Tag: Fiction
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The confinement
I did not know the couple were childless. I had assumed they were recently married. And so when I got the mild rebuke to stop being friendly towards the children on the compound, it made no sense to me. “This is my spiritual father. He came all the way from Mali to attend my wedding.”…
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The road to Damascus -page 3/100
I still remember the first day of class. Used money I was supposed to save, to buy myself fine clothes and shoes, and a new phone. I hadn’t updated my closet in years. That was what I told myself. And it was true. But the real motive sitting at the bottom of my heart was…
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strange times
It all started with village folktales. Of ghosts loitering in the silence of midnight, stalking a wandering stranger or a lone recalcitrant youth returning home late. As mother lowered the wick of the lantern, the darkness in the room loomed large. I shut my eyes tight, careful to not think about dark tales of the…
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The road to Damascus -page 2/100
News from home. Father has been transferred. To pastor a new church. In another town many miles away. Perhaps we should be happy. But we have no reason to be. It’s just a change from one problem to the same problem wearing a different face. In accompanying our father on his missions, we see how…
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Sunday night drama
I turned to find mother crying. I did not understand why. But I always kept the incident in my heart, together with the storyline of the movie we were watching that day. When I was a child, every Sunday night there was this programme on television by name “Akan Drama”. It happened that on one…
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Her name is Samira -part 2
Genuinely, I meant every promise I made. But fate was bent on testing every alphabet in my words. It all started with the withholding of my salary over some friction I had with the secretary. He made some deductions from my salary because I was absent without permission. I explained that I was too ill…
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Her name is Samira
My weakness was that I couldn’t be discreet. Which was why when I fell in love with the cook, the affair was like an open secret. Was it love? I couldn’t tell what label to put on a mixture of lust, loneliness and desperation. She didn’t resist my advances, neither did she give me the…
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fishing in new waters
Flies. They wouldn’t let the sores of a dog be. And the poor dog is forced to stay in motion to ward them off, all along jerking, flicking, tossing its head -all the frantic head shakes its creative mind could conjure. And yet, the savage flies pursue with renewed sadistic zeal. The dog stops and…
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they’ll see you rise
like the sun they’ll see you risethe fake, foes and fraudsters who sawyou weep, crawl and beg will falltheir faces abraded likemetal gods scrubbed with wire gauze here, no vest is bulletproofjust bodies taking in bulletstill they feel tipsy and staggeran unsettling truthmakes the most vocal stutter but this is the furnace in which the…
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We always smell it from afar
Back then, we knew nothing about sexual harassment. All we knew was that teacher Musah loved Mansa and we all envied her whenever she walked about the school head high like a princess. Many ugly girls in the school winced at the thought of not having half her beauty. That Mansa was a minor, we…
