Near the Weeping Trees

Poetic license, a grove of weeping trees
Is said to mark the spot where Babatu's wife perished,
Abandoned by his retreating raiders

Vitellaria paradoxa, the botanists would precise
The creeping shea tree takes 15 years to start to bear fruit
The site of her execution, an arboreal memorial of resistance

The historians would argue about the accuracy of oral history
Questioning how these stories have come down through the ages
That the battle of Sandema most likely took place
Somewhat at a remove from where we now celebrate it
That the invention of tradition prevails

That, yes, Babatu was the prime slave raider in those times
But that the invocation of Samory was a touch of artistic license
Embellishment by the griots,
Born of his fearsome reputation
For the record shows he confined his empire's reach
To the west of the coast

Thus, while Samory's troops did overrun Bole,
They never made it to Sandema
No, Babutu was the prime mover
In what is now northern Ghana

The Zabarima depredations he led
The forced marches, the trail of dread
Spilling over from the East and North - Niger
Shackled, back to the market at Salaga

It follows; the dread that the Gonja faced
Was in the same vein as what the Bulsa bore
The specter of their adversaries
Commingled in the tales of the griots
For it was the same threat, the same suffering,
And the same wounds

And, yes, Bulsa children should run
At the mere mention of either foe
The griots had it right:
What is 200 miles in the grand scheme of things?

So, Salaga market
Or Kasana market near Tomu
Ominous since their founding
The former now a tourist site a century later
With a few exhibits

The footpaths trod by captives,
Marched from Bulsa and Kasena areas
And shackles, so many shackles, symbolic,
And other items that bear reflection
Earth shrines in modern times,
Northern doors of no return

...

We leave faint traces in our stories,
Signposts of intimate legacies
Fumes marking cautionary tales,
The touchpoints and the villains
And heroes too.

Years later, we gather and celebrate the victories
Feok they call the annual festival,
Harvests, and a "time of plenty"
Where warriors gather in performance
And recount the shared memories
And it all happens - historians may debate,
Not too far from the weeping trees

Near the Weeping Trees, a playlist

I recall when the then 3 year old entered the daycare center singing Burning Spear's refrain: "Do you remember the days of slavery?". The looks from the front desk, of those proper, Southern Texas ladies... I decided to keep things light with my playlists going forward. Still, these are living histories, the legacies of men.

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Slavery days by Burning Spear
• Wolves and Leopards by Dennis Brown
• The Invasion by Burning Spear

Bonus beats: a few live and dub versions of these joints

See previously Running Away, my first piece on the tales of Northen Ghana and, just to confuse things, Samory's Old Camp

This note is part of the Things Fall Apart series under the banner of The Bulsa Way.

File under: slavery, Bulsa, Ghana, Africa, culture, memory, history, observation, perception, fear, dislocation, escape, griots, Things Fall Apart, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 10, 2022

Running Away

The lyrics in the songs always mentioned running away. Flight, escape, danger in its many variations. Embedded in the outlook, punctuating the very choruses was a sense of precarity. And yet these were not dirges, these were not laments. They'd long made their peace with the world as they'd found it, nay, they were comfortable even if clear-eyed about this existence.

And they watched.

Running away, heading for the hills and the rocky terrain. Running away, heading for higher ground, for those parts that only those close to these lands would know. The caverns where they could hide, holding their breath, stifling all sounds, covering the mouths of the infants.

And they waited.

Holes in the ground, the entrances disguised, dark caverns where the ancestors were said to have sought shelter from previous predators. At most a dozen could fit in the largest ones so you had to be prepared to seek out other spots, ever calculating as you ran up over the rocks how many had already made it, and if you would be able to use this particular refuge.

Oftentimes it was a gamble.

To enter the hiding places, you crouched, crawled and wriggled. The earth would envelop you, surround you with its embrace. You could expect to taste the slightly acidic crumbs as you pushed your way in, to smell the faint trace of clay. The earth would resist the touch, implacable and stern, until it would yield all of a sudden, plunging you forward into the void of the cavern.

You hoped, you wished for a soft landing.

You had to be methodical even in the heat of the moment, deliberate even as the senses were heightened by the danger. First, to dislodge the covering by pulling at the right spot, the intricate branch structure that only careful hands could pry open, and then to preserve its camouflage so that it would appear undisturbed to the raiders in pursuit. The architecture of escape, the provisional sanctuary.

And they prayed.

No matter how many times they had practiced, no matter how many warnings, no matter how many songs they had sung, no matter how much advance notice they'd garnered, they knew that there would be something lost, that there would be someone lost. It was the nature of life in those times. Something, someone would be snatched from you. Pieces of yourself dispersed, shredded away, leaving only the memories.

