The battered white Toyota swerved off the roundabout and chugged onto the highway ramp, pulling out of Kumasi and heading northwest into the hilly province of Brong-Ahafo. I exulted to think I was at last on my way to Penkwasi, leaving behind the fishing villages and harbor towns, the shrimp and grouper flickering in tubs and baskets, the roasting corn ears, the round clay fish-smoking ovens, the women pounding fufu, the little girls rolling tomatoes on rough stone slabs into pulp for the day’s soup, the baby goats scampering, the chickens underfoot.
Now, I told myself; now, my adventure finally could begin. How odd it was to think that, before I had flown out from New York, I had never suspected the existence of a sprawling province called Brong-Ahafo, or a largish provincial capital called Sunyani, or a tiny municipality called Penkwasi; much less a marauding beast, whatever its dimensions.
Only two weeks before, I had seen the fish queens of Ghana’s coast as the sole and sufficient object of my mission. But over the last 12 days, as I toured the markets and cold stores of Accra, Apam and Tema, then journeyed west to the harbors of Elmina and Takoradi and the tiny fishing village of Komenda, I had come to regard my fish tale as a distraction from a larger, more compelling quest. I yearned to lay down my nets and join the hunt for the predator that had terrified Brong-Ahafo’s residents for months with nightly killing sprees, leaving behind a litter of eviscerated livestock and a trail of lurid headlines. Utterly beguiled, I hungered for the chase.
The driver who now transported me toward the menace was named Kweku. I had hailed him five minutes earlier at a Kumasi traffic circle and persuaded him to take me to Sunyani and back before nightfall (about 80 miles each way) for about $20. I asked him if he was worried about the beast, but he shook his head, dismissively I thought, so I shrugged and took my seat beside him. I’d assumed we would chat along the way, but conversation quickly stalled.
My opening gambit had been about our names. It had been explained to me that every Ghanaian child, male and female, has a name (separate from any given name it may also have) that indicates the day of the week on which the child was born. A boy born on a Sunday is Kwesi; a girl born on a Tuesday is Adwoa. Born on a Friday, I was Efua (or would have been, had I been born Ashanti or Akan or Ga).
When I began asking Kweku about the Efuas in his life, however, he had darted a hostile and uncomprehending glance at me, then swung his eyes back to the road with an air of desperation or maybe mutiny. I abandoned my attempts at chumminess and realized I would have to find an actual interpreter when we reached Sunyani. No matter: The trip was underway, that was the important thing. Everything would surely sort itself out.
When I had arrived in the Ashanti capital that morning, on the bus from Takoradi, the streets were garlanded with banners proclaiming the jubilee of the Asantehene, the Ashanti king Otumfuo Opoku Ware II. Kumasi was a broad, populous, pallid and palmy city, with cement block buildings, not very tall, that were perforated with decorative concrete-lace walls. It made me think of the outskirts of Miami, as you drive toward the Keys.
But as we continued northwest, the landscape changed, seeming to push itself up from the earth by its elbows, to shake off the pallor and dust of city life, flex its muscles, and regain its natural color and contour. Rolling expanses of lush grass spread to the horizon and hills on either side of the road. From a distance, normal-sized palms, maples, paw-paws and umbrella trees looked like weeds or corn-stalks, but ancient trunks rose among them like giants, their tall, thick trunks looming as high as the Chrysler building, maybe higher — mahogany, ebony, neem, I didn’t know all the names.
The foliage and branches of the arboreal monoliths appeared only up at the very tops; dark-green canopies whose shapes bunched and shifted like cloud formations. Massing their leafy arms, the treetops seemed to hunch over and peer down at the countryfolk below like a granny in a folktale woodcut, leaning down to count chicks in a farmyard. The grey line of the highway and the verdant swell of the valley were cut by deep red iron-rich earthworks that rose in ridges, and by outcroppings of huts that climbed the red ridges, their roofs shielded with flimsy tin sheeting weighted down with stones. In the doorways of the huts I saw bed sheets — not hinged doors that you could lock, or even shut. I saw no streetlamps. At night, I thought, it would be so dark.
