Because I am a Girl (3 page)

And she also bore the physical effects from the war. After so many years walking unshod through the bush, her feet were so spread and swollen it had been agony to put on school shoes for the first time. She could remember the day shortly after arriving at MGH when she took off her shoes to ease the pain and the entire playground had started chanting ‘Elephant feet! Elephant feet!’ Since then she had kept her shoes on and herself to herself.

On the day after the dream Bendu had taken up her normal position during break time, sitting under the shade of a tree on the edge of a group of classmates, listening but not saying much. Her peers were all sixteen years old and
the
conversation had returned to a subject that occupied more and more of their time – initiation.

Across West Africa boys become men and girls become women only after a period of training at the hands of traditional societies. In Sierra Leone the bush societies are known as ‘Poro’ for men and ‘Bundu’ for women. It is meant to be secret but everybody knew the basics; the young person is taken away under cover of darkness and led deep into the bush where they are kept for weeks, sometimes months, before finally emerging as an adult sworn to uphold the vow of silence about exactly what went on. The imaginations of every generation of West African children have sought to fill in the gaps of what actually happens during the period in the bush societies.

Bendu listened to the excited talk about the girls’ upcoming initiations. Mostly they dwelled on the fine new dress the Bundu society traditionally presents to each graduate and how they would then be able to take a husband. Bendu was older than sixteen – quite how much older was unclear as she had never had an official birth certificate – and she found it hard to share the excitement of the others. For her, the idea of being forced to live out in the bush and do the bidding of others reminded her of what had gone on during the war.

It all got too much when one of the girls, Aminatta, began talking casually about the culmination of the female initiation when the student is held down by the senior
society
members and is cut. Bendu had once heard some foreign aid workers calling it by an abbreviation, FGM, which stood for Female Genital Mutilation. Another, a scientist, described how the clitoris of each girl is removed without any drugs to ease the pain or chemicals to clean the wound or the blade.

‘How bad can it be when they do this?’ Aminatta asked boastfully. ‘My sister told me one of the girls in her group fought and fought. But I will be brave so I can become a proper woman.’

The thought of being cut there made Bendu feel a pit open somewhere below her stomach. She closed her eyes and her mind spun with images of drunken gunmen and UN medical staff in surgical outfits. For a moment she stopped listening to the girls’ talk but when her focus returned Aminatta was speaking again, bragging about how her mother and grandmother told her initiation was nothing to worry about. ‘In Africa your elders know best,’ she said.

The school day finished at 1pm when the cracked bell in the yard was rung but Bendu still had a lot to do. The heat of the day was at its most exhausting but she had to walk back to the traders to see if a truck had made it through to Kailahun. Disappointed, she walked back to her hut, changed out of her school clothes and spent the afternoon fetching, drying and sorting rice.

First she had to walk the two miles out into the forest to where the tiny parcel of land owned by her late father was found. It was called, rather grandly, a field, but it looked like a place where a cyclone had touched down. Half-felled trees lay at drunken angles, fouled by a web of ivy and undergrowth that trapped them in mid-fall. The ground was uneven and there were large rocks everywhere but the fact that the forest canopy had been broken meant sunlight could get through and crops could be grown, mostly mountain rice but also a little cassava. Just on the edge of the field Bendu had erected a rice attic, a small thatched room raised eight feet off the ground on bare branch stilts to save the crop from rats.

Bendu looked in the undergrowth until she found the stout bamboo pole with footholds cut into each side which she used as a ladder. After propping it up against the platform of the attic she climbed up and retrieved a sack of rice. The faded letters of a European aid group were just about legible on the sack as she lowered it down to earth, placed it firmly on her head, hid the ladder and turned for home.

Once back she swept the area outside the hut and spread the rice out to dry while she went to fetch water from the river. She then spent an hour bent double carefully picking out pieces of stalk, grass and rotten rice, all the time shooing away chickens pecking at the grain. She then gathered the rice back up again and began the
laborious
process of winnowing. Cupful by cupful she poured the rice into a circular tray made of woven grass before flipping the grain up and catching it as it fell. The heavy, healthy grains worked their way to the far edge of the tray, allowing Bendu to remove the chaff which gathered on the near side. It took all afternoon to sort the sack.

