The Twice Married in the City of Accra

Many people living in this unconscious, self-conscious city are twice married to little purpose, and do not even know it. They credit the first in time as the primitive prelude to the higher other, but the law secures both on the same pedestal. It is a cheerless throwback to time no-more, when kids were named and then christened or baptised with a ‘Christian name’. Then they’d injuriously insist at home on being called ‘Kwabena Paul’ or uncultured crass like that. We denigrate the African marriage as the engagement, and elevate the European marriage (also called ‘Civil’) as the real thing. And yet, you can call yourself Mrs. Something-Something after the ‘Engagement’. So, is there a difference? A certain kind of man chooses only to get ‘engaged’ so that he’s not limited to only one lawful wife. Get it?

The Prado Wins the Girl

H, the office manager, traipsed tardily into my office on his daily morning constitutional. He sauntered towards my bird’s-eye window to manage the ante meridian view below. All of a sudden, he called out to me to come and take a quick street scan.

A girl! Slender, tall; still magnificently delicious womanhood! She was tucking in her shirt, which the tight pants on her canyon curves were constantly casting off. Shirt in straight, and she started cheesecaking away from under my look-out.

He wondered if he should call her. Cheerleader-I said yes! As H managed the window into an open-slide position, a parked white Toyota Land Cruiser Prado backed up into the street, and pulled up beside our girl. Quick words were swapped as H’s hellos were deafly disregarded. She half-glided-half-galloped into the SUV, and they were gone in a wisp.

Were we livid? No! Were we sad? Not at all! Were we beaten? Twice soundly, thrice roundly! And it was not even the real Land Cruiser, but its less charming cousin!

Saturday-Night Showdown

Three Levantine leches leaked into Sankofa Night Club, in Akosombo, looking limpid to whisk women away (they were not merely there to whirl and twirl - they were drawing the women, in turns, to shadowy corners, through a jersey-clad cowboy pimp, for smutty brokering). For a short spell, they didn’t come near us, but after selecting and deselecting their wholly willing quarry, the leader of the raiders posted one of his lackeys to call our B.

I leapt over a low table and belted him on the arm, screaming all the while at him to “leave our girl alone”. El jefe employed bravado, but when I was icily intrepid, he backed down dispirited. K (B'S man)was watching unruffled as a tempest threatened, secure in the knowledge that B required no help to sweep off the effluence (but K knows I menaced for a different reason). They ended up sneaking away with three victim vixens (of whom one was just a cub).

Zest for Life even at Z

Persona grata in my life know that I have loathed to double check the surest path to a long life. But I just took the measure of an 83-year-old woman on KSM’s TGIF tripping the light fantastic to vigorous 2008-highlife, and her gung-ho cling-to-life made me modify my mind.

Life is a precious thing! The only affair we’ll have just once. I will love it, live it, share it, give it, dream it, build it, stretch it, rest it, till it’s time to let it go. Then, maybe, if I’m 83, I’ll execute the pommel horse at the Accra Olympics.

100

A complete and comforting number, I think; a good place to stop, or else to go on. This is my 100th blog post and I’m writing in a halo! I would like to say thank you to all readers, comment makers and co-bloggers who have held my hand along the way from poet-exclusive to ... now, what genre do I write?

Thank you, Maya, for starting me on this in the first place. Thank you, readers in Ghana. Thank you, readers in Kenya. Thank you, readers in Canada. Thank you, readers in the UK. Thank you, readers in South Africa, Germany and the US. Thank you, everybody. I’ve made so many wonderful new friends in blogosphere (my laptop accepted the word!)

In these 100 posts, I have written on many topics, love poetry, sob poetry, praise poetry as well as creative nonfiction on: free night calls, miniskirts, song birds, beads, driving habits, the lazy self-employed, the case for an extra day of the week, national Friday wear, phone manners, rain art, my grandfather, the Accra Mall, football, ogling, national heroes, class pretence, check-check, sexism, crazy crushes and infatuations and living life to the full.

I plan to make a few changes to this blog (no early announcements, though). Plus, my little milestone is coming as bloggers in Ghana get together in some form of collaboration. Happy days, yay!!!!

The Battles of the Ever-Broke in the City of Accra

The block we work in strikes a pose on the Independence Avenue (the emerging finance centre) of the City of Accra. I like to enervate the air-con, shift the glass windows out of the way and delight in the shamble-shuffle of feet flogged too long by life, the half-price chatter of passersby, the half-volume drone of new vehicles and the full-bodied squeakiness of battle-worn tro-tros. I glean no less news in this way than by listening to Joy or Atlantis or the Beeb. I shut down my mind and laptop for the day, at half-light, not long ago, when I heard a racket outside. I poked my big nose out, and sniffed trouble as a horde poured out of a stalled tro-tro with its hazard lights blinking. As different conflict centres broke out, I saw a nursing battle-axe untie her carry cloth, lift her nursling off her back with one arm, dump the baby on the pavement and dive for the jugular of the driver’s mate. Another woman rushed to gather up the tot in her arms (and she could have sneaked off with the child). As I shut my window to that world, the prevalent shouts were about toffee change. So little money to kill another (or disown a baby) for, in the City of Accra. The depth of the poverty scares me.

Joie de Vivre

Now won’t you let lambent life seduce you, heart and soul, with her plentiful pleasures, while bashful breasts refuse to surrender to her flirtatious fondling, but, rather, make excellent and noble plans for telescopic tomorrow, even as Time the puppy is snatched spitefully from their very grasp?

Oh, won’t you exploit your full seventy explicitly in every single, silly second; build drivel dreams, whore the world, luxuriate in friendship, and conjugate the one thousand verbs of sex?

Now, won’t you calmly smile when death swings her big rug and snuffs a life close to you, conceited that if you go right this moment, the only raw regrets are those felt by the people who lustfully lose (and miss) your company?