A PSYCHO-CULTURAL REVIEW OF ISSAH TIKUMAH'S BAPTISM OF ORPHANHOOD

A Psycho-cultural Review of Issah Tikumah’s Baptism of Orphanhood

By William John Candler

Lisbon, 9th December 2013

This fine little book is worthwhile for its moral lessons, its character development, for its sparkle, for its impish unpredictability and suspense – yes, suspense in the many apparently inescapable scrapes Issah Tikumah gets into and escapes from. It’s a kind of odyssey, a journey through a world of monsters, risks, loss, grief, but which in the end brings its hero home with all that he has won on the way.

 

When I was asked to review Baptism of Orphanhood, I said yes and thought no. Was not literary review a little outside my compass? I had had my own baptism in science, biology, from which I had moved in early youth to cultivate an interest in literature which had modified my scientific interests and placed my formal studies in the field of psychology. But was I therefore qualified to review a work of literature?

The best way to find out was to read the book (not to be taken for granted in all cases however…for anyone interested in discussing books without reading them I refer you to How to Talk about Books without actually Reading them, by Pierre Bayard).  I discovered that far from being outside my range of interest, Issah Tikumah’s narrative history of his colourful life and colourful sufferings took me soundly into aspects of human behaviour and psychology that were well within the dominion of my chosen studies. Furthermore, I had as background not only a formal scientific training, but also that lifelong interest in and love of literature, including literatures of Africa and other parts of the world;  a regular exposure also to literary reviews would also surely be of service to the challenge.

I don’t wish, in drawing on material coming from the outside as it were, to suggest that Baptism of Orphanhood is not a work of literature. It is. It is not a scientific or even academic treatise on the perils of child abuse, or the suffering of orphans in general. It is an attempt to render, through the medium of the written word, an account of the creative writer’s experience and development from the point of view of his own personal emotion and memory. ‘Imagination is memory’, said the great Irish writer James Joyce. And there are few greater artists of the written word in English than he.

I think the study of literature over the last few years has moved towards becoming a means to the study of almost anything that can be found in it. A repository of discoveries coming from anthropology, linguistics, politics, psychology, psychoanalysis. Literary theory sometimes seems to have become a focus which can include almost anything except literature itself. Literature for its own sake, a literature of character, of description, of thought and action seems to take second place. Where once we talked of art for art’s sake, we now have art for science’s sake. To such an extent that we have the modern science of literary theory, or to dignify it further, theory of literature. A science which is exercised by the question: what is literature? Fair enough.

However, one can ingest too much twiddle-twaddle. I have some sympathy with the view of another great writer in English, D H Lawrence, who, as early as the 1920’s, in rash impatience with modern criticism said in a review of the writer Galsworthy :

            Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced        upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in      the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its         effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-           twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo scientific classifying and analysing of        books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

With that in mind, I have attempted to enter Issah’s world, to understand his development, to  think about, and review his Baptism of Orphanhood.

It’s a funny word, ‘orphan’. It used to be quite common, but now seems to have fallen into desuetude. It somehow belongs to the past. To scenes from the 19^th century, of the sort often described by Dickens. Or to fairy tales, to stories to frighten the children with, of wicked step-mothers and witches. It’s not because we no longer have orphans among us, but they are not present to the mind so much as before; perhaps death does not strike so easily and early as it did in the past, especially in the horrors of the industrial revolution. It is worth remembering that in Victorian London the average life-expectancy was only twenty seven years. The numbers of poor orphans then on the streets is legendary. Today it’s about eighty-plus for women, and seventy eight for men.

Issah Tikumah’s work is a Bildungsroman, a story which traces the development or education, the coming of age, whatever you care to call it, of the author from childhood to adulthood. This genre was made famous by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, hence the German term, but it has famous examples in English and other languages and cultures. In African literature, I suppose we could cite Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, and some of Wole Soyinka’s work, like Ake, The Years of Childhood, and even The Man Died.

Issah Tikumah helps his readers with a prologue, pointing us in the right direction, a key preparing us for what is to follow. We find ourselves not in his earliest childhood in Ghana, but in Australia, which is also where the story ends, and where he had gone for his higher education as we are to learn later. We meet Issah Tikumah in an optimistic mood as he discovers that a lifelong blight of physical suffering was in fact no illness, but was all in the mind. After years of pain and suffering, a visit to a doctor in the campus of New England University in Australia reveals that his symptoms are, in fact, psychosomatic. Knowing what they are, they vanish. He had always thought he suffered from stomach ulcers and wasted time and money throughout his life under the illusion. However, the psychologist who saw him found that his manifest physical pain had no physical causes, there was nothing wrong with him; the real cause was mental. The illness being psychosomatic, was, as Issah puts it, ‘unreal’. With great relief, Issah withdraws into the mosque to meditate, like a biblical prophet, for seven days. He emerges a new man, presumably hungry, but healed of his wounds and able to face the past that dealt them, and write a book in order to share his life and progress with the world. There is vision and there is wisdom in what he has to tell us. A positive beginning to a book which also has a positive, if more ambiguous ending.

