Parental (Un)Control

When some parents settle it that even parental-uncontrolled DSTV is not engaging enough to enthral their adventurous adolescents, they line their pockets with lucre, and chauffeur them to the prepossessing positive influence of the Accra Mall; leaving them there on their own, obligingly. These kidults then haunt the ‘complicated’ corridors with purpose until after dark.

Children and Pastimes

This week, let's explore children and leisure in the City of Accra (knowing that many kids from poor homes already work, and have no time to put up their infant feet). Pointedly, what pastimes are parents obliging their children to pursue.

One-Month Romeo & Not Quite Juliet

Cliques of playas-in-their-prime ‘peacock’ around Adabraka town and other folksy parts of Accra. They have hours and purse-pride aplenty, and precious little self-respect; devoting days and dollars to shifty, married women, pulling out all the stops to knock her down (and, hopefully, not up) and score an ego point. They go ‘Full Romeo’ until the dame is ‘tabled’. Then, they bring down the curtain. Drama over, she goes back home troubled, used, but smiling.

Cupid’s Bubble

Between the loan-lined lives, the arranged ego-calls and accidentally dropped names, they got hitched hurriedly. Seven sad days later, they mutually discovered double-dealing deceit. He was not half important; he’d lost his homemade humour; she did not have an American passport; and she could not fry a chip; they were both drowning in debt.

The Ugliness of a Cheater-Beater

A pendulum swing to the third month after the whirlwind romance, proposal, wedding and exotic-islanding, he ‘wormed’ home late one night. He reeked of whisky, sweat and cheap, cheap sex. He did not say hello, could not. He just sprang and slapped the angel in her face, mumbling something about her sitting in his chair. Fuelled by filth and guilt, the force (no farce) of his swinging arm flung a condom pack out of his shirt pocket. Guilty!

Trust, Lust, Thrust & Dust

He tailed his wife to the playboy politician’s country home. It was 3 p.m. She was supposed to be at work at the city centre. He rapped on the door, wailing and yelling to her to come out, but she did not. The good-time Charlie emerged and smirked, “Yes, I’m shagging your wife, what can you do about it?”

The Stranger Downstairs

They were a spicy, flaming item for most of a year, and had been merrily married for two or three months. She stirred awake in the dead of one night; his side of the bed was empty and cold. She crept down the stairs to look for him. He was nowhere, and the doors were all secure with the keys in place. She eyed the portal to his private room. The one he always kept under lock; the one she had never stepped into; not even to clean.

A sliver of multicoloured light is shooting out from behind the door. There is a chink in the doorway. What happens next all seems like a dream. A humming holds her mind and hauls her towards the door. There are candles everywhere: red candles, blue candles, white candles, big and small, ordinary and scented. There are also ginormous, grotesque masks. The room is swelling (and her head swirling) with hollow haunted chanting. A butt-naked man squats in the middle of it all. It’s her husband – the man she did not know!

P.S.: Totally true story; she filed for divorce.