The village crier came from town, yelled something and was off with the speed of a mouse. Sahada’s family had settled nearby and she understood Twi, the Asante language, so at first Aminah would ask her to translate, but it was never anything interesting—a new provision from the coast, a new church opening up. So she’d stopped asking for help. Also, she’d started understanding snatches of Twi. That afternoon, the girls were taking a break after a sweltering and grueling day, and after the village crier left, Wofa Sarpong called and lined them up in order of height. His wives shuffled out of their rooms to watch. He pointed at Hassana.
“You Adwoa,” he said in bad Hausa. Hassana looked confused. “You understand? You Adwoa.”
He pointed at the next girl, said she was Abena. He was changing their names. The third girl’s was Akua, Aminah’s name was Yaa, and he went on like that, assigning names that corresponded with days of the week. Yaa. Thursday-born. Then he said their last name was to be Sarpong, his name. Yaa Sarpong. Aminah said it a few times in her head.
Wofa Sarpong said a lot in Twi and then turned to those who hadn’t understood him. “Inspector coming. You behave fine, understand? You don’t talk. You use the name I give you.”
Aminah was surprised by the speed with which she’d picked up Twi. Sometimes the words were similar to hers, like “di,” the word for eat. She could even eavesdrop on simple conversations between Wofa Sarpong and his wives. She learned that they lived near a town called Kintampo. And she learned that this Kintampo was within another place called the Gold Coast, which was governed by white men. But complex sentences were harder to understand, so when they went back to the abrofo nkatie tree under whose ample shade they had been lounging to keep cool, she asked Sahada to explain.
“People aren’t allowed to buy, sell or own slaves here,” said Sahada, picking up an abrofo nkatie fruit and biting greedily into its fleshy red pulp, its juices running down her wrist. “If the inspector finds out that Wofa Sarpong has slaves he’ll be fined heavily. Of course, a lot of people still have slaves, but they pretend the slaves are their children.”
“But me and Hassana look nothing like him,” said Aminah. She pointed at the new girls. “And they are much, much taller than he is.”
“All he has to do is act nice and give the inspector some gifts and he’ll be fine. That’s what my father does,” said Sahada, slurping on what was left of the flesh of the fruit. She spat the fruit’s woody leftovers onto her palm, then searched under the tree until she found a rock. Laying the seed on its side on top of the abrofo nkatie’s exposed root, she whacked at the seed until it cracked. She sucked her teeth in annoyance as she split open the mushed nut.
Sahada started talking about how miserly Wofa Sarpong was because he bought slaves cheaply in Kintampo and sold them together with kola in Salaga for a lot of money. Aminah asked her where Salaga was, but she had no idea.
* * *
—
The inspector didn’t come when he was expected. He finally showed up, one afternoon, when the girls were winnowing bowls of millet. Aminah heard Wofa Sarpong’s voice grow squeaky as he squealed and chased after a man in a round hard hat, a light brown shirt, shorts and dusty feet. The man acted as if he’d been there before and knew his way around. It was the same kind of confidence she saw in some of the Hausa traders who came with the caravans. It was the walk of someone who’d been given a small spoon of power and treated it as if it were a barrel. Wofa Sarpong’s wives and children trooped out. Sahada translated for Aminah.
“He’s saying he knows Wofa Sarpong has slaves,” Sahada said. “Sarpong just said, ‘But this is my family. What slaves?’ ” Wofa Sarpong took furtive glances at them. “He said the inspector should ask us himself.”
Wofa Sarpong went to his first wife and asked her to mention her name and the names of her children. Next was the second wife and her brood. Then the third and her children. Then the inspector, who at first seemed uninterested in the whole naming ceremony, looked straight at the girls.
“My nieces, my children,” said Wofa Sarpong. They weren’t standing in order of height this time. Aminah went first, said her name was Yaa Sarpong. The other girls mentioned their new names.
“Hassana,” said Hassana. She said it crisply and the silence that followed, although brief, could be sliced.
“Her late father was my brother,” offered Wofa Sarpong. “He married a Northern woman. Very beautiful. You know how they are tall. She’s Hassana Sarpong.”
