Letter to my African Mum

Hello Mummy,

I have a lot of memories of life with you, life lessons from you, highly biased parables and so much more. It goes without saying that some of them were rather traumatizing but I believe that you did your best by and all your children. I have three very distinctive memories that stick out from my childhood. One of them was how I had managed to lose my younger sister and let her get kidnapped. The finer details of the event might be blurred with age as I was about eleven then but I remember that day clearly. It was one of those strange ladies that we usually saw around the neighbourhood but never really paid attention to. On this very day, I had lost track of my younger sister, Mary. I was supposed to take her with me from school to home which was a simple task but I somehow managed to botch. Mary was only ten months old.

As we were frantically searching for her, calling out her name and asking everybody and their sister if they saw a little girl in a blue dress anywhere around, we came across a lady that had a baby on her back. Her name was Gladys. You had insisted that she remove the scarf that was covering the baby’s face so that you could take a look at her and make sure that it wasn’t your daughter but she had refused and called you all kinds of names in the book. You had ever so politely kept insisting that you had to see who was behind her back.

“None is going anywhere until I see that baby so the sooner the better,” you had said.

When she wouldn’t submit for you to search her, I gave up. Besides, I didn’t know what gave you the impression that she might have my sister. I secretly hoped you would give up on that demand so we could move to more suspicious areas like the bush and sadly, the well. Mary did like water but it never came to that. You must have known because the next thing you did was the most amazing thing I have ever seen anybody do until today. You forcefully pulled the scarf away from the baby’s face. Lo and behold, it was Mary in all her innocence, sucking away on her thumb with no care in the world. Words could not have described our shock. I still wonder if you have some kind of Spiderman sense or if you were clairvoyance. How else would you have known that the baby she was carrying was your daughter?

When the lady refused to surrender the baby, it made me wonder if she was insane. But if she was insane, she was about to find the seven kinds of madness because I knew how berserk you go when someone got too handy with any one of us. As she was trying to step out of reach, you somehow grabbed her and peeled the baby from her back to set her on the floor. I placed myself between her and the baby even though I knew there was no way she was making it past you to get to us but I was prepared to bite her if she did. You have commended my bites many a time. You then proceeded to administer the most incredible ass whooping I have ever seen a grown person receive. I believe I was hyping you up through the whole process. The lady wasn’t standing still and taking it as it came, no. she was trying her best to get a punch in. she even managed to get a slap in here and there. I had pity on the poor lady nonetheless. I call her poor lady because she must not have been expecting the kind of madness that overtook you upon finding that she was set on kidnapping your child. You had hit her multiple times with a bamboo cane I handed you. She had pulled out your hair and ripped the zipper on your yellow sunflower house gown. You loved that gown. People eventually came along and pulled you away from her before you could smother her as you were sitting on her chest at this point of the fight. Since we were from the poor side of society, she was never really prosecuted to the full extent of the law for what she did. But that was one of the most outstanding memories that I have from my childhood.

Another memory that I have was a traumatic one and I will rush through it because I don’t want to dwell on it as that is not the point of my story but this is one of the most vivid memories I have. It was the day that you beat me up for taking money from your purse. This wasn’t your regular flogging with whip or belt, you used cable wires. You tied me up, you poured ground of wet hot pepper on me. It wasn’t those fancy black pepper or Cayenne pepper. It was those hot chilli pepper popularly known as the ghost pepper. You ground this up and you poured it all over my body, tied me up and decided that God should take me back but it was as if this wasn’t enough to drive your point across because you also broke off a branch from the many cashew trees that surrounded us, the branch that has a bunch of yellow/red soldier ants on them and scattered all over my body. I had screamed and cried until I thought that I would surely die but my cries of repentant and solemn promise never to steal fell on deaf ear. You beat me that day until the neighbours came around and separated you from me. Until today, I still don’t know if the punishment was deserved. I will end this recollection here.

As I got older and have more experience, I came to appreciate everything that you have done for me and my siblings. There were a lot of times in my life that I hated you, and wondered if I was adopted and many more times I knew that you were the difference between me being alive and dead. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am grateful that you were my mother. A lot of people would be surprised given all the traumatizing events that happened in my life but I am truly grateful. You did the best you could within your power and your power was powerful. You had the best intentions for me. And you had more dreams and hopes for me than I could ever imagine. You believed in me when I couldn’t. You were gentle when you needed to be, like when you patiently taught me how to write the letters M, W and N so there wouldn’t be spaces between the lines at the horrible late stage of 13 years.

You were like a kiln, you baked and moulded me into the human being that I am today. It wasn’t always gentle but in the end, I like to think that I came out much like fine china. So thank you, mom. I will never be able to repay you and I know you do not hope to be repaid. I do hope that I will give you the old age and retirement that you deserve for having raised such fine children and one stupid boy that is currently determined to drop out of school.