Pillars of Cloud and Fire

A story by RIGWELL ADDISON ASIEDU

Osaah did not hear the initial wave of uproar. 

In her apartment, she indulged her daughter’s newfound activity of playing with the balloons from the previous day’s birthday party. Ama was eight now, and 1983 began with a promise that soothed Osaah with a fragile peace that would soon shatter. The woman ran her fingers across the yellow foam stuffing poking out of the threadbare sofa. She rubbed her protruding belly and hummed along to the pa-pa-pa pops. And so when the first surge of outcry clashed with Ama bursting a red balloon, she did not hear the yells two doors away from her.

Osaah heard the second wave because Ama had become still, listening to the swelling tumult outside. She shot up and drew the girl closer. The entire compound erupted into craters of screams. 

“Stay inside, you hear?” she told Ama before rushing outside. Their door answered her push with a squeaking crack, then an extended retch, before casting her into the hallway of their face-me-I-face-you apartment. Her neighbours spilt out of their doors, some arguing, some crying, others with their hands on their heads. She supported her back with one hand, wincing, as she walked towards the person closest to her.

“Abeg, wetin apen nau?” she asked. When the person whipped around, Osaah stumbled backwards. Mabena was the last person she wanted information from. It wasn’t enough that this neighbour always wore heavy make-up and engaged in men-pleasing work. The other occupants of ECOWAS Compound spied on her while she bathed and confirmed that her body had a penis. That was too much for Osaah’s Christian sensibilities. She often warned Ama to stay away from her. But the last few minutes scattered all grievances to the wind. 

“You did not watch TV?” Mabena asked in Twi. She snapped her fingers. “Awurade, mewu!” 

Osaah shook her head. One month ago, Ama left a sachet of water atop their television, and it poured all over the gadget when it toppled down. The TV was dead, the contents of its hunchback insufficient to power it. Her husband, Elorm, promised to buy a new one, but she knew how their finances had withered in recent months. After her pregnancy bent towards her third trimester, she took a leave from Kulture Restaurant at Agege, where she worked as a chef since she moved from Ghana to Lagos. Although her husband’s job as a security guard at Adeola Odeku luxury flats in Victoria Island lined his pockets with wads of Naira and clinking Kobo coins, it was far from enough. What with the prices of things scaling up the walls of their finances like determined thieves, add that to the drain of sending money home to cover his father’s hospital bills, nothing was left to cater to sudden expenses. Besides, a baby grew in Osaah’s womb. And there was Ama. Ama and the trail of her history that still made Osaah uncomfortable sometimes.

A bigger quagmire sucked her in that Monday evening. Mabena’s sobs were so heavy she could hardly talk: Alhaji Ali Baba just announced on NTA that all unskilled foreigners residing and working illegally should leave Nigeria by 31st January.

“Mama Ama, they said we should go home o!” Mabena said. “After seven years here, go back home? What is in Ghana right now apart from hunger? Saa ɔgyakrom no? Aren’t we the ones sending money and foodstuffs home? Hɛrh! Onyame ntisɛ alata ni ampa!”

Osaah’s eyes blurred into the static of a monochrome TV. She spun around, searching for the closest pillar to lean against. She stumbled away from her neighbours, who lamented: What would happen to the provision stores some of them had in the community? All those goods, how would they move them back to Cameroon, to Senegal, to Togo, to Ghana? New occupants in the compound incurred debts to move to Nigeria just a few weeks ago, and now they have to leave? And those whose studies at UNILAG were only beginning, do they have to abandon that too? 

On the evenings of Osaah’s earlier years in Nigeria, she would join the other Ghanaians in Pankere’s room as they pooled around a radio at 9 pm Nigerian time—8 pm Ghanaian time—to listen to the thirty-minute Radio Ghana bulletin. For a while afterwards, nostalgia would warm their blood as they reminisced about home. Then, the house would explode into heated arguments: Why had Ghana deteriorated so badly within a little over 25 years after its 1957 independence? Hadn’t many flocked to their country back then to seek employment in all spheres of life, working in their post-independence giant factories and benefitting from the free education then? Why were they the ones now strangers in another man’s land?

