Search Sweet Country Read online

  KOJO LAING

  * * *

  Search Sweet Country

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Glossary of Ghanaian words and author’s neologisms

  About the Author

  Kojo Laing was born on the Gold Coast, Ghana, in 1946, studied in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1960s, before returning to Accra, where he would spend the rest of his life as a novelist, poet and educator. A writer of soaring originality and pioneer of Afrofuturism, his Search Sweet Country (1986) won numerous awards, vast critical acclaim, and has been praised as ‘the finest novel written in English ever to come out of the African continent’ (Binyavanga Wainaina).

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the bush just beyond Accra, the bush that handfuls of wild guinea fowl raised with their cries, sat Beni Baidoo. One hand held blackberries picked from thorny branches, the other hand held a jot whose smoke passed through the taste of the berry first. When this cigarette smoke got too much, he would rush to the sea and steal some of the freshness of the breeze. The language of the sea spoke in shells that he could understand: as the waves rolled uselessly over the sand, so his years rolled over him speaking of waste, of events that only showed through his wrinkles, and through the lives of others. He watched others as he did not watch his own life …

  Beni Baidoo was Accra, was the bird standing alive by the pot that should receive it, and hoping that, after being defeathered, it would triumphantly fly out before it was fried. But when he was lonely – which was not very often – his skin crawled all over him, unmaking and remaking wrinkles, tightening his eyes, and making his heart shrink smaller into his faded shirt; this heart could shrink so much that he feared it would secretly crawl out through the back of his chest … leaving its pumping and beating to his laughter. His laughter was part of his shirt. He was a sprightly old man who had retired twice: he had been a seconddivision clerk with an outrageous jaunt in his walk; and then he had become a letter-writer in Post Office Square, the trouble there being his habit of adding his own facts to the complaints of illiterate customers: often a story about a stolen piece of land ended up with a stolen wife added … so he had to retire again. Thus, shrewd and shrivelled, he went around Accra with his one obsession: to found a village. And if some of his friends were making serious and half-serious searches in their lives, he felt it his duty to balance this with his own type of search. The search of a fool touches other lives … Beni Baidoo usually had as much laughter with his food as possible, and finding himself in 1975, had broken up the year into different grades of laughter, sharing the teeth and noise among his friends Kofi Loww, Kojo Okay Pol, ½-Allotey, Professor Sackey, Dr Boadi and others. He brought to friendship a fine quality: nuisance value; and then flowed with his one obsession in and out of the lives he met …

  The two beards crowded in one corner of Accra did not agree … under the shoeshine tree whose breeze polished both souls, in Mamprobi. The mango tree grew, laying its fruit lazily on the unfinished wall. The fruit ripened but the city did not. The father’s beard shifted and pulled at different angles, taking in the sun and folding its rays under the hair. This hair saluted from a chin too small for it. The son’s beard was soft and vast with vaseline, the hair parting ways at the middle, in confusion, and finally lying against its own big chin exhausted. Both beards were, in the brotherhood of hair, heavy with commas; and showed that full stops above the necks of father and son were rare, that permanence was scarce. Erzuah the father’s beard had more fluff, more earth, more answers, more Saturday-nite powder, more tradition, and more smoke than the other. And this other was Kofi Loww the son’s which defined the face less clearly, the hair hanging on in the pose of an afterthought … but this same beard being so still, could father the whole city; and as it gathered, the hair spoke to the five feet of space between his chin and foot, filling the talking with cassava, aimless wandering, long stares at worlds that would not stay still, pawpaw and tart, and the up-down absence of Adwoa Adde, for Adwoa held a room in his heart. Erzuah’s beard had a web of wisdom, but the resident spider was missing; so that his sense of absence, which was far less than his son’s, would immediately be filled with goodness qualified, and with drinking … whether the spider was found or not. It was the learning to stretch his skin to fit the being of the moment that gave him grey hair at the back of his head … especially when the extra skin was needed for anger or for laughter. He believed his pipe to be richer than his mouth, and that a true hunter’s pipe shone and made value long before the mouth did: the hole of the mouth was second to the hole of the pipe. The son’s face was blacker, and had hopes in it brightening the small slanted eyes, which the deep obstinacy there whitened. In a meal, there was a path of okro leading from one mouth to the other, so that okromouth Erzuah talked the world into shreds, while Kofi Loww’s life slipped from another region of the face, with a curious dignity. After all, it was not doubted in areas of Accra that Kofi could walk yards backwards, without anyone telling the difference between his back and his front: the surplus slant of his beard did this, the jut of his bashi did that … the man with the travelling horizon at the nape of his neck. The dust, the ginger and rumours piled up against the walls, and shook them. Now, Erzuah’s eyes were so quick, so arrowed that they travelled in anger round the jutting bridge of his wide nose. This nose, smelling the world with suspicion, edged down with contempt at the ridiculously small mouth, a mouth that in days past was usually crowded with akpeteshie and abuse. The son took the spiritual weight of his father, two kilos; and when this spirit entered his beard – through three out of every ten hairs, he thought – he stooped with the thrust of the weight. Over by the scantlings in the higher grounds, Kofi Loww could see the vulcanizer eating his waakyi, sitting on the tyres that rounded his life. As the years wore on, Erzuah had become alarmed to see that he had been measuring important events in his life by the heat of each drunken tot, and by the linking spice of his pipe … so that one day he had not been able to tell the difference between gin and smoke. But he could still face the sea and blow fuse with Ghana aromatic schnapps.

