23

One day, while out exploring on the lake, I finally heard the mechanical hum again.

Mami, Baby, and I were about half an hour’s swim from the island. I came to an abrupt halt, and Mami dived underneath to bear me up. The hum stopped. Then it started again. Then stopped again, and started, over and over. I swam on, barely causing a ripple, heart thumping. The boat came into view, and I dived down. I inched my head above the surface and watched from a safe distance.

It was the same boat! Two men in khaki uniforms were on board, busy trying to start up the outboard motor. They didn’t look like locals. I spelled out MAN from the letters visible on the side of the boat. What did they want all the way out here?

A light rush of drops on the lake announced rain. It intensified rapidly, and lightning branched through the sky. I dived down to find Mami and held on to her. She rose in the water and swam slowly around so I could rest at the surface while waiting for the storm to pass. I had not yet decided what to do, but I wasn’t ready to swim away, either. I heard the men cursing in the boat, trying to pull down a protective awning. They huddled underneath, already soaked to the skin. The rain took almost an hour to ease off. I could see their agitation as they tried to spark the motor again.

I plucked up my courage. I couldn’t put this off anymore. Besides, they were stranded, so I could easily get away if I had to. I was still a human being, after all. I couldn’t just abandon my fellow men in trouble. And my lake buddies would be waiting for me underwater. I swam closer and hailed the men. But the sputtering noise drowned out my voice till I got right up to the boat. The first one to see me shrieked and clutched at his colleague, almost pushing him overboard.

“Yie, Mike! I told you juju dey for this place!”

The sputtering stopped abruptly as the other fellow shook him off. “Ah, gyae sa kwasiasɛm! Stop your nonsense! It’s just a boy!”

“Hellooo!” I called.

“Hi!” they chorused nervously, but they were calmer than before.

As I reached for the edge of the boat, the one called Mike grasped one of my hands. “Opoku,” he said sharply. “Come on, pull!”

After a moment’s hesitation the other man grasped my other hand, and they pulled me into the boat. It would have been easier just to let me haul myself on board, but I accepted their help as part of our getting acquainted, and my welcome back to the world of humans.

“We work for a wildlife project,” said Mike. “Protecting manatees.”

“Manatees?”

“You’ve never heard of them, right!”

“You and most people,” chuckled Opoku.

I shook my head. “What are they?”

And that was how I found out that Mami and Baby were West African manatees.

We all had questions. I wanted to know more about their work, but I was outnumbered, and they couldn’t contain their curiosity. They were talking at the same time, bombarding me with questions. I settled in the boat and told them my story.

It was the first time I’d talked about what had happened to me since leaving home. Hearing myself tell them about Togbe’s death, my mother’s illness, Matthew, Bright, Jack of Diamonds, Mr. Dovlo, the master, Seth, Abu, Baby Joe, and the others was almost like hearing about someone else’s life. It seemed incredible that all those things had happened to me, but there was also something healing in talking about it as something in the past.

When I finished, Mike said, “Ei! So, you’re one of those fisher boys? I’ve been hearing about them since I was posted here!”

“Yeah!” Opoku said, nodding. “The trafficked children of the Volta Lake!”

“Traffic children?” I asked, confused.

“Trafficked. It’s like… when you force someone to do bad work and you chop the money.”

“But they say it’s not true o!” said Opoku.

“What’s not true?” I asked.

“I saw some government people on TV saying it’s just exaggeration and sensationalism and what and what… you know them and their big words!”

“But look at this boy in front of us!” said Mike. “If they don’t help these kids, who will?”

It made me sad to hear what they were saying. I was never going back to that work, but if this was true, then those I’d left behind and all who worked for masters like ours were truly on their own. Now more than ever I felt I couldn’t abandon them. I told that to Mike and Opoku, and they wanted to take me to the mainland right away to report everything and help me find my way back home. I reminded them that they themselves were stranded out here. “But don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll help you!”

I dived into the water to take a look at the lifeless motor. The blades were trapped fast in a mesh of water hyacinths that Mami and Baby were gently munching on. A readymade solution! But I needed to give them more time. I swam back up and hauled myself into the boat.

“A tree branch is trapped in the blades, and I’ve loosened it a bit, but if we give it more time the water will soak it and then I can easily pull it out.”

The men nodded gratefully and invited me to make myself comfortable on the boat. I asked them to tell me more about their work, and they were only too happy to oblige.

I had an education on that boat as dusk settled around us. The gentle manatee, often taken for the fabled water goddess Mami Wata, was actually a highly endangered species found in only a few parts of the world, including the Volta Lake.

Despite living in water, manatees were mammals like us. This did not surprise me, because I had seen Mami feed Baby. They were tranquil and harmless, another thing I already knew, and they lived in the sea and in river mouths like the Volta estuary, but females often came farther upriver to calmer waters to have their babies. This was what must have happened with the forebears of Mami and Baby, because they were part of a unique population that had been here when the lake was created. The dam had trapped them upstream, and they could never return to the sea.