Issah Tikumah thinks there were a number of general causes lying behind his illness, psychosomatic or not. One of these is in himself, a quality which he confesses: what his mother, his beloved Shetu-bila called his ‘evil tongue’. Issah talks too much, and so gets himself into trouble; he is rebellious and unyielding. A dangerous trait, but one which most of us have at least sometimes, and one which often helps our survival. In Issah’s case, it’s one which recurs often, and dangerously. Another cause, or at least, influence, and not for Issah’s good, one which reappears throughout the book, is what he calls the ‘communalist society’, the collection of lore and taboo by which the village in Africa lives and has its being. It was this communalism that cruelly disciplined the young orphan in a ‘despotic, oppressive, and suppressive way’, giving rise to ‘too many bitter feelings’ within, which might lead to madness, certainly bitterness. After all, ‘It is important to note that all the unconscionable savagery meted out to a child under the slogans of discipline and respect is brutality.’ It was this same mistreatment and misprision which led to Issah’s supposed illness. What can you expect if you are constantly humiliated and cast as worthless, and constantly told you will die young, all this, moreover, while you are still a child. ‘This way madness lies’, as Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it in the face of intolerable cruelty and humiliation. But Issah overcomes.

Issah’s life, we learn, was weighed down by all these things. He comes through. Battered, but finally successful, healthy, still garrulous, still getting himself into troubles, from which he wriggles out with wonderful resources of cunning and tricks, unvanquished, head up, unsubdued. Whatever he faces, he finds the strength for. Luck or providence, God, if you like, intervenes. Nawuni yi kabgi agbali O ni wuha kpahibu. (In case you don’t speak Dagbanli and need a translation: when God breaks your leg, He teaches you how to limp.) After these preliminaries by way of orientation we get one of many lessons, as is fitting in a bildungsroman: ‘It is desirable and appropriate that a child respect an adult, but that must be on the condition the adult understands that the child is a human being with feelings. But not when the adult consciously takes advantage of the child’s respectful attitude to traumatize’.

There are perhaps three overarching themes in the work. Psychosomatic illness, the fatal flaw of garrulousness exaggerated perhaps by abuse, the severe cruelty and mistreatment itself, and through it all Issah’s war not only with those who do him down, but with the very communalist society of Northern Ghana itself.

 Issah was born in Tamale of loving parents. Quite apart from the mystery surrounding his birth as one ‘destined to live indefinitely’, and to ‘die either today or centuries later’, and there is a lot of mystery in those first words, we learn that his father, the great Alassan Sana, dies soon after his birth, and then, when Issah is still very young, his mother. ‘Father died and dearest mum took me to her relatives’ house in Deyali’. Mum remarries but dies not long afterwards, and Issah is left to the tender care of his maternal uncle. The fateful word ‘orphan’ now applies.

One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark:  to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

There is no greater love than that of a mother for a child, is there? Especially for a man-child, a boy. So Freud teaches us. And the love is mutual. It follows then that there is no greater loss than that of one’s mother.

The problems facing an orphan are of a special, poignant kind. Issah encapsulates these in the phrase, ‘secondary love’. The orphan is denied the unstinted, unlimited primary love of his own parents and family, and abandoned to this secondary and, as we learn, rather second-rate version of love that chance confers upon him, placed in households with relatives having children of their own, his ‘parented colleagues’ as he calls them enviously, those who enjoy the primary love and care on which he has no claim. While the word orphan may have unpleasant connotations, the words ‘stepson’, ‘step-brother’, ‘step-father’ have a ring of menace about them that generations of children have learned is not confined to fairy tale or fiction.

And so we are taken through a life of constant, unceasing trials in which we find the orphan blamed for everything and anything that may go wrong or just happen in the household, all your rights and interests being subordinated to your cocooned parented peers. If you cry you are told to go back where you came from, wherever that is; and whatever is said to you will be followed by some gratuitous insult like ‘look at his big mouth’, ‘look at his big ears’!

All the classic common abuses of orphanhood are found. Overwork, for example. Issah is forced to carry heavy loads, be they firewood, or maize. When the family’s ill-treatment is condemned by elders, the boy’s family lie, predictably, and cover up insisting that the boy did it willingly himself. They will make the orphan suffer even more after the elders have gone. Have you ever built a yam-mound? I have not, though I have enjoyed many a good slice of baked yam, and even drunk yam in the form of Chinese white spirit, bai jiu. Unfortunately the young Issah, even as young as ten, was forced by his wicked relatives to build yam mounds before setting out to carry his fearful burdens of firewood or grain. We are treated to an inventory of backbreaking labours he has to perform, along with constant humiliations and indifference. Rather like Cinderella. He draws the comparison himself.

Unlike Cinderella, Issah does not sit fretting at the fireplace taunted by the ugly sisters, but becomes defiant and rebellious. ‘Unfortunately the more brutal the measures they take against you, the more uncultured, obstreperous and unbecoming you become. You now openly insult the elders and even pelt stones at them whenever an injustice is done to you.’ The ‘yucky yobbo’ has become a paranoid ‘bugbear’ to the family and the whole community. It’s not your fault, of course, but clearly theirs. What should they expect of a boy they have so savagely abused.

