HOW NANA OFORIWAA DIED

Within half an hour of their laying out Nana Oforiwaa on the long table in the entrance hall of her rest house, people began to gather, the prominent in the hallway itself, the ordinary people on the verandah, where they crowded around the door and flowed back onto the lawn, many still damp from the evening’s downpour.

Slowly word passed out to the search parties that at two o’clock in the morning were still scouring the valleys and ridges for the lost children. Wherever two or three people met confused words were exchanged: “Found? Who? Dead? Is it not her niece we are looking for?” So that later in the morning, after the sun had come up and the body had been taken away, when the children actually appeared on the main road, walking towards Aburi, nobody approached them; nobody said a word even as they arrived at the steps of the rest house.

All through the early hours of that Monday morning people had continued to gather: men who had been involved in the search parties, those woken from sleep, others who had seen lights on the road at that strange hour—whole families, the youngest holding on to their parents’ legs, eyes open but still sleeping. At one point the police corporal came from Nsawam, then left. A blanket was placed across the body, but still it lay there, in plain sight, for three hours, not because the thought of moving it didn’t occur to them, but because nobody dared.

At a little after five on Monday morning the schoolteacher arrived. Light had begun to gather beneath the horizon, and the sounds of the earth waking could be heard through the half-darkness, and through the restlessness which was growing among thos...