At sunset Bendu lit the charcoal fire and cooked a pot of rice. Without salt the meal was difficult to swallow but a few boiled cassava leaves made it at least palatable. By the time Ma Fata had taken her place to cook at the shared hearth Bendu was itching to talk but she knew she had to be patient. Ma Fata’s feet were red after a day of treading oil out of half-cooked palm fruit and she seemed a little tired so Bendu deliberately spent longer than usual washing in her open-air bathroom, to allow Ma Fata enough time to eat and relax.

‘Ma Fata, please can I ask your help to understand a dream I had last night?’ Bendu asked when she got back to the fireplace. The old lady had always treated her with respect, not something Bendu had experienced much of her in life, so the young girl was always polite.

‘Of course, child,’ the old lady said. ‘Let me fetch a chair for us both and we will talk.’

She went back into her hut and re-emerged with two wooden stools. They were crudely made but polished from years of use and very comfortable. Ma Fata half-closed her
eyes
. She knew a little of Bendu’s past in the war and was not surprised to hear her sleep was disturbed. She hoped the recollection would not be too painful for the girl. Precisely and slowly, Bendu recounted everything she could remember from the dream; the screeching noise, the fear of the other girls, the sight of the raffia-cloaked figure, the threatening dance and, most importantly, the calm Bendu felt when she started to confront it.

Ma Fata was silent for a few moments rocking gently on the stool. She did not want to stir bad old memories for a child who had suffered so much but she also knew Bendu was wise enough to catch her out if she held things back. Ma Fata decided to be fully honest.

‘What you saw, my child, was a devil.’

Bendu was silent, watching Ma Fata very closely by the glow of the burning charcoal. The old lady continued.

‘Not a devil like the ones the missionaries who run your school talk about, but our devil, a bush devil. These are the one who run the secret societies, Bundu and Poro. I am sure you have heard about them even though we are not meant to speak of them.’

Bendu nodded. During her time in the bush during the war there had been plenty of talk about devils.

‘When I was a child, a long time ago now, I was taken for initiation and I remember the devil coming on the last day to make sure all the girls behaved themselves. The devil was wearing a mask, just like you describe, and a suit
of
grass, dancing and screeching. You see, the devils are the ones who keep order, like the teachers at your fancy school. They make sure you do as you are told.’

Bendu thought for a second before asking a question: ‘But why do they need to scare people so much? Why do they use fear?’

‘It’s our traditional way. It’s the way we make sure the next generation carries it on. You know in Africa you elders know best.’

As Bendu stared into the fire the flames began to die down but the embers glowed steadily hotter and hotter. She smiled to herself and nodded as her dream steadily began to make sense.

All her life had taught her that surrendering blindly to tradition was the wrong thing to do. The warlords of Sierra Leone stoked years of conflict by drilling children into mindless killers, staking claim to their loyalty because of some spurious representation of African tradition. And politicians allowed their country to wither, pocketing aid money and lathering on layers of graft and nepotistic bureaucracy, with a nudge and wink about it being the way things were done in Africa. It was all right, they made plain, to wait in line and gorge at the trough of embezzlement when one’s turn comes. And girls across the country were expected to meekly accept physical assault, to let someone else carve away not only a sensitive part of their anatomy
but
any true sense of control they have over their destinies, simply because their mother or grandmother had once put up with it.

No, thought Bendu, this was not right. Tradition was one thing but blindly accepting other people’s version of tradition was wrong. She would not make the same mistake, she thought. She would stand up to the devil.