The classic story unfolds, Issah’s, as in so many of the myths and legends of the past which express real or perhaps collective truths of human experience.  In line with the pattern, after one overwhelming task too many, Issah plans his escape. His uncle anticipated it for he warns him against fleeing to certain death in the city from traffic let alone anything else. But Issah runs away. He decides that ‘God will protect me from these vehicles’, and we see his childish reasoning developing: After all, there are people living there. Why aren’t they killed by the vehicles? He packs his poor belongings into an empty fertilizer bag (interesting image that). He steals his fare from his maternal uncle, and runs off to Tamale, hoping to find his father’s relatives. From the frying pan into the fire, we are warned. Or n’zo bindi n’ti faalu nyirivogu ni: from the faeces into the anus itself.

We now enter a world not just of cruel or, at best, indifferent relatives, perpetrating horrible acts, but a world of African magic, a world of soothsayers, of tibbu, of witches, male as well as female, a world of black arts, an interesting African world, a world which has disappeared from the west. Or so we think. It is there from our past too, even if in our unconscious. We understand what it is all about, after all. Brabantio the Venetian gentleman accuses Othello the Moor of having stolen his daughter by practising on her with foul charms, with arts inhibited and out of warrant, in other words bewitching her. We know what he means because sorcery is present in our mind too.

Issah by pure luck meets his cousin in the big town who takes him to his father’s half brother, Aliru-baga, who was the main heir to Issah’s father’s house and possessions, and therefore we suppose, obliged to treat the young orphan like his own. Aliru-baga takes Issah on a guided tour of Tamale and he meets the elders and friends of his father. One of these, Alpha, was running his own Islamic School, and the versatile Issah, who studied the Quran in his mother’s village, is taken on as a teacher.

The whole history of Issah’s misfortune as an orphan is punctuated in this way by moments of good fortune which serve to advance the young man, contrary to all expectation and laments on his part, in the wider world. He runs into the fire, or anus, as he tells us, but immediately lands on his feet. And it happens again and again throughout the tale, as if he is destined to succeed in spite of everything. But like Odysseus, he has to go through terrible sufferings before his journey ends in the sunlight.

There is a shadow, actually just one of many, an evil villain hovering off-stage by the name of Mutawakilu, whom he would describe as ‘the monster’ except that this is too good for him. This monster contrives to get Issah a job in a school run by a friend of his called Mallam Basha, where Issah finds himself with much greater opportunity ‘for me to further my learning’ than at Alpha’s institution. Although there were sensitive communal taboos and loyalties to be overcome and unravelled, Mutawakilu prevailed and Issah changed schools for the better, as he thought.

The young man, it seems, does well, whatever happens and wherever he goes. What is he complaining about? He’s not thrown into a pit or a cauldron, he’s not being fattened for a witch’s supper. The hardships and setbacks he suffers are not uncommon in the world to any of us, even those who are not orphaned….One begins to wonder what all the fuss is about…

Issah continues his Islamic education, and teaching, but since he is behind in his western studies, he is placed in a lower class, P1, than was normal for his age. This resulted in him being nicknamed P1 Papa. Issah hated it and beat up any smaller, though not bigger, boy who used it. One poor little fellow was regularly beaten by our hero until he promised Issah a free bowl of fufu from his mother who sold it in the market.  This happened regularly. Issah finds a way to feed at a little boy’s expense. We begin to wonder who is the victim and who the villain of this story. Which is Issah? I begin to wonder. He is emerging, like Odysseus, as a young man of many wiles. Cunning ones.

Issah is not without talent and intelligence ( as he often tells us ). He turns out to be a good singer, and this brings him fame. He is to perform in Mawlidi the celebrations of the prophet’s birth. He has, however, no clothes, no ‘uniform’. Once again providence provides. Where he wants, he gets. Indeed three benefactors step in, one being the monster Mutawakilu, and another, Nma Hawlatu, a rich wife of Mutawakilu. Nma Hawlatu decided to favour Issah and support him with gifts and protection, food and the like….The big-hearted Nma Hawlatu treated him most kindly, most tenderly.

The ancient myth does not lie. Have you heard of the Greek myth of Bellerophon. It is typical, let me tell you… and while different, yet Issah’s tale has echoes of it.

Thus, Mutawakilu begins to resent Issah’s presence. He resents his wife’s kindness to the boy. He eventually resents his wife, and she leaves. This is humiliating to Mutawakilu especially as the boy thrives thanks partly to the now departed wife. Rich wife.

The boy is coming of age; he has offended Mutawakilu mortally, but he doesn’t know it. We are, at this point introduced to another skill that he excelled in and that others were more than willing to profit from. This is a religious art, or rather superstitious art known as tibbu, a little like an elaborate form of western-style fortune telling, only even more of a swindle to unsuspecting clients, who pay a lot for the services of an accomplished practitioner like Issah turns out to be. In brief, tibbu involves stage-managed trickery in order to give its clients/victims divine guidance. The divinity consulted is none other than, in this case, the young Issah. Who thus turns out to be a talented swindler.