Back in Accra, I had moved to a different hotel to avoid the drama of the Mekong (although, on my first night in my new lodgings, a Bacchus-faced Italian businessman made a drunken pass at me in the elevator, my lone romantic run-in during my African travels).
Every day, and some evenings, I criss-crossed the city to interview fish queens and female political leaders and journalists. They were warm, smart and assured, but, with the exception of a brisk and modern journalist who wore an Oxford cloth shirt and was the only never-married woman over 30 I encountered (“I’m seen as very intimidating to men,” she told me), they all projected the Ghanaian feminine ideal: long print dresses, or skirts with matching tops; coordinating burnouses; jewelry and lipstick; every hair in place.
Talking with them, meeting their high-achieving children, being served drinks and meals by their servants, I felt childish, unformed, and — among the richer ones — poor. Whether they sold fish at local markets, owned companies that exported fillets overseas, or defended the rights of women and girls in parliament and in the press, the women I met had real influence, real knowledge and, sometimes, real money — country-house, send-your-child-to-Oxford, multiple-BMWs money.
Even so, as they shared their stories, I caught strains of conversation that sounded like home — that is, like New York in the 90s. “Men never want a woman to be ahead of them, it erodes their confidence,” a female parliamentarian told me. “Sincerely. I also think they don’t like it when women earn money for themselves.”
The wealthy owner of a cold store (a plant where fish is frozen in bulk) told me she had dodged that complication by founding her company with her husband. At her home, she presented me with an enviable tableau of harmony and ease. “If you’ve got a good business it’s very easy to live like a lord in Africa,” she said, as she positioned gladioli in a vase on her dining room table. It was important to remain mindful of the “feminine” touches, she added, carefully adjusting a long green stalk, and pinching off an excess leaf. “Men appreciate that,” she continued— then interrupted the theatrical scene she’d concocted to shout abuse at a maid who was being too slow fetching a pail of water.
Was I being played, I wondered? Sorting through my conflicting impressions, I began to worry that the portrait I was receiving of Ghanaian womanhood was too pat, too fortunate — possibly a little trompe l’oeil. But one morning at the country’s largest seaport, Tema, fifteen minutes east of Accra, I met three traders who added dimension and shading to the picture.
Driving to Tema, seeing from a distance a row of gargantuan ships lined up in the harbor like new cars in a lot, spiked with white masts taller than skyscrapers, I expected to find exceptionally grand fish queens in the market alongside. But the traders I met at Tema were markedly humble, and a little bedraggled in appearance. They asked me to call them “fish mothers,” not queens, since they thought “queen” sounded too fancy.
Very early in our conversation, they told me something I hadn’t heard from anybody else: there was prejudice in Ghana against fishmongers. At least, they specified, against those who worked in markets and villages, as opposed to those who had the money to own a cold store, or to ship abroad. “If you are selling fish, people don’t respect,” said one. The others nodded in emphatic agreement. As they were so frank and expansive, I asked them to explain their business to me, from the ground up.
The way fishing generally worked, the Tema fish mothers explained, was that men owned the boats, which were often called “lighters” — dugout canoes painted in bright colors and decorated with Bible verses or lucky sayings. The role of each fisherman’s wife, or wives, was to sell or smoke the fish—and, if they could afford refrigeration equipment, to freeze part of the catch for a later sale.
A boat was a family business, the fish mothers said. The fisherman was like the company’s president, and wives were like vice presidents. A woman might buy a net, or a motor, to increase her share of the profits, but it was unusual for a woman to own her own boat outright. Why didn’t the women do the fishing themselves? I asked. “The reason why men have boats and go to sea is, if the lady have a boat and women go to sea, men will cheat,” one of the fish mothers replied. Why don’t you buy your own boat collectively, since you do the work of selling the fish anyway? I asked. “It is what our mother did before,” said one. “We don’t know any different.”
Fair enough, I thought, as I returned to my hotel that night. How does any of us know to do differently than our mothers did before us? Where, absent our mothers’ examples, is the path? Over the past eight or nine days, I had met with scores of women of varying status; listened to their stories; taken extensive notes of their experiences; explored half a dozen of the markets where they bought and sold; and entered the private homes where they lived and the official forums where they gathered. Yet I had learned nothing I could apply back home or share with others. Their situations were distinct not only from mine, but from each other’s. There was no path for me to find, I realized; my mistake had been to expect one.