ERNESTINE WAS A
tall, sinewy woman who walked miles each day carrying a beauty parlour on her head. This was a heavy wooden box, open at the front, packed with all the products a female might need to make herself desirable – face creams, hair accessories, soap, make-up, skin lighteners, conditioners, razors, hair removal foam, kirby grips and ornaments, perfumes and body lotions. Ernestine sold these in the local villages, tramping along footpaths in her dusty flip-flops, stopping at the secondary school at two-thirty to catch the girls when they came out, working the crossroads where each Thursday the buses disgorged the women returning from market. Though dealing in beauty, Ernestine herself was the least vain of women. Back in her house there was a small, cracked mirror propped on a shelf but she seldom had time to look at it. Besides, when night fell it was too dark to see anything much as they had no electricity. And besides, her husband seemed happy with her as she was.

Or so she believed.

He was a good man, you see. A devout churchgoer, like herself; a hard-working father to their children. Unlike so many men, oh so many, he had never strayed, or even expressed the slightest interest in another woman. They had been married for seventeen years and never, not once, had she regretted leaving her family home in the north, beside the great lake with its drowned trees. The trees were drowned when they built the dam and her little brothers used to make money swimming through the underwater forest, unpicking the nets that had tangled in the branches. Ernestine dreamed about the lake, about the sun sinking over the water and beneath it the fish swimming between the tree-trunks but she had no desire to return to her childhood, she had her own children now. She was exhausted by working hard to keep them in school, to give them the opportunity of a better life than hers, but she loved them and was loved, the Lord be praised, and Kwesi was a good man. Or so she thought.

The night before it happened, the Wednesday night, Grace came home late. Grace was the eldest of Ernestine’s daughters, a studious young woman of sixteen. She was tall and big-boned, like her mother, with a square jaw and an uncompromising stare through her spectacles. She worked hard at school and in the evenings, when the village was plunged into darkness, she toiled at her homework under one of the few spots of illumination, the strip light that bathed with a bluish glow the fried-fish stall
at
the side of the road. People stopped to gossip with her auntie, who ran it, but Grace kept her head down, she was uninterested in tittle-tattle, she was fierce in her determination to pass her exams and go to college. Not for her the girlish giggles at school, the huddled whisperings about boys and lipstick. Grace was above such things; indeed, she had recently been elected Team Leader of the Abstinence Programme, its slogan
Just Say No
. She lectured her fellow teenagers on the perils of premarital sex and the way that early parenthood destroyed all hopes of a future career. She led the singing, ‘
Boys boys boys take care of girls girls girls
’, and promoted, as an alternative to temptation, the taking up of vigorous sports and the reading of improving texts.

All in all she was an admirable young woman. Ernestine was proud of her – how could she not be? Sometimes, however, she felt awed by her daughter, and sometimes she feared for the girl whose rigid convictions were so untempered by the rough complexities of life. And Grace was not the easiest person to live with; recently she had grown short-tempered, as if her own family, even her little brothers and sisters, were included in the congregation of sinners.

That evening she was particularly irritable, and snapped at her granny for forgetting to wash her football shirt. There was a match the next day with the team from the Asseweya High School. She gave no explanation for her
late
return and disappeared into the bedroom she shared with her sisters. Ernestine, at the time, presumed she was frustrated by the earlier power cut that had plunged their village into darkness for two hours and stopped her from doing her homework. Ernestine was not an interfering mother and besides, with a family as large as hers there were always plenty of squabbles, particularly amongst the girls. The boys just fought. For sure it was hard work surviving day to day with eight mouths to feed but the Lord had blessed them with good health and despite their worries they had much to be thankful for. Many of Ernestine’s customers were women struggling to bring up their families alone, their husbands working a long way from home, or passed away, or gone off gallivanting with another woman. One of them had taken a seventeen-year-old girl as his second wife, would you believe, a man of forty-three, and had moved to Nigeria, leaving his children fatherless.

For sure, Ernestine was blessed to have Kwesi for a husband.

The next day, Thursday, was market day at Asseweya, their local town. Kwesi travelled there each week to sell the plantains and pineapples he grew on his land; on that particular day Ernestine accompanied him as she had to buy new stock from the wholesaler.