Sometimes, Osaah would roll her eyes at what she considered desperation to cling to the golden years. Her husband and Pankere were the fiercest debaters. Pankere was actually named Panyin. He earned his moniker from his job as a secondary school teacher, where he wielded long, flexible canes wrapped in sticky tape for a sharper sting. Osaah hated that she had to join the other Ghanaians in the teacher’s room, this neighbour she once saw sneaking a man out of his room. But Elorm maintained that it was important to bond with brothers and sisters from home. And so, she always attended these unofficial meetings with gritted teeth. The only person she could manage a thin smile for was Pankere’s twin sister, Akua, who lived in the next room. 

On those evenings, Pankere’s lithe physique would bend into cursive as he argued that the arrival of the military on the Ghanaian political scene and their mismanagement of the country’s affairs ran down the state-owned enterprises Nkrumah established to foster youth employment. The corrupt heads of state ruined the freedom fighters’ industrialisation drive and replaced it with nothing but a vicious cycle of coups and famine in the land.

“Look at us now, we are strangers in this land,” Elorm would agree. Everyone knew it was a miracle that he maintained his job after the robbery at Alex Ekwueme’s house resulted in his Nigerian colleagues jeering him and calling him a Ghanaian criminal.

“They can tell us to leave at any moment. Do you know they call us aliens now? All over this country, they don’t like Ghanaians anymore. Fights here, confrontations there. Bodies everywhere! It’s only God who is protecting us in this place. What if they tell us to leave the way Busia did to Nigerians in ’69?”

And here they were. 

*

Elorm returned home that evening. He stood on the door sill for a long moment, his eyes glassy and unfocused, and the hopeful glint he’d left with that morning gone. Osaah knew before he spoke. After the announcement, his boss had terminated his employment.

“What are we going to do, me wura? My Lord.” Osaah lowered a lantern on the coffee table. The flame licked the wick into a wagging yellow tongue. A gust of wind blew through the curtains, plastering their shadows on the wall. The room smelled of kerosene. She sat beside him and placed her hands on her breasts.

“The skilled workers can stay till 20th February. We can stay back until then and start preparations.”

“The thing, it has come already.” Osaah sighed. Tears pooled in her eyes and chased themselves down her cheeks. She heaved again and watched the ceiling. The leaking roof had left brown patches that extended into odd shapes. The one above her was a shapeless yam that she liked to imagine was the map of Ghana. She would lie on the floor every evening, visualising that her family at home was somewhere in that pattern.

*

The raids began one week later. Most of the neighbours had set off for the Seme Border, where they would then travel into Benin, and then Togo, before heading to the Aflao Border to cross into Ghana. Some Nigerians started calling the big, sturdy bags, Ghana-Must-Go, for they were now the unofficial luggage of the mass departure. The moniker stung Osaah. The market was full of scores of people who, like her, came to buy stuff for their journey home.

A provision seller frowned when she heard Osaah’s accent. She picked items from the shelves and flung them on the table.

“All of una just come make dis country hard. See the ashawo wey you come do for dis Lagos,” she said, pointing at Osaah’s bulging belly.

A woman in the next stall screamed at the trader to stop insulting Osaah. However, the insults did not dim while the trader packed Osaah’s tins of mackerel, sardines, milk, Blue Band Margarine, St. Louis cubed sugar, and Danish butter cookies in two large nylon bags. They did not dim while she counted the money Osaah paid her. In fact, they flared when Osaah asked for her change, which the seller withheld and dared her to come get it from her clenched fist. 

A cloud of apprehension hovered over her neighbours when Osaah returned from the market. Of all the people who lived in ECOWAS Compound, built by the now deceased Ghanaian-Nigerian landlord, only a few remained— the ones she abhorred. 

Elorm briefed her when she got to the group. Swollen lines marked his face: “Some Yoruba and Igbo boys came here earlier. They warned us to leave today or they would return to burn this house down.” 

“I know where we can sleep tonight,” Mabena offered.

Osaah drew her daughter closer and said they would be fine without her help. Her husband pulled her aside.

“You know how these Nigerians are. Look at your condition.” He moved closer, his hand outstretched to touch her belly.

“I don’t have any condition.” She waved him off, shifting away from his reach.

“Please, Osaah. For the baby’s sake. Look at Ama. She has been crying since you went to the market.”