It was time, I decided, to slip off the map: to quit following up on the excellent, guilt-inducing appointments the government official kept arranging for me, and to pursue instead my own, more personal quest. It was time to go in search of the Predatory Beast.
And so, the next morning, I had gone to the bus station and bought a ticket west, to the port of Sekondi-Takoradi, two hours south of Penkwasi. My seat companion was a sociable and polite schoolteacher named Priscilla, who had come to Accra for her mother’s funeral. As I began offering my sympathies, she explained to me that in Ghana, such events tended to be joyous occasions with music and dancing, not the doleful wake I pictured (this explained the roadside hawkers I’d seen selling velvet funeral pants). She was returning to her husband and children in Takoradi with a fairly light heart.
Priscilla and I got along marvelously. She was glad to meet an American, she told me, because she had been an AFS student in Texas as a teenager. Since I’d gone to high school in Oklahoma, we reminisced about the American southwest, and discussed the pleasant coincidence that southwestern kids in the United States, and all kids in Ghana, are raised to show respect to their elders. Actually, I remarked, the children I met in Ghana had struck me as unusually well-behaved. “Their mothers and grandmothers teach them,” Priscilla said. As soon as I told her about my encounters with fish queens, she offered to help, and when the bus arrived in Takoradi, she accompanied me to the market and helped me locate the last trader on my list — the mother of the silver-lipped mermaid I’d met in New York.
We found the trader at her stall. Once I had explained the reason for my presence, she asked us to drive her on a quick jaunt to see the house she was building with money her daughter sent from America. “You can take a picture and show it to her in New York,” she said. We complied, then, after dropping the trader back at the market, went off to buy the day’s newspapers. Along the way, Priscilla took me on a detour so I could see how fishing boats were made.
It was a very hot afternoon, and as we stood on the parched earth of a slope above the harbor, watching men hollow out logs with fire and chisels to make dugout canoes, I saw a boy selling drinks of water. He was perhaps 12 or 14, and was slightly built but muscular. On his head he balanced a broad, shallow metal bowl, wide as a sledding saucer, and filled nearly to the brim. It nested heavily and precariously in a white rag circlet looped atop his close-cropped hair. A wire connected a tin cup to the edge of the bowl, and the cup hung down to one side like an ornament. I watched as a canoe carver bought a drink; he held out the cup to the end of the wire, and the water boy tipped his head down a few degrees. The bowl was heavy; his neck muscles corded from the effort of directing its angle. Sweat beaded on his temples and slid down his taut face, but he remained in command. With a controlled movement, he sent a stream of water sluicing over the rim into the man’s cup, then raised his chin, righting the bowl. Never had I considered the difficulty that the simple task of pouring water could entail, never had I seen such unselfconscious grace and strength combined in one gesture. When I clicked my camera to capture that moment, I discovered I was out of film.
The papers I bought at a nearby kiosk carried breaking news on the case of the Predatory Beast. I was elated. I’d been afraid that my predator-quarry might have vanished during the course of my dutiful interviews, and be long gone before I could get to Brong-Ahafo; but no, the monster was still on the loose. Every day in Accra I had bought a selection of newspapers, seeking progress reports. These reports, though intermittent, had never entirely ceased; when there was news, it centered on the number of domestic animals slain, occasionally accompanied by criticism of members of the Ghanaian Department of Game and Wildlife, who, it was suggested, had been unsuccessful in their attempts to find the beast because, out of cowardice, they had not looked very hard. A police sergeant scoffed at such aspersions in the Ghanaian Chronicle. “If the predator is really an animal then the people must relax because we will surely kill it,” he said.
But in Takoradi, the beast was back on the front page. That night, in a spare, generic hotel room in a remote subdivision devoid of streetlights, I ate my SpaghettiOs while devouring the papers. Not only was the beast decimating the livestock of Penkwasi, it was sowing division among the populace, pitting church against state, Catholic priests against omanhenes (traditional regional kings, something like a chief or a mayor, who exist alongside the official Ghanaian state apparatus) and their linguists — holy men who converse with the gods.