Once again, we have to ask ourselves, is this boy an innocent victim?  He tyrannizes and bullies small boys in school because he can’t take a bit of cheek. He becomes an accomplished swindler in the black arts…. What can we expect next? Well, even more shamelessly he conspires with his tibbu boss to act the part of a ruhaani, a spirit, and use the power of the spirit, or devil as it were, to deceive an innocent woman. Pretending to be a ruhaani,  he persuades the woman to do what her lover wants. All to get the poor woman back into the arms of a man she has spurned. She falls for the trick.

Evil omens begin to appear. Issah begins to be treated roughly in Mutawakilu’s household. The signs are unmistakable. Angry questions. Sinister acts of vandalism. Eventually, he has to run. He runs back to his father’s house, the household of his half-uncle, Aliru-baga.

But the evil which has begun pursues him. He learns one night that Mutawakilu intended to murder him  ritually for planning to murder him at the demand of his ex-wife Hawlatu. Issah is even accused of making an oath that if Murawakilu didn’t die within three days then he, Issah, would urinate in a standing posture and cease to touch the ground with his forehead. The only way to escape murder was to go to Mutawakilu and confess the plot. Issah gets beaten into confession of the crime. He doesn’t tell us how many blows it took to make him confess. Not many, I think.

We find ourselves in a dense world of magic, of plots, of manifold evils, all operating under the power of envy and jealousy and pride. Issah reasons thus:

            There were several possible motives that might have prompted Mutawakilu to  construct this devilish slander. He might have done it to save his face from public          accusations of being shamelessly envious of a poor orphan; to provide him with a   tangible excuse to confiscate my kundu in order to beef up his own tibbu prowess, or     to drag Nma Hawlatu’s name through the mire so that she would find it extremely         difficult to remarry.

Issah reflects that where a tyrant hates, he manifests love. Quite profound thought for this young, abused orphan. Indeed, can one begin to discern, out of the narrative of his swirling conflicts and emotions, the boy’s development towards maturity, conforming to the Bildungsroman tradition, African style.

Issah is open and honest in the way he reveals his character, good and bad sides alike, in its progress through life. We see how he reacts defensively to cruelties, we share his emotional reasoning with himself, and see how he exaggerates his own innocence and victimhood:

            …if Mutawakilu could be heartless enough to cook up such a fiendish slander    against a defenceless little orphan like me then I might be forgiven for assuming the culpability of Nma Hawlatu.

We learn that Mutawakilu was once humiliated by Issah’s father and nurtured a grudge ever since, one that he can turn against Issah, the son. ‘Mutawakilu found a suitable opportunity to wreck(sic) vengeance on Alassan Sana by abusing his poor little son.’

The poor little son Issah rises from the blows, undefeated, more defiant, and loud, to the last. Man must suffer to be wise, said the Greek, and we see this child’s wisdom and rationality increase. To him, life is a jungle, and a power struggle. Emotions are ambivalent, not what they seem, love conceals hatred. He begins to enlarge his thinking towards a   political philosophy.

            It’s in man’s nature that when one fears another, or even hates the other, that man       may pretend to love you. We may observe how some of the most loyal supporters of   a dictator are quick to turn against him once it is apparent that he is about to fall       from power. Well, let’s imagine a situation where a nation has a tyrannical leader. It is     known             to all that once the tyrant suspects your loyalty, he orders your summary             execution.

We follow Issah’s increasing awareness. Our young man gets embroiled in more plots more witchcraft, the evil Mutawakilu becomes even more evil, bewitches his ex wife who goes mad, she marries her physician for curing her, his daughter goes mad too in vengeance, Issah is exiled by his uncle from his own father’s house, but as always, fortune shines on him, and he stays in Tamale, thanks, as ever, to the intervention of well-wishers from his father’s family and other protectors who always save him in the end. Prominent among these are women. Yet another woman emerges as a benefactress to our hero. In fact, throughout his whole hard childhood, a whole legion of women, kind and concerned step forward with their care and protection.

            Fortunately there was a certain lady, Nma Maryam Zabzugu, who’d been my father’s     fourth wife and was wealthy but barren. It was told that while she was in my father’s house, as characteristic of barren women, she elected me as the apple of her eye. For       all intents and purposes, she was my mother seizing me from dearest mum with        mum’s own consent.

He becomes a tailor’s assistant, and is successful and happy; he has also mastered the Quran.  He becomes a painter, but is eventually forced to leave as the painter’s wife accuses him of witchcraft. This is thanks to Mutawakilu’s slanders.

 

Well, it is not the reviewer’s task to usurp the author and repeat the contents of the whole book. I have given you a taste of some of the scenes in the rich narrative which remains in memory. It is time to take stock and discern some general qualities apparent in the character he has exposed to our scrutiny so far. He is resilient. He bounces up when knocked down. He is positive about life, however much he bleats. He is getting wise, but also a little priggish and self-righteous with his wisdom:

            Due to my deep sense of religion, I refused to run errands for the elders as most           other children did. I wouldn’t run an errand that I considered to be immoral. I would    not call a woman or buy cigarettes or a lotto ticket. This was a major factor that made many adults dislike me thinking me rude and insubordinate….. against this      backdrop of my moral fanaticism my tailoring master’s affection for me soon began      to wane.  

