So, let’s begin with my conception, which is rife with controversy.

I was born to Miss Fafa Brese in a small hospital somewhere in the Central Region. And yeah, there’s a reason why I mentioned only the name of my mother.

Because I don’t know who my father is. Never have, and I may probably never find out who he is.

Why, you might be asking? Let’s put it this way. Have you ever heard of that phenomenon in a certain part of Ghana where some girls give up their virginity for the cheapest of things?

Yeah. My mother was one of those girls, and that is how I was conceived. Apparently, my father, who was a student of one of the secondary schools around, encountered my mother one evening while he sought for an outlet to unleash his carnal desires upon. She asked what he had to give her in exchange for it.

He had ten thousand cedis and a bar of Dove soap. And yeah, that’s the old ten thousand cedis.

That was all it took. He gave her the money and the soap, she let him have his way with her, and he left afterwards.

And that was it. She never saw him again. And once I was conceived, she had no idea how to identify him. They met in some corner bi in the evening, and he was not wearing an identifiable uniform, so she couldn’t even tell which school he was from.

It’s worth mentioning that my mother was about sixteen years old when this happened. So when she and her parents discovered that I had arrived in her womb, it was absolute carnage.

At least, that’s what she told me. She said her parents were absolutely furious. They could not believe she went and opened her legs for one of these secondary students. She said she never told them what he gave her in exchange for the sex, because that would have just worsened the matter completely.

They blasted her, insulted her, did all the things a set of angry parents would do. But thankfully, the topic of abortion was wiped off the table as soon as it was raised. It was my mother who, in a flood of tears, asked if she should abort it. My grandparents instantly shut it down, telling her she had already been stupid enough, and there was no point in furthering that stupidity by doing that.

Yeah, they were in serious savage mode, as far as I was told.

So she went through the whole nine month period of pregnancy with ‘support’ from her parents. I have to use that term loosely because as I’ve said, they were very, very angry with her, so the support was that obligatory kind. You know, they helped out because she’s their daughter, not because they couldn’t wait to welcome me into the world.

Eventually, in the fullness of time, I was born, and my grandfather immediately took up the responsibility of naming me. Since my father’s identity was unknown, I was given my mother’s family’s name. Mawuli Brese was what he settled on, and that became my identity.

So, now that I had officially been born, you might be wondering how my grandparents reacted toward me.

Well… let’s just say that the little memories that come to mind aren’t exactly fond ones.

I mean, they took care of me. There’s no doubt about that. But if you’re asking whether they loved me and were delighted to have their grandson in spite of it all… the answer is no.

In their eyes, I was nothing but a reminder of the stupidity of their daughter in letting some stranger have sex with her without even knowing his name. I might have been a baby, but they weren’t exactly fond of me. With what they confessed to me at a much older age, they tolerated my existence. To them, I was that grandson they were forced to have, not the grandson they were ready to have.

So yeah, my grandmother bathed me, fed me… all the necessities. But she barely sang to me, played with me, or took special pictures with me. When people saw me with her or my grandfather, they proclaimed I was their grandchild with this nonchalant, uncaring disposition. They didn’t show any joy whatsoever in having me around. In fact, as I entered that toddler stage we like to call the ‘terrible twos’, their tolerance levels pretty much dropped.

You know how kids at that age can get so troublesome, and you need to be as firm as possible while being tender with them, right? My grandparents basically tossed the ‘tender’ part aside when it came to me.

Beatings? Oh, I received them. Coupled with the harshest of insults.

I’ve got the faintest of memories, and they admitted to me, that they used to really whip my behind any time I got naughty. Since my mother was being made to do private classes somewhere after dropping out of school, they took care of me more than she did. And apparently, she used to get very upset with them whenever she saw the effects of their discipline. She was silent for a bit, but soon went ahead and confronted them one evening.

It wasn’t pleasant.

I was around two years at the time. I was playing with a small ball, just kicking it about and ‘happying’ myself, as we like to say. I went and kicked the ball at the coalpot on which my grandmother was preparing some soup.

Yeah, even I’m cringing at the thought of it.

When my grandmother saw the pot lying on the floor, the spilt soup, the overturned coalpot and the ball next to it… hmmm. In her own words, ‘she served me with a taste of hell’.

Beatings be what? I really got a whipping at her hands, coupled with some really damaging insults.

“Useless boy! Little demon! Son of satan! You think you can come and kill me? You are mad! Stupid child!”

It was ruthless. And I was still crying when my mother returned from class.

At that point, she felt the silence out of respect for her mother was enough, and she went and confronted her. Quite aggressively.

Like I said, it wasn’t pleasant. My grandmother still hadn’t forgiven my mother for everything, and so you can imagine how disrespectful it felt to her to get confronted like that. It descended into a war of words, then fisticuffs.

And my grandmother, who had quite a heavy build, beat her up fair and square. It wasn’t a fight, it was a beatdown, and the older woman was not the one on the end of it.

It was such an ugly day in that house. My grandfather came home, heard about what had happened, and descended upon my mother, whipping the absolute daylight out of her.

And as if the physical abuse wasn’t enough, they then unleashed the nastiest of words on her.

“Hopeless fool! This is how you repay us?”

“After going to sell yourself for some stranger and we’ve take you like that, this is how you talk to us?”

“Idiot!”

“Shameless girl!”

Chale. It really was an ugly day. And it was the day that my mother’s relationship with her parents was ruined.

From that day onward, they barely spoke to her, and she barely spoke to them. They stopped paying for her classes, so now she had to come and sit home. They officially stopped caring for me, and left all the work to her. I mean, the atmosphere became so strange and eerie and… uncomfortable. Even as a toddler, I felt it.

It was evident in the way my grandparents glared at me whenever they set their eyes on me. The way my mother quickly pulled me away from them when I attempted to walk toward them. The way she strongly warned me not to go near them at a point.

Extremely toxic atmosphere.

Eventually, the old folks got tired of having to share their space with a daughter they were not ready to talk to. So an uncle from Tema was called and ordered to ‘come and take this girl from our house’.

Two days later, the uncle drove from Tema to Edinaman to come for us. It was apparently a very quick and wordless exit; my mother didn’t say a word to her parents as she took her stuff from the room and placed them in the pick-up. They didn’t lift a finger to help. Nothing.

In no time flat, my mother had taken me into the car, and we were out of that simple structure we had called home.

This is just an introduction, and most of this is pretty much based on what I heard from my mother while growing up, and my grandparents when I visited them a while after I got born again. So this chapter is… reliable hearsay, I guess?

Haha, anyways, let’s move to the major part of the story. The part where I’m telling you exactly what I experienced.

Because, folks, the real juice is in the part where we went to the Greater Accra region…

Well, that’s a serious genesis Mawuli had. Not the happiest childhood. Let’s find out what happened once they left the Central Region…