Akua Homegoing Quotes

Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.

Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.

They were locked into either arm, head resting on either breast. Their cries were soundless, but Akua could see the sound, floating out of their mouths like puffs of smoke from the fetish man’s favored pipe. Akua had the urge to hold them, and she reached out her hands to them. Her hands caught fire, but she touched them still. Soon she cradled them with her own burning hands, playing with the braided ropes of fire that made up their hair, their coal-black lips. She felt calm, happy even, that the firewoman had found her children again at last. And

You are a sinner and a heathen," he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. "Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and heathen, like you." Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated. "All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.

She looked familiar, and Akua wanted to ask her questions. She wanted to know if the firewoman knew the white man who had been burned. If everyone touched by fire was a part of the same world. If

Akua didn’t respond. For nearly ten years, she had filled the Missionary’s hunger. Now she wanted to attend to her own.

It did not begin as obroni. It began as two words. Abro ni." "Wicked man?" Akua said. The fetish man nodded. "Among the Akan he is wicked man, the one who harms. Among the Ewe of the Southeast his name is Cunning Dog, the one who feigns niceness and then bites you".

You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua.

Am I wicked?" the fetish man asked, and Akua didn't know how to answer. That first day she had met him, when he had given her the kola nut, the Missionary had come out and seen her with him. He had snatched her hand and pulled her away and told her not to talk to fetish men. They called him a fetish man because he was, because he had not given up praying to the ancestors or dancing or collecting plants and rocks and bones and blood with which to make his fetish offerings. He had not been baptized. She knew he was supposed to be wicked, that she would be in a sea of trouble if the missionaries knew she still went to see him, and yet she recognized that his kindness, his love, was different from the people's at the school. Warmer and truer somehow. "No, you're not wicked," she said. "You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.

By nightfall, Akua was afraid to speak. She crouched in the corner of the hut, praying to every god she had ever known. The Christian God whom the missionaries had always described in terms both angry and loving.