On market day the town was jammed with traffic –
buses
, trucks,
tro-tros
burdened with sacks of produce. Hawkers crowded around them selling crisps, bananas, Bibles, fried snacks, fizzy drinks, Arsenal t-shirts, selling everything under the sun. Ernestine recognised Mustafa, the little son of her neighbour, his head weighed down with a bowl of plastic water-sachets which he passed to the outstretched hands. He choked in the fumes: he had asthma, but his mother, a widow, could neither afford medicine nor afford to send him to school. Ernestine felt sorry for the six-year-old and grateful, yet again, that her children knew their alphabet and had a father who took care of them and sang hymns beside them in church.

Kwesi left his mobile at the phone-charging booth before disappearing into the crowd of the market-place. Every week he left his mobile there and picked it up in the afternoon, before going home. The phone-charger, Ngobo, sat behind his array of mobiles. Ernestine had never seen him moving from his position; he had sharp eyes that missed nothing; there was something about him that made her uneasy. She could feel him watching her as she negotiated her way through the traffic to God Is Good Beauty Products, on the other side of the road.

Ernestine enjoyed her visits to Lily, who ran the business. They sat in the back room, the ceiling fan whirring, drinking Fanta and gossiping. Lily told her about the latest scandals, whose husband had run away with whose wife, whose daughter had become pregnant. That
particular
day she told Ernestine a story about two little girls who were tricked into having the Dipo, the initiation rite, but who escaped, jumping onto a
tro-tro
and hiding amongst the passengers. As Lily talked, her eyes widened and her breathing quickened. Ernestine was enthralled; dramas in the town seemed so much larger than those in her own sleepy village. Little did she suspect the drama brewing just a few yards away.

It happened like this. At the end of the day, when the market was packing up, Kwesi was still busy so Ernestine went to collect his mobile phone. Ngobo paused before giving it back.

‘I have something to tell you, madam,’ he said, his voice hoarse. She smelt alcohol on his breath. ‘It’s not pleasant, but I feel it is my duty.’ He gazed at the mobile in his hand. ‘I sit here, you see. I sit here and watch the world go by. There’s things I see.’ He paused, breathing heavily. ‘It concerns your husband and a
certain female
.’

He looked up at her, waiting for her reaction. She didn’t speak.

He passed her the mobile. ‘So when it’s juiced up again it beeps, that means it’s got a message.’ Ngobo gave her a sorrowful look. ‘It’s you I was thinking of.’

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

‘What do I mean, dear lady? I mean, I pressed the button and I listened to what the message said.’

*

Ernestine sat jammed against her husband in the bus. She couldn’t speak; she felt emptied of breath. Kwesi said nothing either but then he was a man of few words. His silence today, however, now she knew the truth, seemed pregnant with guilt. His bony shoulder and hip pressed against her – the bus was jammed with people – but now it felt like an alien body, a body that belonged to someone else.

Her brain felt sluggish, drugged with shock. The questions turned over and over, laboriously. How could he do such a thing? How long had it been going on? How often had it happened? How could be betray her, and his children? How could he?

The woman’s name was Adwoa and Ernestine knew her well. In fact Adwoa Shaibu-Ali was one of her best customers. She lived at the far end of the village and was a buxom, handsome, lazy woman with a brood of illiterate children, for Adwoa kept the girls at home to look after the babies that she produced at regular intervals and to do the housework which she was too indolent to do herself. Her thin, elderly husband worked uncomplainingly to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed – new make-up, new clothes, a monthly visit to Asseweya to get her hair-weaves put in. Few of the local women could afford the hairdresser and they wrapped their heads in cloths but Adwoa’s hair was always glossy, a curvy bob, ornamented with a selection of Ernestine’s novelty clips.
Most
of the day Adwoa sat around nattering to her neighbours, leafing through magazines and pausing only to cuff one of her children. And texting on her mobile. She was always texting.

The sun was setting by the time Ernestine got home. Normally it was her favourite time of day. Up in the trees the bats detached themselves from the bat-clumps that hung down like heavy bundles of fruit; they flew off, one by one, into the suffused sky. Today they looked sinister with their leather wings and sharp little teeth. Everything had turned upside down; it was as if Ernestine had plunged into the lake of her childhood, plunged beneath the placid surface, and found herself in a strange and menacing world, a warped reflection of the real one that she had so foolishly taken for granted.

