K1 – Koo, what’s the most painful thing a woman has ever said to you?
K2 – I don’t remember! Do you expect me to be so stupid as to collect insults and save them in a book whose cover bears the inscription: “Don’t drift! Cultivate thrift?”
• Ei, you remember that from your Post Office Savings Book of so many years ago?
• Yep! I had four shillings and twopence in it at the time I stopped saving!
• Why did you stop saving?
• The guinea fowl eggs were particularly delicious that season!
• Ei! You remember “ansaa wuɔ”?
• Of course! In fact, we used to use the eggs as “payment” when we were playing draughts. If you won five games, your opponent gave you one guinea fowl egg. Better than threepence in cash!
• Hahahaha village life in those days! Draughts and guinea fowl eggs!
• But aren’t you a Number One ‘Swerver’? I ask you about the most painful thing a woman ever said to you and you take me to one of the most pleasurable pursuits in village life – victory at draughts, rewarded with guinea fowl eggs!
• By the way, where did those eggs come from? You would be sitting your somewhere trying to alleviate the dryness wrought on your skin by Harmattan, when, out of nowhere, you’d hear the cry on the streets, “Ansaa wulɔ eeee—ei!”
• I think there was a network of traders who operated in the big towns: Accra, Koforidua, Suhum, Nsawam and so on. These networks imported the eggs in bulk from the North, and shelled them out to young girls they employed as “agents”, all over the country when the “season” arrived!
• Those young girls! Chasing them was almost as delectable as the eggs they sold.
• Ei, so you were into that, too?
• Well, it wasn’t easy, but there were ways. “Come for the money later!” (whispered so that no-one but the egg-seller would hear it!) And village houses were not difficult to find!
• Hmmm. What pleasant memories the mention of ansaa wuɔ stirs in one’s brain.
• So what was that painful memory you began with? It wasn’t something said to you by one of those sweet egg-girls, was it?
• No! This was an educated, “fair lady” I’d been wooing for quite some time. Lunch. Cinema. Musical event – you know?
• And…?
• Well, one day, I thought I’d done enough ground work as to – you know – be allowed to … to… climb Mount Vesuvius!
• And she tripped you on the Mountaintop?
• Not quite.
• You mean she didn’t trip you and watch you fall into the valley below?
• Well, the effect was just as depressing as that. But actually, it was worse. If she’d merely tripped me, I would have got up and brushed the leaves off my clothing.
• But?
• It was not a physical assault!
• You mean that the effects of what she did could not be wiped off with a shrug and “Oh! Too bad if you don’t feel like it?
• NO! She just looked me up and down…!
• And she said?
• And she said…
• “How dare you!!?
• Nope!
• “I don’t like that?”
• No!
• Go and try that on someone else?
• No!
• I give up! Are there so many ways by which a woman can reject a would-be suitor?
• Depends on what sort of woman she was, doesn’t it?
• Well, what sort of woman was she?
• She was well read, man. She could talk for an hour non-stop, to justify baffling things such as Rosalind’s occasionally coquettish behaviour in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”…
• What?
• Yes!
• And she could quote verbatim and explain – word by word – huge chunks of Portia’s speech in The Merchant of Venice…You know, “The quality of mercy is not strained…” and that sort of thing! How do you “strain mercy? She could!
• Gee-whizz!
• Yeah. So just imagine her looking at me, with testosterone oozing through my pores, trying to draw her bosom to mine, and she looking at me up and down, and coldly intoning:”…In your
dreams!”
• Blimey! Is that what she said?
• Yep! But it wasn’t what she said that cut me down to the size of an ant. No; it was the way and manner she said it! It was as if I was worth absolutely nothing; someone who would only be able to get a person like her in his dreams! I began to understand why some men go and hang themselves when a woman rejects them. There’s nothing quite like it. Love or – lust – makes a man completely vulnerable and at that point in his life, a woman’s behaviour towards him and the words she uses to express her feelings, get imprinted on his mind for ever. His self-confidence can be shattered for life!
• Wow! But you’ve never looked like a man on whom a woman’s feet have trampled?
• Well, that’s what makes a man a man, isn’t it? There’s a word in English that expresses it precisely – resilience! Man is equipped with enough psychological power to overcome a woman’s rejection, find another woman, and if he ever meets the “rejector” in the company of his new acquisition, say to her (not with words but with his manner) “Look – I didn’t get this one in my dreams. Come touch her – she IS REAL!
(BOTH MEN LAUGH): HAHAHAHAHAHA!
By Cameron Duodu