Startling Diversions

His mischief stirred. The situation was sombre and stressful, and he solemnly attentive as his office demanded. Yet he suddenly felt his serene sitting room was the wrong setting for the strife before him. Those two should be in the forests. They’d be at home with cheetahs and leopards. So wild!

Although rapt, he did not write. He had become circumspect over taking notes of cases brought to him. Some of the villagers dreaded their words’ transcription onto paper. Theirs was a terror probably prompted by encounters with sanitary officers, policemen or punitive authority. To have one’s words written intimated jail and doom.

‘Our father,’ raged the irate woman, ‘all I’m saying is true. I swear this in …’ Bassey frowned, accompanying his scowl with a proscriptive lift of his hand. ‘No swearing. Just “yes” or “no”. Anything more is of the devil.’

‘That compound is the compound of my parents,’ the disputant continued. ‘My brother there… and my other brothers and sister, were raised there. He…’ and she again indicated her brother. Beside him sat his wife, glowering at her haranguing sister-in-law. ‘…and I worked that compound together. I would sweep, he would cut the grass when it sprouted. Then, at mealtimes, he split the firewood. I cooked the soup and he pounded the cassava or yam. That’s how we lived with our parents. You know our father was one of the first men in this town to embrace the faith. Only he and my mother. One wife.

‘My parents are dead. I was married… there were too many problems there. My husband came from Amake. He died and his people tried to kill me. So I came back here with my three children. It is our custom that if a woman is mistreated in her husband’s home, she returns to her father’s…’ Now her sister in law expressed scorn, with curled lip and contemptuous nod. The speaker addressed Bassey forcefully, ‘Our father, it’s you I’m respecting. If she tried to insult me outside…’ Bassey again employed sternness to maintain order.

‘All I’m asking … all I was doing was living quietly in my room in my father’s house. With my three children, all in one room. I don’t get in my sister in law’s way. I know she’s the mistress of the compound. Let her rule all over the compound, without knowing how we suffered to maintain it before she came in, before my brother married her and … and she came to live in that fine house that my father built, she from her backward bush home….’

The opponent had sprung up to hurl her riposte. ‘Your bad behaviour drove you from your husband’s house.’

‘Goli, stay quiet, stay quiet, we’re before the Pastor,’ her husband admonished.

Goli’s sister in law concluded her speech. ‘All I’m saying is, to be allowed to stay quietly in my room, until my problems are solved. That’s all. I don’t want to play “madam of the house” with anybody. Let those who are drunk with power play it.’

Bassey pondered women’s rooted reputation as the weaker gender. The abhorrence in the two brawlers’ eyes was homicidal. He had never seen a man look so murderous. How could beings even remotely frail muster such venom?

Goli stated her case. ‘Our father, I don’t drive anyone away from their brother’s house. The house is there, there’s room for all. All I ask is to live, to live without trouble.’ She paused. ‘I come into my kitchen, and it’s not my kitchen anymore. Another woman’s things are all over it, and she’s giving orders. I’m like a stranger there… I sweep my compound and her child’s excreta lies across my front step. I give instructions to my servant, and she tells them to do other things… she gives me problems. She makes my servants look down on me, makes them feel I’ve no authority in my own husband’s house. I can’t speak in my own husband’s house…’

‘Husband, husband,’ cut in the sister in law. ‘I know mine died. Remind me. Mock me for having no husband.’

‘This is no place for wrangling,’ Bassey reprimanded.

‘My words aren’t many,’ Goli continued. ‘To live in my husband’s house. To enjoy a piece of cola nut in peace with anyone who comes to visit.’

‘Two women over one household is a difficult situation,’ Bassey began. ‘But, you are different. You are different because you are Christians. There’s a challenge before you. To succeed where others fail.’ He proceeded to proffer advice on how they might respect each others spaces and susceptibilities.

Afterwards, the trio trooped out. Bassey gave himself an amused scold. A worthy priest you are! You actually enjoyed that. Some of the quarrels brought to him, he frankly admitted, were entertaining. Peacemaking procured peeks into polemics’ piquant privacies. Bassey, however, would never betray a confidence or divulge details of the ruptures he resolved.

Bassey had now held Kenje’s pastorate for over a year. His station and stead still sometimes seemed surreal. For his education had been aimed at a different situation. Buoyant boyhood and adolescence in Pokoma had been followed by study at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. That city was deemed, understandably, the Athens of West Africa. Bassey never expected he would afterwards train at London’s Inns of Court, then end his course abruptly to espouse Holy Orders in Canterbury! Returning to his country, he ended up in Kenje, a remote station of the Anglican Church. Perhaps the strangest factor in his placing was that he had striven for a deprived, backward posting.

Kenje’s Parsonage lay on the edge of the Church grounds. That extensive compound contained the Church, the school, and quarters for some teachers and staff. Before Bassey ran and diverged the roads to the town and hospital. Kenje, even after a year,

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