The Ghanaian Times weighed in on the side of traditionalists, with the headline: “Priest Opposes Sunyani Elders Over Ritual Against Predatory Beast.” The Daily Graphic cast its vote for the opposing side, declaring “Church Stops ‘Evil Rituals.’” The articles were long but inconclusive. They explained that representatives of the Catholic church in Sunyani and Penkwasi had come to loggerheads with representatives of the Sunyani Traditional Council about “how best to handle the situation.” A ritual sacrifice had been attempted and stopped, and policemen were scouring the countryside for telltale footprints (albeit, locals said, only in the daytime). Wildlife officials had been consulted, yet there was no sign of the beast, and no end in sight to the curfew in Penkwasi.
Early the next morning, I left Takoradi and boarded the bus to Kumasi. I settled into an empty double seat, where I was soon joined by a rundown-looking white woman with a backpack, who was traveling with her son, who looked to be about ten. At her signal, he obediently took a seat across the aisle from ours. Her name was Majra; she was petite, sallow and 50, with long dark hair, and looked a little Polynesian. She reminded me of a slenderer, sadder version of Bloody Mary, from “South Pacific.” There was a plaintive quality about Majra that made me think she had led a hard-knock, Balzac-ian life. I wanted to be kind, but I felt self-conscious: It embarrassed me that one white woman had singled out the lone other white woman on the bus.
Majra was Yugoslavian, from Sarajevo, she said, and she was Muslim, but had been married for 24 years to a strict Roman Catholic Ghanaian — only, she said, he had recently divorced her. She had two other children, daughters, whom she wanted me to meet in Kumasi, over dinner. The elder one was 21, and was becoming disrespectful, Majra complained. She was worried that the elder sister was exerting a bad influence on the younger, who was 16. She showed me their picture, urgently, as if, looking at their faces, I would be able to instruct her on how to amend their behavior. I tried to get out of the dinner; I was going to Penkwasi, I told her, and had to return to Accra the next morning, there wasn’t time. “But there is a curfew in Penkwasi, so you will be back in Kumasi for dinner,” she said shrewdly. “We will meet again then.” She told me which hotel to go to in Kumasi, a place called Elegance. We agreed to rendezvous there at 7:00 and go out for Chinese food, so I could meet her daughters.
When I walked into the Elegance, my heart sank; there were paintings of naked ladies in the lobby. Given the modesty I had observed in Ghana thus far, it seemed likely that the place was a brothel, but I couldn’t be sure and had no time to be picky. I had to check in someplace and figure out how to get to Penkwasi, fast. With misgivings, I registered. My room was on the 2nd floor, along a mezzanine that overlooked a central covered atrium. The window directly above my headboard was made of louvered translucent slats, which would be very easy to remove, I thought — anyone could break in. The room had a sordid smell — bleach and pesticides — and the coverlet was damp. Nonetheless, I left my luggage in a corner, and rushed out to the traffic circle. It was there that I spotted Kweku, who would transport me to Penkwasi.
It was about 12:30, and Kweku and I had been rolling through the landscape for about an hour. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had to go, but the sky was listlessly scrolling through a range of wan greys, blues, and greens that recalled the paintwater palette of my dwindling supply of cedis. I hoped it wouldn’t storm.
Interrupting the flow of land, hills, trees and shanties, roadside vegetable stands popped up on the shoulder from time to time, where kerchiefed traders stood beside pyramids of eggplants (“garden eggs”), tomatoes and ground nuts — luscious splashes of color and geometry. I stared avidly at the traders, and at the occasional pedestrians who walked along the road carrying firewood and bundles. Kweku remained entirely silent. I drank in the colors of the kerchiefs, the clothes, the vegetables, thirsting for human connection. I tried to discern features, eyes.
It unnerved me that, throughout this drive, I could not make out the faces of people in the cars that passed us in the opposite lane, though it was daytime. The sunlight was oblique or white-bright, the car interiors were shadowed; and you could not see anybody inside. It was as if a procession of empty cars were driving itself. Kweku’s taciturnity heightened the uncanny mood; and since he also avoided eye contact, my sense of isolation sharpened as the journey lengthened. Feeling shunned, and somewhat haunted, I looked hard at the people outside the car as if to reassure myself that I, and they, existed.