The inspector regarded her and called her forward.
“Where are you from?” he asked her.
“From Botu. I am the second daughter of Baba Yero and Aminah-Na.”
Wofa Sarpong rattled a string of words and then said, pointing to his head, “She’s not correct.”
The inspector removed two cards from his front pocket and handed them to Wofa Sarpong. “You deserve five cards. This is your first warning. I’ll be back.”
“Yessir,” groveled Wofa Sarpong.
As the inspector left the farm, Wofa Sarpong followed him, praying for him to be blessed with many children. Hassana’s fingers were back in the bowl of millet, looking for stones that had to be removed. Aminah wanted to hide her.
When Wofa Sarpong beat his children, he beat them. You could hear the heavy thwacks as he raised his arms to the sky and landed his special whip on his children’s flesh. He didn’t stop until all the anger had drained out of him. Hassana and Aminah had been lucky so far. At most, they had been knocked on the head or screamed at to work harder, but they had never tasted Wofa Sarpong’s lashes.
Loud footsteps approached. Wofa Sarpong was coming back. Hassana didn’t react as she worked on her millet. His children squeezed out of their rooms, their faces cracked into wicked smiles of anticipation.
Hassana didn’t look up at him, which must have angered him even more. He grabbed her ear and used that to lift her up from the ground. Her bowl of millet came crashing down and the tiny gray seeds spread on the red soil, forming the image of a fan, on which Aminah fixed her eyes as he whacked his cane against Hassana’s body over and over. The spilled millet grew blurry. Hassana was screaming.
You should get up and protect her, Aminah kept thinking, but she was paralysed. What is wrong with you? Do something! She forced herself up and ran forward, sandwiching herself between Hassana and Wofa Sarpong. The silence that followed was thick and pregnant. He hesitated before unleashing the next lash. But before it landed on Aminah, Hassana shoved her sister out of the way so it hit her. Aminah watched motionless as Wofa Sarpong continued to whack Hassana. When he stopped, he was drenched in sweat, his cloth bunched at his feet. Gruffly, he pulled up the cloth, over his shorts, and returned to his room with his whip. Aminah dashed to Hassana, coiled on the ground, blood soaking through her wrapper. Sahada came over and the two girls carried Hassana to their room.
“Get leaves from the abrofo nkatie tree,” said Sahada. Aminah rushed to the tree and broke off a thin branch with flat wide leaves. She was running back to the hut when Wofa Sarpong burst out of his room, trailed by his second wife.
“Yes, she needs to go,” sang the woman.
“Bring her,” he ordered. Aminah dropped the branch and she and Sahada carried Hassana out. “Put her there.” He was pointing at the donkey cart.
“Please,” Aminah started, trying to delay whatever was going to happen next.
“Fast, fast!” he barked.
“Please, take us together.”
Wofa Sarpong glared at her with bulging, veined eyes. She stood with her arms at her sides as Sahada and Wofa Sarpong hoisted Hassana onto the back of the cart. Wofa Sarpong climbed up the cart, didn’t say another word, and hit the donkey to get it moving. Sahada grabbed the branch Aminah had dropped and threw it at Hassana, telling her to chew the leaves to rub on her skin. Aminah ran alongside the cart till her chest was ready to explode, but Wof
a Sarpong did not stop.
When she returned to her room, everything that happened sank in. Hassana had wanted to be beaten. Now that she’d connected with her Husseina, she wasn’t going to stay on the farm. She did everything so Wofa Sarpong would get rid of her.
When Wofa Sarpong’s donkey clip-clopped back a few hours later, Aminah rushed out, praying he’d had a change of heart, but Hassana had been traded for bales of cloth, a bag of salt, farm tools, and two chickens.
What is wrong with me? Aminah wondered. She wasn’t in physical chains: there were days after working on the farm, when she would spend hours with no one monitoring her. The land beyond the farm was thick with forest, probably bursting with wild animals, but she was sure no one would come after her. And yet she stayed.
