Mami Wata’s Daughters

“Come and talk to your friend o.” Manga, the retired psychologist, listened to the voice at the other end of the phone. “He wants us to return to Teneria, and I am not, repeat, not, going back; neither is Gitta.” The phone went dead.

The mid-Saturday morning call came from Nyambe, his friend Munda Lamin’s wife. Manga’s mind jumped into overdrive. Nyambe’s call was a plea for help. The “o” sounded like an early warning of impending tragedy. Recent news about Africans living in Tucson, Arizona, had been grisly – a Nigerian dentist had shot his wife, a Tenerian man had hacked his girlfriend, and a Senegalese woman had poured acid on her sleeping husband’s crotch.

Manga did not want to become the interviewee on television expressing shock that his neighbour, such a quiet and helpful man, had done something so gruesome. Not that Manga thought Munda had a violent bone in his body. However, his forty-year clinical experience told him that some childhood trauma lay coiled deep within his wife, Nyambe, like a mamba in an underground burrow. At the slightest provocation, she could unspool with tragic consequences.

Minutes after the phone call, Manga entered the Lamins’ house, half a mile down the road in their gated community. Nyambe had left the front door partially open for him. Manga walked past the massive, solid-surface kitchen island with three unfinished breakfast plates into the cavernous family room. The refracted sunlight of the sky-blue voile curtains, the flickering colours from the 100inch, wall-mounted TV, and the five-panel oversized glass sliding doors gave the room the feel of an aquarium.

It displayed the inert Lamins: Gitta, the 18-year-old vegetarian, with acceptance letters from three Ivy-League colleges, sat unmoving on the left arm chaise of a granite-coloured supersize sectional. She wore an off-shoulder T-shirt and frayed ultra-short jeans, the type she knew her father despised.

On the sectional’s right arm sat Nyambe, a wiry woman in her fifties, ten years younger than Munda and nine months into her first full-time job as a nurse practitioner. For 18 years, she had been a homemaker. “She makes in the mid-six figures, you know,” Munda had told Manga in a tone trapped between pride and resentment. The revelation confirmed what everyone knew: his wife made more money than he earned as an associate human resource director. Yet, Munda was the boss of his home. All major purchases and decisions required his final approval. He paid perfunctory attention to pick-up, delivery, placement, and maintenance.

Almost as still as the other life forms, he sat in his favourite recliner adjacent to the sectional. With a cone head, pointed nose, and round glasses with a thick metal brow, he looked like a black, potbellied, and unsmiling Mahatma Gandhi. Unlike his colleagues who complained about their potbellies, he regarded his as a sign of maturity and wealth. In his neighbourhood, he was well-known for organising fundraisers and shipping books, toiletries, and packaged foods to Tenerians and other Africans in distress across the continent.

“How now?” Manga dropped into a leather accent chair opposite the sectional.

“They pissed in my cereal and forced me to slurp it,” Munda flung a folded sheet of typing paper at his friend. It landed softly on the brushed-gold Karastan area rug. Nyambe’s and Gitta’s eyes turned over, but they said nothing. They returned their attention to their phone screens. Manga eyed Munda but picked up the sheet of paper.

“Read it and see my wahala,” Munda tapped his knees.

Manga adjusted the sheet back and forth for the best reading position.