Healing from Ghana Overcoming the Traumatic Years

Fearing shame and stigma, I concealed the experience to myself. This article is my first means of publicizing what happened to me in Ghana two decades ago because I have concluded that my writing about it is part of my healing process. I have never discussed it with families or friends, and I don’t think I ever will.

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Cologne, Germany

In 1999, my father, my family’s breadwinner, lost his job as manager of a prestigious international company in western Nigeria. I had just completed my junior secondary school final exams and was supposed to go on to a prestigious secondary institution. But my family’s sudden fall from financial security killed the plan.

My mother stepped up to provide when my father could not. She got paid to braid and weave, working her hands through all kinds of hair from dawn to dusk in her customers’ homes. She sold anything she could get her hands on, mainly seasonal produce like oranges and mangoes and we would hawk them in the neighbourhood. Within a few months, she lost her weight and her beauty and started selling her clothes and jewellery to travelling Hausa traders. ‘I’ll buy new ones, better ones, as soon as our situation changes,’ she would say. But the bitterness in her smiles betrayed her show of optimism. I realized that she, too, was just trying to cope.

My mother’s earnings could not sustain us. So, my parents, my three siblings and I moved out of our luxurious 4-bedroom mansion into a crowded room-and-parlour apartment, a ‘face-me, I face-you’. It had one bathroom and a smelly pit toilet that we shared with ten people.

Then, we lost our two Peugeot cars: my parents sold the 505 after my father’s company had taken back his official 504. He used the money for his job hunt, dashing out cash to buy favour. But the bribes didn’t work. After a while, I noticed my father’s beauty...