Osaah watched Ama’s tear-streaked face and sighed.

They arranged their luggage and locked their doors. The Nigerian caretaker, Qudus, promised to safeguard their belongings. Mabena led Pankere, Akua, and Osaah’s family across the streets of Oshodi to Mafoluku, where she knocked at a door. A man with grey streaks in his beard peered out of the door’s crack, then hushed them inside. Osaah’s skin itched when his hands touched her. She restrained herself from making a snarky comment about seeking refuge in a pimp’s dungeon. 

“This is my boss, Uncle Ade,” Mabena introduced him. 

The man stopped Osaah and Akua when they tried to kneel to thank him. “Ah, no, no. Don’t thank me. Thank God. It is just the government trying to win elections against Azikiwe and Awolowo in August. All this nonsense, I have seen it before. Sorry for the inconvenience, my Ghananains,” he said.

He showed them a spacious room where they could spend the night. King Sunny Ade’s music wafted in from a nearby house.

Osaah and her family sat away from the other three. She watched them with suspicious eyes, muttering prayers in rebuke of their vices.

When Mabena offered them food, she raised her hand to turn it down. Elorm, however, leaned forward to receive the amala, gbegiri, and ewedu. The joy that lit up his face was gratitude enrobbed. 

“Ama is hungry,” he said and began eating. The others followed suit.

“I’m not even happy that we are here with… ” Osaah looked at the trio watching her from across the room.

Pankere rose from his mattress. 

“What’s your problem with us? You pray against us every morning, and we don’t know what we did to you.”

“I haven’t said you did anything, but a guilty conscience is always perplexed.” Osaah clicked her tongue. Even now, Pankere wore a flowery perfume that irked her. 

“We are Ghanaians stuck in this together,” Mabena said, swallowing a morsel of amala. “If you can marry a Togolese,” she nodded towards Elorm, “then I don’t know why you can’t even relate with your fellow Akans.”

“Elorm is not a Togolese,” Osaah barked at her at the same time that her husband hollered, “I am an Ewe!” 

“What is the difference between the two?” Akua asked. Her twin brother and Mabena laughed. Osaah sucked her teeth and hissed. After the meal, Uncle Ade called them into the living room where they watched Shehu Shagari’s speech on NTA. 

If they don’t leave, they should be arrested and tried and sent

back to their homes. Illegal immigrants, in fact under normal

circumstances, should not be given any notice whatsoever.

If you break the law, you have to pay for it.

Uncle Ade shared the story of his family’s settling in Ghana many years before the country’s independence. After the departure of the Portuguese from the commercial scene, the Yorubas took over the markets in Kumasi. As a boy, he loved playing in his mother’s big store after school. His life in Ghana ended when Busia enacted the Aliens Compliance Order in 1969 and made his family and many others return to Nigeria at the height of the civil war. 

“We were scared of our fates as deportees, but my family found a way. Now look at me,” he said, waving his hand across the room of polished sofas and marbled floor. “Don’t worry. Everything will be alright once you get there. I know there is hunger and famine in your land, but God will see you through.”

The next morning, they thanked Uncle Ade and left. Qudus met them when they returned. He fought hard to keep the men from pillaging last night; it was better if they left that morning. 

The occupants moved their luggage outside: stuffed Ghana-Must-Go bags, utensils, beds, even generators. Osaah decided to leave her mirror in their apartment because it was too fragile to survive border crossing.

“It will break anyway. It could injure Ama,” Elorm said. She stood before the mirror in her room, combed her hair, and covered it with an Ankara-print head tie. Then she tied her wrapper around her gown and over her belly. She stashed her Naira, CFA and Cedi currencies in her brassiere, the knots of her wrapper’s edges, a small pouch bag that her clothes covered, the pockets of the shorts she wore underneath her gown, and the Ghana-Must-Go bags.

Discomfort coiled Osaah back into her shell when she saw her neighbours waiting outside beside a Peugeot Caravan. 