And they wept.

Farmers and pastoralists, they never had a standing army. Millet and maize in small fields, custodians of the northern territories, eking out enough to support the clan, to trade some guinea fowl and kola nuts, to enjoy the gifts of the earth, to husband it. This patch of land on the lower Sahel was unforgiving but it was theirs.

And they stayed.

But, at length, there had to be some edge they could wield to surprise the raiders. Running away might ensure survival for many, but more was needed. They taught the youth about all the plants and their uses. Those they ate, those they treated with as part of aromatic bitters, those with properties that were prized, their nighttime potency recounted, astringency debated, and medicinal effectiveness evaluated. And once they proved adept and facile with the identification of the flora, they would learn about what in extremis could be used in the poisoned arrows that were always reluctantly fashioned. Weary, wary, reluctant but necessary.

And so they studied.

The elements of survival were well known. Swift recall, preparation, decisiveness under threat, knowledge of topology, and luck. For the gods were capricious. Even the fleetest of foot, the strongest, and the most agile could be brought low and fall prey to the human hyena that roamed the lands. And Babatu's men were implacable and determined trackers. Tears would be for nought when in their grip. Best to fight when caught, to resist with all one's heart. But, above all, to flee when attacked, to live to see another day, to rebuild and restore when these interlopers would leave, for they would surely leave as these lands only yielded bodies to them.

And they ran away.

Taboo. A famous dirge recounted how one of the twins was unable to stay silent, a hard demand of a toddler, let alone in the darkness of the cavern. Their position having been given away, tough decisions had to be made. Father and the one would give themselves up hours later, when it became clear that this set of raiders would wait them out, they were a patient lot. Mother and the other twin would retreat further into the second chamber, deep in the dank bowels of the earth and stay for three days. It was hard to breathe, it was hard to stay silent and still, and there was only one gourd of water and the few nuts hidden in the fold of her cloth. They clanged to each other, charged with the burden of loss, of memory, of survival. Pieces of themselves lost for good. But they lived to tell the tale, to recover possession of the land.

And they survived.

Strangers have come into our land
Raiders have come for our bodies
Take heed, my brother, and run, run away
Caution, my sister, and run, run away
For we will all, someday, be turned into sand
And all that will remain is our story

Running Away, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note. (spotify version)

• Running Away by Roy Ayers
• Running Away by Bob Marley
• Kunta Kinte Dub by The Revolutionaries
• Man in the Hills by Burning Spear
• Hiding by Breakestra
• Slavery Days by Burning Spear
• Kunta Kinte by Horace Andy
• Man in the Hills (live) by Burning Spear
• Hiding (Quantic mix) by Breakestra
• Kunta Kinte by Mad Professor

Further reading:

• Raids and Refuge - The Bulsa in Babatu's Slave Wars by Franz Kröger
• Slavery, Memory and Orality by Emmanuel Saboro
• Wounds of our Past by Emmanuel Saboro

A later discovery: Beyond Elmina: The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana by Joachim Jack Agamba mined similar terrain to great effect.

Next: Near the Weeping Trees

This note is part of the Things Fall Apart series. Do let me know what banner might be appropriate.

File under: slavery, Bulsa, Ghana, Africa, culture, memory, music, history, observation, perception, fear, dislocation, escape, griots, Things Fall Apart, poetry, toli

Writing log. July 24, 2022

Nothing to See Here

It is of the nature of a conundrum, this puzzling passivity
That human beings, in the main, submit so readily to authority
Acquiescing to mass extinction events almost with alacrity
Fearful, as it were, of being accused of disturbing tranquility

A tall order, perhaps, to stick one's neck out in a fit of outrage
Exit, voice or loyalty. The perils, and limits, of moral courage
The dissonance between one's values and what one is prepared to live with
In the dark of night, realizing that our inaction makes us complicit

Inured to pain, with no trace of accountability
The routine tallies, dismaying figures as normalcy
Altogether brutish outcomes, a cheapness, a deadening
Nothing to see here, don't even count on a reckoning

Nothing to See Here, a playlist

A playlist for this intolerable time (spotify version)

• Sitting and Watching by Dennis Brown
• How Soon We Forget by Colonel Abrams
• I Can't Go for That by Hall & Oates
• I Just Don't Understand by Ann-Margaret
• Don't Know Why by Norah Jones

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: failure, coronavirus, pandemic, culture, observation, perception, despair, dislocation, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, covidious, poetry, toli