Trapped again, that familiar theme! Trapped by the dam, by progress, by poverty, by human selfishness. I thought of the things Togbe and Grandpa Dodzi had told me about those who had lost their homes and livelihoods to the dam and how, to crown it all, the poverty in which they’d been trapped was now driving us, their grandchildren, back to the lake, right back to the sites of their flooded homes to be used in a brutal fishing trade!

I felt a new bond with Mami and Baby. Nobody had ever asked us if we wanted to pay the price for progress. But the dam had changed all our fates. Mami, Baby, and the other manatees upstream of the dam were cut off forever from those downstream and in the sea. And from what my new friends were telling me, their numbers were declining. “They get trapped in fishermen’s nets,” explained Mike.

I nodded, remembering the day I had seen that for myself.

“But it’s not only fishing that’s killing them,” said Opoku. “It’s people too!”

Kill Mami Wata? I was dumbstruck. “Why?”

“For meat! And to make oil from their fat.”

“They use these huge spears they make from tree trunks,” said Mike, holding up his hand as if about to thrust one.

I didn’t want to hear any more. The mere thought of anything like that ever happening to Mami and Baby made me feel sick and panicky. The island was a sanctuary for us all, I saw that now. I was glad I hadn’t said anything about them being under the boat. No matter what, I had to be careful not to lead them into danger.

“Mtch, it’s sad o!” said Mike, seeing the expression on my face. “If you see the dead ones, kai!” He shook his head. “What they do to them… You’ll feel pity! A quiet animal like that too; not worrying anybody!”

“They even help people!” said Opoku. “Eating those waterweeds the fishermen hate so much.”

I thought about how Mami and Baby were doing precisely that right now, unbeknownst to these two! I tried to explain what Togbe had told me about how the dam had changed salt levels in the Lower Volta, making waterweeds and bilharzia spread, and causing the clams to die out. I imagined what we must look like right now—a half-naked, half-wild boy explaining riverine geography to a rapt audience of uniformed men in a boat marooned on the Volta Lake.

“Ei! Your grandfather told you all this? Did he go to school?”

“No, but he taught me more than I ever learned there,” I said with pride. It was my turn to ask questions. I wanted to know what would happen to the manatees of the Volta Lake.

They said their project was working to protect them. It took thirteen months for a baby manatee to be born, and if the hunting and trapping continued, they were going to die out.

I thought of all those trapped and hunted—myself, Togbe and his family, the manatee, the trafficked fisher boys and girls. I thought of our brutal work, and of all the times I’d seen flickers of humanity, so quickly extinguished, in the eyes of children with no childhood—Seth, Tseko, Abu, Baby Joe, and likely hundreds more like them. My constant nightmare flashed through my mind, and there, on that boat, I knew I had a new purpose.

I would get off this island and go back to school. I’d study whatever I had to; do whatever it took so that one day I could get involved in whatever work helped free trapped creatures, both human and animal. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to go about it, but if I had learned one thing this past year, it was that if you were really determined to do something, you’d find a way.

I asked Mike and Opoku if they’d ever seen a manatee, and they said only dead ones and photos of live ones. I wasn’t surprised. Only people who swam regularly underwater would ever see live manatees, and the way these guys were scared of the water, I knew they couldn’t swim. I wondered what they’d say if they knew there were two manatees, very much alive, right beneath their boat at this very moment! But I kept quiet. They didn’t need to see Mami and Baby in order to protect them.

We’d been talking for a couple of hours, and night was beginning its rapid descent. It was time to get the boat working. They needed to get safely home, and so did I. That last thought lingered in my mind as I dived back into the water. Wasn’t I going back with them? Where was home for me now?

I postponed the answer to my own question as they shined a flashlight in the water. I hardly needed it because I was so used to working in the dark. I popped my head out of the water. “I’ll tell you to when to spark, okay?”

The blades of the engine looked like new. I dived beneath the boat. Mami and Baby were waiting down below, at a safe distance. I swam back to the surface:

“Spark!”

The motor sprang to life with a grand purr, and Mike and Opoku cheered. “Climb aboard!” they shouted. “Let’s go!”

I shook my head as I prepared to dive back into the water. They were puzzled, but I trusted in my instincts as they tried to persuade me. They were so grateful, they’d take me personally to the police to report the boat master, Jack of Diamonds, and his henchmen, and make sure I got home safely. We’d take my story to the newspapers. I’d be famous. The papers might even launch an appeal to raise funds for my education!

“Not now,” I said simply.

They looked at me as if I was the strangest thing they’d ever come across, which, no doubt, I was.

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“We can pass here next week if you want,” said Mike. “Our project is based in the Afram Plains, but we’ve been patrolling different parts of the lake.”

I nodded into the water. “I’ll be ready! Meet me here, a week today.”

“How will we find you?”

“I’ll find you.”

They promised and headed off, waving. Then they turned around and Opoku shouted above the roar of the motor, “We forgot to ask—what’s your name?”

I paused for a moment and then called out over the water, “Sena!”

As I swam off with Mami and Baby I said my name again, mine and Togbe’s. I smiled into the water at the sound of it. It was so long since I’d heard it. I turned over to swim on my back and shouted it to the stars.