Akua couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen fire, but she could remember the first time she’d dreamed of it. It was in 1895, sixteen years after her mother, Abena, had carried her Akua-swollen belly to the missionaries in Kumasi, fifteen years after Abena had died. Then the fire in Akua’s dream had been nothing more than a quick flash of ochre. Now the firewoman raged.
Akua’s ear was growing, so at night she now slept flat on her back or stomach, never on her side, afraid of crushing the new weight. She was certain that the dreams entered through her growing ear, that they latched onto the sizzling sounds of fried things in the daytime and lodged themselves in her mind at night, and so she slept flat-backed to let them through. Because even though she feared the new sounds, she knew she needed to hear them too.
Akua knew she’d had the dream again that night when she woke up screaming. The sound escaped her mouth like breath, like pipe smoke. Her husband, Asamoah, woke up next to her and swiftly reached for the machete he kept beside him, looking at the ground to check for the children, then at the door to check for an intruder, and ending by looking at his wife.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.
Akua shivered, suddenly cold. “It was the dream,” she said. She didn’t realize she was crying until Asamoah pulled her into his arms. “You and the rest of the leaders should not have burned that white man,” she said into her husband’s chest, and he pushed her away.
“You speak for the white man?” he asked.
She shook her head quickly. She’d known since she picked him for marriage that her husband feared her time among the white missionaries had made her weaker, less of an Asante somehow. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s the fire. I keep dreaming about fire.”
Asamoah clicked his tongue. He had lived in Edweso his whole life. On his cheek he bore the mark of the Asante, and the nation was his pride. “What do I care of fire when they have exiled the Asantehene?”
Akua could not respond. For years, King Prempeh I had been refusing to allow the British to take over the Kingdom of Asante, insisting that the Asante people would remain sovereign. For this, he was arrested and exiled, and the anger that had been brewing all over the Asante nation grew sharper. Akua knew her dreams would not stop this anger from brewing in her husband’s heart. And so she decided to keep them to herself, to sleep on her stomach or back, to never again let Asamoah hear her scream.
—
Akua spent her days in the compound with her mother-in-law, Nana Serwah, and her children, Abee and Ama Serwah. She started each morning by sweeping, a task she had always enjoyed for its repetitiveness, its calm. It had been her job in the missionary school too, but there, the Missionary used to laugh as he watched her, marveling at the fact that the school floor was made of clay. “Who ever heard of sweeping dust from dust?” he would say, and Akua would wonder what the floors looked like where he came from.
After she swept, Akua would help the other women cook. Abee was only four years old, but she liked to hold the giant pestle and pretend that she was helping. “Mama, look!” she would say, hugging the tall stick to her tiny body. It towered above her, and the weight of it threatened to throw her off-balance. Akua’s toddler, Ama Serwah, had big, bright eyes that would glance from the top of the fufu stick to the trembling sister before sending her gaze to her mother.
“You are so strong!” Akua would say, and Nana Serwah would cluck her tongue.
“She’ll fall and hurt herself,” her mother-in-law would say, snatching the fufu stick from Abee’s hands and shaking her head. Akua knew that Nana Serwah did not approve of her, often saying that a woman whose mother had left her to be taught by white men would never know how to raise children herself. It was usually around this time that Nana Serwah would send Akua out to the market to pick up more ingredients for the food they would make later for Asamoah and the other men who spent their days outside, meeting, planning.
Akua liked walking to the market. She could finally think, without the scrutinizing gaze of the women and elderly men, who stayed around the compound, making fun of her for all the time she spent staring at the same spot on a hut’s wall. “She’s not correct,” they would say aloud, no doubt wondering why Asamoah would choose to marry her. But she wasn’t just staring into space; she was listening to all the sounds the world had to offer, to all the people who inhabited those spaces the others could not see. She was wandering.
On her walk to the market, she would often stop at the spot where the townsmen had burned the white man. A nameless man, a wanderer himself, who had found himself in the wrong town at the wrong time. At first he was safe, lying under a tree, shielding his face from the sun with a book, but then Kofi Poku, a child of only three, stumbled in front of Akua, who had been very close to asking the man if he was lost or needed help, pointed with his tiny index finger, and shouted, “Obroni!”
Akua’s ears prickled at the word. She had been in Kumasi the first time she heard it. A child who didn’t go to the missionary school had called the Missionary “obroni,” and the man turned as red as a burning sun and walked away. Akua was only six years old then. To her, the word had only ever meant “white man.” She hadn’t understood why the Missionary had gotten upset, and in times like those she wished she could remember her mother. Maybe she would have had the answers. Instead, Akua stole out that evening to the hut of a fetish priest on the edge of town who was said to have been around since the white man first came to the Gold Coast.
“Think about it,” the man said, after she told him what happened. In the missionary school they called white people Teacher or Reverend or Miss. When Abena died, Akua had been left to be raised by the Missionary. He was the only one who would take her. “It did not begin as obroni. It began as two words. Abro ni.”