  In those days, Erzuah’s wife Maame was a proud tower of fat, and when this fat was heated with his taunts, it fried and burned his dignity … then spread between his legs. Years of emotional walls, across which no mangoes lay, had taught her how to ignore him when he asked for anything. She talked to little Kofi alone when she had anything to pass on to Erzuah. This one-way shemouth almost halved Erzuah’s face with the anger it grew there. He accused her of trying to make him manless, of putting stones in his rice and beans. He rushed to her in his rage – in this compound yellowing – his pipe dangling in his mouth, and he shouted as she cooked, ‘You, your kitchen is full of hate! I can’t keep your food down in my stomach, it could be my grave on the fire now! All these years you think I haven’t seen you shake your buttocks at Yaw Brago … he’s rich, though there’s nothing between his legs. It’s money, not manhood, that he has between his legs! Bright coins, that’s all. At least for me I’ve fathered someone! You will bear him only pounds and pennies … and as for your face, hmmm, I’ve on
ly tolerated it all these years, it’s not fit for daylight, and it’s just like your mother’s …’ He then moved his dry, smirking body, dancing round her, puffing his smoke just above her duku. Kofi Loww was a little child, and he sat in the terrified corner of the world, the compound of which he was trying to push away with a desperate frown. His widened eyes saw his parents as two beasts from an Ananse story. He hated it when his mother insulted his father back, and included him, small as he was, in the insults. What had he Kofi done? His few words of despair sent to the middle of the quarrel were only like kerosene for their fire. Little Kofi lifted up one foot, as if to lessen the surface of terror on the earth. Maame changed her position, and then slowly rose, presenting a different target for the bursts of fresh abuse. At such moments, she was torn between the guilt she felt at listening with interest to the sly persuasions of Yaw Brago, and the need to fight back and make the point that Erzuah’s guilt should be far greater than her’s. She began to walk slowly. The snails and onions she was cooking with fell at her feet. Her arms had started to shake, as if exorcising the space around them. As the walls moved closer to the three of them, the passing car’s horn increased the turmoil. With her eyes searching the compound sky – the onion sky she looked at so often – she began to sing a song of supplication to God, showing her anger now only in the shaking of her big arms. Her brown cloth brightened with injustice, and her song was her twin. Then as she went on singing, her hand reached to her waist and loosened this cloth. As it fell onto the old concrete, she turned round with speed, pulled her underwear down, and completely bared her buttocks. She continued to sing, her eyes up high. Her beads defined her outrage, were the roundabouts of the utter confusion in the eyes of Erzuah. He could not move; Kofi wanted to borrow his father’s feet, but he could not move to do so either … four feet stuck in the depths of the world. Maame then started to walk backwards towards Erzuah, slowly, contempt on her face, and screaming with terrifying weight, ‘Yes, look! look well! You haven’t seen it for years! I will stand here like this till Yaw Brago and everyone else come to the house! If you don’t want me, others do! I can have more trousers than you can ever count. And this son of yours always takes your side. Fools together! I will claim back every expense I’ve made on the two of you. Yaw Brago wants to give me a cloth so what, so what, I’ll take it … I’ll take it at night lying down. So God help me!’ She resumed her singing and stood still, throwing her head from side to side.