I had never before felt more superfluous to my surroundings, more geographically irrelevant, more expendable, more unsettled. I realized in this moment that every strength I believed myself to possess was rooted in a context of relevance that now was absent. I did not belong in this picture. I had no role in the human backdrop that lived, breathed, worked, played, rejoiced and feared all around me; no connection to this people, whose society I had sought for reasons that were obscure even to myself. The beast I was hunting might as well come and get me; I would not be missed.
The welcome sign for Sunyani lifted this fatalistic spell. As Kweku and I pulled into town, the car slowing to an unhurried, city-streets pace, I looked through my open window, and spotted in the courtyard of a café a well-dressed student—button-down shirt, tie, gabardine trousers — who looked like he would speak English. He was standing and idling in an alert way, chin up, looking a little Nouvelle Vague, or at any rate, like someone who was waiting for something to happen. We pulled over.
As I was ordering a Coke at the counter, the café-goer, Martin, strolled over and introduced himself. As I had hoped, he was curious, voluble and eloquent in English. Not only did he have time on his hands, he was well acquainted with facts relating to the Predatory Beast, and eager to share them. With alacrity he joined me and the driver in the formerly mum vehicle, and we drove off to the Catholic school in Penkwasi whence the beast, Martin informed me, was thought to have sprung.
The beast, Martin explained, was said by the village elders to be a manifestation of a river spirit whose demesne lay in a small pond on the grounds of the Sacred Heart school in Penkwasi. Some people thought the spirit in question was Nsuatre, a river god; others pointed at a different spirit, Agyei, a god of flowing water. An 11-year-old boy had drowned in that pond in May, “whilst he was swimming,” Martin told me.
The predatory beast’s nightly siege of the village had begun after the boy’s death, and continued throughout the summer. Early one morning, five days before my arrival, Father Emilio Gallo, the parish priest of Sacred Heart, had returned from morning mass to his office to learn from the friars that members of the Traditional Council of Sunyani, led by the omanhene Nana Asor Bosoma Aso Nkwawiri II and his linguist, had gathered by the school pond, and were preparing offerings of eggs, yams, and sheep’s blood to propitiate the beast. Within seconds, Father Gallo and the brethren had gathered up their robes, and begun marching from their offices to the muddy, treacherous pond, a few hundred yards away. Horrified to discover heathen activities afoot, Father Gallo and his friars had stopped the ceremony on the grounds that church land was no place for pagan ritual. “They said it was ‘devilish,’” Martin recalled with zest.
But if Father Gallo was incensed that church-owned land was being used for pantheistic rites, the omanhene and his followers were no less angry at being thwarted in their project of conducting a ritual that they believed would end the beast’s reign of terror. The omanhene and the elders saw themselves as the proper defenders of the populace, protectors of their bodies as well as their souls. And so the next day, Saturday, both the chiefs and the Franciscans went to complain to the Catholic bishop in Sunyani, the Reverend Father James Kwadwo Owusu. Here, Martin told me, was where the story grew murky. Father Gallo left his meeting with the bishop believing that no ceremony would be performed; the omanhene left his audience with the bishop thinking he had a green light for the sacrifice. The rites were performed that day at a river a little ways away from the Catholic diocese. This was as much as Martin knew.
Our car now was approaching the school, and clouds were building. Passing a scattering of beer gardens and tailors shops, we drew near a group of tidy cement-block school buildings. We parked, got out of the car and walked over to inspect the pond. It did indeed look ominous — an effect heightened by the ashen sky and rising winds. The water was browny-green and the banks were clumpy with red-orange mud. A rumpled guava tree stood beside it, its limp puffy-leaved branches looking like illustrations from Dr. Seuss. Classes were just getting out for the day, and when the children emerged in their neat uniforms, I stood by with my notepad, and Martin asked them if they had any knowledge about the Predatory Beast they would like to share. They surged forth to volunteer.
