New Currency: A Novella By Ajoa Yeboah-Afari Reviewed by Cameron Duodu

Writing and reading fiction is a function of the mind. And the wonder of the human mind is that it can be everywhere it wants to be.

Now, let me share with you, from my personal experience, a little bit of what fiction can do. I think I was in what used to be called Standard One (which changed suddenly to Primary Four), that I read a story from the Oxford English Reader, lines in which began:

“See me Lakayana with my spear! The spear which [someone or other!] gave me”....

And so on and so forth, with Lakayana narrating the story of various possessions he had acquired and what he had to give up in order to be offered the new possessions. Now that I have grown up, I think it was an allegorical story, meant to convey to our minds that, as the maxim say, “You cannot get something for nothing”!

I am proud to say that since I made the acquaintance of “Lakayana” in 1947, I haven’t been able to ditch him! Are there other more, perhaps deeper, meanings to the story? The story in fact illustrates what good fiction should be: it should make you ask questions upon questions.

Anyway, what would the author of the Lakayana story say, if he were able to hear this testimony I have given about the relevance of his or her story in this age which he did not live to see? Yet another attribute of good fiction now raises its head – namely, good fiction should be ageless; it should challenge our imagination with its beauty in a manner that is timeless.

You can see from the little I have said, that, writing fiction – and, as I insist, Good Fiction -- can be one of the most rewarding pursuits the human mind can engage in. Imagine loving, and being loved in turn, all through the air we freely breathe and no matter what age, or era, we happen to live in!

A year before I encountered Lakayana, I had read about Kwaku Ananse, from Kan Me Hwe Book 3.

Again, something from that book stuck to my mind, and has stayed there ever since. I had, of course, heard a lot about Kwaku Ananse from oral sources – older members of my extended family gathering round a fire, at night, and regaling is with stories so monopolised by Ananse, that they were collectively called Anansesem, whether Ananse himself featured in the particular stories hat were told or not.

The peculiar thing about the word Anasesem is that it was created by people who did not read or write, as we know it. How did they know how to collective similar stories and give them a single name that enabled everyone to recognise what was coming when Anansesem was mentioned? In asking that question, I want you to ponder this issue: are we too quick to write off the verbal ingenuity of our ancestors who did not possess the craft of reading and writing, as we know it?

But let me go on and tell you about one particular Ananse story that stuck in my mind, after I had read it in my Class Three textbook. I remember vividly, how our teacher, who spoke the Akuapem dialect of Twi, read to us in impeccable Akuapem, what Ananse said, as he struggled, unsuccessfully, to wriggle out of the hands of his own sons, led by Ntikuma. They had caught him, after smelling the scent of groundnut soup in his cloth. Groundnut soup?

Yes – a great famine had afflicted the land, and food was very hard to come by. In order to be able to obtain a greater share of whatever food was available than anyone else in his family, selfish and greedy Ananse instructed his wife, Okonnore Yaa, to go and place a sizable portion of every meal prepared by her, under a tree, in the deep forest. A fetish, known only to Ananse, would come and eat it (Ananse said).

When he ate the food, the fetish would become so filled with gratitude that the family loved him so much that they had sacrificed food they couldn’t really spare, to him, the fetish. And as a reward to them (Ananse explained) the fetish would bless the family’s farms and the farms would produce more food than anyone else’s farms.

But Ananse was lying, of course. What he did, in fact, was to slip out, every evening, to secretly eat the food left for the fetish. He did this in the late evening, , on the pretext of going to smoke his pipe in the bush. Why did he want to smoke his pipe in the bush? Oh (Ananse took the trouble to explain further) he went to smoke his pipe in the bush to avoid offending members of his family with the nasty smell of the tawa [native tobacco].

You know, (Ananse elaborated) he realised that members of his family didn’t like the smell of the tawa. But out of respect for him as the head of the household, they suffered his smoking in silence. Well, the famine had brought him to his senses, you know – they were all now suffering from hunger together and it wasn’t fair that when people were silently angry, because they did not get enough to eat, someone they respected should annoy them by smoking a pipe that emitted noisome fumes.

As a person who was widely renowned for being clever, as well as being the kindest of the kind, he was aware of the tawa’s strong smell, even though they didn’t complain about it. So he would go into the bush, alone, at night, to smoke, and enjoy the “pungent” smell of the tawa, which was “a cultivated pleasure, that was gifted to people of age and experience” (Ananse concluded his elaborate explanation).

Of course, despite dispelling any suspicion that he might be a selfish motive, Ananse went alone to secretly gobble the food for Okonnore Yaa left for the fetish. Now, one day, Okonnore Yaa cooked a delicious groundnut soup. A good treat for the whole family on any day, let alone in a time of famine. So enthusiastically did Ananse set about consuming his secret portion of the soup that quite a lot of it dribbled unseen into the folds of his cover-cloth. And the next morning, when his children went to clean his bedroom, they detected a strong smell of groundnut soup there.

