Kofi: A Child of Lavie by Kofi Amouzou (review)

Kofi Amouzou, the author of Kofi: A Child of Lavie, grew up in the village of Lavie in the French-speaking West African nation of Togo. His book recounts episodes of his childhood. In addition to fascinating details, he utilizes a two-page author’s note to confirm certain pieces of information about himself. He writes that his is an authentic story: “I really did grow up in a remote village named Lavie, a collection of mud and clay houses with straw or tin roofs built into the African hills” (p. v).

Apart from a preface (pp. v–vi), the book has thirteen chapters: “Mud Man” (chapter one), “Village Elders” (chapter two), “Straw-Roofed Schoolhouse” (chapter three), “Ready for School” (chapter four), “Orange Boy” (chapter five), “Spider’s Hope” (chapter six), “Finding the Rhythms” (chapter seven), “School Fees” (chapter eight), “Christmas in Lavie” (chapter nine), “Sweet Mother” (chapter ten), “Journeyman Magician” (chapter eleven), “Things Fell Apart” (chapter twelve), and “Gonazol” (chapter thirteen). The book has pictorial illustrations (pp. 160–64), acknowledgments (pp. 165–66), and a note “About the Author” (p. 167).

As with the upbringing of youngsters in other West African countries, Kofi had to endure what has been described as back-breaking farmwork. In the opening chapter, he reminisces about village gods and the mud man. “Where were the village gods,” he asks, “when I needed them?” (p. 1). The village elders were “the mighty teachers, who hung out there and shared their experiences with us children alongside the sellers of food and crafts we mingled with” (p. 1).

As with most colonial experiences of linguistic imperialism, Kofi shows that instead of the local dialects or languages in his part of Togo, foreign languages reigned supreme: most members of the older generation spoke the colonial language, in this case German. Kofi highlights an episode dating back to 1884: “This one village elder named Adjovito even spoke German. He said that the German tongue was one of the few good things he remembered from his boyhood during the time Germany colonized Togo from 1884 through 1918” (p. 2).

Kofi remembers when his father joked about how the German colonialists had been driven out of Lavie by the French and the English. Those were “common anecdotes traced back to the colonial time, and they made me wish for a film replay of the German era to find out what it was really like. The bigger towns on either side of the village had grown more” (p. 45). During the good old days, “about eight long miles south was the town of Kpalime, where there was electricity, a hospital, a pharmacy, a town hall, a bar, kerosene-powered refrigerators, shops, a post office, a book store, gas stations, cars, and a bigger marketplace” (pp. 45–46). As with market days of other colonial towns, Kpalime’s “market opened Saturdays and Tuesdays and carried expensive foreign goods such as perfumed rice, dress shoes, cigarettes, fabrics, canned tomato paste, pasta, meat, bread, cookies, and Peak milk” (p. 46).

The book has a subtitle, “Things Fell Apart,” reminding readers of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s famous postcolonial novel dating back to 1958, typically viewed as the archetypal modern novel of Africa produced in the colonial language. Achebe’s book follows the life of Okonkwo, the Igbo (or “Ibo”) leader, a wrestling champion in his own village of Umuofia, but Amouzou’s Kofi, in his things-fell-apart episodes, has different anecdotes. He quotes René Descartes, the French philosopher, as having said in 1637 that “common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world” (p. 138). At barely thirteen years old, Kofi concludes that he has seen a lot of common sense: “A Lavie townsperson had common sense and used more than just a fair share of it” (p. 136). About to finish secondary school, whereby he would earn the French certificate known as lycée, Kofi and his friends and classmates were starting to think about the prospects that that qualification...