Because I am a Girl Read online

  She had never trusted the ‘okada’ men. Most of them were rebels who had been given motorbikes by the United Nations in exchange for laying down their arms. She remembered how once she had climbed on to the back of a bike only to be overwhelmed by an aroma cocktail of palm wine and sweat on the rider that brought back terrible memories. That day was baking hot but by the time she managed to jump off she was covered in goose bumps.

  Bendu walked past the ruined mosque, the largest building in town, then past the old mission station that once belonged to the Methodists but was now a store room for general traders. Their old shops destroyed, today’s sellers made do with wooden roadside huts that had to be secured each night with iron bars and padlocks. The lack of reliable police in Sierra Leone meant law and order was a service normal people had to provide for themselves. Bendu stopped at what passed for a grocery store – a small shack with a tray out front made from rough planks nailed together – but all the trader had in stock was pasta. He was selling a few pieces at a time, wrapped in a twist of cellophane, for in a town as constitutionally poor as Kailahun few could afford an entire box. She would check on the way home from school to see if any delivery trucks had made it through from Freetown.

  The day’s first beads of sweat ran down Bendu’s face from the rim of her green felt cap as she lined up for registration at 7.30am. School gave her a sense of purpose that she had rarely felt before but if she was honest she never felt particularly comfortable there. After missing out on so many years of schooling, most of her fellow pupils who had not been so caught up in the war were much more advanced than her. She felt it a mark of shame that girls not yet in their teens could recite answers quicker than she could.

  And she also bore the physical effects from the war. After so many years walking unshod through the bush, her feet were so spread and swollen it had been agony to put on school shoes for the first time. She could remember the day shortly after arriving at MGH when she took off her shoes to ease the pain and the entire playground had started chanting ‘Elephant feet! Elephant feet!’ Since then she had kept her shoes on and herself to herself.

  On the day after the dream Bendu had taken up her normal position during break time, sitting under the shade of a tree on the edge of a group of classmates, listening but not saying much. Her peers were all sixteen years old and the conversation had returned to a subject that occupied more and more of their time – initiation.

  Across West Africa boys become men and girls become women only after a period of training at the hands of traditional societies. In Sierra Leone the bush societies are known as ‘Poro’ for men and ‘Bundu’ for women. It is meant to be secret but everybody knew the basics; the young person is taken away under cover of darkness and led deep into the bush where they are kept for weeks, sometimes months, before finally emerging as an adult sworn to uphold the vow of silence about exactly what went on. The imaginations of every generation of West African children have sought to fill in the gaps of what actually happens during the period in the bush societies.

  Bendu listened to the excited talk about the girls’ upcoming initiations. Mostly they dwelled on the fine new dress the Bundu society traditionally presents to each graduate and how they would then be able to take a husband. Bendu was older than sixteen – quite how much older was unclear as she had never had an official birth certificate – and she found it hard to share the excitement of the others. For her, the idea of being forced to live out in the bush and do the bidding of others reminded her of what had gone on during the war.

  It all got too much when one of the girls, Aminatta, began talking casually about the culmination of the female initiation when the student is held down by the senior society members and is cut. Bendu had once heard some foreign aid workers calling it by an abbreviation, FGM, which stood for Female Genital Mutilation. Another, a scientist, described how the clitoris of each girl is removed without any drugs to ease the pain or chemicals to clean the wound or the blade.

  ‘How bad can it be when they do this?’ Aminatta asked boastfully. ‘My sister told me one of the girls in her group fought and fought. But I will be brave so I can become a proper woman.’

  The thought of being cut there made Bendu feel a pit open somewhere below her stomach. She closed her eyes and her mind spun with images of drunken gunmen and UN medical staff in surgical outfits. For a moment she stopped listening to the girls’ talk but when her focus returned Aminatta was speaking again, bragging about how her mother and grandmother told her initiation was nothing to worry about. ‘In Africa your elders know best,’ she said.

  The school day finished at 1pm when the cracked bell in the yard was rung but Bendu still had a lot to do. The heat of the day was at its most exhausting but she had to walk back to the traders to see if a truck had made it through to Kailahun. Disappointed, she walked back to her hut, changed out of her school clothes and spent the afternoon fetching, drying and sorting rice.

  First she had to walk the two miles out into the forest to where the tiny parcel of land owned by her late father was found. It was called, rather grandly, a field, but it looked like a place where a cyclone had touched down. Half-felled trees lay at drunken angles, fouled by a web of ivy and undergrowth that trapped them in mid-fall. The ground was uneven and there were large rocks everywhere but the fact that the forest canopy had been broken meant sunlight could get through and crops could be grown, mostly mountain rice but also a little cassava. Just on the edge of the field Bendu had erected a rice attic, a small thatched room raised eight feet off the ground on bare branch stilts to save the crop from rats.

  Bendu looked in the undergrowth until she found the stout bamboo pole with footholds cut into each side which she used as a ladder. After propping it up against the platform of the attic she climbed up and retrieved a sack of rice. The faded letters of a European aid group were just about legible on the sack as she lowered it down to earth, placed it firmly on her head, hid the ladder and turned for home.

