Black And White Television
/The first person to buy a television in my village was the envy of village gossipers for months.
Clansmen who lived in distant places heard of the new wonder. The excitement in the village was electrifying.
The man at the center of the news was a womanizer. Imagine how easily he magnetized desperate women longing for a man who loved to evolve with the times.
At night, families marched in the direction of his house. There was no electricity in our village so the sound of his generator was the GPS address everyone followed to the new Netflix.
A small black and white TV it was, and every now and then a neck craned to look behind the little screen to see where the images filing past our eyes went. The images were so real and emitted joy into our hearts that it was hard to imagine who got all those witty people and wonderful places crammed into the box in front of us.
Whatever we saw on television was news those who couldn’t go to Sani’s house to watch his television paid money and ears to be fed updates.
We didn’t know what it was, but it was exciting watching and hearing the random grey and white dots sizzling on the TV screen just before the images arrived.
I remember the day papa bought his first TV. Mother took her time to dress the table on which it was placed, and all of us children were warned to take our bath before coming to sit at the feet of the new god installed in the house.
Daddy’s new feat meant my brother and I would no longer loitter around our landlord’s window to catch a glimpse of nollywood movies on his TV screen. Usually, my junior brother went first, and once he was sure there was something exciting going on, he signaled me, a noiseless signal with his fingers. I knew what it meant, and together we knocked and went into the living room of the landlord.
Sometimes there was a frown on the face of the landlord’s wife, but we weren’t bothered and never gave up. Her husband was always happy to see us, and whenever he came home with watermelon or pawpaw, he made sure we had a slice.
Now our father too had a TV!
Back then our TVs used antennae usually tied to some little pole nailed to roofs of houses, and for some strange reasons, it was always in the middle of a movie or football match, when the action was intensely suspenseful, that there would be a sudden community-wide power outage, a blackout that blackened our hearts and colored our joy grey.
If it were day time, the killer of our joy was likely a problem related to the signal, and a zealous uncle or cousin would climb our roof, tweaking and twisting the damned antenna in all directions while we shouted “Stop!“ whenever the tweaking produced crystal clear images for a few seconds.
Whoever was up there was always deaf to our plea to stop at the right moment, at the right place, in the right way.
Back and forth endless screams would be made till a smart sibling stood up to be the mediator of our exchanges, transmitting to the soul atop our roof our messages of just when the tuning was perfect… And voilà! Crystal clear images on our beloved screen once again.
As if the manufacturers of those black and white tvs cast some spell on their devices, the TV signal usually became normal again when the key moments in a movie or football match was nearly over.
But we were never dismayed. Our imagination pieced the rest of the story with whatever we had initially seen into a complete story.
Oh, the good old days!
By Benjamin Nambu
From: Ghana
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