Unchained E-Book

SaCut Amenga-Etego

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Unchained is not just the title of this book but it is the key to a whole life. The life of  SaCut Amenga-Etego, born and raised in Ghana, journalist and activist, who has broken any chain life and people have tried to impose on him over time, especially those that could have undermined his freedom of expression. In  Unchained the story of his life is imprinted, from the beginning up to the days of an unfair trial and imprisonment, passing through a very long career as an activist in the Ghanaian political field, economic and family problems, love affairs, the pandemic, and a part of his life spent abroad. He has made his voice heard in every possible way, mainly thanks to an intelligent use of social networks and the internet, and now through this book.

Leseprobe

SaCut Amenga-Etego

Unchained

© 2022 Europe Books| London www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220133050

First edition: February 2023

Editor: Effie Quattrociocchi

Unchained

This book is dedicated to Maia-Atogbo, my daughter, who was only three months old during the period of my unlawful imprisonment but who refused to eat a whole day in telepathic solidarity and protest against injustice.

Those who can persuade us to believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.

Voltaire

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge all the people who have played a role in shaping my life philosophy and choices especially those who have personally protected me, provided for me, invested in me, opened doors for me and believed in me along the way.

My biological parents, siblings and the external family but more importantly, those who have become family through sharing of values and loyalties.

To the eternal memory of Ex-President JJ Rawlings who inspired me into political consciousness, Herbert Mensah my life coach and Godfather has relentlessly pointed me in the right direction despite several years of stubborn resistance, Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey has protected me and stood up for me at some of the most crucial periods of my political life journey, Dr. Don Arthur personally held my hand, put me in journalism school and showed up as the only government official at my graduation, John Baptist Anira Abaah helped me discover my talent as a writer, Nana Bobie Ansah, my sparring partner on the radio airwaves - speaking truth to power without apology – for almost a decade, Jude Sekley my protégé and comrade who is always there for me at the ring of a phone and Elena Scarnato believed in me and my talent and invested in the publication of this book.

Prologue

Jude was my first visitor at the detention centre. I knew that I had stirred a hornet’s nest with my investigation, and it unnerved those who had arrested me in court on the count of taking photos and videos of the proceedings. Jude sat across from me with my lawyer, Kojoga Adawudu, to break the news that my illegal arrest and detention had not been made public yet. I was incensed. There was a cover-up going on. Ghanaian law doesn’t allow the detention of anyone for more than forty-eight hours without an official charge, yet there I was approaching my fifth day. Mainstream media hadn’t got wind of the news yet and the Ghana Journalists Association had said nothing. Even social media was still silent on me at this point. Why weren’t people aware of what happened?

Before that, rumours were going around among the political elite about whether or not I had committed a crime. Those who disliked me were hoping that I had gotten into something that would hurt my reputation and shut me up forever. The rumours continued to spread. My true friends, on the other hand, knew that I would have done nothing illegal. The story finally went viral on social media after that first visit by Jude Sekley. Mainstream media, apart from a few, remained silent on the matter because they were playing on the side of the government. The Ghanaian Journalists’ Association didn’t even make a statement about the situation. I was not a registered member of the association because I believed they had sold out to the authorities, and true to my belief, they made no statement for a fellow journalist in illegal detention.

It was a Saturday and I had been arrested on Thursday. I had not spoken with my lawyer and I had not received an official charge. I had spoken with no one but my cellmates. We just sat in our cells sweating even with no clothes and our backs against the wall or the leather mattresses that furnished the cells. The cell was a hot box without a window. We sweat all day and night, barely able to sleep. I went on a hunger strike as a prisoner of conscience for the first twenty-four hours until I realised that my detention was going to be an extended one. I still had to admit that my situation was infinitely better than the others who were being held for five and six months when I was dragged in, full of indignation.