  Once back she swept the area outside the hut and spread the rice out to dry while she went to fetch water from the river. She then spent an hour bent double carefully picking out pieces of stalk, grass and rotten rice, all the time shooing away chickens pecking at the grain. She then gathered the rice back up again and began the laborious process of winnowing. Cupful by cupful she poured the rice into a circular tray made of woven grass before flipping the grain up and catching it as it fell. The heavy, healthy grains worked their way to the far edge of the tray, allowing Bendu to remove the chaff which gathered on the near side. It took all afternoon to sort the sack.

  At sunset Bendu lit the charcoal fire and cooked a pot of rice. Without salt the meal was difficult to swallow but a few boiled cassava leaves made it at least palatable. By the time Ma Fata had taken her place to cook at the shared hearth Bendu was itching to talk but she knew she had to be patient. Ma Fata’s feet were red after a day of treading oil out of half-cooked palm fruit and she seemed a little tired so Bendu deliberately spent longer than usual washing in her open-air bathroom, to allow Ma Fata enough time to eat and relax.

  ‘Ma Fata, please can I ask your help to understand a dream I had last night?’ Bendu asked when she got back to the fireplace. The old lady had always treated her with respect, not something Bendu had experienced much of her in life, so the young girl was always polite.

  ‘Of course, child,’ the old lady said. ‘Let me fetch a chair for us both and we will talk.’

  She went back into her hut and re-emerged with two wooden stools. They were crudely made but polished from years of use and very comfortable. Ma Fata half-closed her eyes. She knew a little of Bendu’s past in the war and was not surprised to hear her sleep was disturbed. She hoped the recollection would not be too painful for the girl. Precisely and slowly, Bendu recounted everything she could remember from the dream; the screeching noise, the fear of the other girls, the sight of the raffia-cloaked figure, the threatening dance and, most importantly, the calm Bendu felt
when she started to confront it.

  Ma Fata was silent for a few moments rocking gently on the stool. She did not want to stir bad old memories for a child who had suffered so much but she also knew Bendu was wise enough to catch her out if she held things back. Ma Fata decided to be fully honest.

  ‘What you saw, my child, was a devil.’

  Bendu was silent, watching Ma Fata very closely by the glow of the burning charcoal. The old lady continued.

  ‘Not a devil like the ones the missionaries who run your school talk about, but our devil, a bush devil. These are the one who run the secret societies, Bundu and Poro. I am sure you have heard about them even though we are not meant to speak of them.’

  Bendu nodded. During her time in the bush during the war there had been plenty of talk about devils.

  ‘When I was a child, a long time ago now, I was taken for initiation and I remember the devil coming on the last day to make sure all the girls behaved themselves. The devil was wearing a mask, just like you describe, and a suit of grass, dancing and screeching. You see, the devils are the ones who keep order, like the teachers at your fancy school. They make sure you do as you are told.’

  Bendu thought for a second before asking a question: ‘But why do they need to scare people so much? Why do they use fear?’

  ‘It’s our traditional way. It’s the way we make sure the next generation carries it on. You know in Africa you elders know best.’

  As Bendu stared into the fire the flames began to die down but the embers glowed steadily hotter and hotter. She smiled to herself and nodded as her dream steadily began to make sense.

  All her life had taught her that surrendering blindly to tradition was the wrong thing to do. The warlords of Sierra Leone stoked years of conflict by drilling children into mindless killers, staking claim to their loyalty because of some spurious representation of African tradition. And politicians allowed their country to wither, pocketing aid money and lathering on layers of graft and nepotistic bureaucracy, with a nudge and wink about it being the way things were done in Africa. It was all right, they made plain, to wait in line and gorge at the trough of embezzlement when one’s turn comes. And girls across the country were expected to meekly accept physical assault, to let someone else carve away not only a sensitive part of their anatomy but any true sense of control they have over their destinies, simply because their mother or grandmother had once put up with it.

  No, thought Bendu, this was not right. Tradition was one thing but blindly accepting other people’s version of tradition was wrong. She would not make the same mistake, she thought. She would stand up to the devil.

  The Woman Who Carried a Shop on Her Head

  DEBORAH MOGGACH

  Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including These Foolish Things, Tulip Fever, and, most recently, In the Dark. Her screenplays include the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.

  ERNESTINE WAS A tall, sinewy woman who walked miles each day carrying a beauty parlour on her head. This was a heavy wooden box, open at the front, packed with all the products a female might need to make herself desirable – face creams, hair accessories, soap, make-up, skin lighteners, conditioners, razors, hair removal foam, kirby grips and ornaments, perfumes and body lotions. Ernestine sold these in the local villages, tramping along footpaths in her dusty flip-flops, stopping at the secondary school at two-thirty to catch the girls when they came out, working the crossroads where each Thursday the buses disgorged the women returning from market. Though dealing in beauty, Ernestine herself was the least vain of women. Back in her house there was a small, cracked mirror propped on a shelf but she seldom had time to look at it. Besides, when night fell it was too dark to see anything much as they had no electricity. And besides, her husband seemed happy with her as she was.

  Or so she believed.

