The kitchen is warm. You’ve spent the entire day trying to cook waakye like the one your mother used to make. You never stayed with her long enough to learn her process from start to finish, but you thought you knew the basics… or so you thought.
You know the cowpeas have to be soaked overnight and pre-cooked for about half an hour. Then, when the beans are soft, just soft, not overly soft, you add the rice. But somewhere along the way, your calculations went wrong. Something is missing, though you can’t quite put your finger on it.
You miss your mother, not only on these days when you miss her food. You miss her during your morning devotions when you sit alone. You miss her when you need someone to comment on your uniform before you leave for work. You miss her when you have to sit all alone in the living room at night to listen to your favourite program on the radio about exorcism.
Your lives were once perfect. She had retired early at fifty-five, wanting to spend her time doing what she loved most: moulding things out of clay. It was her lifelong dream, one she hadn’t pursued in her youth because her own mother assured her that, in this part of the world, art couldn’t pay the bills. Convinced to take a more “practical” path, she studied business and accounting, eventually working as an accountant at a bank for over three decades. She even secured a job for you as a teller before she retired. She had always been self-sufficient, never asking for your financial support once you started earning.
She had enough, until the diagnosis. Diabetes. It wasn’t the hospital bills that drained her finances; it was the pastors. The kind who sold palm kernel oil at exorbitant prices, claiming it could cure any disease when used in cooking, or special body soaps that had to be applied on the legs and forehead before bed. You marvelled at her energy for these so-called miracle-working churches. She attended every fasting and prayer session they organized, throwing herself into forty-day programs for desperate believers like her. She made checklists of pastors to consult and “directions” to follow before each week ended.
One pastor even told her that someone close to her was responsible for her illness. She told you this and, astonishingly, asked if you might be the one. Her question wasn’t sarcastic. She truly wanted to know. You could only cry. How could a pastor plant such thoughts in her mind? How could she believe such absurdities? You began to wonder if her illness had affected the part of her brain responsible for reason.
What didn’t you say? What advice didn’t you offer as a good son who wanted only the best for his mother? What more could you have done?
You spent countless nights talking to yourself, replaying every decision, wondering if there was something, anything, you could have done differently.
When a colleague claimed to have seen your mother on television at one of these churches, carrying a bag of stones as the congregation prayed for the stones to turn into David’s weapon against Goliath, you denied it. You insisted it must have been someone who merely resembled her.
Your mother visited all the miracle churches, handed over large sums of money, and came home unchanged, or worse. When you begged her to focus on her medication instead of chasing false promises, she compared herself to Job and called you one of his persecutors. It broke your heart. You hated seeing her suffer, but you hated those pastors even more for manipulating her faith and trust.
Eventually, the illness won. After she was hospitalized, they amputated one leg. Then the other. Unable to attend church anymore, she prayed fervently from her hospital bed. The nurses and doctors noticed her constant prayers when she wasn’t moaning in pain.
Her condition worsened. Diabetes escalated to typhoid, anaemia, and hypertension. None of the treatments worked. It was clear, even inevitable, that she wouldn’t survive.
You hated seeing her like that: weak, suffering, defeated. You wished you could take away her pain, even just a fraction of it. But all you could do was watch as she lay in that hospital bed, a Bible beside her, whispering prayers when the pain subsided. Until finally, she passed.
Now, you miss her—her strength, her faith, her unwavering love. You miss the way she’d hold your chin and say, “Tell your inner man that you can do this,” whenever you faced a challenge. You miss the way she called you ‘Mempaa’ because you looked so much like your grandfather.
Aha! You remember the thing you have missed all along. You have to add saltpeter to the beans just before you add the rice. Smiling through your tears, you set out to cook another batch, and this time you are quite sure it will work out.
** My failed attempt at cooking waakye in 2018 inspired this piece. Hehe 🙂