There was an elderly man, who obviously came from a rural community, charged with child trafficking. A midwife who had saved the elderly man’s life twentyfive years before knocked on his door one day with a baby in her arms. She said the baby had no one in the world and wanted him to care for it until she could find a home. Of course, the man said, a baby could not be left out in the world with no one to care for it. The midwife promised to come back with food and necessities to care for the baby. She didn’t return though and the man didn’t think much of it. A few months later, while the man’s wife was preparing food, the baby died. No sickness. No crying. It just expired in the padded basket. The elderly man buried the baby just as silently as it had come into the world. Eventually, the midwife came back and instead of fulfilling her promise of bringing food, she held another baby in her arms. Yet another tiny child without anyone in the world to care for it. The elderly man couldn’t say no but he and his wife didn’t feel they could take on the child. They gave it to their son to care for instead. The son was contacted by a rich family looking to adopt the baby as they had no children of their own. It appeared to be an ideal situation. They had taken the child because they felt it was their moral imperative but they couldn’t see how they could care for it long-term. As the arrangements were made for the rich man to adopt the child the police came knocking at the elderly man’s door and arrested him, his son and his son’s wife for child trafficking. They had been framed and most probably by the driver of the rich family. Six months later they were still languishing in their cells without the money to pay for bail and no court date on the horizon.

There was another man, a Nigerian, who was being held for crossing the Nigeria-Ghana border with too much cash in his possession. He had never imagined there was a limit to the amount of cash he could carry, and to make matters worse, he also carried a bunch of bank cards belonging to other people and only spoke Hausa and Arabic from northern Nigeria. He was being held for eight months already.

Another man was held on the counts of inciting a coup d’état in the Volta region east of Accra on the border with Togo. Security agents were giving him regular shakedowns to get the names of his co-conspirators and he feared for his life. He was also in his eighth month in jail. These people were helpless in a system that snaked out of control with corruption and arbitrary bureaucracy. They had no support, their written statements were taken without any legal advice, and for this reason, their banal crimes kept them locked up.

Then there were those connected with the case that I was investigating—Ghanaians, other West Africans and Indians—being held. They only knew of me as the journalist that was investigating the allegations of extortion by rogue security agents and their government official enablers. They were present outside of the courtroom when I was arrested ostensibly for taking videos and pictures in the courtroom. The people held in jail represented the corruption of the country from minor abuses to deep-state lawlessness. I understood the worry of my cellmates because I had felt it the first few days that I was held without explanation, without adherence to legal procedures, and without the ability to speak to my lawyer, family or friends. As a journalist, politicallyexposed person and public figure, I was convinced that my case would get resolved sooner than the others and when I was finally able to meet Jude and my lawyer, my assumptions were confirmed.

“SaCut, it is not illegal to take pictures or videos in court.” my lawyer said to me, “They don’t have a leg to stand on in confiscating your phones. The good news is that because there is no legal reason for them to be holding you, we will figure out a way to get you out—and soon. The bad news is that you have information that is of interest to national security so they will not let this all go over easily. You know something they don’t want you to. It’s time for you to tell me the story.”

Chapter 1: The Fate Of My Grandfather Sets The Stage

My grandfather’s reputation reached beyond Kandiga of which he was chief. He was the first one in the area to have an automobile. It wasn’t exactly a car because they hadn’t arrived in the northern part of Ghana yet. It was a simplified contraption of gears and levers, but it was more exciting than moving on foot and he was the first to have it. He travelled around the region in that contraption, his reputation spreading like the veil of pink dust in the wake of the automobile and the grand entries it afforded him and his entourage on his travels. My grandfather had a reputation for carousing in town with his elders. And there is a tale in the family and community that he used to enjoy having his beer foam on his moustache. One day he piled an entourage of elders into his machine and drove the eighteen kilometres to town to attend to some business. Though usually the one to take the lead on all matters of business, my grandfather suddenly fell silent. A thin veneer of sweat had gathered on his forehead and his eyes looked as if they were trying to conceal some discomfort. The elders took him to the hospital and before the day had ended, he was dead.

He was no more than fifty at the time and the way of his death was suspiciously sudden. In those years—a decade before Ghana would be the first to gain independence on the continent, when his son, my father, was just barely becoming a man, and several years before I would be born—autopsies were not practised and as such, the circumstances of his death would be forever clouded in speculation. Something was not right for the leader of the people, a man of sound health and veracity, to so suddenly perish. Hypotheses of poisoning whipped through the community like the harmattan. The first wife of my grandfather was certain of this. Looking into the eyes of her first-born son, about to inherit the chiefdom from his too-early deceased father, she knew she had to protect him from the same fate that had befallen her late husband.

