Emmanuel Bane's Fond Recollections. A choice assortment of little gems fit for prescribed set book and leisure reading!
Botsalo Ntuane | Friday June 12, 2020 12:17
As the golden nectar and other fire waters take over our faculties, inhibitions also recede. Soon we are overcome by nostalgia for the times when we thought we would be forever young, and the fun would never end. As the night wears on we abandon vernacular and spice up slurred conversations with English, the choice language of literate Africans who’ve had a few too many. Invariably someone would recite a passage from a literature set book and all would follow suit trying to relive characters who have accompanied us since the first time we fell in love with the written word. In my circle of friends, we tend to coalesce around material from a certain era.
These were prescribed set books for those who started school in the late seventies until the early nineties when the state trucked us off to national service in exchange for free tertiary education. It is those set books that determined the trajectory of our lives, in terms of disciplines for further study and professional career choices. Because everyone applying to varsity had to demonstrate proficiency in the English language, even those who ended up in the sciences had to read some literature.
With every turn of the page vistas of a new language and exotic worlds beyond our environs opened to us. Set books took us to places beyond our imagination. Of those we read, some stayed ingrained in our minds, still making fleeting appearances on nights of revelry as we regret the follies we can never change and dream ever less of achieving redemption in the time remaining. Who forgets the brilliance of a boy called Obuechina Maduabuchi in The Potter’s Wheel, a dizzying, side splitting novella by Chukuwemeka Ike. It gives account of a precocious student somewhere in Nigeria uprooted from a cloistered family life to be placed in the care of a stern relative. The book resonated because though not an exact replica of life in these parts, there were uncanny similarities which local learners could recognise.
Right to this day everyone who flicked its pages remembers the early scene that builds up to a crescendo when Obu, the likeable urchin with a big head always bobbing from side to side, shattered all records by correctly spelling the jawbreaker Tintinnabulation.
Up to this day I don’t know if it’s a real bombastic word or was just conjured up by the excitable Teacher to find out if Obu’s big head contained just water or a proper brain. From the day Obu floored Teacher with the jawbreaker there was no question he was destined to sit alongside the white man in England, sipping tea from a saucer. We loved such stories because they were fun, spoke to our improbable dreams and we could even see some eccentricities of the characters reflected in parts of our lives. In this time of coronavirus we are reminded of the wonjo pestilence that ravaged many villages in the book
The Great Ponds by Elechi Amadi. Of course there were the challenging books like Things Fall Apart but within its pages we still found characters and incidents that became imbedded in us. Okonkwo could have been a hero but he was the tragic type and not very likeable.
I don’t know any classmate who didn’t love Nwoye or at the same time feel sorry for Ikemefuna, some of the key characters in Chinua Achebe’s classic. Whoever had the bright idea to set up the Heinemann African Writers Series introduced us to authors like Cyprian Ekwensi, Bessie Head, Bediako Asare, Sembene Ousmane and others of our race who wrote in the kind of idiomatic prose accessible to the native ear. That said, a cause of concern has always been the absence of localised stories that can infect a reader’s mind for life. The use of language and imagery by the authors mentioned became a device into our affections for English and by extension wider reading.
Although output is negligible, books have been written in this country but few reach the quality of works from African Writers Series. Possibly a work that mimicked the styleof those wordsmiths was the Andrew Sesinyi debut work , Love On The Rocks which depicted a deprived boy from the village finding success in the big town theme. I think it was well received and no less because it was a standout symbol of pride for a literary scene suffering a paucity of books. The publication was arguably a product of the West African tradition because the author had studied in Ghana. In the interregnum since, we have never had a rites of passage work that is home spun and truly funny. That is up until I read, thrice, Fond Recollections which is a collection of 22 short stories of boyhood memories.
Told through the eyes of the character Mmei, his tales traverse the rural world of daily struggles, torrid school days, fears of the unknown, maternal love, migrant labour and daily struggles for a better life.
Set mainly in Tswapong region, every individual aged from mid forties and raised through that period will find familiarity in the witty, contemplative and at times melancholic nuggets of raw story telling.
Back then was a culture of hazing, or ‘treating’ form one arrivals at boarding school which the author narrates so well it returns the reader to the day they too were put through their paces.
