

&n
bsp; “So that was Baba,” said Husseina. “I also dreamt that someone was stuck in a place with no light.”

  Even though it had happened a few times, Aminah wasn’t sure if it was possible for the twins to dream of the same things. Usually, their shared dreams were of Botu or their friends at the water hole. Harmless things. There was something more sinister about this one.

  “It doesn’t mean he’s not coming back,” she said, more to reassure herself.

  After she finished the twins’ cornrows, she went to Issa-Na’s room and was enveloped in grassy, minty air, from the medicinal herbs she gave to Issa to cure his many sicknesses. Ebony roots, baobab leaves, dawadawa bark, Issa-Na had it all. Issa-Na was teaching him to play awale, and was rattling the seeds in her hand over the wooden, round hollows of the board when Aminah walked in. Awale was Aminah’s favorite game and others were often surprised at how competitive she got, trying to end up with four seeds in the most number of hollows. Issa waved at Aminah.

  “I came to find out if I could help you with anything,” said Aminah.

  “No, thank you,” said Issa-Na.

  Aminah was about to walk out, when Issa-Na whispered, her voice a shaky version of itself, “You don’t realize how much you love someone until they’re gone. Maybe he ate something and fell sick. Maybe someone tried to cheat him and things went badly. He’d have sent word if he’d been able to. Or maybe he got lost. But the way he’s quiet…he probably would not have talked to anyone.” Her hair had been tied back, but as she said this, she let it loose, and it grew like a cloud around her face, thick and full of tiny coils. In that moment, Aminah thought her beautiful. That she was teaching her son awale also warmed Aminah’s heart.

  “Let’s keep praying,” said Aminah.

  As if released from a trance, Issa-Na realized who she was talking to and closed her mouth.

  Aminah decided to talk to Eeyah the next evening. Everyone said the aged were wise. She would have answers. Usually, the old lady was knocked out before Aminah even entered the room, so Aminah finished cleaning the evening pots as fast as she could and went into the hut she shared with her grandmother.

  Eeyah wiped her fallen breasts with a wrapper and made for her pipe, carefully folded in a piece of cloth next to the mat she shared with Aminah. From birth, Aminah had slept in her grandmother’s room. Eeyah was the one who bathed her and looked after her. To allow Na and Baba time for each other, it made sense for the baby to stay with her grandmother. Eeyah took the pipe out of the cloth, held the bowl, and looked about for her tobacco leaves. She stuffed the leaves in the bowl of the pipe and suddenly seemed to notice Aminah for the first time.

  “Is the fire still going?” she asked.

  “Yes, Eeyah.”

  The old lady went out and shuffled back in with a lit pipe. She slit her eyes at Aminah. “Why are you here so early?” She extended her tongue and inserted the pipe into her mouth.

  Aminah watched her grandmother while thinking up an answer. Baba must have looked more like his father. Where his eyes were round, Eeyah’s were long and sharp. While Baba appeared perpetually distant, Eeyah looked like the kind of person you couldn’t lie to. When Aminah was younger, her friends avoided their house because they said her grandmother was a witch.

  “Is Baba still alive?” said Aminah.

  “Oh my child. What a question,” whispered Eeyah, pipe between her teeth. “Only Otienu knows.” Eeyah’s skin, which Aminah had always found beautiful, was beginning to lose its luster. The air was hot and heavy and left a wet sheen on everyone’s skin but Eeyah’s. Was her son’s disappearance affecting her health?

  “When I was a girl,” continued Eeyah, “my baba would tell me about how people were kidnapped and sent up through a desert only to end up as slaves. Many of them didn’t survive the terrible journey. Their bodies were often found next to wells. They died just as they reached a source of water. We didn’t live in Botu then; we were closer to Jenne. He said he and his parents lived even farther away from Jenne, but because of raiders and people of the book, they moved down. Now the raiders come from down, not from up. Going to Jenne is safer than going to Salaga. But I pray…”

  “Eeyah, what are you saying?”

  “Nothing, my child. Don’t listen to my ramblings. But hear this, we don’t know if and when he’ll show up. But whatever happens, you need to be strong. There are people who need to be taken care of, and there are people who take care of others. You are your mother’s daughter. She takes care of people, as do you. But with the baby she’s carrying, she’s more likely than not going to break down. We all know Issa-Na can barely take care of herself. It’s only a matter of time before I join the ancestors. It’s on you to be strong for us all. It’s not an easy task I’m asking you to take on. It will absorb a lot of your energy. You already do so much for the house. And it will be a drain on here too.” She jabbed at Aminah’s heart. “But we need someone to look up to, and that person is you, with all your fifteen years. We have no choice. You have no choice.”