“She get good buyer in Kintampo,” Wofa Sarpong said, later that evening, scrambling to his feet and covering himself. “He’ll take her to the big water.”
Wurche
A group of women, old and young, sat on mats outside Jaji’s hut, in the shadow of the tall Lampour mosque with its slanting walls and spokes from roof to floor. Their eyes patiently watched Wurche, waiting for her to teach them Nana Asma’u’s poem, “A Warning II.” Wurche felt as if her heart had been pushed into her mouth and she was surprised and annoyed by her nerves. After all those times she’d practiced speeches to Fatima in the Kpembe forest, she thought she’d breeze through teaching Jaji’s students, but now she didn’t even know what to do with her hands. She clasped them behind her and pressed her fingers into her back. She watched as some of the women wiped their faces with their brightly colored scarves. She heard distant drums. She heard bells. She smelled and tasted the woodiness of a fire. The egg-like smell of Salaga’s one hundred wells was carried over by the wind. Flies buzzed and zipped around her. Her senses seemed to have multiplied. The air was wet and heavy. She wiped her face and recited:
Women, a warning.
Leave not your homes without good reason.
You may go out to get food or to seek education.
In Islam, it is a religious duty to seek knowledge.
Women may leave their homes freely for this.
Repent and behave like respectable married women.
You must obey your husbands’ lawful demands.
You must dress modestly and be God-fearing.
Do not imperil yourselves and risk hell-fire.
Any woman who refuses, receives no benefit,
The merciful Lord will give her the reward of the damned.
“Good,” said Jaji, standing opposite Wurche in her trademark woven hat. She pressed her fingers together under her chin and hunched her shoulders, the posture she assumed when she wanted to gently admonish. “Now, Wurche will repeat the verse again, slowly, so you can start memorizing the lines.”
That morning, Wurche hadn’t stopped to contemplate the poem, but as she recited the lines again, she realized how much the poem was a warning for her. She had left her home to pursue education, but the last thing she was doing was behaving like a respectable Muslim woman. She banished thoughts of ending up in the raging fires of hell and instead observed, with increased amusement, the women struggling to repeat the poem. By the time they’d gone through it a fifth time, Wurche felt her nerves disappear.
The lesson was over by midday. Jaji called Wurche a natural leader, and said with Wurche’s help, she would be able to reach more women, a feat which would please the imam, who was convinced women could make sure their husbands stayed in the faith. He had been so unhappy since the war he was considering leaving Salaga. A place without a spiritual leader was doomed. And as Jaji prattled on about how difficult life had become since the war, Wurche panicked. This was now the only reason Adnan let her out of the house—to teach these women. Her panic was imbued with a sense of loss—an absence of something she couldn’t even name—and another sentiment: that of being covered by a thick cloth, a feeling that grew worse when Jaji asked her how her husband was, a feeling that stayed with her when she went to the rectangular hut (where she and Moro had done katcheji) and found it locked. It grew especially heavy when she went home and sat wordlessly by her husband during the evening meal.
The heaviness that had cloaked her lifted when she rode Baki and spent time with Moro. Once, riding down to Jaji’s, she crossed paths with him as he led a sluggish queue of men and women chained to each other, followed by two others on horseback. Moro moved with solemn purpose, and when he noticed her waving, he smiled, signaled to the other horsemen, and rode to her.
Around Moro, she was like a patient who only felt well in the healer’s company; her ailment was deemed benign, curable, but when the healer left, her symptoms returned. It amazed her that her heart had such control over her.
Wurche appreciated that Moro talked to her, because since her marriage, she had almost no access to Etuto and her brothers, except during mealtimes. Just that morning, before she’d left for Salaga, she walked into Etuto’s room, where he and his mallam were huddled over a manuscript. She asked him what it was.
“The treaty of friendship we signed with the Germans five years ago,” he said, standing up to herd her out. “How are things with Adnan?”
“The one that declared Salaga part of the neutral zone?” Wurche asked, ignoring the question about Adnan.
“Mallam Abu is here. Another time?”
Lately, all her encounters with Etuto fell into that rushed pattern.
* * *
—
She went to Salaga and after the class at Jaji’s, she met Moro in Maigida’s back room.