  The hearts of father and son became one, turned and turned in their one desperate chest. In Erzuah’s head Maame had become fire, had become a witch with her powers turned in evil towards his destruction. He rushed across the compound with his batakari flying, and covered the tear-stained face of his son. ‘Kofi don’t look, don’t look. She’s mad, she’s mad in the buttocks!’ Maame still followed Erzuah backwards, in her abomination. The compound was the Bedford – just passed – in reverse gear, with all the roars now quiet. Erzuah’s own daze cooled him down, it reached his depths, forcing out of him a calm that both broke and raised the last barriers in his head: he suddenly had a feeling of righteousness. For an action beyond his own excesses had been thrown at him, and this released him from any feeling of responsibility. He welcomed her outrage, and yet wanted to kill her for it. His pipe, that weapon of war, held his jaws in determination. He drew at it with both hands, and no smoke, no comfort came. As his hands shook with one useless match after another, he pushed aside his ambivalence, took hold of his son’s hand and was walking out of the compound. Kofi pulled his hand away from his father’s and looked in terror at his mother. ‘Cover yourself, Maame, cover yourself,’ he said to her with prayers shining in his eyes. She stood, stiffening herself with the mercy of her son’s tears. But she ignored him, she looked through him as the light changed the colour of her skin, casting a deep purple of controlled shame around her. Erzuah’s shame had already vanished with the absence of his son’s withdrawn hand. He had gone out to the streets in a mad glee, shouting, ‘Come and see this woman! Come and see! She has found a new way of bringing up her child … She’s bringing up her child with her buttocks! Come and see, come and buy! As for this, it is cheeeaapp! Cheap! Come and see something you have never seen before! Come!’ The compound filled up in seconds with curious, gaping people of all ages, hooting, laughing, chattering in uproar, with little Kofi desperately trying to cover his mother. Erzuah joined them in their cries of ‘shame, shame, shame!’ There was a voice: ‘Her buttocks are copper coloured paa!’ Then two women came, they pushed Maame, with finality, into the nearest room, covering her and shouting at her, and asking her how deep she wanted to go to shame her womanhood, just for a man … Maame replied, shaking, ‘deep as the sea, the man is a devil!’ ‘Then,’ one of the women said sadly, ‘you have made all women naked in Accra today. Did you not, did you not see the face of the men?’ Maame merely gathered her shaking and held it in her unstill arms. She looked down deep. The women left her as quickly as they had come, and drove away the crowd in the compound.

  Not a word was said to Erzuah, whose eyes they avoided like a great sickness. He had risen from his exhausted stool, his handkerchief full of the powder of other people’s passing sympathy: ‘What a wife to live with,’ they had said. Kofi could neither comfort nor even look at his mother. The walls moved far away, and the dying muttering outside them was more than a judgement; it was an intrusion into the shattered heart. The probing breeze had nothing for the father, nothing for the mother; the bird it had blown over sang by the gnarled tree near Kofi. Erzuah rose again, his heart under the fuel of a new resolve, this in turn being fuelled by shame … as if all the years of waste had been redefined then. He was leaving the house: he gathered his clothes, his gun, his photographs, his cloths, his railway testimonials, his pipe, and his son … who stood there rigid and unleaving. When Kofi finally moved broken to his mother, all she said was, ‘Go, go, go to your father! I can’t look after a mistake, my whole life with him has been a mistake …’ Kofi did not wait. He threw his broken heart at her, and left, running to his father at the gate, shouting, ‘Papa Erzuah, if I must stay with you, I will. I will help you to move everything.’ Father and son left in their doubt, and Erzuah’s hat could fit both of them since the pain was so wide. They did not see Maame stare after them with an intensity that felt nothing and for a long time lived nothing. She built up a bank of silence that she later withdrew from, sharing her indignation – and guilt – among her sisters until it was all finished, all forgotten.

  The sun broke into his face and bisected it. Kofi Loww, now thirty and living on the wandering side of doubt, walked along the High Street of Accra. His head was slightly lower than it should be, so that much of the world, even when laden with a breeze of fresh kyenam, raced immediately above him. Everything seemed to happen at a distance, yet could come back later with a sly poignancy. His father, whom he had changed over the years, was now trying hard to change him: Erzuah deeply wanted Kofi Loww to realise, through his wanderings, that it was necessary to continue with university, since he, Loww, had persevered with his diploma course. It was a matter of degree, Loww would think with irony; and standing under a sudden orange tree he thought his doubts would come to fruit. So his whole being, except for his okra, moved faster, as if the postponement of this decision was a dam raising his seeing level and letting it flow. His neck was tilted to one side away from the thrust of Accra. Each corner, each new vista opening out behind a building, a crowd, or cars was an intrusion and a release at the same time: interruptions ceased to be such, and became successive presences on their own. The neem trees held and brushed Accra, yet the corner breezes only moved the heat from one person to another, and to no other person than Beni Baidoo deep in thought and sitting on his donkey.

