Yefon: The Red Necklace (8 page)

“My findings confirm that the UPC revolts in French Cameroon are getting serious,” Uncle Lavran said to Pa, one day in 1955 when he was visiting.

The Union des populations du Cameroun, aka the UPC, was one of those new political parties that were formed in Cameroon in the late 1940s. Pa only listened, and drank his palm wine without commenting. As usual, I was at his feet listening to the conversation while slicing bitter leaves that Ma was going to use to prepare supper.

“These local rebellions in French Cameroon are being brutally suppressed,” Uncle Lavran said eloquently, a worry line deep on his forehead.

Just like most of the things he said, I didn’t understand the meaning of his last sentence, but I listened on watching both him and Pa.

“And so how does that affect my palm wine supply?” Pa asked, jokingly.

He was hardly a man to speak just for the sake of it. His words were always cool, calm, and calculated as if he processed every thought, every answer, and every reaction before even replying.

Uncle Lavran looked offended. “I speak to you about how the whole of Africa is being thrown into the shackles of colonial rule and your answer is palm wine?” Uncle Lavran asked, raising his voice slightly.

I shared a look with Kadoh. I knew we both thought that his nose opened too wide as he shouted furiously. But Pa was very collected when he asked effortlessly what Uncle Lavran thought the solution was.

“Self government,” Uncle Lavran replied, lighting up a cigarette and inhaling deeply. Pa nodded his head, but said nothing.

I had just turned fifteen when Uncle Lavran visited again and he gushed about how big I was, and how soon they will start collecting my bride price. I smiled shyly, playing with my right foot as he spoke. This time, he had brought us biscuits, and we received them gratefully.

It had been almost eight years since his return from the war and all shapes and sizes of women flocked to our house with gifts to visit him during his short stay. Pa’s wives grumbled loudly about his whoring tendencies, and Pa warned him about them and advised him to take a wife. Uncle Lavran eventually married Kinyuy, one of the young ladies in the area, and resettled in the
Mbiame
region.

His visits decreased dramatically after his move, and Pa always sat in the front door reminiscing about their childhood. He told me stories of how they had gone hunting as children and caught a fat bird. They fought over whose bird it would be until
the bird escaped, and then they fought each other until one of them bled.

“Ha ha ha!” Pa laughed deeply, adjusting his loincloth between his legs as he chopped some pieces of beef on the chopping board. “It goes to tell you that a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.”

I didn’t know what that meant and my quizzical expression gave me away.

“I mean that my brother is all I have, and I have to hold on to him now that he is still here, just like you and your siblings.”

“I don’t ever want you to die, Pa,” I acknowledged.

He looked at me for a moment then smiled and returned his attention to the sloppy beef that he was chopping for dinner. Beef was scarce at that time, and I was still getting used to its rancid smell.

“As sure as the sun rises each morning, we will all go someday,” Pa explained then he looked at me. “You must remember that you are special and don’t be afraid to be yourself because everyone else in this village is taken.”

Those words made me smile, and I became surer of myself, no matter how anyone else saw me. I felt alive, and proud of the fact that I was different from everyone else. “Everyone is taken,” I sang happily to myself, basking over the newly found joy that came with this realization. It almost felt as if I had only been existing rather than living for the beginning portion of my life.

Uncle Lavran and his wife, Kinyuy, came around before the day of my scarification. It was the pride of a Nso woman to show off her beautiful perky breasts and her scarification tattoos on her back and stomach. Only wealthier people could afford it since scarification was a costly practice. All of my siblings had theirs done before the age of eighteen, and I was no different.

“I find this process rather archaic and primitive,” Uncle Lavran explained to Pa over a cup of tea that his wife had brewed for them. None of Pa’s wives knew how to make tea and they gossiped about her as she bent over the fire, squinting to deal with the smoke that was heading for her eyes.

I liked her. She was a loveable character, and I went up to her and introduced myself while my sisters watched from a distance. She smiled at me and offered me some tea. It was the first time I ever drank tea. I tasted a little bitter, and I recoiled as
soon as my tongue touched the hot liquid.

