Togbe!”
“Yes, vinye.”
“Can we go to the creek again, please?”
It was a Friday afternoon, and we were on the farm, standing under the shelter because it had started drizzling. The rainy season was setting in properly now, and I was impatient to see if the creek was expanding. It had been a month since our first trip there. I watched hopefully as Togbe put his hands on his waist and arched his body backward.
“In this rain?” He stifled a yawn and rubbed at the gray stubble on his chin.
“I want to see if it’s filling up the creek!”
“You’ll need to give it a bit longer!” We moved farther under the shelter as the wind drove raindrops toward us. “And, anyway, I promised your mother we’d help her package pots this evening. We’re going to Mepe market tomorrow, remember?”
“Aww, yeah.”
“But,” he added quickly as my face fell, “school’s out soon, isn’t it? That’s when we can go spend quality time there!”
I’d been looking forward to the long vacation, but now I wanted it to start immediately, like, that very second. We might not be able to go off to a river island together, but the creek was the next-best thing.
It seemed like years till the last day of school, though it was just a couple of weeks, but finally the third term was over. I couldn’t believe I had only one more year of junior high left, or that I’d be taking my BECE exams within less than a year! But for now, the long vac stretched out endlessly before us. We still had to farm—much more than on school days, and I’d also arranged to do extra farming for a couple of teachers in exchange for a few private lessons, and to have access to schoolbooks over the vacation. But Togbe took me to the creek that first afternoon of the holidays.
We just took off in our dirty work clothes and Wellington boots with our farm baskets on our heads. It had been raining almost daily over the past couple of weeks, and the stream now filled its bed and was much faster-flowing. There were many more fish traps in the shallows, and it looked like a different place altogether.
We went the next day too, and every one after that. We’d start our farming earlier in the morning, and I’d work like fury so we’d have an extra hour or two of daylight to spend there. We packed our tools and any foodstuffs we’d harvested into the large straw farming baskets, along with ripe fruit from the farm to snack on, if there was any. Mawuli came with us once, but he found it boring. He preferred to spend his precious free time playing football with his friends.
Togbe and I built a small shelter by the stream like the one at the farm—just four bamboo poles with thatch on top. He taught me to weave mats for the floor, and we cut more bamboo and fashioned a rough bench. He was so adept with his hands; it was amazing to watch. And learning from him was so different from how it was at school. He made you feel as though he had all the time in the world for you, and if there was anything to laugh at, he laughed with you, not at you. I asked him to teach me to make fish traps too. We wove them right there, and I climbed down and nestled them in the shallows. I couldn’t believe it when we found fish in them the next day. I knew that was what they were for, but still, it seemed miraculous when it actually happened!
“Shall we grill them here?” Togbe asked. “We can gather firewood and roast wild cocoyams to go with them!”
“Yes!” I felt like jumping up and down, but I was too old for that, so I just smiled really hard to myself as I went hunting for the wild cocoyams. I found some growing by the water a little way down from our shelter, with their fanned-out leaves like scalloped elephant ears. I loosened the soil around them with my cutlass and pulled out a cluster of tubers. I would take the leaves home for Ma to cook delicious green soup or amadetsi, my favorite stew.
Togbe brought out a matchbox from his pocket, but I waved it away. “Teach me to make fire with sticks!”
He laughed. “I can hardly remember! It’s hard work, you know!”
“Please!”
I saw the spirit of fun dance into his eyes. He asked me to find the driest twigs. We prepared a little pile of them and then he took two and started rubbing them together. I just couldn’t imagine how that was going to create fire, but sure enough a tiny tendril of smoke suddenly erupted between the sticks. I felt as if I were dreaming.
“Your turn!” Togbe placed them carefully on our pile of firewood, which began to kindle and smoke. He handed me a couple of twigs. It took a few tries, but I was finally able to conjure up my own wisp of smoke. I knew it was simple science, but it felt like magic. The whole afternoon felt that way, even though we were just a couple of raggedy farmers by a creek, and there was something about the taste of food cooked out in the open—I could see what he had meant.