Hunting toads to prepare a well roasted kebab would be something that terrifies the kids of today. I wonder how they would react to being assigned the job of killing the family dog which had loyal all along. Children running 16 kilometres to and from school which saw them arriving, shivering, barefooted, piece of wood and tin plate in hand, sometimes a few hours after midnight because there was no way of telling winter time is rekindled for those today enjoying lucrative tenders and picking their kids from private school in luxury sedans.
Those were the days of sadistic teachers who with the complicity of parents, administered terrible beatings on impoverished little creatures whose sustenance of delicacy was a nutritious soya based meal known as malutu, for most their only meal of the day.
As I read the piece I wished the author had gone all the way and described the khaki wrapping and cooking oil container proudly depicting two clasped hands, declaring they were a gift from the people of the United States. The wrappings had multiple uses and could be used to cover grubby exercise books just about falling apart. The oil containers were handy for heating water. Or as the base of a homemade guitar. Up to this day, I have beef with ungratefuls who dismiss America but for its humanitarian efforts, they would have been childhood starvation victims. Fond Recollections is like a box of those choice assorted biscuits wherein every reader will find their pick. Mine is Oris. It’s about a local hero whose morning grooming rituals, including combing his afro, are performed in full public glare, just for control.
Oris rides a brightly decorated Humber bicycle baptized Rekang Tsa Lona, a name he presumably decided on for even more control. Sadly, he never stood a chance. But his short lived career as a village heart-throb is told in a delightful tone. Closely related to the fate of Oris is the story of Kaposi. This tale was commonplace. In our formative years which coincided with migrant labour recruitment.
We saw many a Kaposi returning home with a stack of vinyl records, a ‘sun box’ music system, trunk full of wash ‘n’ wear clothes, a bicycle and the symbol of status, a trinket wrist watch. It was all they could lay claim to as worldly possessions after years drilling for gold deep in the bowels of the Transvaal mines. For the old women left at home, all they got from the toil of their sons was a Puma fleece blanket and a set of doeks. But for every Kaposi, the day came when the bicycle broke down.
The vinyl records cracked in the heat. And the ‘amprofaya and sun box ’ which had been a source of income from playing stokvel parties, finally croaked to death. Then it was back to a life of penury for the once proud dandy. For weddings and funerals, his best attire would now be reduced to tough ‘reefs’ and faded overalls branded Durban Deep or Carletonville, relics from gold mines where labour broking companies like Wenela had placed him.
Kaposi and Oris are victims of the evils of apartheid and its migrant labour system which exploited and spat out thousands of young black men from the hinterlands of this sub region. Social ills such as passion killings also make an appearance in the book. Of course the country bumpkin story is thrown in about Mmei who is bitten by bug to enlist in the mines. He had been told migrants go there by train. Only problem is that as a rural native he has never seen rail track, let alone a train.
But somehow after running away from school, he finds himself at Palapye station, and at night smuggles himself into a goods wagon. Upon waking up he is elated he is in Gaborone halfway through his journey to the mines. Only when he inquires about the location of the mine recruitment office is he told he is in Palapye. The country bumpkin had slept all night under the tarpaulin and the noise of other trains changing tracks misled him to think he was on the move. A reviewer will always fall short in giving a book enough merit. Better everyone reads it by buying a copy.
The gift of the author Emmanuel Bane is his deep passion in interpreting experiences that are a throwback to the years of adolescence. On the face of it the pieces are curated for enjoyment. But from another perspective, they could be some kind of cathartic journey by the author to unburden himself by sharing not only his childhood odyssey but also that of many others raised in the same milieu. In this book, Emmanuel Bane is not only a chronicler but the fly, and not on the wall, but buzzing around the public and intimate affairs of the community. Fond Recollections is a delightful read, but its life should not end with regaling our kids about how we grew up. That would be a travesty of literary justice.
This is a collection for the ages; an honest, warts-and-all account of life in a time that is gone forever, but cannot be allowed to fade from memory. I haven’t checked out current set books, but I doubt if any comes better. The work deserves the attention of those anonymous gatekeepers who prescribe which works must go on school set lists.
Much like the iconic West Africans who once upon a time mesmerised us with their domesticated use of the Queen’ s language in their story telling, the name, Emmanuel Bane deserves wider readership for this creative effort at localised prose. This is a debut publication, and one cannot help but get the nagging feeling that from the granary where the 22 stories come from, what remains is bountiful and a follow-up is only in order.
*Copies of the book are available from Sebilo Books and from the author at 76000025.