NANA OTUTUGYAGU (THE GREAT SEER)
This is a very serious issue. I, Nana Otutugyagu have never seen the likes of this issue ever since I was born. How lovely that girl was in this town. Immediately she was born, there was a very great downpour. Yes! And the gods told me that she would be a very great person. She would bring fame to this town and make us proud.
And she lived up to it. When I went to her parents to tell them, they drove me; like a strayed fowl out of their house. It was not as if I wanted anything from them. And it was not as if the gods asked me to go and tell them. But I really needed a fowl for my supper. For it had been long since anyone had come to my shrine! But her proud parents drove me away like a strayed goat. I felt so ashamed but the gods kept quiet and did nothing about it because I was to blame.
I wouldn’t have been hurt if I knew that this was what the gods were referring to. I didn’t know that the gods meant her fame will be as a result of armed robbery or murder or is it both? And as foolish as I was, I was so hurt that I killed the man a hundred times every day in my head. Well I wish to see his pathetic face now that he has been shamed. Now that the deed of his daughter is out in the open! May the gods be praised!
They profess to have brought her up in Christianity. They look at the likes of us as devils when their great grandparents were worshipers at the shrine and obeyed every rule of the gods. Only the gods knew what they were doing. I wish we were in the olden days. They would’ve been banished from this town for giving birth to this angelic devil, or should I say respectful murderer? Anyway, what a sweet death the victim suffered, looking into the ever smiling face of a beautiful woman and feeling the pangs of death in your groins, I guess it will be a sweet- painful sensation. But of course I wouldn’t want to experience that. I am too young to die. At fifty five years, I am nowhere near death as long as I am a descendant of the Otutugyagu clan. My father spent about two hundred years before he joined his ancestors. My great grandfather, I heard, passed on when he was two hundred and fifty one. They all lived pass two hundred yet were strong. I mean that I can never die now. At least I have to live for the two hundred years that my father and great grandfathers lived before I join the land of my ancestors. Mine can never change because I too am a great seer.
The fact that I like meat more than they do does not mean the gods would not protect me. I don’t kill people; I mostly follow the directions of the gods. It is only when I run out of meat that I use the mind that the gods have given to me to get some from o-o-other means or is it from others? Well I thank the gods for avenging my shame. But this girl lived a very good life. The gods will punish me if I do not say that the girl was good and very humble.
If I were to lay blames, I would definitely lay it on her wretched parents. Those people behave as if there is no difference between them and their supposed Jesus. They always think they are right in whatever they do. Ever since I was born, never have I seen them come to the shrine for even thanksgiving if for nothing for the fact that the gods have protected them from bad omens since time immemorial. They always see traditionalists as grave sinners! Even when I happen to meet them and decided to greet them and say “May the gods be with you” they would say “may God forbid that, He is the only person who can be with us not your wretched gods”. Then they would pass.
All that time, I was wondering what the gods were doing, not knowing they had their own way of dealing with pompous people like that. Last year when I was taking a stroll and met that Osei Bonsu, he sneered at me and asked me where my shoes were. When I told him that I was on a sacred mission and was not permitted to wear shoes he laughed as if he had heard the joke of the century and said that “everything that is traditional is indeed ugly and inflicts pain on individuals who indulge in it.” The impudence of a strayed cockroach!
Well, and that beautiful but arrogant wife of his! I have nothing to say on that one. She walked and always sang the hymnals as if she was the heavenly Lucifer. Especially when the wind is blowing gently and her headgear is swaying in the direction of her voice and her gait is calculated. I hear she is even not in the choir! What a shame. Now she too cannot come out, but I am glad. Imagine that woman telling me that my dread, my godly dreadlocks look like the hair of a mad person. Why must blacks always love fake things? They have fake hair, fake clothes, now even fake nails and fake eyebrows when Odomankoma gave us everything that will fit us.
They actually are very lucky that they did not come to meet my predecessors! Like a mere thoughts of insults on the gods would have landed them into a very big trouble! I am not saying that I am loose oh! Far from it! All I am trying to say is that I am somehow lenient because I have lots of sympathy for human kind. And so I overlook certain things and then regard them as mere childlike behaviours.
Well, let them go through this trying times imposed on them by the gods. I am sure with time they will learn their lessons and come to the shrine to beg for forgiveness. That is the time I will have my sweet revenge by collecting a goat from them, yes a very big white goat with very strong bones!
AMOAFOWAA SEFA CECILIA.
Mum Cee 