“Can you make it clear to me the importance of this unnecessarily arduous process?” Uncle Lavran asked, causing Pa to reflect but Pa had no answer. I think he tried to discuss the option of them dropping the process but Ma would have none of it.

“Let them not do it on their children. It does not affect me, but as long as Yefon is my daughter, she will do it. As the rest of us have.” Ma concluded, her lips bundling into a thin line.

I was never asked, and even though I was afraid of the seemingly hurtful process, I succumbed. Mine was done by one Ta Shemlon, a large man who lived on an isolated hill several hundred yards away from the rest of the hamlet.

His hut smelled predominantly of
meyanga
and was marked with several symbols. An assortment of well-sharpened knives lay gently on the wall initiating my fear once we arrived.

A sheep was brought and Ta Shemlon slit its throat as he mumbled several incantations. A giant thunder roared and I screamed when a thick amount of blood gushed out fiercely and splattered all over his face. And on my feet.

“Am I going to die?” I cried, every part of me shivering.

He was very silent and had an intense look on his contoured face. With a hot knife from the fiery furnace in front of him, he branded pictures into my skin. I literally thought I would perish when the blade first touched me. I began to cry and I could hear my father causing a ruckus outside. He worried that if it hurt too much then I shouldn’t do it.

Ma held him back. She told him one day I would love my body. It burned as Ta Shemlon etched his old knife into my skin over and over again. I almost collapsed by the time he was done, but I had to stay conscious to show off my new scars—for they truly looked spectacular.

They fully healed almost a year later. They formed uniform keloid marks all around my breasts and on my back. With the excitement that comes with any new possession, and just like everyone else in the village, I proudly showed off my upper body by wearing only a small woven cloth from Northern Nigeria over my privates. But after a thousand bug bites, I slouched comfortably back into my clean cotton dress.

Even though time had passed, Uncle Lavran and Pa still
conversed in the same pattern. First they argued about who should pour the wine.

“I am a guest, you should honor me,” Uncle Lavran explained cordially, occasionally distracted by the sharp sound from my brother’s tools that were being used to weed grass from the nearby lawn.

“I am a titled man,” Pa replied, and after a thirty minute playful back and forth debate, Pa finally said he would pour, and he would hold the bottom of the gourd to pour the wine.

Uncle Lavran brought up the new school that was being built, and I eavesdropped as Yenla and I dutifully cracked groundnuts at Pa’s feet.

“You should contribute to that school, you know,” he began, speaking hesitantly as if he didn’t know how to bring it up.

I looked up to see what Pa would say. The sharp “
crcr
” sound of dry hard groundnut shells filled the air as Pa took a moment to think on what he had just heard.

“St..stop lis..lis...,” Yenla wobbled.

“Listening?” I said innocently.

Yenla looked as frustrated as a fish on a bicycle. I knew she really hated it when someone tried to complete her sentences for her, but it was hard not to. A conversation would literally drag on for hours if allowed.

“Lavran, you know I am a Nso man to the core!” Pa declared. “I am not contributing, not even one
shilling
. For what? No way!”

I looked back to Uncle Lavran who was now laughing hysterically then he immediately got serious.

“I sympathize with your sentiments, but I’m afraid one must consider the importance of education to survive in contemporary times.”

I didn’t hear all of it since Ma sent Kadoh and me to her friend’s house to collect a pot.

“Ya Mbilam lives on the way to the Catholic mission. You just take the first turning point on the left, just after Pa Rime’s house. Go there, take the pot and come back.” Ma said.

‘There are four houses around Pa Rime’s house. Which one’?

‘The one with the tallest mango tree’ she spat back.

It was rather unfortunate because I really wanted to finish
listening to the conversation. As we were preparing to leave, I heard my name sounded in a low voice.

“Yefon! If I hear that you wandered off anywhere,” Ma warned, “I will kill you myself.”

I curtsied politely and left.

And just like that, because of Uncle Lavran, Pa became a contributor to the newly built Shisong Primary School. A school I would never be able to attend because I was a woman and that was what the tradition said.

