The Tomorrow-Tamer Read Free

face by her strong fine-shaped bones. When I saw Kwabena coming along the street behind me, I did something totally strange to me. I turned and went to meet him, and led him back the other way, so he should not see her.
    Â 
    My father had forbidden me to take part in the mission parades, and I never went again. I wondered afterwards what he would have thought if he had known what I did instead. When the talking drums sounded in the evening, I got Kwaku to tell me any of their invocations which he understood, or the proverbs and parables which they drummed forth.
    Odamankoma created the Thing,
The Carver, He hewed out the Thing–
    I learned some of the other names of Nyame–the Shining One, Giver of Rain, Giver of Sun. Once for a whole year I called God by the name of Nyame in my silent prayers. I tried to find out from Kwaku–and was laughed at–the meaning of the saying “Odamankoma created Death, and Death killed Him”. When my mother was ill for the last time, I invoked Nyankopon’s strong name, Obommubuwafre, not for love of her but as a duty.
    God of my fathers, I cannot think You minded too much. If anything, I think You might have smiled a little at my seriousness, smiled as Kwaku did, with mild mockery, at the boy who thought Africa was his.
    The year after my mother died, I went back to England to school. It was not until I was seventeen that I returned to Africa on a visit. I had grown very like my father, tall and big-shouldered, and I did not have much difficulty in working my passage out as deckhand on a cargo boat.
    Kwabena was at school in Takoradi, but he came home several times to see me. He had grown taller, although he was still a head shorter than I, and his lank child’s body had filled in and become stocky. Apart from that, to my unobservant eyes he was the same. I wonder now how I could have thought so. The indications were plain enough, had I not wanted to ignore them. I asked him to come with me to the palm grove one day, to look at the fetish huts. His face became guarded.
    â€œI do not go there any more,” he said.
    We passed a man planting cassava in a little field.
    â€œThey pour libation to make the crops good,” Kwabena commented, “and then work the land like that, by hand, with a hoe.”
    We saw the District Commissioner one afternoon, his white topee gleaming. He was holding a formal palaver with the local chief.
    â€œWe will not always be slaves of the English,” Kwabena said. “That’s stupid,” I replied. “You’re not slaves now.”
    â€œIf they own us or own our country, where is the difference?”
    â€œSo they will have to go?”
    â€œYes,” he answered firmly. “They will have to go.”
    â€œSplendid,” I said ironically. “And I with them? If I were here in government?”
    He did not reply for a moment.
    â€œPerhaps I would not wish it,” he said finally, carefully. “But there is a saying–follow your heart, and you perish.”
    We did not talk of it again, and after a while I forgot.
    Â 
    Afua still lived with Yaa and Kwaku. I thought she had changed more than anyone. I see now that she had changed less than Kwabena, for the difference in her was one that life had brought about, easily, of itself. Her body gave the impression of incredible softness and at the same time a maternal strength. She belonged to earth, to her body’s love, to toil, to her unborn children. One evening, after Kwabena had gone back to Takoradi, I fulfilled the promise to myself and went to the palm grove. It was deserted, and the wind ruffled the tops of the trees like fingers through unruly hair. Afua walked quietly, and I did not hear her until she was very close. But she did not enter the grove.
    â€œWhy do you stand there?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t know. Perhaps to hear the ancestors’ voices.”
    â€œYou must