Godwin Inyang's Blog

  CHAPTER 4   THOUGH THE ‘EUROPEAN UNION SPONSORED’ PROJECT was yet to take off, the small-scale cassava flour business thrived with its unique gain and pain. Because of the large number of farmers involved in processing cassava in the four sections of the village, there was a glut of cassava flour at a point in time. Buyers made a mess of the situation, hoodwinking the sellers. So the prominent people in the cassava flour supplying business, including Mr Ransom, formed the Fufu Sellers Union (FSU) and eventually checkmated, as they thought, the excesses of the buyers. Apart from passing their bylaws, the union demarcated the village into two sections that respectively would supply the buyers with the product every fortnight. The situation was ameliorated. But from time to time, some woes and blows kept surfacing. There was this speculation initially of some farmers who had taken more cash from buyers of cassava flour who thought they could outsmart their rivals by lavishly adv

Grace knew of the secret the day their eldest daughter was caught smooching with a young fellow who had pretended to be a friend to the second son. The father was mad that she was getting spoiled and would not properly follow the footprints he deliberately planted for them so they would become great men and women in the future. Though she had narrowly escaped the blows he flung at her, Mr Ransom since the evening of that Saturday kept threatening her with thunder and hailstones and the wife who felt he had quarrelled enough had asked him to pipe down, that their daughter had made a mistake and with his reaction, she had learnt her lessons and would definitely not repeat the act. Mr Ransom would not condone such a permissive attitude, so he and the wife quarrelled. He had said pretty nasty things to the wife but she had avoided answering him. As the wife saw the fight had not fully left him, she had started avoiding passing near where he stood. While trying to pass near the pen to get t

  CHAPTER 3   THE DAY FOR MILLING CASSAVA was like a tug of war. Out of seven days a week, only one was set aside for the farmers to bring out their produce and the buyers to come and get it. The arrangement was done to favour both parties, so the buyers would not come and go back empty-handed hence wasting their fares and for the sellers to jointly bargain and get good returns for their efforts. The evenings the peeled cassava arrived in sacks, the nanny goat knew she would not hear any other sound in the area except that of the grating milling machines mounted on trucks. Those who had their sacks of cassava ready would go call the millers. At night the area around the Ransoms’ frontage was like a mini-market with the cassava owners pointing their torches at the sacks littering the sides of the path and haggling with the millers the amounts they would pay for their produce to be milled. Where a bargain was struck, the machines would roar into life and the deafening sound w

  CHAPTER 2   THE RANSOMS’ COMPOUND was on an uneven path off the main road and had a large signboard emblazoned with the words SITE FOR CASSAVA PROCESSING PLANT tagged with SPONSORED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION WITH #6,000,000. The figure obviously did represent the amount expended or about to be expended by the sponsor. But what was not clear was the specific currency, whether dollars, euros, pounds or the local naira. Grace suspected someone deliberately asked the signwriter to use the hash sign instead of the symbol of the actual currency to frustrate petition writers. If someone wrote a petition to any quarters and quoted a wrong sum concerning the project; that would readily put a big question mark on the petition and paint the writer as a false accuser and one may ask, a false accuser of what? Grace for the past three years had seen that signboard standing out there and the little ceremony she could associate with its erection was of a group of four men driving down here in a

  CHAPTER 1   WHAT PROVOKED THE WRATH of the nanny goat was the wife of its owner, Mrs Ransom, this fateful day. She had pointed disdainfully at her and asked her youngest daughter in a fit of anger if she wanted to be like the nanny goat’s teats giving milk only when repeatedly hit. The nanny goat knew those words were directed at her. She had stayed that long in the pen and had curiously observed human actions, especially of Mr Ransom and his family, noting the words used in every act and milking (no pun intended) the meaning from them. By her superior intelligence ... the she-goat I mean, and she would henceforth be called Grace.  T o her wretched owners, the christening would have been hilarious. They never dared to name their goats though not so with their dogs and by her superior intelligence, Grace thought that had happened because the dogs were too stupid to stay awake and bark nonsensically in the pretext of guarding them at the slightest shake of a blade of grass stir