“It is better if we travel together,” Elorm said, and she nodded, sneering. Akua hugged Pankere and Mabena goodbye after putting her luggage in Tunde’s Benz. She insisted on staying with her boyfriend, even getting tribal marks on her face if her fluency in Yoruba was not enough to blend her in. The teacher’s eyes reddened in the wake of the dust left by Tunde’s car. A strange ache to hug him overwhelmed Osaah. Her baby kicked. Mabena hugged Pankere, assuring him that Akua would be fine. Osaah sighed and lifted Ama into the caravan. The house retreated into a dot as they drove off. Memories sifted in her mind of all the days and nights she had spent building a life in Nigeria during the oil boom of the 70’s. 

She had met Elorm at Kulture Restaurant one day when she was serving food. It was usual for her to meet Ghanaians from all walks of life there: university lecturers and students, medical officers, political refugees, constro boys, girls who sold bread in the traffic on the highway leading out of Lagos to Abeokuta, sex workers, and unskilled male workers who did odd jobs sharpening knives and mending shoes. Elorm belonged to the last group. The silver blades of the knives, which he placed on the floor so he could eat, glowed orange with the rays of the setting sun hitting them. Highlife music boomed in the background. A few men hailed when Fela’s voice graced the atmosphere. 

Osaah brought Elorm’s dish to his table. He grinned when he heard her accent.

“Medaase. This banku and abenkwan tastes just like home,” he said, smiling at her after further engaging her in a short conversation about her background. His teeth were soup-stained. There was something about his gap-toothed smile that reminded Osaah of her immediate younger brother’s open-armed and unabashed embrace. Her eyes watered. One year later, at their wedding, Elorm met Kojo and hugged him. He exclaimed, “Oh, so this is the hug that made my wife think of you when she saw me!” The remark made Osaah’s Asante family bristle. Their laughter was reluctant, punctuated by eye-rolls, as they shrugged at one another: it was still better that she had married an Ewe man than a Nigerian.

It was that same smile that Elorm flashed at her as they now drove towards the border. Their driver was a Togolese who constantly conversed with Elorm in Ewe. His laughter was bold, unencumbered by their situation. Bob Marley’s “One Love” blasted off the radio before segueing into “Three Little Birds”, and for a while, Ama screeched the lyrics. Osaah laughed and sang along with Mabena and Pankere, and warmth spread within her. 

“Thank you for yesterday, Mabena. God bless you.”

Mabena’s lips stretched into a tight smile. She studied Ama’s face for a long moment before pointing out that the light-skinned girl did not look like either of her parents. Osaah’s lips puckered. Elorm stopped talking in the front seat too. 

“She looks like my husband’s mother. You know how fair Ewes are.”

“Ahnnnn, she always looked like an Igbo girl to me.” 

Osaah shifted away from the neighbour and muttered a curt no, looking outside the window. She wondered if Mabena knew the truth and was taunting her with it.

More trucks, caravans, and buses joined them on the road. Soon, their caravan ground to a halt, trapped in a gridlock. Horns honked. Voices volleyed. The chaos reminded Osaah of the cacophony of Oshodi Market. People swarmed out of the vehicles, walking towards the nearby border like ants scurrying over a field of spilt sugar. The driver stepped out to assess the situation and returned, shaking his head: Rawlings closed the Ghana-Togo border due to the attempted coup in ’81. He claimed that the exodus was a ploy by Nigeria to sneak Sudan-trained mercenaries into Ghana to topple the Ghanaian government. Togo had also locked its border with Benin to avoid a refugee crisis, and now Seme Border was shutting out the hordes that gathered behind it, waiting for safe passage.

“Mummy, I want to go back home,” Ama began to cry. 

“We are going home, Ama,” Osaah said. She gave her some biscuits and patted her shoulders. 

“We can wait here until the border opens and then we get a ship home from the port,” Pankere offered, stroking his beard.

*

They camped beside the parked Peugeot Caravan. Thousands of people busied themselves, setting up makeshift tents. The smell of human waste filled the air when nursing mothers changed their babies’ napkins. The clamouring noise made Osaah’s head light with nausea. Some people went around selling items they couldn’t afford to carry along with them anymore. A man beside them preached to a group of people in Twi.

“Do not fear, my people. God led the Israelites through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. We will all get home. The Egyptians you see today,” he said, raising his hands in anticipation of a choral response.

“We shall see them no more!” the group screamed.

“He is deceiving them so they can offer food to him,” Mabena said, nodding at him. 