It had all started with my grandfather’s wife. Not my father’s mother. Not his other wives, but his spiritual wife, Dongo. Dongo is a powerful goddess who, among other powers, grants the position of chief and bestows him with divine power. Her selection is considered a spiritual marriage. She is a deity who is at the side of his throne, and like all marriages, she must be kept happy. She imbues charisma, wealth, love and protection of the people to the chief, his family, and his community. The chiefdom is a patriarchal system that flows down to the family line of first sons only bypassing those who have somehow disqualified themselves. In this way, Dongo granted this position to the line of first sons in my family, eventually reaching my grandfather. My grandfather had married Dongo and her throne sat next to him as he ruled the community and he unfurled ritual sacrifices and ceremonies in her honour.

But Dongo’s grace is like a faucet; when rituals are performed and sacrifices are made it is abundant and full like the rivers in the rainy season, and equally vengeful when she is neglected, her powers and protection drying up, leaving a chief vulnerable and weakened. It is this foundation that I would inherit as a boy in the savannah of Ghana. But something went terribly wrong with the culture before I was even an idea. My grandfather faced a decision that would change his life, my father’s and mine as well.

Since the end of the 19th century, Westerners showed up believing that Christianity was a better business than slavery. Previously concentrated on the coast, the missionaries made their way inland. The Methodists and the Protestants burrowed in from the Atlantic coast, while the Catholics descended into the savannah from the north, from Burkina Faso. It was the Catholics that reached Kandiga, and my grandfather, first. The missionaries used a subtle approach. They didn’t just come with the Bible; they flooded the community with incentives to convert. With each parish that was built, schools followed and then medical clinics, and then fancy articles and food. My grandfather didn’t need a new god— he had his goddess—but education was a good thing, the foreign articles were amusing, and the clinics extracted the poison of snake bites that before would have killed people. People may even have thought orthodox medicine was magic. Conversion was about going to school, about the feeding program, about the clinics and hospitals. It was about getting so-called civilization and enlightenment. Those who maintained and practised the African traditions were framed as not enlightened but as if they remained in the Stone Age. If one didn’t go to secular school or go to church or take a colonial name, like Peter or Paul or John or Matthew or Denis, they were left behind. Before the formal schools, children followed the profession of their parents becoming the replica of their fathers through apprenticeship. That was the narrow scope of traditional education. It is characterised by an oral tradition where everything is passed down through folklore and observing traditional rituals and ceremonies. And then this new education system came along and people wore uniforms and looked smart and fancy. They were given new names, fanciful names.

The guy attending school was called Peter, while the guy who didn’t was called Attia. Since Peter is a white man, it sounded more exotic and attractive. The psychology behind it encouraged people to change. There was only one path to becoming a global citizen, a civilised man or woman. While making Christianity very attractive, the missionaries were demonising the people's traditional religion as pagan, and because religion and culture are interwoven, their culture was also considered pagan. This created a feeling of shame and lack of self-confidence in the people and the more they went to school and adopted the Western philosophy of secular education and lifestyle the more confident the people felt. The Christians considered Grandfather’s marriage to Dongo, the ritual sacrifices and ceremonies that fed and honoured her, indeed her very existence, to be pagan superstitious practice and idol worship. The social, economic and psychological incentive for Christianization was very high and my grandfather, ever the progressive leader, could not have resisted the infiltration of the Christian movement nor could he halt the invading popular culture and its corrupting effect on the traditional culture. Since my grandfather was inclined to progress, it was not such a difficult task for the Christian missionaries to convert him in the 1940s.

Many thought it was a good idea to embrace the church and all its materialism brought by white people but there were others, hard-line traditionalists, who thought my grandfather, by embracing Christianity, getting baptised and given the name Paul, was selling out the traditional spirituality or main source of meaning to the people, offending the gods, and abandoning their heritage. To these radically extreme right-wing traditionalists, Christianity and African Traditional Religion were irreconcilable; churches and schools had become the devil’s work to them.

A house with too many gods gets crowded and more so when they don’t hail from the same tradition. Each god needed attention and my grandfather only had so much to give before he was spread too thin and had to make choices and a great confusion set in. On the one hand, Dongo had bestowed on him the privilege of being a chief, while on the other, the Christians’ god brought in Western education and fanciful things. As he embraced the Christian practices, part of his community resisted the change. They refused to allow their children to go to either Church or school. And without church or school, the names remained unchanged and the traditions continued. But others took the resistance a notch higher and they plotted to eliminate him. Some elders shot suspicious sideways glances at him and schemed behind his back. Grandfather withdrew from appearing in the many outdoor community events to avoid giving an advantage to the plotters. He began to attend fewer gatherings and then open conflicts broke out with elders of the community. They accused him of encouraging the pollution and corruption of the traditions and told him that if he continued, the gods would be angered and tragedy would befall them. But he was already under the grotesque grip of the Christian religion and Western cultural imperialism. He saw his young daughters and sons learning to read in school and saw that the missionaries were going to stay and their ways would be the future. He had two roads in front of him and he felt compelled to take them both. Chiefs before him had never had to juggle appeasing two gods who were at odds with each other and they had never had to decide between tradition and literacy. My grandfather was on his own, all eyes watching his next move and the consequences that it brought. Meanwhile, Dongo sat on her throne and fumed while grandfather weakened under the duress of this cultural crisis.