”What have you done, Pa wan?” Ma pursued him, yelling. She clapped her hands and put them on her waist. “Lions have become
ngwv
∂
v
s.”

Pa was silent. He stared at one point on the wall, and then eventually ordered firmly, “Leave me alone!”

Ma went quiet. “Sorry, my husband,” she apologized and excused herself from Pa’s hut. Pa never beat his wives and children like other men that I knew. He believed in voicing one’s opinions, but Ma knew when to stop. I suppose she didn’t want to test his temper. Kadoh told me that in his youth, Pa’s temper was like a wild lion but he had calmed down with fatherhood.

“I was thinking about taking adult classes,” Pa confided in me as soon as we were alone. “Your uncle says it will be good for my business.”

I looked around to make sure he was speaking to me, and he was. The Nso people are a proud nation and Pa was no different. Just like most men in the Nso tribe those days, he was against the white people and their education. Unlike most tribes, we offered strong resistance to the white people when they came in with their ideas of civilization.

“How can they say they want to civilize us,” I heard Pa say to Uncle Lavran while he was visiting once before Christmas when the dry season was at its peak. “Before the white man came, we already had a centralized government, a standing army, an executive, a legislature, and a police force. What do we need to learn from other civilizations?”

Pa offered Uncle Lavran a bowl of bitter kola, a black kola with white insides, which tasted bitterer than the Nivaquine you get at the hospital when you have malaria. Uncle Lavran accepted the bowl and bit into it, his jaw tensing from the acerbity.

“They predominantly want ascendancy over us,” Uncle Lawrence affirmed. That was Uncle Lawrence’s way of saying they wanted to control us. It made me wonder how he spoke to his wife at home. She was a hundred percent illiterate so how did they understand each other?

I imagined she used his strong mastery of the English language as a bragging right amongst her friends.

“It would appear that the colonialists have congregated in the Bali area,” Uncle Lawrence observed.

“I hate the British,” Pa concluded and I soon started saying, “I hate the British” without understanding the meaning of what I was saying. What can I say? Children copy their parents! I also heard from my kind-of-reliable source, Kadoh, that as a young man, Pa was part of the mwerong standing army of the palace, and they had fought and driven away the first white nuns. The San Francisco sisters, I think they were called.

I don’t know why he left the group and resorted to trade. He never explained any of his revolutionary days to me. Perhaps I was too young to understand.

Pa eventually took a few months off from his business travels to Yola and went to adult school. I was happy because it was the first time since I was born that I had seen my Pa for more than a week, each month. He spent a lot of time with us, and for a moment, I actually liked my family.

Story time was much more exciting! Ma didn’t beat me up as much, and Pa always took my siblings and me to the market. For a few months, no one fought in our house, not even Ya Buri.

The first thing I noticed about Pa after he began classes was that he bought himself a white cotton shirt. As surprising as that was, I liked it.

“Yefon, what do you think”? he asked me and all I could do was giggle.

The next habit he cultivated was the use of pet names for everyone at home. For example he now called Ma darling instead of
yawan
or
Yento
. She would blush deeply each time. My name never changed.

We even began to drink tea every morning before going to the farm. After Pa finished the course, his business indeed picked up just as Uncle Lavran had predicted. It had something to do with the fact that he couldn’t be cheated anymore now that he
could calculate invoices and match them with his earnings. It was a good time in our lives. Pa encouraged his sons to go to school.

“The white man’s book is like black magic,” he explained to them desperately, but they were not interested. My brothers were more interested in kola nut farming and that disappointed Pa a little.

By 1956, we resided in a bigger compound in Shisong, not too far from the new church that the white missionaries had built. I often sat in front of our house and watched the white people travel up the road. They would double their speed suspiciously whenever a black person looked at them for fear of getting robbed. I knew this because we would share an uncomfortable glance, especially, this one old nun who always wore a lengthy dusty cloak. Her nose was as long and crooked as the wicked witch of the west, and she had a queer look in general. I think she either disliked Africa or me because her face was always irritated every time she passed by. It would seem that I smelled of shit or something.