“I haven’t seen the beast personally,” a 10-year old boy named Kwame said, nervously tugging at his shirttail. “But it looks like a leopard, and I think it just goes for sheep.” “He has killed plenty sheep,” a 16-year-old named Francis chimed in. “Do you think the beast might hurt you?” I asked. Dozens of children formed a clamorous ring around me. Some shrieked with laughter, others were timid, hesitant. “I’ve heard he looks like a tiger,” whispered an eight-year-old boy named Sebastien. “We can’t even study because of the animal,” an older boy named Daniel said sadly. “The beast, he drinks blood from the neck!” said another boy. “He came to my friend Solomon’s house — he’s black and white.”
A babel of voices rose, and then a little girl, Lihei, said shyly “I’m afraid to sleep. My mother says, don’t go outside.” I asked the children, “Do you think the beast might really be a river god, like Chief Nana Bosoma says?” The children grew silent, and Lihei said gravely, “I can’t tell.” As the children looked at each other uncertainly, Francis burst out, “The chief cannot stop the beast because he himself fears the animal. The beast killed a sheep at the police station last night, but the police ran away — they were afraid!” He concluded bravely, “If you give me the power, I’ll catch the beast!” The children all broke into laughter, the tension dispersed, and as a light rain started to fall, they headed home. I looked at Martin. “The beast killed last night?” I asked. “Oh yes,” he said. “I thought you knew.”
Martin and I walked toward the school offices, hoping to find the parish priest, Father Emilio. Instead we met a teacher, Brother Anthony. The friar was young, perhaps in his early 30s, but had a wise and stern countenance that made him seem older. He had no patience for rumors that the beast was supernatural. And he objected strongly to the omanhene’s visit to the schoolgrounds the previous week. “They did a ritual at another pond. But after the sacrifice, the animal came twice — once on Tuesday, once on Wednesday.” Brother Anthony looked at me with exasperated resignation. “All I know,” he said quietly, “Is that if every time you dig a fishpond you make a god, there must be millions of gods in fishponds all over Ghana.”
By the time Martin and I left Brother Anthony, the drizzle had stopped and the sky had cleared. We returned to the car and drove back to town to look for the omanhene at the Sunyani Traditional Council headquarters, a white cement-block structure with bright-blue trim and a rose-spattered curtain at the door. It was an unassuming, anodyne little building, reminiscent of a nurse’s office at an elementary school, where a pupil might go if she felt a little logy, or needed a Band-aid, or just wanted to take a break from her peers.
Entering the Traditional Council felt like walking into a school principal’s office. A no-nonsense male secretary looked up from the reception desk as we walked in, with an “…and what might be your business here?” expression. He was Nana Bosoma’s registrar, and he was conservatively dressed, in a pale safari-style suit. As I explained my purpose, the registrar listened attentively in a way that showed that his attention would be of short duration, then deflected my request for an interview with the chief in absolute terms. The omanhene, Nana Bosoma, was a busy man, and would not have time to see journalists today. Nor, he added, would his linguist.
As we were talking, the man himself suddenly appeared in the doorframe. With a slow and stately stride, Chief Nana Bosoma Aso Nkrawiri II, omanhene of the Sunyani traditional area of Brong-Ahafo, entered the room, preceded by his firm belly, and stood among us. His linguist, svelter, slipped in right after.
Nana Bosoma was draped in a voluminous grey cloth and carried a large black umbrella, long enough to be used as a cane, crooked over one elbow. Surveying his unexpectedly crowded ante-chamber, he smiled opaquely, gave a kind of half-wave, then turned slowly on one foot like a steam shovel on a swivel, and departed the premises, his linguist following in his slipstream. I was too surprised by this apparition to react. They were heading, the receptionist said, to a top-secret council with police, linguists and other chiefs, where another sacrifice to mollify the beast was being planned, since the first one evidently had not worked. We should not wait, he added, because, when Nana Bosoma wasn’t dealing with the predatory beast, he was generally booked up settling land disputes, settling arbitrations, or dispelling curses.
