Because I am a Girl (2 page)

Tomorrow, she thinks, will be different. Tomorrow,
instead
of watching the road, instead of going to market, she will walk up to the schoolhouse wearing her khaki uniform; swinging her boots by the laces in time to the song only she can hear. Her mother will try to stop her, perhaps; but only with a half of her heart. And when her brothers come home at last, she will tell them:
Why did you leave? The Promised Land was always here. Inside me. Inside you
. And maybe, in time, she will make them hear this song she hears so clearly; and maybe their children will hear it too, and understand her when she says:
If the road doesn’t take you where you want, then you must make your own road
.

There are so many gods here in this land of Togo. River gods; road gods; all of them, maybe, false gods. But the real power lies in the human heart; its courage; its resilience. This, too, is the song of the road, and through the voices of children it endures, and grows more powerful every day; sinking its roots deep into the soil, sending out its seeds of change wherever the wind will take them.

THE DREAM WAS
so vivid it woke Bendu and for a few seconds, as she lay blinking on her grass mattress getting her bearings, strands of recall flickered at the edge of her mind. There are some dreams, she told herself, that are meant to be remembered and this was one of them. Knowing how after looking directly at the sun you can close your eyes and still see its glare, she screwed her eyes tight shut. Slowly the dream came back to her.

The first thing she remembered was the noise. There was an inhuman howling accompanied by rustling and scuffling but she had difficulty making out where it came from. The scene was lit by a strange half-light, a bit like when the harmattan wind blows, clogging the skies over West Africa with dust from the Sahara, but she could clearly see a group of other teenage girls. They were moaning with fear.

She could not quite recognise their faces but they were composites of individuals with whom she had shared episodes of her troubled life – a hairstyle from a classmate she was held hostage with, a cotton lappa wrap with a
distinctive
curly seashell design. The last time she saw that lappa it was being used as a shroud by a young mother, hollow with grief for an infant who died of starvation while fleeing through the bush.

In her dream she turned round slowly to see what was causing the others so much terror.

Cloaked in raffia and capped by a headpiece carved from black wood, showing a snouted creature’s face with tusks and wide eyes, it was impossible to tell quite how large the being was. One moment it crouched motionless, low to the ground, the mask no higher than waist height and the grass tresses of its coat hanging limply, and then, with an explosion of dust and screeching, it span and shook, the mask now towering high above Bendu’s head, the raffia startled with energy.

The dance stoked pure fear among the others but the thing that made the dream so memorable for Bendu, the thing that made her screw shut her eyes extra tight to check she was remembering correctly, was how she had reacted. Instead of reeling away, Bendu recalled how at ease she felt as she broke away from her cowering companions and walked forward, her hands outstretched in welcome.

At this the creature seemed to become even wilder. Its cries became more demented, the dust thrown up by its gyrations grew thicker and the carved wooden mask loomed ever higher throbbing with more menace. And that is when the dream ended.

*

Bendu blinked her eyes shut a few more times but the image had gone. In its place were the shapes, smells and sounds of her small rented room in a mud-walled hut and her life far up country in Sierra Leone, or ‘up-line’ as she was taught to say, in an echo of colonial days when a railway line, long defunct, connected the capital, Freetown, with the provinces.

She was about as far from Freetown as it was possible to be inside Sierra Leone, in what had once been a busy trading town called Kailahun. Its position close to the country’s far eastern border with neighbouring Guinea and Liberia had, in its day, been a blessing, ensuring cross-border trade and a sense of open horizons as outsiders journeyed through with their different languages, customs and ideas. There had been Mandingo traders, the wanderers of West Africa who stood out with the flowing gowns and brightly coloured fezzes. Their Islamic faith and desire for profit cared little for international boundaries. And there were ambitious Krio administrators from Freetown who came out to the provinces with their textbooks and college degrees determined to drag rural Africa into the modern world. And there were even a few white missionaries, remnants of an earlier age when seeding Christianity in the heathen hinterland of Africa was seen as the way forward for a continent.