Sweet are the uses of adversity, a character observes in As You Like It. A tribal war breaks out between Issah’s own sister tribe, and an enemy tribe, the Kponkpamba. Far from rushing to support his own in battle, he travels deep into enemy territory to sell them protective armour made bullet proof by his own magical but deceitful tibbu practices. Was there ever such a shameless Machiavellian? He claims innocence, of course: ‘although I was just a little innocent teenager acting on the perverted order of my elders...’

Issah, however manipulative is not totally lost to depravity. Therein lies the interest of the book. He has a conscience. He thinks how treacherous and traitorous the tibbu game can be. Yes aiding a rival tribe in war against his own people for money. So he denounces tibbu. Not, however, before he has made a great deal of cash from it. It’s not only his mercenary acts in war. He receives an evil request from his guardian, Aliru-baga, to turn someone who has offended him into a lunatic, an evil wish which is too much for him, so now he renounces tibbu utterly and burns all his kundu material. Our sinner turns saint.

He is sent by his shameless half-uncle out onto the streets to beg. For this he has no talent. It’s his first failure. Too ashamed to stand in the street begging he uses his own money to show his uncle he tried. He has more success as a scrounger. He visits friends in turn at mealtimes and according to tradition, shares their meals. But he complains that all he gets is dried okra soup. A boring menu, he grumbles. Ingrate.

Finally he puts all this aside and decides, flouting the taboos of a traditional society, to live for himself. ‘I took total control over my life because I had a valid reason to do so.’ His baptism has brought about his survival, and placed him at war with his own society. The young submit, or suffer. Issah wants to defy this lore. But being of many wiles, defies it according to the dictum, if you can’t beat them, join ‘em.

But I demean the young philosophizer by this flippant remark. At this point in the book, Issah’s character becomes complex, more interesting as it matures, and more worthwhile. He found he had manifold talents in his struggles and adventures. Now he is able to think, to reason, plan and philosophize, pointing the way to a bright rebirth (one of many) and future. He gives himself a valid reason for life and action; in fact several valid reasons, the first of which was to do whatever he felt was right for him, whatever the odds. His ego instincts become strong. He is on the way to liberation.

That meant liberation from the constraints of his society; the most important challenge he had to overcome. This brought him into direct conflict. A child was property, and had little room for freedom to kick over the traces. Otherwise the child is abominated. Well, that has already happened. The difference is now we have Issah’s deliberate theory of life for support.

The young teenager decides to turn himself into an elder, an old person. Rather curious. Most old people would do anything to be the opposite. But Issah philosophizes:

             he discovered the valid reason to wear his father’s hat and to continue life on behalf   of his deceased father…..no one likes to die. They die by force. So my father didn’t           want to die and died only because he couldn’t do otherwise. He would have wanted        to live so his inability to continue living is his unrealized ambition….My father was      unable to realize his goals. Then it becomes my responsibility to continue life on his             behalf. I’ll be living as a surrogate for my father and in that capacity as an old   person….. now that he was living as his fathers representative, he was older than       all those old people and was one of the oldest you could find in the community.

Well.  How strange and amusing. By the way, when does old begin?

It’s not so curious when one realizes that Issah expects a number of great advantages to accrue to him as an old man, and here we have one of the funny caricatures that the book rewards us with.

            The fact that Issah was now living his life as an extension of his father, gave him a       valid reason to act as an elder, demanding entitlement to all the freedom, respect,   immunities, and impunity that elders were enjoying in their society.  This marked the   beginning of Issah’s precocious life as a deviant. He would always try to behave        exactly like the elders talking with a slight-smile on his face, eyes half-closed, and       clearing his throat after every three words even though there was no tickle.    Moreover, an elder couldn’t be criticized regardless of how wrong and instead of      being a role model for truth and sincerity for children elders were licensed to tell lies     without feeling any compunction.  Also children were… to carry the can for elders’             deliberate untruthfulness. So having conferred on himself all elderhood immunities,      Issah bandied words with any elder who attempted to criticize him. Similarly, he           could spin a tale for fun, but would never tell a malicious lie.

If this plan was not enough, Issah has other valid reasons designed to back up the first and fortify himself. He decides ‘to blow his own trumpet’, though he has already done plenty of that throughout the narrative. Perhaps he resolves to redouble his braggart ways. He is a brilliant student, in the Quranic school and lets us know. Well, he had no parents to be proud of him and boast of his achievements so he does so himself. And he justifies it by referring to his father: ‘since I’m continuing life on behalf of my father, I have a valid reason to blow my own trumpet on his behalf.’

He discovers a personal economic theory, specifically about distribution of wealth in society. Influenced by some preacher-or-other, he believes that God combined riches into the hands of a few. Therefore, the rich few have a duty to share their wealth compose as it is of shares intended for the poor. It follows therefore, that the rich should give up some of their riches to people like Issah, as by right and by God. Issah goes about identifying the rich of Tamale in order to claim his share directly from them. He pesters his richer friends with demands for this and that. He had found this other valid reason to justify his harassment. He kept his valid reasons to himself, but believed them to be true. So he tells us.