Dispelling curses filled most of his time, the registrar explained, because the people of Sunyani were so prone to cursing each other. “For instance, if you say to someone, ‘If it is true that I stole this bottle of glue then Nsuatre should kill me — and if I did not, he should deal with you in the same way,’ then the person you said it to will be very afraid, and he will come to me and make an appointment to see Nana Bosoma to dispel the curse,” he explained. “You use Schnapps actually, and you don’t see the omanhene himself — it is normally done by the linguist. He drinks the Schnapps and talks with the god and removes the curse.” But both the omanhene and the linguist would be far too busy today to dispel even one curse, he emphasized, so Martin and I had better go. We got back into the car, and Kweku drove us to the district police headquarters.
There, sitting in a chair on the cement patio in front of headquarters of the District Police, we found a lanky, somber policeman in a navy and light-blue uniform, with gold-striped epaulets. I asked him about the sheep the beast had killed the night before, right by the police station. Had he himself seen it? “People are saying it’s not an animal, it’s an evil spirit. But I have not seen it, so I don’t know,” he said. However, another police officer had seen the beast the night before, he said, “Only it was not he who saw it, it was his daughter, who was just going out to urinate. He ran out and he said it looks like a dog type, and he says there are three of them. Wild dogs. They killed a sheep, and last night we have disposed of the carcass.” Did that mean that the omanhene and his entourage would now come to the police station to exorcise the beast? “I don’t think they’ll come here and perform their protection rites,” he said. “They say it was the god Agyei, who is a god of flowing water, and we have no flowing water here.” He added, “But the water at the school does not flow, either. It is a pond.”
Leaving the police headquarters, we returned to the Sunyani Traditional Council, hoping to catch Nana Bosoma and his linguist on their way back from their secret meeting, in which case I resolved not to be so easily put off. They were not there, but right outside the council building, a council elder was sitting beneath a tree, and gave me a full report of the meeting. Another sacrifice was to be made, he said. The first ones had failed, it was thought, because the river god felt that the offerings made to him were insufficient, and was angry that the people doubted his power. One more sacrifice, made in good faith, might appease him, the elders thought. A bottle of Schnapps would come in very handy in achieving this end, he said. I gave the councilor a bottle of Schnapps to pass along to the linguist, and then Kweku, Martin and I left Sunyani, dropping Martin back at the café on the way out of town. It was getting late, and we wanted to be far away before nightfall: in any case, the streets were already empty, except for a lone madman who lay on a median, naked, too deranged to fear for his safety.
I made it back to my seedy hotel in Kumasi in time to get cleaned up for dinner with Majra and her daughters. We were the guests, it appeared, of a Lebanese businessman, who looked about 56, who I hoped was Majra’s boyfriend, but who seemed more solicitous of her daughters, particularly the younger one. Majra tried to divert his attention to the elder sister. “You like to buy her ice cream?” Majra asked him, then whispered to me, in an undertone that dismayed me, “No, he does not want to marry her, I don’t think.”
The next day I returned to Accra. I threw out the few remaining uneaten cans of SpaghettiOs, but still had to buy an extra bag, a big red burlap satchel, to hold all my source material. Sitting on the hotel bed, I phoned my parents in Bethesda, who were relieved to hear that I was alive, and then my Swiss boyfriend, Louis, in New York, who had left a message at the hotel for me to call, but was maddeningly nonchalant when I did. I wanted to call Neil in his war-torn foreign land, but knew I shouldn’t. Besides, I couldn’t; I didn’t have his number anymore. And what would I have said to him if I had called? “I couldn’t have you, so I tried to be you. It didn’t work.”
I dreaded returning to New York, to my empty apartment, my unresolved future. But at least there would be glacial air conditioning, and yellow cabs, and bicycling in the East Village — with or without Louis.
On my last night in Accra, the feminist journalist I’d met the previous week took me to see the Miss Ghana beauty pageant, a spectacle that further confounded my understanding of Ghanaian female social conventions. We waited for two hours in the packed National Theater for the contenders to emerge from the audience and make their way to the stage. The contestants, I slowly came to understand, had not been chosen before the event: the women who wanted to be considered had to rise from their seats and take the stage to proclaim their candidacy. But they were reluctant to do so, not wanting to seem vain.