“Wicked man?” Akua said.
The fetish man nodded. “Among the Akan he is wicked man, the one who harms. Among the Ewe of the Southeast his name is Cunning Dog, the one who feigns niceness and then bites you.”
“The Missionary is not wicked,” Akua said.
The fetish man kept nuts in his pocket. This was how Akua had first met him. After her mother died, she had been wailing for her in the street. She hadn’t yet understood loss. Crying was what she did every time her mother left her, to go to market, to go to sea. Wailing for the loss of her was commonplace, but this time it had lasted the entire morning, and her mother had not reappeared to shush her, hold her, kiss her face. The fetish man saw her crying that day and had given her a kola nut. Chewing it had pacified her, for a time.
Now he gave one to her again and said, “Why is the Missionary not wicked?”
“He is God’s man.”
“And God’s men are not wicked?” he asked.
Akua nodded.
“Am I wicked?” the fetish man asked, and Akua didn’t know how to answer. That first day she had met him, when he had given her the kola nut, the Missionary had come out and seen her with him. He had snatched her hand and pulled her away and told her not to talk to fetish men. They called him a fetish man because he was, because he had not given up praying to the ancestors or dancing or collecting plants and rocks and bones and blood with which to make his fetish offerings. He had not been baptized. She knew he was supposed to be wicked, that she would be in a sea of trouble if the missionaries knew that she still went to see him, and yet she recognized that his kindness, his love, was different from the people’s at the school. Warmer and truer somehow.
“No, you’re not wicked,” she said.
“You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.”
She did remember. She remembered it even as Kofi Poku pointed at the white man sleeping under the tree and shouted “Obroni!” She remembered as the crowd formed and as the rage that had been building in the village for months came to a head. The men awoke the white man by tying him to the tree. They built a fire, and then they burned him. All the whi
le he was screaming in English, “Please, if anyone here can understand me, let me go! I am only a traveler. I am not from the government! I am not from the government!”
Akua was not the only person in the crowd who understood English. She was not the only person in the crowd who did nothing to help.
—
When Akua returned to the compound, everyone was in an uproar. She could sense the chaos in the air that seemed to get thicker, heavier, with noise and fear, the smoke from sizzling food and the buzzing of flies. Nana Serwah was covered in a film of sweat, her wrinkled hands rolling fufu by the second to plate up for the large crowd of men who had come. The woman looked up and spotted Akua.
“Akua, what’s wrong with you? Why are you just standing there? Come and help. These men need to be fed before the next meeting.”
Akua shook herself out of the daze she had been in and sat beside her mother-in-law, rolling the mashed cassava into neat little circles and passing them along to the next woman, who filled the bowls with soup.
The men were shouting loudly, so loudly that it was nearly impossible to distinguish what one was saying from what the others were saying. The sound of it was all the same. Outrage. Rage. Akua could see her husband, but she did not dare look at him. She knew her place was with her mother-in-law, the other women, the old men, not begging questions of him with her eyes.
“What is going on?” Akua whispered to Nana Serwah. The woman was rinsing her hands in the calabash of water that sat beside her, then drying them on her wrapper.
She spoke in a hushed tone, her lips barely moving. “The British governor, Frederick Hodgson, was in Kumasi today. He says they will not return King Prempeh I from exile.”
Akua sucked her teeth. This was what they had all been fearing.
“It’s worse than that,” her mother-in-law continued. “He said we must give him the Golden Stool so that he can sit on it or give it as a gift to his queen.”
Akua’s hands started to tremble in the pot, making a low rattling noise and marring the shape of the fufu. So it was worse than what they had all been fearing, worse than another war, worse than a few hundred more dead. They were a warrior people, and war was what they knew. But if a white man took the Golden Stool, the spirit of the Asante would surely die, and that they could not bear.
Nana Serwah reached out and touched her hand. It was one of the few gestures of kindness Asamoah’s mother had shown her since the days of Asamoah and her courtship, then marriage. They both knew what was coming and what it meant.
By the next week there had already been a meeting among the Asante leaders in Kumasi. The stories that followed told of the men of the meeting being too timid, disagreeing about what to say to the British, what to do. It was Yaa Asantewaa, Edweso’s own Queen Mother, who stood up and demanded that they fight, saying that if the men would not do it, the women would.
Most of the men were gone by morning. Asamoah kissed his daughters, and then he kissed her too, held her for just a moment. Akua watched him as he dressed. She watched as he left. Twenty other townsmen went with him. A few men stayed, sat in the compound waiting to be fed.
Nana Serwah’s husband, Akua’s father-in-law, had kept a machete with a golden handle beside him every night of his life, and after he died Nana Serwah had kept it in the place where he used to sleep. A machete in exchange for a body. After the Queen Mother’s call to arms reached Edweso, she had pulled that machete out from the bed and taken it with her into the compound. And all the men who had not already gone to fight for the Asante took one look at the old woman holding the large weapon and left. And so began the war.
—
The Missionary kept a long, thin switch on his desk.