Osaah chuckled even though the prophet’s words comforted her. Castaway from the home in Nigeria and locked out of the one in Ghana, she was stuck in this wilderness in between. She would give anything for four walls and a roof instead of this open space with only the sky for cover. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in all the warm homes she had lived in since childhood. But the light of reality mocked: her entire being remained in the chaos of the exodus. And so she, too, prayed for the guiding cloud and fire.

When she set out of the camp to urinate behind a bush, Mabena offered to join her. 

“We are the only women in our group,” she said, slapping dust off her dress. 

“Indeed.” Osaah’s tone was a sharpened knife. Her reservations bobbed back to the surface. Her earlier softening threatened to curdle into something hard and cold. When they got to a bush clearing, Osaah crouched to pee, and Mabena stood behind her. 

“Do you want me to go before you stand and piss like the man that you are, Kwabena?” 

“My name is Mabena,” the woman said and walked to the other side of the bush.

As Osaah adjusted her gown after peeing, multiple hands grabbed at her limbs. She turned to see some men surrounding her. Terror clanged hard at her chest, and a sharp stab of pain shot through her body.  

“Give us your money,” they said. The leer in their eyes was unmistakable. The men grabbed her, jeering in different languages and trying to loosen her wrapper. Osaah screamed and kicked. The clamour of voices drowned as if she were sinking into caliginous depths. Just before the blackness swallowed her whole, a final glimmer of light took shape: the face of Mabena. 

“I chased the men away with this stick.” Mabena pointed at a club, drawing Osaah up. 

Sound rushed in first: the distant camp noise, her own ragged breath. Then, the sting of scraped knees and the weight of a hand pulling her upright. Osaah’s vision cleared and she saw the men were gone.

“Thank you…Mabena.” Tears filled Osaah’s eyes. 

“I’ve known those kinds of men all my life.” Mabena shrugged. They hurried out of the bush and slowed down their pace when they got closer to their group. Mabena talked in a quiet voice about her time at Uncle Ade’s brothel.

“Some men didn’t like it when you were very willing to do it with them. They liked the idea of forcing you to do things. I had to learn how to fight those men off.”

Afterwards, they walked in silence, their fingers brushing past in shy kisses, as though contemplating getting intertwined. Osaah didn’t understand the blob of shame that settled in her throat.

Pandemonium seized the camp once Osaah returned. A bottle shot through the air, shattering against a vehicle. A woman grabbed Osaah’s shoulders and asked if she had seen a little boy.

“I was holding his hand. Then some people started fighting with the customs and immigration officers and everywhere sca…” The woman whipped around, screaming, “Fiifi! Fiifi!”. She turned back to Osaah with tears in her eyes: “He is wearing a red shirt!” Osaah shook her head, dizzy with confusion. She cast a furtive glance to ascertain that Ama was safe with Elorm a few metres away. The searching mother disappeared into the frenzied crowd. 

“Let us in! We want to cross to our country!” someone beside Osaah screamed at the officers. Another yelled that their family was going all the way to Abidjan, and they had already run out of food. The protest peaked into a deafening wall of sound all around her. Then the air itself split. 

Gunshots thundered. Bodies dropped.

For a moment, the shock startled Osaah to a standstill. The bullets were jarring to this woman who had only known the music of bursting balloons a week ago. Her ears rang. She whirled, trying to make sense of her surroundings. That barrage of percussive cracks and sizzles, was it slaughter or celebration? She spun in the stampede of tramping feet and screams. People fell, and the horde of fleeing refugees mauled them, like the rush of a broken dam eroding farmlands. Ahead, Elorm lifted Ama and ran with the others to safety. Osaah heard a familiar cry and turned to see Pankere on the ground. For a split second, she paused to assess her options. Then, she hurried towards him to drag him up. A swarm of men ran past them, trampling fallen people into bloodied corpses. 

They sprinted out of the maddening crowd and soon caught up with the rest of their group beside a bush clearing where a lone bungalow stood. The driver and Elorm conversed with the occupants in Ewe and Yoruba. The rest of them hovered at the edge of the clearing, their breaths still coming out in spurts. In that moment, Osaah wished she were fluent in her husband’s language. The people would listen to a pregnant mother’s pleas. She watched their faces and lips, trying to make sense of the discussion. The two men returned after a while, and Osaah thanked God when Elorm nodded. They could stay on the veranda. The group showered their hosts with thanks and blessings. The family then served them bread and water. 