The obvious candidates stood out among the crowd like the tall trees in the Volta Valley — women who looked like living goddesses, their hair piled on their heads like gleaming coronets, their bodies wrapped in silk satin sheaths. Their male friends and relatives practically had to drag them into the spotlight, over their vociferous but ladylike protests, to make them compete. Were they more independent or more dependent than the women I knew back home? And which was the real illusion — their weakness or their strength? I suspected the former. Whether they were fish queens or beauty queens, the women I encountered in Ghana seemed to me to have invented their own rules, with or without male sanction. They had no clearer map than I had. But they had a better idea, I felt, of where they wanted to go.
As for the beast… I never did find out what became of it, nor did anybody else. It returned, I suppose, to the jungle of inchoate fears from which it came, and from which it may emerge again one day. Before I flew home, the Ghanaian Times declared that the recent rites had succeeded, in a piece headlined: “Rituals ward off predatory beast.” The Daily Graphic announced a similar happy ending, declaring that, despite reservations of “die hard Christians” in Sunyani, townspeople were beginning to believe that “the animal would not appear again and in the end, the chiefs would be vindicated.”
It occurred to me that, whether or not the beast had tired of marauding, the people had tired of being afraid of his marauding. There is a limit, I thought, to how long people can put up with a fear, whether or not it is justified, before they discard it and move along. Perhaps, I thought, the difference between cowardice and bravery comes down to remembering to be afraid, or forgetting.
After I got back to New York from Africa, I never wrote the piece about the fish queens. I told myself it was because I was afraid of not doing them justice. Because I hadn’t produced that piece, I never wrote to Priscilla, in Takoradi (though I had promised I would), out of shame that her kindness to me had been unwarranted. I didn’t keep in touch with the heroically helpful government officer for the same reason. Chance had waylaid me, I told myself. A couple of weeks after my return, a job offer I hadn’t sought came to me and derailed my writing life, then Louis and I broke up, and my love life went off the rails, too. I felt lost, unanchored.
For months, all of my notes and notebooks of Ghana, all of my brochures and newspapers, photographs and cassette tapes — some 60 pounds of “source,” as we would call it in my fact-checking office — sat on the floor of my study. But I got sick of tripping over them, and finally zipped them back into their red burlap satchel and shoved them into my closet. Every now and then I would climb on a stepladder, meaning to drag the satchel down and decipher them all, but it was so heavy.
In the spring of 1996, I received an aerogram from Martin, my Nouvelle-Vague beast guide in Penkwasi. The family of the boy who drowned in the school there had been run out of town, he wrote. They had been blamed for bringing the anger of the beast upon the community. And at the Sacred Heart schoolyard, Brother Anthony and Father Emilio had filled in the pond.
The pond was filled, my red satchel was stowed in the cupboard, and for nearly 20 years, that is where the matter rested.
But not long ago, some impulse made me look up as I sat writing. I noticed a mask I had bought on that long-ago journey, hanging high on the wall above the open door between my study and my bedroom. It was an evil-looking mask of hard, dark wood, fringed with shells, with narrow, merciless slits for eyes and a still smaller, crueler slit for a mouth. Masks have nothing to do with Ghana; Ghanaians, unlike other West Africans, don’t use them; but I had wanted to bring back some relic of my journey that resonated of the continent, even if it was culturally inauthentic. I had bought it in Accra, along with some clay beads, at an outdoor art market.
Why, I now asked myself, had I preserved this token of malevolence? I got the stepladder, took the mask down, went out to the street and threw it away. Immediately, I felt my mood lighten. And then I took the stepladder to my cupboard, brought down the red satchel and unzipped it, freeing all the notes, all the memories, of that long-ago adventure, untouched, unreduced, expectant.
Cedis spilled out onto the carpet like pressed leaves, and as I sat among them, stacking the tapes, the notebooks and the photographs, unfolding age-yellowed newspapers, sifting through the pages, reading, remembering, I marveled to think that for 20 years I had walled up this history, which I now held again in my hands. Why had I made that impulsive expedition to another continent, in another century, another lifetime? What, if anything, had I learned from it?
I was no longer afraid to ask.
♛ THE END
*Names of private individuals and small businesses have been changed.
Illustrations by Robert Frank Hunter
The Renaissance Hotels are a part of the Marriott International Portfolio.