  Beni Baidoo wanted to found a village, away from his own Mfantse area … where he knew he was poorly regarded. He drove this desire as usual into other people’s garages, and Kofi Loww was the space that Baidoo saw now. ‘Hey young man! Is yo
ur father driving you to dream again! I know everybody in Accra except dignity! See my donkey, I bought it with my retiring benefits. I ride it with one buttock so that it will eat less and last longer. All I need now is a little help from my gooooooood friends to start my village. I can get land, I have my donkey, and all I need is a few human beings, some furniture, several superhuman girls, a family god, an okyeame, a village fool and a village thief … to steal from the rich to give to me gently. You should be more like Dr Boadi: he gives me beer to keep me quiet, but I have to talk to earn the beer first. Young man, how much can you contribute to this great new village?’ Baidoo said at great speed. Kofi Loww looked at his watch to see whether there was any luck in meeting Baidoo. He found none, he found only ten o’clock, and said nothing. ‘That’s right! Quiet as usual! I fear your silence as I fear your father’s noise … as for me I know everybody, and the rumour I have to pass onto you is that they want to arrest you, so stop walking about, and start making money for your little boy. I’ve told you, and I love sugarbread! Get me some, so that I explain to you how you managed to turn your father from a boozer into a half-drunk domesticated philosopher …’ Loww scowled, but put a cedi note behind the donkey’s ear, and walked on past the chattering Baidoo. ‘I am the explainer, this unimported explainer thanks you, Kofi … from the bottom of my heart and from my wife’s bottom too…’

  Passing Ussher Fort by Sraha Market where the Pentecostal church clapped its wall, Loww saw how clearly everything – from fresh water and churches to governments and castles – could fit so easily in reflection in the gutters. This city could not satisfy the hunger of gutters, for there was nothing yet which had not been reflected in them. The Bukom building gaped through its small windows at the ancient coconut tree … which danced with the odd rhythm of his own heartbeats. The old fisherman mending his net had hair the same colour as the passing clouds; and this same colour was thrown down in different shades onto so many buildings, buildings sharing among themselves the poverty and richness of different decades, different centuries. One hundred feet from Kofi Loww to the shore, the tides threw up good and evil as plentiful as Keta-schoolboys: he found no answer there, not even with the one shell that defined the entire dirt of the Jamestown sea. Each piece of doubt had the status of a grain of sand. Bebreee. And the sun rose from the prison yard after thirty minutes of custody. Everyone took the sunshine, the earth, and the streets freeee! The sun was the brightest sister! The sun was a baker: heads, laws, fish, backs, beauty, chiefs, and history all browned under it; and the deepest assessment of the twosided coin of life, the life of fufu, the life of pito, ended up with the same brown. And it was exactly this brown that Kofi Loww saw in the faces that laughed, frowned, mocked, and loved. Fatima bumped into him so that his thoughts fell down with her groundnuts. Fatima lived in a hut smelling of groundnut skins. She screamed: ‘Owula, you don’t look where you’re going? You are lucky that these nuts are still in their shells! And look at the dream on your face!’ Fatima had been trying to work out the number of groundnuts she could eat without her mother finding out, so she threw a grimace every few seconds at Loww as they picked them up. Loww stared above her so that, without looking, he was picking up as many stones and bits of alokoto, as nuts. When she saw this she shouted ‘Please go, please go. I’ll do this myself. Whaaaat! For all I know you have put half my nuts in your beard. My mother will kill me if I don’t hurry up and go and boil the rest!’ The bicycle repairer was pumping somebody’s patience into the shape of a tyre, for it could burst. When Fatima finished with her nuts, she carried some words quickly over to her friend who was selling oranges; as soon as the words were put down, they both burst into laughter at the disappearing Loww. But that tough aplankey with the smoke in his eyes thought they were laughing at him. So he spat out, as his old trotro passed. Fatima and her friend cursed him, chattering and laughing.