Grandfather had underestimated the anger of the traditionalists. They believed that if someone in the community didn’t put a stop to it, trouble would find them all. It was a question of maintaining, sustaining and honouring the traditions that motivated those people who made it their moral duty to eliminate my grandfather through poisoning.

Grandfather left behind his wives and over twenty-five children that were all growing up and embracing the Christian tradition when he passed. It was my father, the first son following a line of four elder sisters, who was destined to take on the chiefdom. My grandmother was sure that it was the lack of protection from the Dongo that sent my grandfather to his early grave. My father, barely old enough to be a chief, needed guidance. The matriarch became the de facto ruler while her son naturally grew into his position. She gave him direction and guidance and he could trust her. She understood that her husband had died because of the risk he had taken in partially abandoning the traditions and that he made so many enemies among his own people for his conversion. The same fate awaited her son if she didn’t do something.

She sat her son down and she told him his responsibilities.

“You must not abandon your traditions. I am baptised, you are baptised, we have all embraced Christianity but our traditions have not disappeared. You must not forget that it is our tradition that makes you a chief and you must carry out your traditional duties or you will make enemies with the goddess and the people.” My father must have been attentive as his mother told him these things in great seriousness. “Your father, he was not capable of this, and you see that he was sent to an early grave. You must find a way to balance both. If you go to church, it is ok, if you pray with your rosary, it is ok, but don’t forget your traditions because it is your source of life.”

She was much more prudent in her worldview and in the way she approached the traditions, old and new. She understood that my father would have to maintain the practices of a traditional ruler and also maintain the appearance of a Christian ruler. She taught him to balance both worlds with appearances and practices.

And so, my father offered sacrifices to Dongo at home, prayed with his rosary at church, performed traditional religious rituals and ceremonies in the community and sent his children in turn to school. He didn’t neglect his traditional responsibilities and no fatal ill fortune befell him.

When my father married his first of five wives, my mother, she followed the traditions as the wife of a chief had to do. To demonstrate this point, my mother was eloped by colleagues of my young father from the market of her village. She didn’t know my father and was not interested in getting married as she was just about to enter teacher’s training college. She vigorously resisted her elopement but she eventually succumbed to the tradition which didn’t require her consent in marriage. They skilfully balanced both beliefs, denouncing neither, reaping the benefits of both. Many of the chiefs in the surrounding towns followed eventually in converting and letting the children go to school. People chose when they could ignore the Christian religion and practice their traditions, and when they would pray in church, learn to read and receive care at the medical facilities.

Most of my father’s siblings had all but abandoned the traditional religion without so much as looking back. They were not compelled to adhere to traditional responsibilities like my father and no harm befell them as they cast it off. But my father knew that it was their privilege to do so because none of them was the chief. They considered him an idol worshipper and they also saw my father’s adherence to tradition as disrespectful to the Christianity that their father had embraced and eventually died for. They didn’t see that a person could follow both. This drove a deep wedge between him and his siblings, a wedge between tradition and progress, one that could not be straddled in the mind of some of my father’s siblings and it bore conflict between them which I too, would inherit. It was in this environment that I was born, the first son of the chief.

Chapter 2: Training

In Kandiga, each extended family lived in compounds made up of huts called datima housing each nuclear family. The datima were connected with the huts of another nuclear family forming a maze of households. Women went to live with their husband’s families when they married. Our houses were built with red earth, mud mortar and thatch roofs. There were also mangoligo— square buildings with crisscrossing wood beams for roof support. Traditional architects and artisans built each compound. Nowadays, thatch rooves are replaced by zinc. One narrow gate, locked from the inside, enclosed each compound. Each compound had a corral, called a nandenu, where the animals were kept at night. Here also were the baare, traditional silos for storing each season’s harvest.