“Togbe.” I munched on a piece of cocoyam. “Did you use to come here before we lived with you?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
He looked away, grimacing a little. “I know it’s a long time ago, but still… memories.”
I felt sad for him.
“It’s different this way, though,” he added. “They’re happy when I share them with you!”
I smiled. “Tell me a story about the boy by the river.”
We cleared away the remnants of our meal and lay on our mats by the water’s edge. It was cool and breezy, and the clouds promised rain, but in a leisurely kind of way. I listened drowsily to the soothing cadence of Togbe’s voice taking me back out onto the Volta, where the boy was fishing with his father, exploring a small creek in their canoe.
Suddenly, a shoal of fish flew out of the water toward them. A flock of moorhens swimming around their canoe had dived down, scaring the fish straight into it.
“They must be nesting somewhere along the bank,” said his father.
“Can we go see?”
“We still have work to do! Then again, if we could get some eggs… Tell you what—you come out and look along the bank for their nests. I’ll come back for you after I’ve set some fish traps farther up.”
The boy hopped out.
“Be careful!” called his father, paddling away.
The boy rolled his eyes. Parents! What could happen?
He went back in the direction they’d come from, parting the reeds and shrubs. In the distance he heard moorhens cluck and weaverbirds chirp in their frenetic multitudes. The sound led him to a small brook, overgrown with foliage. He walked along it for a couple of minutes and emerged by a secluded pond with nests everywhere, like loosely woven baskets. Moorhens, ducks, and herons were walking, flapping, swimming, some trailed by their young. Dragonflies skimmed the surface, and a turquoise kingfisher dived into the water and flew out with a wriggling flash of silver in its beak. The air whirred with the wingbeats of weaverbirds, flashing bright yellow as they fussed over their funneled nests in branches overhanging the water.
He saw eggs in some of the moorhens’ nests, but the mother birds were constantly coming and going. He decided to observe for a while before doing anything. He chose a shady spot under a vast tree with branches overhanging the water, but with the murmur of the river and the clucks, chirps, and chirrups all around, he soon drifted off to sleep. He was woken by a commotion from the nests closest to him.
A green mamba had slid down from a branch of the tree and was hovering over an empty nest in the shallows. Its rear end was still in the tree, close enough for the boy to see the black edging on the scales of its tail as it slid down and dropped fully onto the nest, balancing itself above it. It took an egg in its mouth, and as it swallowed, the skin of its neck stretched out, making it seem double its size.
Suddenly, a moorhen flew onto the edge of the nest. She fluffed out her feathers and flapped her wings at the snake. The boy stopped himself from exclaiming just in time. The snake hissed and struck at her. There was an uproar from the other birds as she flew out of its way, then perched again and lunged just as it was about to take another egg.
Slowly, the boy reached into his pocket for his slingshot and one of the pebbles he kept in there. He fitted the stone into the band and pulled it slowly back. Then he adjusted his angle carefully and fired. The stone hit the mamba with an audible tap. The snake fell into the water with a splash and swam away as birds took to the air in a mighty rush of wingbeats. They circled until the ripples disappeared, then came back and settled down. The moorhen fluffed herself over her remaining eggs, using her beak to tuck them in beneath her.
“You attacked a green mamba to save a moorhen?”
Togbe shrugged. “I was a crazy kid!”
“Why didn’t you kill the snake while you were at it?”
“What if it was just another hungry, nesting mother?”
I opened my mouth to respond and then closed it. I hadn’t thought of that. After all, the moorhen ate other creatures too, like fish, snails, insects, without worrying what she was doing to them and their young. Togbe had a way of thinking around things.
I didn’t want the story to end because I didn’t want the day to end. But the sky was turning orange, and the clouds were getting heavier.
“Your turn next time!” He got to his feet and rolled up his mat.
“For what?”
“To tell a story. I like them too, you know!”
How could I ever tell stories like him? But then I thought of books I’d read. Our school library had only a few, and I’d read most of them.
On our next visits to the creek, I started telling him stories I remembered, then bringing books to our hideaway. I read them out loud, translating into Ɛwɛ for him as I went along.