  He was a good man, you see. A devout churchgoer, like herself; a hard-working father to their children. Unlike so many men, oh so many, he had never strayed, or even expressed the slightest interest in another woman. They had been married for seventeen years and never, not once, had she regretted leaving her family home in the north, beside the great lake with its drowned trees. The trees were drowned when they built the dam and her little brothers used to make money swimming through the underwater forest, unpicking the nets that had tangled in the branches. Ernestine dreamed about the lake, about the sun sinking over the water and beneath it the fish swimming between the tree-trunks but she had no desire to return to her childhood, she had her own children now. She was exhausted by working hard to keep them in school, to give them the opportunity of a better life than hers, but she loved them and was loved, the Lord be praised, and Kwesi was a good man. Or so she thought.

  The night before it happened, the Wednesday night, Grace came home late. Grace was the eldest of Ernestine’s daughters, a studious young woman of sixteen. She was tall and big-boned, like her mother, with a square jaw and an uncompromising stare through her spectacles. She worked hard at school and in the evenings, when the village was plunged into darkness, she toiled at her homework under one of the few spots of illumination, the strip light that bathed with a bluish glow the fried-fish stall at the side of the road. People stopped to gossip with her auntie, who ran it, but Grace kept her head down, she was uninterested in tittle-tattle, she was fierce in her determination to pass her exams and go to college. Not for her the girlish giggles at school, the huddled whisperings about boys and lipstick. Grace was above such things; indeed, she had recently been elected Team Leader of the Abstinence Programme, its slogan Just Say No. She lectured her fellow teenagers on the perils of premarital sex and the way that early parenthood destroyed all hopes of a future career. She led the singing, ‘Boys boys boys take care of girls girls girls’, and promoted, as an alternative to temptation, the taking up of vigorous sports and the reading of improving texts.

  All in all she was an admirable young woman. Ernestine was proud of her – how could she not be? Sometimes, however, she felt awed by her daughter, and sometimes she feared for the girl whose rigid convictions were so untempered by the rough complexities of life. And Grace was not the easiest person to live with; recently she had grown short-tempered, as if her own family, even her little brothers and sisters, were included in the congregation of sinners.

  That evening she was particularly irritable, and snapped at her granny for forgetting to wash her football shirt. There was a match the next day with the team from the Asseweya High School. She gave no explanation for her late return and disappeared into the bedroom she shared with her sisters. Ernestine, at the time, presumed she was frustrated by the earlier power cut that had plunged their village into darkness for two hours and stopped her from doing her homework. Ernestine was not an interfering mother and besides, with a family as large as hers there were always plenty of squabbles, particularly amongst the girls. The boys just fought. For sure it was hard work surviving day to day with eight mouths to feed but the Lord had blessed them with good health and despite their worries they had much to be thankful for. Many of Ernestine’s customers were women struggling to bring up their families alone, their husbands working a long way from home, or passed away, or gone off gallivanting with another woman. One of them had taken a seventeen-year-old girl as his second wife, would you believe, a man of forty-three, and had moved to Nigeria, leaving his children fatherless.

  For sure, Ernestine was blessed to have Kwesi for a husband.

  The next day, Thursday, was market day at Asseweya, their local town. Kwesi travelled there each week to sell the plantains and pineapples he grew on his land; on that particular day Ernestine accompanied him as she had to buy new stock from the wholesaler.

  On market day the town was jammed with traffic – buses, trucks, tro-tros burdened with sacks of produce. Hawkers crowded around them selling crisps, bananas, Bibles, fried snacks, fizzy drinks, Arsenal t-shirts, selling everything under the sun. E
rnestine recognised Mustafa, the little son of her neighbour, his head weighed down with a bowl of plastic water-sachets which he passed to the outstretched hands. He choked in the fumes: he had asthma, but his mother, a widow, could neither afford medicine nor afford to send him to school. Ernestine felt sorry for the six-year-old and grateful, yet again, that her children knew their alphabet and had a father who took care of them and sang hymns beside them in church.

  Kwesi left his mobile at the phone-charging booth before disappearing into the crowd of the market-place. Every week he left his mobile there and picked it up in the afternoon, before going home. The phone-charger, Ngobo, sat behind his array of mobiles. Ernestine had never seen him moving from his position; he had sharp eyes that missed nothing; there was something about him that made her uneasy. She could feel him watching her as she negotiated her way through the traffic to God Is Good Beauty Products, on the other side of the road.

  Ernestine enjoyed her visits to Lily, who ran the business. They sat in the back room, the ceiling fan whirring, drinking Fanta and gossiping. Lily told her about the latest scandals, whose husband had run away with whose wife, whose daughter had become pregnant. That particular day she told Ernestine a story about two little girls who were tricked into having the Dipo, the initiation rite, but who escaped, jumping onto a tro-tro and hiding amongst the passengers. As Lily talked, her eyes widened and her breathing quickened. Ernestine was enthralled; dramas in the town seemed so much larger than those in her own sleepy village. Little did she suspect the drama brewing just a few yards away.

  It happened like this. At the end of the day, when the market was packing up, Kwesi was still busy so Ernestine went to collect his mobile phone. Ngobo paused before giving it back.