In those days, the children of Africa’s urban centers were truly God’s little sparrows, who had neither field nor granary. And these children no longer had a clan to back them up, but sometimes only a gang. Yet people were astonished at the violence and delinquency running rampant.
Some parents no longer even wondered how their children lived, as if everything always went of its own accord, as it had in the days that the parent was secondary, and the entire community took responsibility for all its children. Now, the basic rules that used to allow for such solidarity—respect for taboos, for the dignity and general interest of the clan—had been completely flouted. One was under the impression that in this new society, only riff-raff would manage to get somewhere. The family circle was growing narrower and narrower. Systematically and on every level, the population was being materially and spiritually impoverished, while all the essential values of the local cultures were made less and less practicable, especially among the elite.
That is undoubtedly why, having lost their sense of initiative and responsibility, it wasn’t hard for men to grow accustomed to not worrying much about their offspring. So the children lived by their wits in every way possible, and it actually became an ever-growing trend for parents to send their children out begging or into prostitution to feed the rest of the family.
To my great surprise and confusion, my father adopted the same attitude, the way one catches an epidemic disease. He would go out in the morning and come back at noon or later and later in the evening. He’d find his meal on the table, his clothes freshly cleaned, starched, and ironed. He no longer cared who had done this, when or how, or what had happened in his home all day long. I tried talking to him, communicating with him if only with my eyes, but all in vain. Even while he ate he wouldn’t take his eyes off his notebooks or newspapers. He no longer had any ears except to listen to the newscast on every radio station, or to his friends or party comrades, with whom he incessantly discussed politics. Then he would leave with them on propaganda tours or to politically oriented cultural activities, and nothing else existed anymore.
Here, mealtime was no longer the moment of happiness and sharing that my grandparents had made us love and respect so much, like a sacred and festive ceremony, one that inspired us to love cooking. On the contrary, mealtime became a moment when I’d reluctantly dredge up old aggravations and frustrations, a moment that drove me toward some demoralizing conclusions.
I had become the servant in my father’s house without him even realizing it. And so he couldn’t even derive any pride from having an industrious and virtuous daughter who was well brought up, according to custom. He should at least have thanked his mother and given her credit for the fine work she’d done. Our Grand Madja Halla had trained us well, to be responsible in the household from the age of nine, the age of the first female initiation.
Therefore it was completely logical that at age eleven I mastered the skills needed to run our home. Every day, I’d clean the house from top to bottom, do the dishes, wash and iron my father’s clothes and those of his midwife-wife and their three little boys, too. I’d also go to the market that, fortunately, wasn’t very far, barely two kilometers, come back, do the cooking, and make sure everything would be ready at one o’clock at the latest, the time that my husband might be coming home from work and my children from school, the time that my father and stepmother usually came home for lunch and their nap.
Having thoroughly absorbed my lessons as a caramel woman, I always got up very early and finished a good part of the chores—laundry and dishes in particular—before dawn, before anyone else was up. Sometimes I preferred doing these at night before falling asleep. Then I washed and fed my little brothers before my parents left the house in the morning, after their breakfast. In my home I wasn’t going to have to worry about laziness and incompetence. I was always proud of being ready on time. It was my one pleasure, and guaranteed me some serenity.
As a reward for all my efforts there was never a single remark or any encouragement from my parents, especially not from my father. I began to wonder why it had been necessary for him to be assured of his paternity through a ritual blood transfusion, only to ignore it so completely afterward. I figured that even a machine deserved a bit of attention every now and then, a kind of maintenance check. What had happened? Perhaps something very serious had happened to my father, and he was steering clear of me.
Sometimes my stepmother mocked my cooking for being too sophisticated, calling it “grandmother style,” and asking if it was New Year’s Day. Then she’d run her hand through my hair as if I were a cat, make fun of me, and call me “mother-in-law.” It was her way of letting me know that she enjoyed it, but that was as far as it went. In her defense, I realized how worn out she was when she came home, and knew that she, too, could surely use a little more affection; but I couldn’t find the right words or gestures with which to ease the tension and thereby bring us closer.
Poor Mam Naja! Often she’d wait for her husband, checking her watch every few minutes, an atmosphere not conducive to chatting. The new man my father was turning into seemed truly determined to add to the already-tense atmosphere, and thereby made it more frightening for me.
Not able to take it any longer, Mam Naja would sometimes eat alone, stuffing herself like a pig. She’d only leave the table to flop down on the couch, where often she began to snore almost immediately, sometimes until early morning. When he came home, my father wouldn’t bother to wake her up to take her to their bedroom. Such indifference, I thought, could really kill just about anything: love, childhood, and hope.
In the end, what was my father up to?
I decided to try to find out, and one fine morning, having done all of the housework beforehand, I followed him. Gracefully he went through the streets, greeting everyone with a kind word or a personal remark, the way he’d always done. He went straight to a garage in the valley section, where for hours on end I watched him take an old engine apart in the burning sun and then, with true zeal, put it back together again in the body of a different car.
Why, then, was he so withdrawn when he came home? Did he feel some special resentment toward his family? What terrible things had we done to cause such a profound change in him the minute he returned?
What did my father really want? He had explicitly wanted me with him as his daughter, and he had me there. To what end? I didn’t understand anything anymore, and a kind of mute rage began to beleaguer me.
When my spirits were at their lowest, and I would begin to lament my lot, Grand Madja’s voice would come into my head to straighten me out: “Always feeling self-pity combined with negative thoughts about the rest of the world inevitably leads to holding others responsible for your own failures. In that state, it’s better to set your creative and inventive mind in motion and come up with an acceptable explanation for the behavior of those you incriminate. Promise me that you’ll at least try!”
And of course I promised, but out of context words like these don’t contain any concrete reality. If you’re lucky, you might hear them surface again from the depths of your memory when you’re confronted with problems; only then do they reveal their full weight.
Fortunately, I was that lucky, and because I heard them I was finally convinced that my father must be involved in ever more abstract and thorny battles, and that I couldn’t ask him to turn his attention away from those for the sake of my trivial desires. If I wanted to be worthy of him, I should be struggling as he did, silently and unobtrusively, and be as lighthearted as possible. True, I no longer had any clue about the stakes in his battles, but it was of the essence not to feel judgmental toward him anymore.
“You don’t judge your parents. You should only get to know and accept them, for they will always be ours, just as they are, and there’s nothing you can do about that,” Grand Madja used to say.
All I needed to do, then, was be patient until I understood what my father wanted, what was to become of us, and how we could improve if I myself participated in the effort.
Thus I had to manage as many African children must—in other words, live like the birds scratching about left and right and being just as happy as King Solomon was, according to the Bible. At the market I bargained long and hard over the prices of every item. I endeared myself to some of the saleswomen, who started to save additional pieces for me out of kindness and friendship. This way I managed to obtain some solid discounts, and with my little savings I would buy the clothes I needed secondhand. My stepmother must have thought that my father was spoiling me, and my father that his wife was being very good to me. And because they never had any time to discuss it, they never knew the truth. I went on living without either my father or my stepmother ever buying me anything at all. After the constantly increasing recriminations from Mam Naja, I understood that “he spent all his money on his party and on parties with his friends and mistresses while she alone went out of her way to keep the household going.” I didn’t know whether she included me in this household for which she so exerted herself.