Our compound was three or four times bigger than most compounds because it was the palace holding over one hundred people in it. My father had four wives and each of them had their own household. I lived with my mom and siblings in a hut with two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a yard shared with other wives’ families.

I was the first of my father’s children and the first son: the heir, the prince, the one who would eventually take over his position. I was privileged but also had many responsibilities and just like my grandfather before me, the consequences of not following through were high. The traditions, rituals and stories weren’t recorded in books. They were passed on through being practised and spoken of in the community. There was a historical responsibility to pass on that knowledge. From an early age, traditional customs were imprinted on us young people until the time came to attend a school where we were exposed to Western culture.

My role in learning and preserving the tradition was particularly high due to my position as heir. Without being told the purpose or the goals, I had to go through different training or be sent on various missions preparing me to eventually take on the position of chief. My father would wake me up in the middle of the night and send me to far-away compounds, crossing several other compounds, and through several kilometres of rivers and forests. Elders had warned us that the community was full of any number of witches and ghosts that populated the night, flying around like fireflies and ghosts touching and killing anyone roaming at nocturnal times. Night-time was associated with danger; invisible and unknown forces could take away your life. By sending me out in the dark, my father intended to drive fear out of me and I had no choice but to go, trembling with fear. The night darkness played tricks on my eyes and mind and it was impossible to discern if the specks of light or sounds in the bush were animals or wind or a spirit.

When I would arrive at the compound there would be someone waiting for me with strange discoveries and rituals. On one occasion, my father sent me to a compound with a live bird and told me to give it to the man who was waiting for me at my destination. To my utter surprise, the man killed the bird without a knife or strangling it with his hands but with a mere spiritual chant in a flutter of flailing wings and feathers that filled the darkness without a sound. It was the first traditional religious miracle I witnessed in my life. After that, the man started mixing various ingredients and gave me something to eat and drink. He dabbed a concoction on my heart and head. He sent me back to my father and told me to relay that everything was alright. After many years, I learned that this ritual was protection from venomous snake bites and other spiritual attacks that were a common and fatal affliction in the savanna and was believed to be provoked by the ill-will of others in the community. I was being christened in the traditions and gaining spiritual armour. Not all superstition made sense to me and witchcraft was very hard for me to believe as I grew older. I saw that the purpose of superstition was to put fear in us and create certain boundaries and limitations. I saw it as a feature of an illiberal society. This was not to say there were no witches and wizards, but I could dismiss or defend neither. Perhaps all of the little sparks of fire that I saw in the night were just fireflies, or perhaps they weren’t. My training imbued confidence in me, and made me feel impervious, because not only did I make it through these midnight journeys unharmed. I overcame the fear of the unknown, of the dark void.

Had I had an older sister, my training would probably have stopped at the assignments my father sent me on, but for many years, we were only boys, and as the oldest, I also helped my mother with her domestic and commercial activities. My mother was a businesswoman and she trained me to help her. This training was usually reserved for girls, but being only boys, gender norms were erased out of necessity.

My mother was industrious. She had a chop bar and sold the local beer, pito, or rice balls and groundnut soup laced with dry fish called amane, and goat meat. She also sold sagbo and bito ziiro, the traditional staple of our people. Every day she woke up at about three or four in the morning to start the pito or the food preparation to be ready at the market before midday. Brewing pito was a complicated three-day process and still is, as no new technology has been invented to speed up the brewing process. I woke up early to start work with her and fetch the water. She would give me ten different assignments at a time. I did much of the work with my mother, receiving this full-time training while also receiving the training from my father. I didn’t like it, but I was her only helper.

Chapter 3: The School Of Hard Knocks

In the savanna region of northern Ghana, the main source of livelihood is agriculture and animal husbandry. Every compound sits on a farm with crops and livestock that the families tend to: fruit trees, sheep, goats, cows, horses, donkeys, poultry, millet, sorghum and grains. Though a dry region, heavy rains soften the earth from July through August or September and this is when crops are cultivated, taking advantage of the waterfall to hydrate the young seeds.

The animals ravaged the crops if they were not kept away from them and so it was the task of the adolescents of each compound to herd the animals into the wilderness every day to graze. This activity practised from ancient times was called the Dun-Sekam and it served a few purposes. It ensured that the animals were away from crops, thereby avoiding conflict between disgruntled farmers and herders. The second reason was that the Dun-Sekam served as a training program for young people, a rite of passage, primarily for boys, but also girls. It toughened us up physically and mentally and prepared us to handle the everyday difficulties of life with ease.

