The Will To Evolve

The Will To Evolve by KuamiTunez

​​Amina loved the rivers and the serenity of the forest which surrounded her. She used to come here as a child to play with her friends. How happy they all were! These days, whenever her legs carry her here, she doesn’t meet any of the faces she used to come here with. Is it because they all grown up now and too matured to come? Is it because they’re all busy working or helping their parents or married and taking care of their families? Amina comes from the Northern part of Ghana. Not just the north but the upper north if you know what I mean…

​Amina is the last girl of a family of eight, with three brothers and two sisters. As far as she can remember, the last of his brothers went to school while the two sisters she came after stayed home. She never bothered to ask until she was eight, by then, one of her sisters, obviously the older one, had been married to a man with already five wives. Amina couldn’t fathom why her brother was the only one who went to school. She noticed also that all the boys who played with them in the moonlight every evening went to school. The only women or girls she assumed to have any knowledge they acquired in school was the community nurse and the women who came to visit their families from the South. Gods, did they not look all ravishing whenever they came during the Eid bearing gifts and speaking some little bits of English and a strange, but familiar language?! Amina sat with his brother whenever he returned from school and pestered him until he taught her what he had been taught in school that particular day. With time, Amina began to pick up some tricks here and there.

​The question of why the boys were the only ones going to school still lingered on Amina’s mind and she was determined to get it off. One evening, as the family sat by the fire in front of their house, or hut, whatever, their father told them a story about his youth. After he was done and they all drank, the men with the wine, and the women and children with water, Amina spoke up. “Baba, why is that girls aren’t allowed to go to school like our brothers?’’ Psttt…hmph…humph… it seems the sounds weren’t the only things directed at her. She looked around the small circle as all eyes turned towards her. Her father’s eyes lasted on her only for a while and then it turned on her mother. “Hajia, you haven’t had this talk with your daughter?”, he barked. “No Baba”, Hajia mused. “I better do it myself then. Amina, girls aren’t allowed in schools because their going to school doesn’t yield any fruitful results. At the end of the day, they’ll be married and serve their husbands. Educating women will practically have no remuneration.” Baba explained. “What about the community nurse Baba?” Amina asked. “She is not one of us Amina, she is from the South and the customs and beliefs of her people are different from ours.” Baba replied. From that day forward, Amina’s tutoring was cut short much to her chagrin.

​Amina, unwaveringly, went to see the community nurse. She explained to the nurse her willingness to learn like the boys did in schools and how her father said that the education had no valuable contribution to society. The nurse decided to teach Amina, continuing from where she had left off with his brother. Some days later, Amina heard that the nurse had been transferred and that it’d be a long time before they get a replacement for her. She couldn’t stand to tell Amina herself so she wrote her a letter which she read with the help of her brother pointing out that Amina’s life was in her own hands and that she had the power to tune her life in a direction she deemed fit. As though that news wasn’t bad enough, Amina was to marry her betrothed, a man who had children older than Amina herself.

​She heard stories. Were they good stories? Were they bad ones? Girls run from their betrothed and went South. Did they go South to study? Did they go to work? Some run with the boys they loved. Did they make it down there? Amina contemplated on these things as she listened to Salia tell her about the ‘women who came home for Eid looking ravishing and speaking that strange but familiar language, which Amina found out later to be Twi’. They had all left and gone down South. Of course, some didn’t come back home. It was believed that they became the bad women of the city and couldn’t return home. Some who came back home were rejected by their families simply because they travelled South, didn’t help the family fulfil its promise by marrying the betrothed. Will this be the consequence for Amina if she decided to travel down with Salia who was convincingly talking Amina into this?

​A week before Amina’s nikah (wedding) or rather what was supposed to be her nikah, she sneaked into the night with Salia and a couple of other teenage girls she knew in their village and went to wait for the bus bound for Kejetia. The bus plied that route only once a day and at night. They waited in front of a shed for the bus to arrive from the next town. The bus picked them up and travelled further down south as Amina looked out the window. How she wished they had left during the day so she could enjoy the sights of the countryside. Unfortunately for the occupants of the bus, they were ambushed and attacked by robbers on the highway. In fear for his life, the driver pulled over and the robbers ordered everyone down. It didn’t take long for Amina to realize that the robbers outnumbered the men they’d travelled with so there wasn’t any chance of… well, anything. After taking almost everything they had, they had their way with the teenage girls aboard. Amina stared up into the dark sky amidst tears as her whole body turned numb with pain. Was this a good idea after all? Had the nurse and Salia led Amina down a dark path?

​Arriving on the streets of Kejetia, the only thing that rang in Amina’s head was ‘you have the power to tune your life in the direction you seem fit’. Amina and her compatriots lodged their sisters who had travelled down South some years past. Most of them were porters while a handful of them were street hawkers. Amina decided to stick with the latter and started selling handkerchiefs and gum. It wasn’t a particular profitable trade but Amina made do with it. As and when she could, she made sure to save a little. Later, she switched to selling yoghurt. That one was better than the gums and handkerchiefs, at least. When she’d saved enough, she enrolled in a sewing class with Salia. She attended the class in the mornings and hawked the streets in the afternoons till evening.

​Around the time when she’d almost completed her apprenticeship, Amina found out that she was a few months pregnant. Abort it! Keep it! were the two contrasting ideas which waged not only in her head but also around her for her sisters also had different opinions on what she should do with her child. In the end, Amina resolved to have the baby. Proceeds from her own sewing business she opened up helped her in catering for herself and her unborn child. At the end of the nine months, Amina gave birth to a healthy baby girl with bushy eyebrows and named her Rashida after her own mother.

​As it churned out, having a child at such a young age was truly hectic. Amina battled to keep herself and her child aloft amidst the difficulties they encountered. The sewing business continued and when she’d saved enough, she invested in other trades. Amina couldn’t go to school as she planned when she was travelling South but did that mean that Rashida couldn’t? At stake was her daughter’s education so Amina worked very hard and made sure her daughter went to school. ‘Your life is in your own hands and you have the power to tune it in any direction you deem fit, Rashida’, Amina did not only tell this to her daughter but also herself.

​I met Rashida in our first year of medical school at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and she told me this story. She continued that she and Amina will travel North when she graduated. Will Amina and her daughter be rejected by their family? Or will they be received with open arms and warm smiles?


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