Godwin Inyang's Blog

  With his new friend, the tout, Tom had torn open a side of the leather suitcase and found the jewels and money. They took out the first five thousand dollars for the bus terminal tout to go exchange and know what it would amount to in naira. The tout did change the dollars and brought back eighty thousand naira which Tom split equally between them. He took another five thousand dollars and gave to the tout to go exchange – it was safe they exchanged the money in bits. While waiting for the tout to return, Tom bought himself new clothes and shoes and was running around with the village girls. The percipient stepfather noticing Tom’s sudden transformation, looked into the synthetic bag, saw the strange-looking bills but seeing what was happening, decided to pilfer some, remembering a popular saying of his people: ‘When God helps you; help yourself.’ When the police came, the alert stepfather stole out of the house and it was he who saw the tout coming around at the same moment the ...

  With that Mma Tom left the akara business to her eldest daughter, got into the Land Rover which turned around and drove them to her compound down the road. As the police vehicle cruised into her compound, Mma Tom noticed a lanky stranger waiting there already and as the Land Rover stopped, he walked from behind to meet them. They all quietly moved onto the veranda of the mud house with a corrugated iron roof with a long bench which the first three men and Mma Tom sat on. The new man opted to go further and perch on a table at an angle to the bench, leaning on an adjacent wall. ‘If I may ask,’ Tom’s master said, ‘you said you’ve not seen your son?’ ‘E tay I no see am,’ she replied in heavily accented pidgin. Looking like she would have a problem expressing herself, she said every other word in her mother tongue which the brother and the policeman who understood helped interpret for the other two who didn’t. After the tirade and wild gestures, the man perching on the table...

  MMA TOM SAT BESIDE THE FIRE, the oil in a pan sputtering as she formed balls of milled beans and carefully dipped them in the oil. With a perforated ladle, she would check to see if the underside was brown enough, showing half the bean cake popularly called akara was done and then she would turn it over for the other half to be equally brown. When the entire ball became sensibly brown, Mma Tom gingerly with her ladle would remove them, placing them in a tray on a table with customers itching to buy. Her eldest daughter assisted in selling, wrapping the balls of akara in old leaves of newspapers, collecting the money and putting it in an empty plastic custard cup. Mma Tom from the corner of her eye did see a police jeep crawling on their yet-to-be-tarred dusty road, being the dry season, as if the driver was scared of unnecessarily raising dust, towards her. But her younger daughter, who was churning the milled beans in a mortar with a pestle by her carelessness, distracted he...