Each section of the community had a clearing, the tinpia, where the adolescents gathered every morning for half the year with the animals before heading out to the Dun-Sekam. We would discuss the plan for the day—which area of the wilderness we would go to— and also make deals with each other, trading work for snacks. We brought daily rations of millet and nuts in our tampoko, a bag woven from plant fibre and gulmagu’o, a round-headed staff carved from the strongest tree species that served as a weapon and also a tool for controlling the animals. We would then set out to the wilderness and return after the sun had set.

Despite adhering to traditions, once we reached a certain age, we had to also attend school. Sometimes I would trade my food rations for someone to take my animals out so I could attend primary school instead. Though my father was the chief, I was not exempt from doing the Dun-Sekam. Other children couldn’t go off to the Dun-Sekam while I was at school getting a secular education because it would be considered discriminating. Besides, I needed the training in this school of hard knocks.

As far and remote as it was to get to the Dun-Sekam, we would find people who farmed in the wilderness and had to pass through their farms and this inevitably brought conflict when our animals entered their farms. They would beat us with sticks and we had to learn to take it. Complaining and whimpering wouldn’t help because the next day the animals would get into someone else’s farm and beatings would follow. There was no escaping the daily peril. It was purely survival of the fittest.

If it wasn’t the farmers causing trouble, it was nature itself. When the rain fell, the rivers grew swollen and wild. We learned to swim so we wouldn’t be swept away by the strong currents. We learned by holding on to the tail of the cows and horses as they leaned into their weight to get themselves across. Nature didn’t care whose son or daughter we were, she treated us with equal disregard. Only the strong in body and mind would make it through and grow stronger through the process.

When the animals strayed into people’s farms, someone had to go and get the animals back. Everyone looked to get out of retrieving the animals to avoid the inevitable beating from the farmers. We would point to the person next to us: “You have to go!”, “No, you have to go!”, “No, you have to go!” And in the end, we would wrestle to determine who would get the animals. We didn’t throw blows when we wrestled; we would just try to pin each other to the ground. Learning to be stronger than the others was the ultimate survival lesson.

When one day the animals had gotten into a farm, a young man in the group insisted that he wouldn’t go to bring them back and since I was the youngest or the weakest, as he truly meant, I should be the one to go. We wrestled it out and he pinned me down. But I was impetuous, filled with the entitlement of being the chief’s son and the conviction that I shouldn’t have to be the one to bring the animals back. We wrestled a second round and again he pinned me, the coarse dirt pressing into my face. The boys surrounding me were cheering, but not for me.

Bitter anger filled me with what I considered an unfair result. I didn’t want to get the animals and receive a third beating—one more brutality at the hands of a farmer. I wouldn’t stand for it so when I was released from the ground, I ran off. I didn’t have a plan but I refused to get the animals. The anger drove me forward and I ran until I came upon an old woman standing in front of her compound. I told her my predicament. She couldn’t do anything for me but listen. On this note, I faced a second peril. I knew that my father’s animals, for which I was solely responsible, could go astray with the cover of darkness approaching and I could not return home without the full complement of animals under my care. I had to return quickly and accept the task of retrieving the animals and the inevitable beating that went with it. Returning home that evening, I was so humiliated with my triple beating and my failed attempt to protest. The only way forward was to build up my power. I had to pin instead of being pinned. I had to man-up or face several years of beatings.

After a couple of wrestling matches, I was eventually successful and won. Then I won another. And another. Eventually, my opponents knew they couldn’t win and began to forfeit without a match to save themselves the extra beating. A strong person might not even have to prove their strength if they were successful in instilling fear and doubt in others. Strength always helped, not because one worked harder or was more efficient but because, with it, came hierarchy. A person perceived to be strong would get in fewer wrestling matches because no one would dare challenge their perceived strength. A strong person didn’t need to walk because they could ride the horses instead. A strong person could task the younger ones to watch their animals while they sat under a tree or played games. A strong person could send others to harvest the abundant shea nuts from the trees that, when brought back to the compound, would make everyone happy and be a marker for success. But when you were strong it was more likely that you had to fight bigger battles. It took a lot of effort, and many beatings, to get to the point where one was considered strong and feared

Chapter 4: You’re Hopeless