La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono

Author:Trifonia Melibea Obono
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932245
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

CELEBRATION

Three days later, everything was ready for me to start working. At the beginning of this century, the population of Equatorial Guinea that lived near Gabon survived thanks to trade, especially with the district of Akurenam. Huge plantations of sugarcane, yucca, corn, malanga, and all kinds of foodstuffs were sold in the French-speaking country. Everyone had to earn money, and I certainly had earned it after all I’d been through!

I was to carry a basket with a container of malamba on my back from Ebian, along with other girls and boys. Selling malamba was so profitable that even Fang men carried baskets of it as well, even though they considered doing so women’s work. My mother’s sister prepared twenty liters of malamba and assured me that I could sell it for 3,000 francs. Such a sum was the same as a million francs back then. It was a lot of money for a girl my age.

I went to work, thinking of how much fun it would be to spend that money with Dina and how I could use it to bribe some family member to tell me where I could find my father. I also planned to bring back a gift for Uncle Marcelo. Although I already knew exactly how I wanted to spend my earnings, my mother’s sister upset my plans by making a list of what I was to buy: all cosmetics, to turn me into a normal woman. And the rest would be set aside for my grandmother.

The work itself was much harder than I’d expected. I thought that we would reach our destination in two or three hours after we left town. If only! We walked for the entire day, across rivers both big and small and through forests barely touched by traditional agriculture, where animals watched us and seemed to laugh at us before running away.

I was especially afraid of the rivers. We had to walk across narrow tree trunks to get to the other side; one had to be a tightrope walker not to fall. I was so nervous that I always crossed in the middle of the group so that, if I fell, someone would be nearby to help me.

At six thirty in the afternoon we reached Oveng, a town that seemed much too large to be located in the middle of the forest with no connecting roads. I was surprised to see that many homes had generators and that there were even bars and nice restaurants, and a lot of glamour, all of which indicated the presence of the Gabonese. On the streets I heard words like bonjour, monsieur, bon voyage, instead of Spanish.

The town of Oveng was a symbol of Gabon’s wealth—a prosperity I hoped to share in myself after the long walk in the dark along that route my companions knew by heart. We had crossed the jungle like animals, in total darkness, with just a lantern to guide us—but only in an emergency, like if someone fell. Some of us even walked barefoot the whole way, and everyone but me had wounds on their back.

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