“Do you spend any time with the Germans?” she asked him. “They signed a treaty to make Salaga and the north a neutral zone and yet they have taken sides. They are protecting the people who fled Salaga after the war.”
He leaned forward. A young girl was rasping in the corner. Whenever his slaves were present, Wurche and Moro just talked.
“They signed treaties of friendship with the chiefs in the north, not protection,” said Moro. “Kete–Krachi is not in the neutral zone and whoever enters the town is under the protection of the Germans.”
“If the Germans say they are friends with us, they shouldn’t harbor our fugitives.”
“You’re confusing friendship and protection. The reason Salaga is not under protection is its location. To the south are the British, to the southeast the Germans, and to the north the French. Nobody wants to go to war against each other. And don’t forget the mighty Asante. Everyone wants Salaga and, for now, keeping it neutral pleases everyone.”
The slave girl sneezed, an intrusion into their conversation. Before spending time in Maigida’s back room, Wurche had never considered what girls like this one, or her childhood friend Fatima, could have gone through to end up as slaves. She hadn’t seen this side of the slave raids. In the dank room, they weren’t like the slaves who worked on Etuto’s farm and went back to their own houses; in the dank room, they were caged.
“Don’t you feel for her, for them?” she asked.
Staring at the girl intensely, he said, “I do.” Then a beat later, “But destiny placed me on this path. My people believe even a thief has to do his work well.”
His parents had sent him, as a child, to work for Shaibu’s father. When he’d shown promise in horse riding and archery, the old chief co-opted him for his slave-raiding army. He was sure his destiny would lead him to something. What, he wasn’t sure of.
“My grandmother says I’m more interested in the running of Kpembe than I am in the business of Salaga,” said Wurche. “And maybe she’s right. I don’t know much about this. Would Salaga be worse off if we simply stopped the trade?”
“Yes. We would have to replace the slaves with some other trade.”
“My father thinks it’s the kola nut…Tell me more. You do the raids, bring these people to Salaga to landlords like
Maigida; then what happens?”
“Maigida hosts the people who come in to buy the slaves.”
“And the buyers take them where?”
“Some to Asante, but we don’t get many Asante buyers anymore. Now, they are taken to the Gold Coast or down the Adirri. Some stay in Salaga and end up working for families like yours.”
Of all the options, a slave was probably best off with her family, she thought.
“And after that?”
“I’ve heard about a big sea. You know the Brazilian Dom Francisco de Sousa?”
Wurche nodded.
“He said the journey to Bahia was worse than the underworld. That the vessel he and a hundred others were stuffed in, something like a large canoe, shook everything in his belly, every single day of the crossing. Nothing stayed down. He said over half of the slaves on the ship died and were thrown into the water, and when he arrived on land again, he was branded with hot brass and sold like a bull.”
“How can you continue the raids knowing this?”
He was quiet then said, “This room is nothing compared to when we have to get them from their homes. I try not to leave anyone behind. Most raiders don’t take people who are very old, or babies.” His voice was a whisper. “They leave them behind and then set everything on fire. Some people think my way is worse, that I make old people suffer on the long journey to Salaga, but I’d rather do that than take their lives. I know I am trying to sound honorable, but I know I am not. I believe I’m working with something bigger than myself.”
* * *
—
About five months after her trysts with Moro began, Wurche sat in the dark, dank room, surrounded by the odors of fermenting millet and unwashed bodies. Even Baki had never smelled so bad. She covered her mouth with the collar of her smock to stifle her nausea. The four people were silent, except for one girl whose cough shook the entire room. Voices in the front room: Maigida’s, Moro’s and a third person’s. Moro had brought in a pot of water for his slaves, a small act of kindness she hadn’t seen any other raider do. Most of the raiders who came into Maigida’s hut shoved their slaves into the back room and didn’t look back. And yet, she couldn’t reconcile how Moro said he felt for them with how he continued to bring them into such unkindness. Then again, what right did she have to question Moro’s morality when her own family insisted on the trade?
The Hundred Wells of Salaga Page 9
