I Must Have Been Born With A Piece Of Charcoal In My Hand!

When I think of the number of things I regret never having done in my life, one of the first that comes into my mind is never hanging apologies to my mother for the trouble I must have caused her when I was an infant.

I remember, in particular, writing all over her kitchen floor with a piece of charcoal. Well, kitchens and charcoal go together, don’t they? In the sense that charcoal is produced when firewood turns black when it is burnt in a hearth.

That may be so, but my mother didn’t think charcoal belonged in her kitchen.

She used to go to particular spots on riverbanks, and laboriously dig up

Soft, red clay, called “nkyoma”, and bring it home to plaster it all over her kitchen floor. She was so meticulous in doing this that if you looked hard at the kitchen floor after the clay had dried, you would see someone resembling yourself on the floor.

My practice was to wait, until after she had finished polishing the floor, and use a piece of charcoal to write all over it. “3×5=15”; (I would write) or “Shokolokobangoshay” (a word we found in our Oxford English Reader, which we believed was the “longest word in the world!”)

The reason why I defaced her kitchen floor so much was that I was intoxicated with the power of literacy when I first went to school. When I was enrolled into Class One, I already knew how to read, because an older half-brother of mine was already in Standard Three (that is six classes ahead of me!). And one of my father’s nephews was even further up on the educational tree – he was in Standard Five!

We all played together, ate together and told tall tales to one another, and as the youngest member of the gang, I was everyone’s favourite, for it was I who was everyone’s “fag”. That meant I was the one sent to deliver verbal messages to their girlfriends; or to buy kenkey and fish for them when they wanted to “diversify” their diet away from the “fufuo” and “ampesie” that was our normal fare.

In return for being their errand boy, I got access to all their knowledge.

I had a special way of whistling to each of them when I needed to see them alone; I heard all their stories from school first hand; and I smuggled their vocabulary into my own head by stealing it from their “Notebooks”.

There were penalties to pay for some of my sharp practices: for instance, I once came across some peculiar “vocabs” which the Standard Three classteacher had just taught my brother’s class. These included a quaint expression that took my fancy, namely, “ I am all aches and pains” (for the Twi expression: ”Me ho nyinaa ye me ya!”)

The boastful brat that I was, I showed off before my brothers’ classmates when they came to visit him and were testing one another by asking questions whose answers they knew from school.

Without an invitation, I boldly asked, “What is the meaning of “I am all akis (sci) and pains?”

Instinctively, one of them corrected me by pronouncing “aches” correctly. But then, they all rounded on me and asked, “How did you get to know that expression?”

They looked at my brother, who guiltily reached out to strike me!

I ran off, not quite understanding why they should be angry at me. Was there any such thing as “secret knowledge” in a school?

Apparently, there was – whenever their teacher taught them something that he regarded as peculiarly his own, in that only he probably knew it in the school, he forbade them from spreading it to the pupils of other teachers!

By doing that, he demonstrated that “some teachers were different from other teachers.” His own pupils would boast that “As for our teacher, he is brainy!” and look down upon those whose teachers were not that gifted. School politics in a past age, what? I had innocently enrolled myself into an “occult” class by reading my brother’s notes. Had I not made myself scarce – in a quickish manner – I might have been punished.

Thereafter, my mother’s kitchen floor became the only safe place where I wrote down any secret knowledge I found, and then chewed it by heart.

My mother complained and complained, but I didn’t stop writing on her kitchen floor. I wonder whether she ever connected my professional writing with what I did then? (I mean, I became a Journalist at the age of 19!) Did she catch on that perhaps what I used to do on her kitchen floor was a sign that I had a strong desire in me to communicate what I knew to other people?.

Anyway, I am sure she may have vaguely appreciated what I did, even if she didn’t fully understand the situation. For she saw that out of practising on her kitchen floor, I learnt to write my way into full journalistic employment, which enabled me to help educate her children, my eight siblings, all of whom have made it by obtaining qualifications that are now helping them to earn a decent living for themselves and their offspring.

See what a piece of charcoal can do? So, my unasked advice to everyone is: encourage your children to do what their hearts desire; what really interests them. Had my mother decided to cure me of my “naughty” habit of writing on her kitchen floor, by catching me to “TUA” me (give me a hot-pepper enema!) would I have persisted in writing? I doubt that very much!

BY CAMERON DUODU