But in recent years those horizons had closed in on
Kailahun
and its location had been its curse. When Liberian warlords set about stirring conflict in Sierra Leone it was through Kailahun that their rebels and guns flooded. As more and more of Sierra Leone fell to the gunmen, so Kailahun became a transit point for gems flowing out of the country’s diamond fields and blood money flowing in. A once major town was destroyed and though the war had officially ended years before there remained in Kailahun a very immediate post-tsunami air, a strong and still current sense of shock at the scale and cruelty of the battering it had endured.

Bendu’s life had spanned those awful times although she remembered little of what she had actually witnessed. She knew her parents were both dead, killed in the first attack on the village where she was born just outside Kailahun. The story went that she had been found still bound by a lappa to her dead mother’s back and taken in by one of the rebel army’s female camp followers. That woman had in turn been killed in a later counter-attack and Bendu had spent the next years as flotsam on the war’s ebb and flow.

Forced to work as a slave for various armed factions, she spent years on the move, making temporary home in the ruins of war-damaged villages or out in the forest. There were moments when she had been forced to carry a gun, shooting madly into the forest in what was later described with pride, though scant honesty, as ‘military
operations
’. There had been assaults by men if that’s the right word for the armed brutes often not much older than her. She could remember the rancid smell of palm wine on their breath and the glazed unseeing eyes as they crushed the last remnants of her childhood out of her.

Since the war ended, child psychologists sent by aid groups had come to treat her almost as a special case. War crimes investigators had endured the eighteen-hour drive all the way across Sierra Leone to speak to her. Apparently one of the rebels she had spent time serving, Issay, was a ‘kakatua’, the so-called Big Fish responsible for the worst atrocities of the war and the investigators came with their notebooks and tape recorders to take down what Bendu remembered.

But she had deliberately kept the details from lodging permanently in her mind. Her past was too distressing. Like many in Sierra Leone she saw no point in looking backwards and trying to pin blame. There were too many in the community who had taken part in atrocities that to hold them all to account would eat out society and leave nothing in its place. But she remembered how Issay justified everything – child soldiers, rapes, killing – with the same remark: ‘In Africa your elders know best.’

After the operation she underwent at the United Nations hospital when she was told she would never be able to have children, she made herself try to look
forwards
, to think of tomorrow, not yesterday. All that mattered now was earning enough from growing and selling rice to pay the rent on her room in Kailahun, and keeping her place at Methodist Girls’ High – MGH – the oldest school in the region and the first to reopen after the war.

She struggled to sleep again after the dream but dawn was still some way off. Murky moonlight came through her un-curtained window allowing her to make out the outline of her possessions. There was the rattan armchair, fashioned by her landlord and paid for by a month of skivvying – slavery, most would call it – for his spiteful wife. Bendu half-smiled at the memory of a month being chided by that woman. ‘Switch bitch’ she called her because of the rattan switch she carried and the willingness with which she used it. The silly woman thought she was all-powerful with her cane but Bendu never let her win. What Bendu had gone through during the war, the suffering and pain she had endured, meant she could easily take a beating. The woman screeched at Bendu to do as she was told, using the words the warlord Issay had used – ‘In Africa your elders know best.’

On the chair lay Bendu’s entire wardrobe: a few changes of clothes, cleaned, pressed, folded and capped by the felt school hat required by MGH. And on the wall were the two possessions she loved most. From one of the bare
pole
rafters hung a poster showing a football player from a team called Arsenal. She did not know where the man came from or what the name, Arsenal, might represent, but the fact he was black, successful and oh-so handsome gave it a special place in her heart.

And next to the poster on the same wall, hanging from a twig stuck into the mud, was her favourite object – a small, plastic-framed mirror. For most of her life Bendu had not known what she looked like – buying that looking-glass a year or so after the war ended from a Mandingo trader, one of the first to return to Kailahun after the fighting, had felt like the moment when her life had begun again.

The room was silent except for the flurrying of rats in the dried banana leaf thatch but she could tell by the smell of charcoal smoke that the day would be starting soon. It meant Ma Fata, the old lady who lived in the hut the other side of the clearing, was awake and preparing for another day.

The smell gave Bendu an idea. ‘Ma Fata is old and knows a lot. She will know the meaning of my dream.’ The thought gave her the energy she needed to get out of bed, wrap herself in her lappa and take the mile-long round trip to the stream so she could fill her plastic water basin. By the time she began the slow walk back to her hut, with the full basin settled heavily on her head, the cocks had begun to crow.