*

For the next two days, the group camped out close to the bungalow, away from the insanity of the others a few yards away from them. They spent the hours after the first stampede moving their luggage from the bus to their benefactors’ porch. The caravan, with its doors locked and windows shut, was still stuck in the jam. Osaah enjoyed the evening’s breeze under one of the coconut trees in the spacious compound. The numerous trees stood sturdy like protective pillars. Osaah felt a fragile sense of safety in this place. Yet, she ached for home. She couldn’t wait to be in the arms of her mother, Yaa Akyea, and her younger sister, Sweety Akos, in Kumasi. 

Pankere walked up to a nearby tree with a machete, cutting down some coconuts. Osaah smiled when he cut one open and served her. She guzzled the water first before scraping the white flesh and crunching it.

“Is the baby okay?” he asked, sitting beside her. She shrugged. She wanted to say that she had never truly cared about the baby, that when she found out she was pregnant after many years of miscarriages, it wasn’t relief or gratitude that flooded her body, it was rather indifference. She was unsure if the experience would be different if the baby had come before Ama.

Pankere ranted about the injustice of their situation. The majority of them did not bother to get the residence permit because paperwork was foreign to them. Didn’t people move around in the region for centuries unencumbered by the arbitrary borders imposed by colonial powers?

“Nkrumah was right about Pan-Africanism,” he told her, slipping into the impassioned debater mode of his days at ECOWAS Compound. 

She nodded, soothed by that warm, honeyed falsetto, even though she understood little of what he said.

“Do you sing?” Her question interrupted him. 

His eyes fell to a trail of ants marching on the sand. “In school, the children loved to hear me sing. They all cried when I told them I had to return to Ghana. And once in a relationship, I wooed her with highlife songs.”

“He must have been a fool to leave a man with such a voice,” she quipped and met his eyes. The scale of hate towards the people at the border had shrunk the one in her heart. 

“No, she… ” Pankere chuckled and shrugged in surrender. “He died in ’81 during the Maitatsine riots in Kano.”

“Oh, Jesus. Sorry, wai.” She touched his arm. 

Osaah watched Ama playing with sand near the veranda.

“I hated her,” she said, nodding towards the child. Pankere withdrew his hand from her palm. The coolness of his sweat remained on her hands. 

She eased into the story of how her husband woke her one night three years ago and told her that he had had a brief relationship with an Igbo woman when he first arrived in Nigeria. The product of the union was a girl, Amarachi, whom Elorm did not mention during their relationship and the first two years of marriage. The mother of the child had died a few days prior, and the family called for Elorm to come for his daughter. Her husband begged on his knees, and she just watched him, stunned. Even when he brought the girl to the house they lived in before moving to ECOWAS Compound, she stayed silent. 

For the first few weeks, she ignored the girl. Then, she received news from home that her brother had died after a short illness. Grief gutted her, and she remained in bed for two days. On the third morning, Amarachi crawled up the bed to comfort her. The child’s diastema reminded Osaah of Kojo. The memory of her brother made her smile. Amarachi chuckled at this first glimpse of warmth. Osaah wrapped her hands around the girl for solace, for a pillar to lean on in her moment of despair. 

Elorm returned home that day to see his wife feeding Amarachi. The first and only thing Osaah said to Elorm since and about his confession was, “Her name is Ama from now on. She was born on Saturday anyway.”

Pankere held her hand again after she told this story.

“We are all people in this, after all,” Osaah said. 

Mabena joined them under the coconut tree. Pankere offered her a coconut, and they all chewed in sync. The three adults watched Ama playing with Elorm and the hosts’ children. Osaah sighed and squinted upwards. The sky was losing its fire, and the setting sun torched the western clouds orange. The woman rubbed her belly and closed her eyes in prayer. She begged for safe passage, for the divine to guide them home. When she opened her eyes, only Mabena and Pankere sat beside her in silence. Another stampede was starting at the border. She focused on the laughter of the group around her.

For now, the uproar was distant rain.