Such Is Life

My people hardly traveled. Those who did were few. And everyone knew them. Because they were usually the multilinguals in the village who brought news, songs and tales of other lands to our uncultured, ignorant, naive ears.

Back then many things were communal. My dad was building his first house. And many men in the village were present, some on top of the building, others below. The building material wasn’t cement, sand and stones, but sand, special clay, water, wood and aluminium for the roofing.

Sand was mixed with clay and while a certain amount of water was being poured into it, men stood barefooted in it, mixing with their feet. When the master builder felt the mixture was ready, it was rolled into sizeable balls and thrown to a man at the top of the building who used them like building blocks. Unlike cement blocks, these clay-sand mortar was flattened on previous layers of the wall till the walls of the house look like layers of shades of clay.

Same material was used for the plastering. You can guess that when it rains heavily, the building will  wear down, and after years, collapse from the pressure.

But that was what papa could afford as a new home for us.

There were however, techniques that made a building withstand the pressure of rain and heat. In addition to the clay and sand mixture, cow dung was introduced, then used for both plastering the house and as concrete for the floors. Long sticks with thick flat  pads were used to pound every area of the house compound to reinforce the strength of the concrete floor and to smoothen the surfaces.

For plastering the walls of the house, wooden throwels were used.

Of course, when the house is freshly built, the stench of the cow dung will naturally be the first occupants. But they do not stay for long. When the sun shows up, everywhere become clean and empty and fresh. Many use thatch for the roof, but papa used aluminium sheet. It was a sign of class. The thatch usually kept the interior of the house cool during hot hours of the day, especially in northern Ghana where the weather was a junior sibling of Middle East deserts.

During the construction of papa’s new house, the men kept talking about so many things to kill fatigue, sometimes singing in unison. I still remember what they were discussing when they were constructing the fence wall, the part close to the little hen coop and the well on the compound.

The brother of a relative who travelled a lot was saying that in some parts of the world, it was morning while we were in late afternoon. I still remember the shock in my ears, and how wide my little eyes and young mind dilated with shock upon hearing the news. I imagined the place a little world far away, hanging a little close to ours where such strange things happened. How did it happen that way?

From time to time, the builders would digress into some gossip and laugh heartily. Every now and then women came into their subject of discussion. They would use all kinds of code names to talk about man-woman interactions and body parts. I was a spoilt child then, so the terms weren’t very difficult to decode.

Finally, they retired to the shade of a tree where the women brought food and fresh water to nourish them.

Once a while, I would wander off with other kids of the neighborhood and on one of such occasions we bumped into an aunt killing a long snake on a path beside the stream with a pestle. She had screamed when she saw it but no one was around so she concocted a killing machine.

It took weeks to complete papa’s house, mainly thanks to the generous efforts of relatives and friends at no cost of labour except food and good jokes.

There was a kitchen roofed with thatch, six other rooms, bedrooms, but only one was finished (where we would later sleep with our parents -they on the bed and us the children on mats spread on the floor).

There was a small vegetable garden in one uncompleted room beside the kitchen, not part of the six rooms of the main house, and there was a very big garden behind it with maize and groundnuts planted on it even before we moved in.

Our house was on the outskirts of the village, very few houses were beside and behind us, and some distance away lived the fulanis, who were not of our clan but herdsmen who had become part of the little village. Much farther was the only river in the village, and it separated our settlements from the farms.

Life in the village was fun, especially sneaking out to chase girls under moonlight against the wishes of our parents.

But one by one we left the village behind, migrating to big towns and cities where village life suddenly tasted savage and unattractive, till now I can’t remember when I last visited, probably even bypassed a childhood friend or close relative in the city without knowing.

But it’s all part of life.

By Benjamin Nambu

From: Ghana

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