Issah had long been ignorant of the lies spread about him by Mutawakilu, but gradually they come out, and disturb him. A boy calls him a bastard for contriving to kill a man. His painting master’s wife sends him out of the house. A neighbour berates his wife, Nma Abu, for giving him money as he passed. A certain Mrs Tailor suffers the same rebuke from her husband for giving him food. It was all down to the slander emanating from the odious Murawakilu monster, poisoning his reputation and therefore his relationships in the community. The Greek word for devil also means slanderer. The slander of Issah was fuelled with the jealousy that some husbands felt for their wives’ kindness towards the boy.

            He was assailed by worry and depression as he spent the next couple of months           moping in nervous insomniac trauma. He couldn’t withstand the horrible stigma of   slander, yet there was nothing he could do to clear himself with this superstitious             society. Yes, give a dog a bad name!

There is nothing in the communalist society that you don’t find in ours. Except perhaps the colourful proverbs. ‘To wit, my people say, ninsala yi ja a, hali ayi dugra kom o ni fabli ni a yigsira tankpagbulgu  - if a person hates you, even when you are swimming, he will grumble that you are raising dust.’  On the point of despair, another maxim saves him: ‘if you’re called a monkey, let your tail be long’. In other words, you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. ‘Never say die!’ said Issah later in the book.

Issah’s valid reasons for his way of life and being seem to proliferate. He arrives at a fourth one, one which seems to override the others so far, namely For God’s Sake. This valid reason took pride of place above all others since it allowed our hero to do just about anything he liked, however incorrect, as long as he believed he was acting for God’s pleasure. We get the impression that the more incorrect, the more relish Issah found in doing it.

As prolific as his valid reasons for behaviour, are his ventures into new careers, the latest being that of preacher. But if he’s such an evildoer in the eyes of the world, who will listen to his lessons? It’s no handicap to our young hero. In fact the more the curses and ill-wishes rain down on his head, the more he spurs himself into even greater acts of rebellion and defiance. Invited to preach at weddings in a village he flouts all propriety and lambasts the menfolk of the place for not respecting the rights of their women under the Quran… he is quickly chased away.

Next in his exciting journey through life, by the use of influence, he gets himself into secondary school to complete his state-school civil education. He is successful, and even elected SP, or school prefect, in charge of discipline in the whole school. He shines as a leader, to the extent of turning himself increasingly, when frustrated by democratic practice, into a dictator; this only serves to stimulate his sense of mission. He brings about a complete revolution and turns a school that had been totally undisciplined into a model of good behaviour. However, this time it is not his tricks, but his moral fanaticism which works against him. It highlights how much of a self-righteous prig he has become. The girls of the school are becoming lax in their dress. Some of them are dressing in ways which are improper, both according to the rules and general culture; above all to the young prude Issah. It offends our new saint, and he condemns their laxness, and commands that they observe propriety; he criticizes and tries to suppress and humiliate the GP, or girls’ prefect who is not bothered by the saucy dress. The victim of tyranny, the bullied Issah, once again turns bully. Issah imposes his will, but gets no applause for it. Instead he falls foul of plot against him attempting to show the saint is a womanizer himself. However false, the school falls for it. A letter of warning to the GP is construed as a letter of love or seduction.

Unfazed, Issah uses the opportunity to defend himself and show his brilliant eloquence in a passionate and amazingly eloquent speech to the whole school assembled before him. Brilliantly stage-managed, Issah appears dramatically, imposing silence by force of character on the jeering multitude, and gives his speech of such brilliant oratory and mastery of language, that, as we expect, those who support his audience erupt into ovations and cheers which silences his critics.

Pride, self-regard, narcissism all seem to cohabit in Issah’s persona. As he likes telling us, ‘The silver tongued Issah was indeed one of that rare breed of SPs capable of juggling and frolicking the English language with magical splendour… ‘

And so the reader is shown into a life of contradictions, virtuous and flawed, good and evil, honest and tricky. Like all our lives, and therefore of interest. We are all a compound of conflicting emotions, love and hate. Hating where we love, loving where we hate. Aren’t we?

The language of the book, the English that is, is sometimes rather odd. Not like Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard, which is almost unintelligible, or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake which is difficult. Issah’s usage has its own idiolect, which sometimes surprises, at times baffles the reader. We find odd admixtures, misappropriations, slang expressions mixed with formal discourse. We get australianisms like Sheila, and cove, and ocker, as well as words like umami, of uncertain provenance. Well, it doesn’t deter the sympathetic reader, only puzzles him.

Thus, in the First Real Laugh Issah talks of people’s bile for him as ‘a bohemian’; a rather odd appellative for the young man. But it doesn’t matter, the author has anticipated the reader’s problesm and kindly supplied us with an extensive glossary. Another unique quality is that the text is liberally seasoned with proverbs, which sometimes run in strings, mainly in Dagbanli, but also in Arabic.