“You will no longer go to class with the other children,” he told her. Only a few days had passed since a child had called the Missionary obroni, but Akua hardly remembered that. She had just learned to write her English name, Deborah, that very morning. It was the longest name of any of the children in the class, and Akua had worked very hard to write it. “From now on,” the Missionary said, “you will take lessons from me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she answered. Word must have gotten to him that she had mastered her name. She was getting special treatment.
“Sit down,” the Missionary said.
She sat.
The Missionary took the switch from his desk and pointed it at her. The tip of it was just inches from her nose. When she crossed her eyes she could see it clearly, and it wasn’t until then that the fear hit her.
“You are a sinner and a heathen,” he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. “Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and a heathen, like you.”
Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated.
“All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”
This time, Akua did not nod. She looked at the Missionary, but she didn’t know how to describe the look he returned to her. After he told her to stand up and bend over, after he lashed her five times and commanded her to repent her sins and repeat “God bless the queen,” after she was permitted to leave, after she finally threw the fear up, the only word that popped into her head was “hungry.” The Missionary looked hungry, like if he could, he would devour her.
—
Every day Akua woke her daughters up while the sun was still sleeping. She wrapped her wrapper, and then walked with her girls out into the dirt roads where Nana Serwah, Akos, Mambee, and all of the other women of Edweso had already begun to assemble. Akua’s voice was the strongest, and so she led them in song:
Awurade Nyame kum dom
Oboo adee Nyame kum dom
Ennee yerekokum dom afa adee
Oboo adee Nyame kum dom
Soso be hunu, megyede be hunu.
Up and down the streets they sang. Akua’s toddler, Ama Serwah, sang the loudest and most off-key, her words a slew of gibberish until the song reached her favorite part, at which point she screamed more than sang, “CREATOR GOD, DEFEAT THE TROOPS!” Sometimes the women put her in the very front, and her little legs would stomp about valiantly until Akua picked her up to carry her the rest of the way.
After the singing, Akua went back to wash herself and the children, put white clay on her body as a symbol of her support for the war efforts, eat, then sing again. They cooked for the men in shifts so that there was always something to send away. At night, Akua would sleep alone, dreaming of the fire still. Screaming again, now that Asamoah was gone.
—
Akua and Asamoah had been married for five years. He was a tradesman, and he had business in Kumasi. He had seen her one day at the missionary school and had stopped to talk to her. And from then on he stopped to talk to her every single day. Two weeks later he was back to ask if she would marry him and come to live in Edweso, for he knew she was an orphan with no other place to live.
Akua found nothing particularly remarkable about Asamoah. He was not handsome like the man called Akwasi who came to church every Sunday, standing timidly in the back and pretending not to notice as the mothers threw their daughters at him. Asamoah also seemed to possess little mental intelligence, for his whole life had been about the intelligence of the body: what he could catch or build or lift to take with him to market. She had once seen him sell two kente for the price of one because he could not count the money correctly. Asamoah was not the best choice, but he was the sure one, and Akua was happy to accept his proposal. Up until then, she had thought she would have to stay with the Missionary forever, playing his strange game of student/teacher, heathen/savior, but with Asamoah she saw that maybe her life could be something different from what she had always imagined it would be.
“I forbid i
t,” the Missionary said when she told him.
“You can’t forbid it,” Akua said. Now that she had a plan, a hope for a way out, she felt emboldened.
“You…you are a sinner,” the Missionary whispered, his head in his hands. “You are a heathen,” he said, louder now. “You must ask God to forgive your sins.”
Akua didn’t respond. For nearly ten years, she had filled the Missionary’s hunger. Now she wanted to attend to her own.
“Ask God to forgive your sins!” the Missionary yelled, throwing his switch at her.
The switch hit Akua on the left shoulder. She watched it drop to the floor, and then, calmly, she walked out. Behind her she could hear the Missionary saying, “He’s not a man of God. He’s not a man of God.” But Akua cared nothing for God. She was sixteen, and the fetish priest had died only a year before. She used to go to him whenever she could get away from the Missionary. She used to tell him that the more she learned about God from the Missionary, the more questions she had. Big questions like, if God was so big, so powerful, why did he need the white man to bring him to them? Why could he not tell them himself, make his presence known as he had in the days written about in the Book, with bush fires and dead men walking? Why had her mother run to these missionaries, these white people, out of all people? Why did she have no family? No friends? Whenever she asked the Missionary these questions, he refused to answer her. The fetish man told her that maybe the Christian God was a question, a great and swirling circle of whys. This answer never satisfied Akua, and by the time the fetish man died, God no longer satisfied her either. Asamoah was real. Tangible. His arms were as thick as yams, and his skin as brown. If God was why, then Asamoah was yes and yes again.
Now that war had come for them, Akua noticed that Nana Serwah was nicer to her than she had ever before been. Word of this man and that man dying came in every day, and they were both holding their breath, certain that it was only a matter of time before the name out of the messenger’s mouth was Asamoah.