Ananse’s eldest, Ntikuma, who had the usual love-hate relationship with Ananse that oldest sons tend to have with their fathers, got the picture at once. And he hatched a secret plan. He and his brothers waylaid Ananse in the forest that night, and held him down, despite his struggles, they pinned him down till daybreak. Then, just as the sun was rising, he told the children: “Moannyae me a medan mo agya!” [If you don’t let me go, I shall turn into your father!”

I invite you to imagine the laughter that greeted our teacher’s enunciation of this stratagem by Ananse. The Akuapem dialect made it doubly amusing to us, who spoke the Akyem dialect.

I ask you: where are today’s equivalent of the Kan Me Hweseries of primary school textbooks in our schools that contain such memorable stories? Where are the equivalent of the Oxford English Readers series and the ”Supplementary Readers that went with the book for each class? Let me now ginger the memories of my more senior readers: where is today’s “Ingwe The Leopard”? Or “The Woman And Her Son”? “Sinbad The Sailor”? “Rip Van Winkle”?

I have no doubt that the educationists whose policy decisions led to the eradication of such books from the curriculum of our schools had reasons that seemed to them to be very good, when very threw out the books. Well, over seventy years after I read the books I have mentioned, I have not needed to look up any of their titles before venturing to reveal what effect they had on my mind. Can I say the same about the books in our schools today? I don’t know, but I doubt whether they are holding their own against the challenge offered by cartoons on TV, and the like.

I have laboured to give you this long introduction to the book whose title is given above because I am sure Ajoa Yeboah-Afari ABSORBED her love for the products of the craft of writing from the books she read as a child. After reading her book, I can fully acknowledge that she has fully repaid her debt to her favourite writers.

Absorb? Yes! Good writers are not taught – they ABSORB good writing unconsciously, and -- sub-consciously. Then, they DISGORGE it all, again, unconsciously and sub-consciously.

Someone says, after reading one’s book, “I can see traces of ---- (and a good writer’s name is mentioned). The writer being praised might be surprised, for he or she might not even have read the author mentioned. The reason, you see, is that good writing, when absorbed and disgorged, would have gone through invisible processes akin to what physicists call quantum mechanics. From atoms to quarks to neutrinos: which were created first and why? What is their relationship to each other? How is it that certain combinations of such particles create forces too humongous for the ordinary human mind to fully comprehend? Above all, how do we human inter-relate with them?

From physics, please allow me to transition you, as it were to metaphysics! The story told by Ajoa Yeboah Afari in New Currency ISBN:978-9988-9094-2-0 [Smartline Publishing www.smartlinepublishers.com ] has awakened a seed for a novel in my own head! How come?

Well, when the Cedi Demonetization exercise (which forms the subject-matter of Ajoa’s book) occurred in March 1979, accurate Information reached me that the people of my home-town, Asiakwa had been placed in great distress by the exercise. There was no bank in the town, and yet the old currency being withdrawn could only be changed at a bank. (Or so the people believed). Now, there WAS a bank at Kyebi, only seven miles away. But lorry drivers were not accepting fares in the old currency to take passengers to Kyebi to change their money for the new currency!

I could see immediately that this was a vicious circle type of dilemma of the greatest proportions, as far as the people of Asiakwa and similarly-placed towns were concerned. If they had a driver with humane instincts around, he would take passengers to the bank at Kyebi, wait for them to change their money and then collect their fares in the new currency. But where were drivers with a humanistic instinct at a time of queuing and chaos everywhere? Ajoa’s book will tell you how callous some people became, given the powder to solve the problem of changing the old currency for the new one.

When heard of the problem, I drove to the Bank of Ghana and saw the authorities. I shall, God willing, reveal what happened, in a work of some sort, yet to come. Not only that: I shall reveal how two members of my own immediate family were marooned in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, when Kotoka Airport, in Accra, was closed for the exercise. They had gone there for a holiday. And the airport was closed behind them! Without notice!

Did the then Government of Ghana realise that there would be such difficulties for the populace when it embarked on what seemed to it to be the good policy of demonitizing the CEDI currency of the time? Ajoa’s lovely story takes us to the heart of the events that can happen inside people’s families in times of hardship; occurrences in their neighbourhoods; the development and, or, transformation, of their individual relationships. They can be very complex and indeed, almost unimaginable. Just read the book and see

Do Governments read? I don’t know! But if they do, they should learn from such books to tread carefully whenever they contemplate taking action whose consequences affect the mass of the populace. Indeed, we know, from our own lives, that unexpectedconsequences can spring from our actions.

Yet we never learn from them!