As extraordinary as his language are the extraordinary devices that Issah concocts in his search for self-knowledge and knowledge of his friends. Thus he writes to them all asking them to write back and point out what is wrong with his character. When they do, he gets quite irate and asks why they don’t do the same.

Issah’s Hobbesian view of the world is getting more articulate and is sometimes the subject of brief lectures to the reader, such as:

            We live in a world of dog-eat-dog; everyone is struggling for the best recognition.         Man instinctually envies and hates his fellow man and is determined to outfox all     others in order to feel superior. However, this instinct is in relative degrees of    strength and bitterness, depending on how far achievement is intertwined with that           of the person he is envying…..the oft-quoted Arabic proverb, “ I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the outsider,” may help drive the         point home…. To what extent is the word “friend ” not a verisimilitude of the word        “spy”? In other words without being unnecessarily jaundiced one may ask, “Does the   name Judas really have a credible antonym?”

He tells us that he calls so-called human beings, ‘underground-beings’. All surely very bitter and cynical for such a young man, but he supports his attitude with the cynicism found in an Arab poet. His next experience with the treacherous is enough to augment his bitterness.

After a little lecture about the dangers of over love and over trustfulness, as being degrading, disappointing, insulting and frustrating,  with due reference to Aristotle for support, we follow the devious machinations of Alpha whose school he now attends to teach, to study and to reorganize – what else? The cunning Alpha tries to profit from Issah’s great success in the school turning his shortcomings into Issah’s success. He can’t, however, outfox the cunning and clever Issah. We are reminded of the vulnerability of the poor orphan, but see the poor orphan win over, outwit his abuser, and, sticking to his valid reason For God’s Sake, win success and fame after all!  He finally gives some needful religious counselling to the odious Alpha from the Quran. ‘God is the Protector of the Righteous.’ Issah clearly includes himself among the latter. At least. Throughout the whole of this episode we see Issah increase greatly in knowledge, in scholarship and in oratory. Once again, he seals his fame with a fine speech, once again it is theatrical with Issah dressed in all-white raiment, and once again he earns respect. But, he breaks his valid reason, the one he calls for god’s sake, and against his better judgment he remains serving Alpha’s school. God on his part does not forget his special care for the boy. Issah believes that the inspiration to adopt the name Tikumah is of divine origin, for the Dagbanli word means ‘dried trees’ which, proverbially, have suddenly born leaves to the great disappointment of fire- wood cutters. The dried trees, now blossoming green, cannot be cut or burned. Issah now proudly makes Tikumah his family name.

You have to hand it to the man. The courage, the gameness for life of this young man. You have to be game for life as D H Lawrence said somewhere, and Issah is game. He gets through horrendous adversity, and as protagonist in his own novel, turns adversity to his own advantage, and gets the last laugh. Although somewhat self-righteous, that is only at times. Indeed, he is quick to drop his for God’s sake truth, and serve the Devil when it suits him. The devil, under the pseudonym of Lucifer makes an entrance in a scene in the drama when Tikumah gets, through courage and determination, where he wants to get. For the poor boy faced with every disadvantage, a great achievement. He makes it to Silmintiŋa, that is to white man’s land, and not just to the fabled land (however undeserved), but into a university, in fact two, and returns to Africa with a degree, and the highest commendations.

How does he pull it off?

It really is a tale worth applause. To be brief, improvident as ever, but armed with his cheek and cunning, as well, thank god, his humour, Tikumah gets admitted by his academic prowess to UNE, an Australian university. He has no scholarship, he is still a poor orphan of course, but one rich friend, Alhaji Gado sponsors him to study in Silmintiŋa.

He suffers continuous setbacks brought on by the risks he is taking along with his mercurial character and his incautious tongue, his big mouth. It is all highly amusing. Indeed, in spite of everything, his humour and ebullience dazzle the reader in this last, successful act. For example, he quarrels with a Nigerian soldier after jumping the queue in the visa office in Nigeria, and has to grovel his way out of it. He tells his wife how he roughly dealt with the soldier, but omits to mention to her his obsequious grovelling. Why does he confess it to us? When he arrives in Australia he basks in the bath and goes without his supper as he is so delighted to find unlimited hot and cold water. One might almost think that Tikumah and water had had little contact in the past. His humour enlivens the restaurant scene where he sits down waiting to be served not knowing that it is a self-service establishment. He thinks racism is preventing the sheilas (he wastes no time in using Australian slang) from serving him. When he finally realizes what to do he feasts without restraint, heaping everything on his plate.

His improvidence, alas, catches up with him and we find him in many tense and difficult situations which would prevent most ordinary mortals from even trying to do what Tikumah has. But he has unquestionable confidence in himself, and as usual, against all the odds, overcomes. Not without a few embarrassing moments, such as, having boasted that he doesn’t need to work since his brother is the richest man in Ghana, he laughs at his unfamiliarity with hot running water. How could such a rich man be unacquainted with hot water?