It was still stiflingly hot. She watched Kwesi as he washed himself in a bowl of water. His chest was bare, his hair dripping. He wasn’t a handsome man, his nose was too big and his ears stuck out, but he was hers, and they had been man and wife for half her lifetime. Beside him, the unsuspecting Grace was stirring
banku
over the fire. She looked so pure, so innocent. Kwesi’s mother was chopping onions. Old and frail, she doted on her son. What was going to happen to their family, that a few hours ago had seemed so contented?

Night fell. Nobody noticed Ernestine’s silence; she had never been a chatty woman. She moved around in a
daze
, the voices of her family echoing far away. She was more hurt than angry – hurt, and deeply humiliated, that her husband had revealed himself to be no better than all those other men, the errant fornicators whose wives she used to pity. How blind she had been! In bed she lay rigid beside him, and when he put his hand on her breast she muttered that she was tired and turned away. Soon he fell asleep but for many hours she lay awake, her mind racing. What was she going to do – tell him she knew all about his affair with Adwoa? Kick him out of their home? The prospect was too terrifying, it made her blood run cold. Beside her slept her youngest boys, the twins. What would they do, without a father? And what would Grace do, a budding young woman, filled with such purity and fervour, when she discovered that her father was an adulterer?

The next day Ernestine went to the monthly meeting of the women’s savings group. In normal times she looked forward to this; the twelve women had formed a close bond based on mutual trust and a shared stake in each other’s financial matters; besides, it was a chance to catch up on each other’s news. Ernestine was proud, that she had saved up her money each month to start her own business, that as a respected member of the community she now held one of the keys to the money box. Today, however, she was filled with dread. As they sat in a circle
under
the trees, she looked at the faces around her. Did any of them know? Did the whole village know, and had everyone been whispering behind her back? Would she soon be like Dede, the widowed mother of little Mustafa the water-seller, who lived in such abject poverty that she could only contribute one
cedi
a month and had frequently been bailed out by the other women, much to her shame?

Adwoa didn’t belong to the group; she was a stranger to thrift and female empowerment, she let her husband do the work while she sat at home on her big bottom, leaving messages to Ernestine’s husband on her mobile phone. Ernestine wondered what Adwoa was doing – primping herself up for a tryst with Kwesi? Rubbing Imam Shea Butter on to her skin and anointing her lips with the Yana Luxury Lip Shimmer she had bought the week before, the better to kiss him with? Ernestine felt sick. Kwesi’s patch of land was not far from Adwoa’s house; was it there that they met, hidden amongst the cassava bushes? Ernestine hadn’t heard the message, Ngobo had deleted it to save her blushes, he said, but the gist of it seemed to be how much Adwoa was longing to see her Kwesi again, she could hardly wait.
Her
Kwesi.

Now Ernestine thought of it, Adwoa’s youngest baby had a big nose, just like Kwesi’s.

‘Are you ready?’

Ernestine jumped. The two other key-holders were waiting. Ernestine rallied and the three women opened
the
padlocks. They all sang a song together, gathered round the tin box and got down to business. Dede, whose husband had died of AIDS, was saving up for a piece of land to grow maize. Humu was supporting herself through school by running a food stall. Lydia was setting up a biscuit bakery. Ernestine gazed at the scene – the dappled shadows, the chickens scratching in the dust, the kids walking from one woman to another, selling sweets and plantain chips. Her secret weighed her down; she had a strong urge to confide in somebody.

There was a burst of laughter. Nancy and Irene sat together, sharing a joke. They also shared a husband, Joseph. Two years earlier, when Joseph had taken the young Irene as his second wife, all hell had broken loose. The savings club, however, had brought them together. Previously both women had made a meagre living selling cassava, which they chopped laboriously by hand, paying a middle-man for the milling. But with the help of the tin box they had clubbed together to buy a milling machine and now they worked it together, joking about Joseph’s shortcomings as the machine whirred away. Could Ernestine ever imagine sharing her husband with another woman?