AN EXPERIENCE I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE AGAIN
If you have not experienced a public disgrace during which you are regarded as an outcast and a bastard by the people of the community which you had always regarded as yours, you may not know the import of what happened to me. I was brought up among the people of a tribe called Tango in The Gambia. My mother belonged to this tribe and I had lived all my life among the people. I grew up to know everything a child needed to know about the people and at the age of nineteen,I was initiated into the cult of adulthood as the tradition of the people demanded.
I lived with my mother and her brother who I had always thought was my biological father. I behaved like an adult from the tribe of my mother and I related with other adults of my age until one day an incident happened which made me realize that I did not belong to the tribe.
Wuse was a girl that I had loved all my life. I knew her when she was a little child and we grew up together to love each other. We were so intimate that all the people in our community knew that we were made for each other. I had even proposed to her and there was a plan to make my intention to marry her known to her family. Wuse was, no doubt, a charming lady who had become suddenly the cynosure of all eyes in the community.
One day, my mother called me and told me that I could not marry it Wuse because the son of the king was planning marry her. I was annoyed with my mother, and I promised to fight out even if the whole community was in support to plan of the son of the king to marry Wuse.
I was summoned to the King's palace and warned to stop visiting Wuse. I was not frightened by the King's warning as I was resolute in my decision to marry Wuse, even if it demanded that I flouted the king's order. This caused a lot of furore in the community, and the elders in the community called me one day to tell me that I should forget the idea of marrying Wuse because a bastard who did not belong to the community could not stand against the wish of the king.
The pronouncement of the elders of the community made me to go back home in annoyance. I called my mother and demanded to know who I was. She told me that her brother who I had been regarding as my father was not my biological father and that my real father was a Nigerian who came to The Gambia to trade, and that soon after my birth, he decided to leave me behind and went back to Nigeria.
She told me his name and gave me his picture, and soon after the search for my father began. I traveled down to Nigeria and started the search for my father in the eastern part of the country where he came from. I was fortunate to see him after a long search. You can imagine how happy I was when I finally met him. He had grown so old and senile that to stand up was no longer easy. But his facial appearance and physical features gave him out as my father. He was happy to see me and so were his people who welcomed me as they would welcome a lost son. What an experience! But unfortunately, my father died in the evening of the same day while holding me in his arms, almost suffocating me with his fatherly warmth. On the day he was buried, I looked up the sky and wept. I missed his warm embrace of the previous day; it was an experience I would have loved to have again.