Healing from Ghana

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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 fade away, too. Grey hair invaded his dark, shiny afro. His sweet, gap-toothed smile crumpled into a frown that never seemed to go away. Before, my father used to tell us colourful folk tales, speaking his Ekiti-Yoruba regional language. But that stopped. No more folk tales. No more jokes.

Life had been good before my dad lost his job.

We lived like a typical middle-class Nigerian family of the 90s. We had a huge compound to ourselves and two Peugeot cars: my father used his company’s official 504 for work and road trips, while the 505 belonged to Mother and us. Whenever Mother could not drive us to school, our family driver, Uncle Sola, took us. On weekends we visited supermarkets, holiday resorts, or grandparents in the villages.

The gardener tended the flowers and trees in our huge compound. A domestic worker kept the space tidy and a laundryman assisted in the cleaning on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet, our loving parents, especially Mother, maintained discipline. My immediate brother and I used to wash our socks and underwear with our hands. We cleaned our rooms by ourselves, too. Mother inspected all our chores. If we failed to do our chores, Mother disciplined us by preventing us from playing our favourite games and sports and from inviting our friends to play with us. We were a happy family. But that was a long time ago.

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Healing from Ghana

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