While his final chapter is ebullient his financial problems are never far away. The young student is under intolerable pressures. His sponsor Alhaji Gado is out for gain, indeed for profit, Tikumah knows that the charity he piously bestows is actually calculated to bring in material return; indeed everybody back home in communal-land expects to gain from Tikumah’s future. Meanwhile he never has enough money to meet his fees and living, and never knows where his next cent is coming from. But help always seems to come as if by some deus ex machina. Thus, he is in contact with an Islamic centre run by a Syrian who kindly puts him in contact with a Saudi official. The Saudi, impressed by Tikumah’s Arabic language skills, wants to take him to study ‘real’, Islamic law in his kingdom, but the Syrian is sympathetic enough to Tikumah to advise him against it. Tikumah is brave or reckless enough (once again his big mouth gets to work) to insult Saudi Arabia in the face of the Saudi sheik; but he nevertheless pays the next instalment of Tikumah’s tuition. Tikumah’s insolence grows throughout the book until it seems to know no bounds. He writes to the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating (never say die, as our young author puts it), and curses him when told that he cannot have a grant. He moves to ANU Canberra, where he can work and study, gets a part time job slaving – another delightfully humorous scene in a Turkish restaurant. He hoodwinks a hapless Nigerian student into lending him subsistence, and in this case, he finally by working on a cotton farm, pays back his debt in full. Tikumah, for all his tricks, is an honest and decent young man. So pennilessness, reckless risk-taking, and cheek, notwithstanding, Tikumah comes home from Australia with his degree and salutes both his past and his future. At the end of his narrative, though not the end of the book, he actually publishes a photo of his act of homage, to his own destiny; we see him standing, not in a white caftan but a sort of official uniform, saluting into the infinity of fate.

This fine little book is worthwhile for its moral lessons, its character development, for its sparkle, for its impish unpredictability and suspense – yes, suspense in the many apparently inescapable scrapes Issah Tikumah gets into and escapes from. It’s a kind of odyssey, a journey through a world of monsters, risks, loss, grief, but which in the end brings its hero home with all that he has won on the way.

However, it closes in sterner mood with a solemn epilogue. Tikumah (‘Dried-Trees’) discloses to the world his serious ideas about childhood suffering. His humour may have made light of the very real pains and limitations of his position in a society like his. But he delivers a harsh reprimand to the world. Indeed the Epilogue is Tikumah’s message to the world, to all who have ears to hear. He denounces above all the situation and culture which he lived in and tormented him. He blames the communalist society for its elevation of elders to irrational and unquestioned esteem no matter what; all to the detriment of the child. Elders are immune from criticism, while children, above all defenceless orphans, receive endless reproach and criticism. He condemns religious observance in the culture – or rather non-observance, deviance from the teaching of the Quran. He reminds his fellow Muslims that maltreatment of children is sinful - contrary to the teaching of the Quran, and of the example of the prophet who taught peace and forgave his enemies, but who also permitted retaliation if necessary - contrary to practice in the communalist society where no young person can challenge the old.  But  Tikumah doesn’t let the West off without blame either; he denounces the modern trend in Silminiŋa in which parents hardly dare touch their children who escape censure, and punishment, and may be prepared to inform the authorities if their parents break the law by beating them. Indeed, now we even have ‘non-human rights’ for animals appearing in the U.S.

To what extent were Tikumah’s sufferings as they were because of the individual characters of the men and women to whom he was entrusted, and to what extent was the nature of the culture the cause. Is the culture so easily defined that we can point our finger at it and say it was that which did it all, it was you! It was you who were responsible for my sufferings. And even if it were could it be easily changed?

Issah Tikumah was and is the fighter. He fought and won. He had guts and conquered throughout his development. But where did his weapons come from, his armour, his tricks for survival? Wasn’t it that same communalism operating inside him, internalized inside him, present to his mind, that which served him as well as any weapons of war in the ceaseless struggle that he describes? Wasn’t that what ensured his survival and success? That came to him from his own people, his society. He didn’t hesitate to sponge, cadge, scrounge. In our culture scrounging is shameful. Something that no writer would like to admit to; let alone trumpet, and crow about it for all the world to hear. I couldn’t. It would be against that part of me in which my upbringing lives. So should we condemn such dodgy practice in him? No, certainly not. He was communal-wise, streetwise, and he used his dodges and tricks to defeat the forces that wanted to bring him down, and thanks to those devices they failed; and that is worth applauding.

Issah Tikumah was an orphan in what the so-called developed world would call the poor, developing world. He shows that if you are alive to the world nothing need stop you. If you are intelligent, in whatever form, there can be no obstacle to the enquiring mind. I have worked in the poorest countries, like Niger. Those students who wished to, no matter how hard their background, made it and became the scholars, doctors, lawyers who lead any country. And education is not only what feeds the inquiring mind. Man is a thought adventurer said the poet. I knew one once in Cabo Verde, a fisherman, a great hearted old man. Piloto, from Porto Gouveia. He had a sharp intelligence and an inquiring mind that I still find an inspiration. He was at war with the Church. Why? Because he asked questions, something which the Church is not very happy with. But he didn’t care. Like Issah he found his valid reasons and exercised with great panache his thirst for enquiry into the nature of things. 

One thinks of some of the great leaders of this world. Cameron, for example, with all the so-called advantages of the best, at least, most expensive education available in the English-speaking world. And what good has it done him?