First was a collection of Ananse stories. He knew some of them already. He’d listen till the end of each one, then tell me what was different in his version. I brought Alice in Wonderland from a tattered series of picture book classics. The story was so weird, but we enjoyed the pictures of the strange creatures and people Alice met, like the ones with bodies made from playing cards. “It’s because she followed that rabbit,” Togbe said. “Animals can lead you to magic places!”
Oliver Twist was in that series too, and I brought it along. Mr. Bumble reminded me of Mr. Dowuona, and some of our other teachers. The way he behaved when Oliver asked for more gruel—I knew exactly how that felt. They could make you feel like a criminal for your own misfortune, for things you couldn’t help, even just for being a child.
Togbe liked the Artful Dodger. He said he reminded him of an old friend called Dodzi. He liked the ending too, when Oliver was adopted by a rich man who turned out to be his father’s friend, and Mr. Bumble ended up in the workhouse. “You see?” he said. “Never despair, vinye, because life is like this wind blowing on us right now. It can change direction at any time!”
I brought textbooks too, because I knew Togbe would be interested in some of the things in them. I would read to him, and we’d look at the pictures and diagrams, and he’d say, “Ehennn! So that’s why so-and-so happens the way it does!” and ask questions I couldn’t answer. I wondered if my teachers could answer them, but I doubted it. Sometimes he’d tell me what he thought the answers were, and add things he’d learned from the old people, especially his own Togbe.
The day we read about riverine systems in my geography book I opened my atlas too, and we looked at the Ghana map together, tracing the Volta River from the estuary at Ada Foah all the way up to the lake. Togbe’s forefinger charted its arc, undulating northwest along the Volta Plains with brief stops as I read out familiar town names: Sogakope, Mepe, Asutsuare, Akuse, Kpong—with a blue pool on the map for its much smaller, newer dam—then more steeply north toward Atimpoku, Adome, and finally, Akosombo. He drew his finger across from one bank of the river to the other to signal the dam, then stared at the lake sprawling above like a giant blue tree branching along the eastern corridor of Ghana.
“Hmm,” he said. “This is not what it used to look like!”
That was when it first occurred to me that the only map of Ghana I had ever known—depicting the lake—was mere decades old. “What did it use to look like?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve seen many maps in my life,” said Togbe, “but it must have been similar the whole way along to what it looks like here in the Volta Plains—just a river, not this huge thing!”
I pictured the difference between this map and the old, and it struck me all over again, the enormity of what had happened to our country.
Togbe resumed his finger’s journey on the map, now along the eastern shore of the lake. “Trokorpe is underwater now, as you know, but maybe I can show you roughly where it used to be.”
As his finger climbed north, I called out names again, and he’d pause to listen, then continue upward—Peki, Vakpo, Anfoega, Kpando, Nkonya… “Okay, stop!” He lowered his finger to a point between the last two and slid it west into the blue of the lake. “Somewhere around here.” He circled in the printed blue water. “It’s not very exact but it’s the closest we’re going to get!”
I looked at the underwater circle where his hometown must have been, and thought of our own moving, seven years ago, and how trivial it must seem to someone who could never go back to his childhood home because it simply wasn’t there anymore.
But Togbe wasn’t lost in sadness this time. He’d picked up the geography textbook and was looking eagerly at its images. I could tell he was enjoying being both a teacher and a pupil. He started asking questions, and I set about explaining some of the words, like “estuary” and “salinity.” Immediately he started talking about the Volta estuary. He knew all about the mingling of river and seawater, and how different levels of salinity affected the ecology. “See, that’s how our clam industry collapsed!” he said. “And bilharzia spread, and water weeds came—when they started messing with the river! There’s always a price for tampering with nature.”
“But to be the one to pay when you did nothing—that’s so unfair!”
“Hmm,” he muttered, “you have to make your own fair in this world!”
I snapped the textbook shut, my head full of questions, wondering how many people knew the things Togbe was telling me. I suspected, in his own way, that he knew more than the people who had written the books.