Fact and Fable from Frafraland: Book One

© 2011.Agana Nsiire. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 08/10/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-7833-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-7834-7 (e)

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Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Nobody Knows

Chapter Two

Night Dread

Chapter Three

Police

Chapter Four

Master Paul

Chapter Five

Kangima the Kamponte

Chapter Six

Delete

Chapter Seven

Eclipse Experience of Dr Ngule

Chapter Eight

The Animals Farm

Chapter Nine

No Infant Detected

Chapter Ten

Feast In the Sky

Chapter Eleven

My Public Health Dilemma: Tap Water or Pure?

Chapter Twelve

26 December 2005

My Publich Health Dilemma:

The Sick Child

Chapter Thirteen

26 December 2005

My Public Health Dilemma: Porridge and Massa

Chapter Fourteen

Half-Man. Awengo.

About the Author

To Mother and Father, the progenitors

To Gowrie, the soil I belong

To my family who is my universe

And to you, Reader, always

Author’s Note

We can never finish writing. Why? There are more tales in the world yet to be told. Ananse is different from Aso-onga is different from Rabit is different from Hare. Look, can’t you just see how different they are? Gowrie is a reasonably sized village of ten thousand people at the time of writing. It was formerly a part of a bigger village called Yorogo that the white man divided one day into two by walking round the whole place on his horse, followed by the elders. When he was done, he stretched his walking stick in one direction and said: Yorogo is too big to remain one village. From today, all those to my right will go under Nawibiga (then chief of Yorogo) and all those to my left will go under another chief. Nawibiga, you and your side will continue to go with the Bongo paramount chief. The other half, henceforth, will chose their own chief and go under Bolgatanga. Thank you, elders, for being kind and consenting witnesses. The white man then rode back home to Zuarungu, leaving the big Yorogo village divided from that day, because the two sides used to quarrel with each other which did not allow white man to sleep peaceful, and which did not encourage the collection of the lampo especially with Nawibiga as chief of Yorogo. Nawibiga, disappointed but arrogant, declared that he was thorns in the flesh of people because, literally, his side of the village had lots of a particular short tree with very long thorns called gu-uror. So his side was called Gu-uror while the Bolgatanga half of the village maintained the name Yorogo. But till today the whole village still appears on Google maps as Yorogo, Gowrie being found nowhere. The reason. Two. The white man complained that he couldn’t call such breath breaking Gu-uror names so called it Gowrie which had no meaning for the people, all illiterates then except Nawibiga himself, nobody knowing where he had his alleged education from. Second, culture and community then overrode individual identity. So nobody could just get up the next morning and start calling him or herself Gu-uror or worse still Gowrie. So till today the average person from Gowrie easily says I am from Gowrie as much as I am from Yorogo. The two sides still remain quite one in mind but with different chiefs. We don’t intermarry.

How would you know this until I told you today? Tourism from afar. You just relax where you are, in your corner of the world with lights by night or darkness outside, a warm ambience enveloping the whole, or a cold wintry gust outside kept at bay by gas pipes from the belly of the earth, burning to keep you warm on your sofa or bed while you watch cartoons from a faraway land called Frafraland or read this book and see for the first time names like Gu-uror, Gowrie, Yorogo, Vea, Zorkor, Zuarungu, Bongo, Bolgatanga or Nawibiga which stand side by side with familiar words like ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘chief’, ‘black’ or ‘white man’. Tourism from afar, because you can’t travel the whole world, and don’t lock yourself inside ignorant, like the American bank cashier who asked my friend, Doctor Smith, seeking money change: Pounds? What currency is that? Writing and reading is the currency of the world and facilitates tourism at least cost. The menu today is folklore from Frafraland, told from the FM studios of Gowrie Village, Yorogo, Bongo. Like all menus it is spiced with desserts of milk shakes and the eddy currents of everyday life. Come to Gowrie, Yorogo and Vea and see for yourself, from their flat rooftops, Aposariga Hill, where the smoke of fairies rose every evening and every morning as One Head, Two Heads and Three Heads quarreled over the fair Ayinyella yet far out of reach over the rivers, the hills and the forests. See Azeem, the Great Grove, an impressive sight in this Sahel denuded of trees over years by farming peasants, majestic in the path between Feo and Namoo, like a pillar of cloud by day and night, a god worshiped, watching, mute, his children as they commute up and down the land and all the way over the skyline to Yeliworngo (Gueliwongo) and Wugrigor (Ouagadougou) in quest for life. See River Avea, now Vea River Irrigation Project, fed by a big and expansive lake which the youth of Gowrie, Vea and sometimes Balungu, fishermen, seasonally swim across unprotected, a great sport and power contest which has come to replace the old time rivalries and tribal war. Come. Come over and see and listen. If you can’t, read them here in Fact and Fable, tales from Frafraland, which open a window to parts of your world you may never see before you say good bye. Don’t stay locked inside wondering What is Pound Sterling? Or for that matter, What is Ghana cedi? Come to Gu-uror-Yorogo, Ghana. See for yourself, for seeing is believing. But there is more for you.

