Thunder in the Morning

A Novel of Africa

A Novel of African Independence! At last, a book about Africa's first industrial action in Ghana! Secret populist up-rising! The horror, from folk perspective! Africa's public grief! Rural farmer's private anguish! Strike action? Protest? All ineffectual! The only viable alternative for property distribution? Unspeakable! Looting! Radical organized nation-wide liberation of Multi-national Shops! The story? Akuse-Amedeka, cosmopolitan heaven, hosted all boats sailing the Volta! People comingled and made blissful music. Then, a farmer, started asking pointed questions. Secretary of secret Labor Union, receives a strange gift - a kiss from unusual visitor! A stunning white lady, immaculately Sunday frocked, at his blacksmith workshop! "Do you see that?" Nomo Adziga, whispered to Maa Adzeley. "Clear as day light!" "Nose-rubbing! European merchants are rubbing noses with us!" Betrayal? Or, solidarity? Enough to challenge folk imagination at the Holy African Traditional Shrine of Thunder, Yeve, teaching proper ethical virtues to initiates! Mysterious Lady? Seeking what? And what kiss! Interracial long nose, poked into native affairs! Friendly? Pinocchio? Admirer? Or Colonialism's charming alter-ego? Expatriates, with classical theories of racial profiling, studied the natives. Natives, also studied their visitors, with one classic - the human heart. One fine Friday afternoon in January 1948, a kiss was planted near the left ear of Anani Nanor, a blacksmith who worked the forge, at his workshop in Atsukorpe, a quarter of Akuse-Amedeka township, in the Eastern Region of the Gold Coast. This apparently innocuous event which under ordinary circumstances might register no surprise at all, or if it did, no more than a mere passing fancy in the remotest rural enclave, gave rise to a great deal of excitement in the local Akuse-Amedeka area. For an unusually considerable time afterwards, the news sprouted and became the talk of the town. Morning, noon or evening, whenever workers paused to gasp in-between the activity with the pickaxe, the shovel or hand broom, it was on their lips. Whenever the water pot and firewood carriers balanced their enormous head-loads on their heads, and cagily neared each other, it was the main conversation piece. Let vendors and peddlers - those dynamic women with robust voices under the open trays - meet between the market stalls and lower their voices, in-between the lyrical outbursts of the hawkers' cries for attention to their goods, and, it was not far from their muted small talk, nor heated chatter. There were innocent ones who, peculiar as it might sound, had never seen displayed in public, or presumably experienced in private, the physical phenomenon of a kiss, and to all appearances, had never missed it! To them the gesture was a mere curious cultural oddity whose display presented no magic to charm or shock the senses. These members of the community were not the children - so adept at role playing "Mami and Papa". They were not teenagers who had overgrown "hide-and-seek" as a contact sport and, in whom the thawing life-juices had become as restless as the Volta in floods. They were not young adults, blooming silently like virgin cocoa trees under the shelter of forest timber. The innocent ones were seasoned grown-ups of matured experience, over whom the veil of cultural otherness had cast a different spell. They were those in whom the emotions had ripened but thawed to run in a different vein. These were the folks of nuanced sensibilities, who could tell the different unpredictable flavors of wild honey in cassava tapioca, warmed over open flames, and served on straw mats in swish buildings roofed with peasant hay. These were the folks who could tell the source of the nectar from the movement in the bee's dance at day, and at night, they had mastered the delicate art of scooping the noon heat into their sleep, to bake their dreams. The innocent ones were the folks, who had succeeded to cast their buckets down the shaft of the deep well, to meet the hidden spring in its sweetest flow. And yet, because the physical phenomenon of a kiss, fell outside the realm of their courtship behavior, at first notice, their visual experience of it rebelled against the very foundation of their feelings and sentiments. It challenged and puzzled them; the mixing of salivas could not acquit itself before their eyes in a hurry, as being clinically defensible, and the horror which was the thought of that possibility of its intrusion upon their own persons, affronted them like a major act of class war. About Anani Nanor, the whispers arose, "Oh, she only neared him and sucked in his face with her lips! What is that also for?" They would ask plainly appalled. Some were intrigued, "What did she mean by it?" Olympio Vormawor Pioneering Founding Father and President of The Debating Society, of G h a n a 's Temascho, won the annual writing prize for G h a n a schools with a short story, The Missing Shilling, published in The New Generation, 1969. He graduated from Oberlin College, U S A , and was Captain of the Varsity Soccer team, in 1973-4. He did Post Graduate work in the Department of African and Asian Studies, in Sussex U n i v e r s i t y Falmer, U K As Korku Vormawor, he was Editor of that department's AFRAS JOURNAL, 1975-6. He did further graduate studies at University of W i s c o n s i n M a d ison. The tutor of English Composition, in Eastern Kentucky U n i v e r s i t y, at Richmond, KY, U S A , came to Harvard U n i v e r s i t y ,for Independent Research.