Free Yefon: The Red Necklace by Sahndra Dufe

finishlistening to the conversation. As we were preparing to leave, I heard my name sounded in a low voice.
    “Yefon! If I hear that you wandered off anywhere,” Ma warned, “I will kill you myself.”
    I curtsied politely and left.
    And just like that, because of Uncle Lavran, Pa became a contributor to the newly built Shisong Primary School. A school I would never be able to attend because I was a woman and that was what the tradition said.
    ”What have you done, Pa wan?” Ma pursued him, yelling. She clapped her hands and put them on her waist. “Lions have become
ngwv
∂
v
s.”
    Pa was silent. He stared at one point on the wall, and then eventually ordered firmly, “Leave me alone!”
    Ma went quiet. “Sorry, my husband,” she apologized and excused herself from Pa’s hut. Pa never beat his wives and children like other men that I knew. He believed in voicing one’s opinions, but Ma knew when to stop. I suppose she didn’t want to test his temper. Kadoh told me that in his youth, Pa’s temper was like a wild lion but he had calmed down with fatherhood.
    “I was thinking about taking adult classes,” Pa confided in me as soon as we were alone. “Your uncle says it will be good for my business.”
    I looked around to make sure he was speaking to me, and he was. The Nso people are a proud nation and Pa was no different. Just like most men in the Nso tribe those days, he was against the white people and their education. Unlike most tribes, we offered strong resistance to the white people when they came in with their ideas of civilization.
    “How can they say they want to civilize us,” I heard Pa say to Uncle Lavran while he was visiting once before Christmas when the dry season was at its peak. “Before the white man came, we already had a centralized government, a standing army, an executive, a legislature, and a police force. What do we need to learn from other civilizations?”
    Pa offered Uncle Lavran a bowl of bitter kola, a black kola with white insides, which tasted bitterer than the Nivaquine you get at the hospital when you have malaria. Uncle Lavran accepted the bowl and bit into it, his jaw tensing from the acerbity.
    “They predominantly want ascendancy over us,” Uncle Lawrence affirmed. That was Uncle Lawrence’s way of saying they wanted to control us. It made me wonder how he spoke to his wife at home. She was a hundred percent illiterate so how did they understand each other?
    I imagined she used his strong mastery of the English language as a bragging right amongst her friends.
    “It would appear that the colonialists have congregated in the Bali area,” Uncle Lawrence observed.
    “I hate the British,” Pa concluded and I soon started saying, “I hate the British” without understanding the meaning of what I was saying. What can I say? Children copy their parents! I also heard from my kind-of-reliable source, Kadoh, that as a young man, Pa was part of the mwerong standing army of the palace, and they had fought and driven away the first white nuns. The San Francisco sisters, I think they were called.
    I don’t know why he left the group and resorted to trade. He never explained any of his revolutionary days to me. Perhaps I was too young to understand.
    Pa eventually took a few months off from his business travels to Yola and went to adult school. I was happy because it was the first time since I was born that I had seen my Pa for more than a week, each month. He spent a lot of time with us, and for a moment, I actually liked my family.
    Story time was much more exciting! Ma didn’t beat me up as much, and Pa always took my siblings and me to the market. For a few months, no one fought in our house, not even Ya Buri.
    The first thing I noticed about Pa after he began classes was that he bought himself a white cotton shirt. As surprising as that was, I liked it.
    “Yefon, what do you think”? he asked me and all I could do was giggle.
    The next habit he cultivated was the use