Cup Man and Other Stories

3. Wrong foot forward

26 3 Wrong foot forward eter Ngwa Akuma was well known in Azope town, the divisional headquarters of Kulanja. A tax officer for many years, he worked in several parts of the country before being posted to Azope as divisional chief of service for taxation. He worked in Azope for five years before being put on retirement. Once he was posted there where incidentally he had not worked before, he made up his mind that he would stay in Azope with his family after retiring. Peter Ngwa Akuma was not a native of Azope neither was he even from Kulanja division. In fact, he was from Mbome in Nyen division, hence the name, Akuma. His mother though was from Batuf, which was why he was named, Ngwa, after his material grandfather. For anyone who understood the socio-political map of the country, Menam, was no surprise that Peter chose this locality for his retirement home. Right from independence in the early 1960s, the government had adopted a policy by which it posted any civil servant, at anytime, to any part of the country. It is worth pointing out that the country had over two hundred national languages in addition to French and English being the official ones. The result was that even in a divisional headquarters like Azope one could find oneself living and working side-by-side with compatriots from many other parts of the country. In terms of the official languages, such postings and working arrangements meant that entire families which had moved into a zone where the other official language dominated, could learn and beginning to use it fairly easily within a couple of years. For Peter and his living in Azope, that official language vantage point was irrelevant because Kulanja, just like his own administrative division, Nyen, was in the predominantly English speaking part of the country. However, his family, including the children, spoke French, P 27 the reason being that he had served in French-speaking towns before, although not in the capital. Peter Ngwa Akuma and his wife, Akuma Bernadette, née Ambe, had five children, two of whom left the Ecole Normal Superieure and were now secondary school teachers. The eldest, Diana, taught English at the Lycée de Bangoualenga and her immediate junior, Louisa, was an Economics teacher at the Government High School (GHS), Bissouma. They were aged 32 and 28 respectively. Although Louisa was happily married with four children, Diana was still searching. Occasionally, she joked with friends saying if she hit 40 without finding a man, she would give up getting married altogether. Roman, aged 25 was in the United States of America, having been helped over by a cousin of his out there in Wisconsin. He was doing business administration, or so, his parents were told. Justus, 21, was a second year law student at the University of Benka, the national capital. The Benjamin of the family, Sandine, was aged 18 and in the Upper Sixth at Azope Government Bilingual High school (GBHS). Mrs. Akuma herself was headmistress of the local Government Nursery School. She was part of the first batch of candidates who entered the Ecole Normale Superieure for training Grade One teachers. After graduating, she taught in a government primary school and was later appointed chief of service in charge of teacher administration at the Ngwambong sub inspectorate of primary and nursery education. It was from there that she was appointed headmistress of Government Nursery School Azope. Two years before her husband went on retirement, she remarked to him that she was four years from it. She said it would be her greatest wish to set up her own nursery school in Azope, the idea being that nursery education was her sector. Besides, there was only one nursery school in the town, yet the population was growing. Thirdly, Mrs. Akuma just fell in love with the town and its people. She enjoyed the plain landscape of the region and liked the smiling and accommodating disposition of the people. Here, both she and her husband 28 vibrated on the same wavelength because he had also fallen in love with Azope hence his decision to make the town his dream retirement home. At the time Bernadette’s husband retired, he had built the much dreamed about home, in a quiet and forward-looking district of Azope. He had not finished construction work. However, work had advanced well...