Tale of an African Woman

Chapter Nine

45 9 t was not very long after Chacha had died. The villagers started to notice some very weird patterns of behavior in Yaa. It started slowly and then took a turn for the worse. She came out late at night half-naked and went up and down the village talking to herself at the top of her voice. Unable to cope with the loneliness and shock caused by her mother’s death, she had become insane. Her once beautiful and long hair gradually became scraggy and then started to entangle into thick, dirty strands of ropy locks which fell over her bare, scrawny shoulders. Bare body, her strong and pointed breasts shamed the men. Her speech was incoherent and sometimes garbled. Her once shiny and silky skin started to develop warts and scabies as she refrained from washing her body. Yet underneath the filth and squalor her beauty was apparent. One afternoon, on a Njuellah, the day chosen by the village as its day of rest, she put up a show and made a declaration which provided a hint of the great tragedy to come. “These are my balls and they’re bigger than those of the Tabih!” she had exclaimed amid the silly laughter of a lunatic as she pointed at two little pumpkins which she had stuck underneath her skirt and which bulged out. This had provoked tremendous laughter among the villagers. “Even madness is never expressed in a language foreign to that of the lunatic,” a voice had cautioned following that declaration. Then slowly, like a skin container which was gradually filling up with water, her once flat and firm stomach started to bulge out until it became apparent that Yaa was pregnant. A lunatic woman pregnant in Bankim! It was an abomination, a severe breach of tradition which was punishable by I 46 death in the old days if the male responsible was found. The people of Bankim naturally believed that it was the work of one of the inhabitants of the neighboring villages which she sometimes visited. As the stomach grew bigger, she stayed home all day. One morning, the village woke up to intermittent bursts of a terribly violent thunderstorm and rain and also to the cry of a baby. Some people mustered the courage and went into Yaa’s hut. They found a tiny baby wrapped by its afterbirth kicking and screaming in a pool of blood by the woman’s side. One of them picked up the child. The others felt its mother and tried to stir her up. She was long dead and cold. All day, following that death, the village continued to be rocked by the thunderstorm. It rained very heavily and rivers and streams flooded their banks. Crops were destroyed and some huts and footbridges washed away. The thunderstorm was strange. But even stranger was the fact that it struck in the thick of the dry season. For the second time and from the same house, the community was stuck with a motherless baby. It was not long before many people noticed the very close resemblance which the child bore to one of the village dignitaries. Like the individual most people had in mind, the baby was very handsome, with a deep brown complexion, thick nappy hair, snub nose, wide mouth with full lips and above all a broad forehead. Though those who had seen the baby refrained from making any open declarations, behind the scenes whispers began to circulate. Many of the whispers were malicious and sometimes tended to implicate the entire Council. When they got into the ears of Asanbe, he was overcome with shame and embarrassment. He silently reflected over the incident but was not convinced that any member of the Council could have had the lunatic pregnant. Something had to be done to clear the name of the Council. It was to tradition, which had been pretty much disrespected, that he thought of turning for an answer. “No man of this august body could be responsible,” he murmured to himself as he tried to assemble other members of the Council. 47 Ngufor was the first to come to his support when he disclosed what he planned to do. As it was their right as members of the Council, the two convened a meeting shortly after their discussion. When the Council met, even though nothing had been disclosed, a certain feeling of uneasiness...