  Eeyah set down her pipe, tugged Aminah into her arms, and began a song she’d always sung. One that only then made sense to Aminah. It was a sad song about their people leaving a land in the East, where a long river made the land fertile and provided so much food there was surplus, and how invaders had forced them out, making them travel the desert, eventually disintegrating them into smaller and smaller clans.

  Wurche

  A small forest marked the lower boundary of Etuto’s farm and next to it was a water hole. At the upper end, the soil grew drier and stonier. The sparse land of the farm stretched on forever, and yet, the feeling one got there was not unlike being cornered in a small, dark room. Wurche’s boredom and claustrophobia were aggravated by the dreams she kept having of the slave-raiding Moro. Her father hadn’t come out of his room in days, and his wives wove in and out, each time looking more perplexed than before they went in, sometimes clutching empty bottles of alcohol. There was no telling when or if the family would return to Salaga–Kpembe. Every so often, Etuto slid into one of these episodes: days when he did nothing but apparently stare at the wall. The rumor was that he’d stop eating and bathing, and wouldn’t speak to anyone while the bout lasted, occasionally drinking rum or gin. Mma, always full of explanations, said it was jinns that possessed him. In his lucid moments, he’d asked that Wurche never be allowed to see him like that.

  She mounted Baki and rode in the direction of Salaga. She could say her teacher had sent a messenger for her. Or that Mma—Wurche would toy with her forgetfulness—had left something behind. She was so occupied with finding an excuse for leaving that she almost missed Dramani wiping down a musket in the grass, a pouch slung across his chest. Covered with a brown patina, its inscription in Arabic was still visible. One of Etuto’s first guns with his name on it. A wide smile lit up Dramani’s face, as it always did when he saw her. People who didn’t know better thought they were twins, a resemblance she refused to see. They were born a day apart, to different mothers. Dramani’s mother was still going in and out of Etuto’s hut; Wurche wondered if her mother would have done the same.

  “Who gave you that?” she asked, not returning his smile.

  “Etuto,” said Dramani. “He insists that I improve my shooting to be a man.”

  Sulemana was the only one who had a gun. Wurche wanted to go to Etuto’s room to protest his partiality. True, she didn’t have a manhood to prove, but she’d asked him many times. Sulemana had allowed his siblings to shoot his musket a few times and Wurche proved better than Dramani every time. Etuto knew that. Yet she wasn’t being given a chance. Also, the white men had given Etuto so many guns that he hadn’t used. He could have given them each one. Then she had another thought.

  “Are we shooting at guinea fowl now?” she asked. “What happened to the trusty bow and arrow?”

  Dramani was quiet.

  “Shouldn’t you be lear
ning how to grow yam?”

  “Perhaps,” he said after a while.

  “You’re hiding something.” It was quite possible that Etuto was grooming Dramani, since he wanted to rest, but one is often suspicious for good reason. There had to be more to this story of Dramani being given a gun.

  “Shall we work this together?” asked Dramani.

  He was the last person with whom she wanted to spend her afternoon, but shooting would be a way of avoiding trouble. She nodded and waited as he scrambled back to the stable to get his horse. They rode out silently to the small forest, redolent of dust and cinnamon. Wurche dismounted and tied Baki to a tree. The trees were spaced wide enough for her to keep an eye on Baki and for them to practice comfortably and not scare the horses. The sun’s rays sliced through the branches between the tall trees, splaying out onto the dry, gray soil. Dramani thrust the musket into Wurche’s hands too happily, and she, just as willingly, took it.

  Now that she’d thought of it, guinea fowl would be delicious targets, but the soil on the farm was so arid, all the birds had fled. She looked about and saw, about ten paces ahead, a slim truncated tree. She found dried baobab pods, most of which dissolved to powder in her hands. She dropped the large stone she’d considered—the shot would ricochet badly—and settled for a short branch, which she placed on top of the trunk. She went back to Dramani.

  “Where’s the cartridge?” she said. “I hope you brought a lot.”

  Dramani frantically rooted through his leather pouch and took out a small cartridge wrapped in a paper and a tiny clay pot—the kind Mma liked to carry around filled with shea butter so her skin was always shiny. Nerves hit Wurche suddenly. She’d been confident all along, but she’d only practiced with Sulemana a few times—two or three—and an expert that did not make. Still, she took the items from Dramani and proceeded as if she were. She bit open the paper cartridge, revealing the gunpowder, as black as Baki’s coat, and poured it into the musket’s barrel. She extracted the ball from the cartridge, slathered it in shea butter, pushed it down the barrel, and added the rest of the gunpowder and the rest of the cartridge. She took the rod and tapped down the barrel’s contents, cocked the musket over her shoulder, and tried to ignore Dramani’s nervous rasping next to her as she aimed at the branch. She homed in and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.