Writing log. July 20, 2022

Internal Exile

The ellipses in our family narratives always get filled in eventually
It is this unhurried and meandering discourse that frustrates outsiders
Yet to us, who seemingly navigate these blind spots
   with unerring accuracy,
The discursive vagaries of the oral tradition lie at the heart of the matter

Nay, we have the certainty that the story will indeed be told
Will be shared in its own time and place, before we grow old
Truth and reconciliation will overcome secrets and lies
So it was that I learned about the matter of internal exile

You see, it is a matter of fact that the man known as The Founder
Sometimes called Osagyefo, His Messsiahship, Ghana's first leader
Issued an executive instrument ordering that my grandfather
And four of his friends, then at Mawuli - they were school teachers
Be sent into internal exile, abruptly and without giving a reason
They were no longer authorized to live and work in the Volta region

Sixty odd years later, I'm still rather inclined to take it personal
I've been told to let bygones be bygones, that it's not my battle
I hear the rejoinders, the man was fighting imperialism
The liberation struggle and other exigencies, colonialism

It's ancient history; those were heady days. Perhaps it was random
We know all too well what he said: Seek ye first the political kingdom
And it was internal exile, they'll say, as if to restore the balance
At least it wasn't preventive detention or, worse, a disappearance

I pieced it together, that's the reason why my Aunt was born in Kyebi
And why my Uncle will squint and snort heartily
And then will bring up rogues and Young Pioneers
And why Mum always pauses
   when you start going on about the man and that age
And tells you that she had already started at boarding school during those years
And how she was determined to not go to ideological college
And those training camps, and declare allegiance to the CPP party
And the deafening silence in my grandfather and grandmother, it still rings
They would shrug and move the conversation on,
   they made the best of things

Our view on The Founder is thus born of an intimacy with his failings
We have no patience for apologists who deflect,
   and mention his weakness
Pointing to machinations among his entourage and political stress
They have no leg to stand on, he was right there in the middle of things
Personally applying his stamp on policies, he gave his endorsement
For better or worse, to the conflation of state, party, and person

Whether it is being advised daily about Danquah's prison routine,
Involvement in university appointments or meddling in nutrition
The historical record shows him as the decision maker
   who signed the decrees
The starvation diets that were designed for those he refused to free
I've seen the squalid scrawls in the margins
   of bureaucratic memos of his pen
So it was unsurprising that there was rejoicing
   when his reign came to an end

Heck, I hear you say, with a rather knowing smile,
Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn famously bore internal exile,
And many others too, it couldn't have been that hard
The world got Crime and Punishment and even Cancer Ward

After all, those years in Kyebi were a life removed from Siberia,
Papa, Da, and your aunts and uncles didn't get burnt by the sun
Well, Lenin too got in on the act, I'll have you remember
And generations learned bitter lessons about what is to be done

And so we come to the former prisoner's dilemma
Whether to forgive and forget, move on and write new chapters
Or whether to bear the grudge,
   as not everyone can be like Nelson Mandela
My grandparents decided that it was best to deflect with silence and laughter

...

Some time ago, I had a discussion, it was late one night
With two men, acquaintances, about Bloodbath, South Carolina
I probed and questioned them at length, seeking their insight
About all manner of blind spots and the weight of trauma
We honed in on the discomfort of the skin that they were living in
Now that I think of it, I was being holier-than-thou about matters of sin
I had quite forgotten about my own family's misgivings and traditions
That I wasn't too far removed from similar deflections and misdirection

I won't flinch from the rough beast, as if in denial
I'm quite prepared to bear the costs of internal exile
Rather than turn my back on the conflicted legacies of men
For soul insurance, there's no limit to what I am prepared to spend

Internal Exile, a playlist

Sade and Cameo provide the soundtrack to alternately haunt and invest our skins and memories to equip us for life in the torrid zone. (spotify version)

• Haunt Me by Sade
  Paradoxically this was the lullaby that I sung the most to my children. It is etched in their psyche as bedtime music despite the lyrics. Irony is indeed the key register of African life.
• Skin I'm In by Cameo
  The horn section is unparalleled, I could listen for hours even as the lyrics sink in.
• Turn My Back On You by Sade
  A shadow's burden never sounded so sweet.
• Back and Forth by Cameo
  Everything is written in sand

I nominate this internal displacement for the Things Fall Apart series. Do let me know what banner might be appropriate.

File under: displacement, exile, politics, Ghana, Africa, history, memory, culture, observation, perception, outrage, dislocation, rogues, dictator, alienation, family, personal, Observers are worried, Things Fall Apart, toli

Writing log: March 14, 2021