Acknowledgements

My thanks first go to my parents, uncles and the Adalba family within which I grew up with the background of story telling that I now want to share with the world. I wish to thank my wife and children who gave me the necessary environment to write this book and helped to proof read it and made useful suggestions. Thank you, Dr Larsey, for also finding time within your busy schedule to read, correct and comment. Finally I thank my Publishers AuthorHouse for their patient guidance through the publication of this book.

Chapter One

Nobody Knows

What is this…? He stood there holding it up in his hand.

I am writing to you the shortest letter in my life here. Whether it reaches you or not, whether I can post it at all has more or less direct relations to its brevity. The President of the Junior Common Room (JCR) of the Farmers Hall roused us at dawn by blowing a loud whistle in the centre of the vast accommodation complex of the main hall. Roused us by blowing a whistle, a very unusual sound for calling students long used to gathering around the emergency clanging of a metal conch. Or conches, for all the halls, all the Varsity, have stretched the football stadiums into the Campus in the object of the metal shell whose peculiar hollowness is heard on the sports field, in JCR meetings, and in every other kind of student convention. Away from the notice boards it was the only sonar instrument for attention in this Campus till the twilight of this dawn. The shrill sound of a loud whistle originating from the centre of the main hall was, I am convinced, an expected note for very few but very real persons. For several others, however, it was an alarm in proper sense. Still for others, Bang’s whistle came as a shattering of dreams and the conversion of terrifying nightmares into the temporary relief of a reality less terrifying but immediately mystifying. Including the ever present exception to every rule all these categories of prophets, alarmists and dreamers, in the space of one minute, formed one dark and silent patch about the centre of the long and starlit pavement joining the eastern and western gates of the great Akuafo Hall of residence.

As I write (and I must wind up soon), I can tell you with confidence that at exactly the same time this dawn similar starlit shadows of student masses surrounded their JCR Presidents in all the other four Halls of the University, from Sarbah in the valley to Vandal City on the hill. But in the Farmers Hall, about which I can speak with the authority of my presence, being saved first from the pursuit of a one-legged cadaver whose eerie call blended with and got lost in Bang’s waking whistle, I remember that the gathering was very silent, like I have never seen in any convention of students before tonight. I remember that we all stood with our arms mostly folded across our chests in the morning cold, sleep gone, faces turned up towards the centrally elevated and shadowy figure of our diminutive and bearded President, Bang. Also I remember very clearly his last words:

Comrades, as I am talking to you now, our colleagues of the inland campus have already taken to the streets and into town. Shall we abandon…

Shall we abandon what? Several years have passed and I am looking through my junk of school days. A mad man’s junk. Books. Papers in blue, green and red ink. Notebooks, clean, dusty and tattered. Notefiles torn and intact. Stamped envelopes opened in various ways exposing letters that must have been read and forgotten of along the way, and now sought out again to join the piling chaff of crumpled papers and discarded books awaiting atomization and a return to the elements by fire. In that state of sorting out the proverbial wheat from the chaff I resembled, figuratively, and, I daresay, physically one man who was mad in the literal sense of that word. Asorna, that was his name. At the time I was a child he was known in all the villages, especially in Gowrie. He did not come from Gowrie but from Zuarungu, another