*

As always Bendu’s day was crowded with chores, a treadmill of survival that kept the palms of her hands split with calluses and back prone to pain. Returning to her room she used some of the water to wash her cooking pot and plate which were still dirty from the night before. Over the charcoal fire she shared with Ma Fata she then cooked herself some rice and mixed it with the last of her palm butter. Storage of cooked food is impossible without power for refrigeration so, like millions of other people in a country without electricity, Bendu rarely prepared more than what could be eaten at one sitting. Ma Fata was clucking around her side of the compound, busy with her own work so now was not the time to discuss dreams. It can wait, thought Bendu.

After sweeping the floor of her hut and her ‘side’ of the mango tree clearing, she took the water basin behind a screen of woven palm leaves erected over a collection of flagstones she had dragged up from the river bed, and washed herself. Her cheap soap stuck to the stones, making them white and slippy so, as always, she focused on keeping her footing before looking skywards and tipping the final dregs of the water over her forehead, allowing it to cascade over her body. She could see the first blue of the sky as the morning mist lifted and she knew the heat of the day would soon build. Running her hands over her limbs, she flicked off most of the water before putting
her
lappa back on. By the time she walked the short distance round to her door she was dry.

Wearing her uniform Bendu began the short walk through town to school. There were no tarmac roads in Kailahun and the streets were either dusty in the dry season or muddy when the rains came. At this distance from the capital city, government was merely notional. It did not get much beyond the spreadsheets of aid groups and empty platitudes promised by Freetown politicians, so nobody took care of the roads in Kailahun. Ruts churned up by trucks and jeeps when it rained were baked hard by the sun, creating an assault course that destroyed axles and gearboxes. The only vehicles you saw in Kailahun were either new 4×4 jeeps owned by aid groups or battered local vehicles – minibuses and trucks – with doors missing, shattered windscreens, and bodywork patched with crudely welded pieces of metal.

Bendu had once asked a town councilor at a public meeting held near the remnants of the petrol station in town why, after so many years of international aid, the town of Kailahun was still a ruin. She forgot the first part of his answer which was all about politics but she could not forget the self-important smirk on his face as this man told her not to bother herself with such questions because ‘In Africa your elders know best.’

Only ‘okadas’, the cheap Chinese-made motorbikes used as taxis, could move with any sense of speed as the
young
, male riders dared to surf the troughs and peaks of the roadway. Each time she walked through town Bendu would have to jump out of the way as the bikes sputtered past in a haze of blue exhaust fumes. The bluer the smoke the dirtier the fuel and, in a town as remote as Kailahun, the fuel was never clean.

She had never trusted the ‘okada’ men. Most of them were rebels who had been given motorbikes by the United Nations in exchange for laying down their arms. She remembered how once she had climbed on to the back of a bike only to be overwhelmed by an aroma cocktail of palm wine and sweat on the rider that brought back terrible memories. That day was baking hot but by the time she managed to jump off she was covered in goose bumps.

Bendu walked past the ruined mosque, the largest building in town, then past the old mission station that once belonged to the Methodists but was now a store room for general traders. Their old shops destroyed, today’s sellers made do with wooden roadside huts that had to be secured each night with iron bars and padlocks. The lack of reliable police in Sierra Leone meant law and order was a service normal people had to provide for themselves. Bendu stopped at what passed for a grocery store – a small shack with a tray out front made from rough planks nailed together – but all the trader had in stock was pasta. He was selling a few pieces at a time, wrapped in a twist of
cellophane
, for in a town as constitutionally poor as Kailahun few could afford an entire box. She would check on the way home from school to see if any delivery trucks had made it through from Freetown.

The day’s first beads of sweat ran down Bendu’s face from the rim of her green felt cap as she lined up for registration at 7.30am. School gave her a sense of purpose that she had rarely felt before but if she was honest she never felt particularly comfortable there. After missing out on so many years of schooling, most of her fellow pupils who had not been so caught up in the war were much more advanced than her. She felt it a mark of shame that girls not yet in their teens could recite answers quicker than she could.