Novels

SYNOPSIS: RAIN ON MY LEOPARD SPOTS

Rain on my Leopard Spots is a coming of age story, set in the little country of Ghana on the West Coast of Africa. Ghana achieved independence from Britain in 1957, and the first Europeans who arrived on the coast were so astonished at the amount of gold they found that they called the land the Gold Coast. The country is rich in minerals, the people are rich in history, and therefore the culture is a curious mix of the traditional with overtones of western influence.  Abena Adu, through whose eyes the story is told, is born to a large family with traditional royal lineage. Her
mother and father are modern Ghanaians however, raising her in the capital city of Accra, while taking her on regular trips to the village to mould her in the traditional ways.

In the prologue, we are taken back to the birth of Abena in a dark hospital room in the capital city of Accra just a decade after independence. The unimaginable hope that Ghanaians feel after having their freedom handed over to them is becoming more and more of a mirage. Infrastructure is crumbling, rebel soldiers are taking over, and all hell seems to have broken loose. Abena’s birth is significant for the three people in the room: her father, her mother and her grandmother,
and throughout the story, each will pin certain hopes on this child. Can she live up to these to these hopes? Whose will be the hardest to live up to?

We are happy for Abena when her family moves to England, and she finally makes friends. Her brother Yaw is in her school, and together they stand up to racial bullies and their taunts, show off their athletic skills and make lifelong friends. One of these friends is Bronwyn Radford. Bronwyn is white and is her saviour during an awful bus ride – where sardine sandwiches play a significant role – to a sports game. As Abena navigates issues of race, some too deep for a six year old, she wonders how long the feeling of being different will have to last. Not being allowed to take part in the school’s annual nativity play, despite knowing the entire play, is a blow she seems destined to never recover from. And, the reason will leave you dumbfounded as it did Abena’s father, Emmanuel Adu. At the end of their third year in England, when Abena is nine, the family goes back home to a place where he hopes, “ it’ll be an even playing field” for his children.

What Abena doesn’t realize is that something happened to her in England. She is no longer as black as she used to be; some whiteness has crept in. She tries her best to mask this when the family arrives in Ghana by striving to learn the local language. She has an ally in her grandmother, Nana, a woman with a mission to train this child to take her royal place. Nana is Abena’s grandmother, the matriarch of the family and key, it seems, to all mysteries. Nana was born ‘when the rains fell’, which technically makes it impossible to guess her age; the rains in Ghana fall without fail every year between April and July! As a child, Abena is irritated by Nana’s constant use of proverbs but as a teenager, she finds that tuning her out is an easily learned art. Her refusal to do any housework usually elicits this proverb from Nana: “My child, learn to cook, for you cannot eat your beauty”. And when she quarrels with her siblings (by this time, three of them: Yaw, Es & Kojo), she always hears the one about the stubborn chicken who learned its lesson in a hot bowl of soup. She finds it weird though that whenever she feels sad and retreats into her shell, Nana always finds her and reminds her that ‘rains fall on the leopard’s skin but it doesn’t wash out the spots’. In that state of mind, this proverb is the most confusing of all and Abena is at a loss to understand it. A military coup is the most destabilizing event in
Abena’s life by the time she is ready for high school. Overnight it seems, all food disappears from store shelves, and many families, including her own are reduced to having one full meal a day. Abena’s mother Emma, goes through a heart-wrenching episode where she loses all the money the family has, and has to face the children and tell them there is no food. During this time, her father Emmanuel, working in England is separated from the family by work and when the military government bars all flights from leaving or entering Ghana, the family is torn apart
for several years. He has to endure short phone conversations with them, hearing how hungry they are. The phone lines are so raspy from disuse that they sound hungry themselves. However, Abena’s childhood is idyllic in many regards. She attends boarding school and in her first year, grade 7, loses all her underwear in the first semester. As she matures and discovers boys in grade 9, she miraculously has more underwear than she now wants! In a bid to attract more boys, she joins the cadet corps and faints on the parade ground but shrugs the embarrassment away when she hears that she was ‘air lifted’ by four hunks from grade eleven. By the time she is ready for the major exam that all Ghanaian students have to take in grade twelve, she has had her fair share of lecherous male teachers; many have approached her selling a good grade for a night with her. When she shares this information with Nana, the response is “There are no short cuts to the top
of the palm tree”. Needless to say, Abena is clueless.

Abena grows up to become a successful biochemist, researching in North America and enjoying the benefits of her international upbringing. Nana’s death, while Abena is away from Ghana, hits her hard and sends her on a tailspin that no one seems to be able to draw her out from. She shuns what one would call her blackness, seeing no point in ever going back to Ghana despite the fact
that her parents are both alive and living there. She dates many men of different races – Jewish- American, Australian, Nigerian, and African-American and finds that with the break up of every relationship, she hates herself even more. One of these relationships leaves her a shell of her former self. In the deepest moments of her despair, like the prodigal son, she musters up enough courage to decide that the only thing left to do, that might bring her redemption, is to visit Nana’s grave. To do this though, she has to go back to Ghana.

Abena returns to Ghana after fifteen years of having meticulously purged the essence of her heritage from her royal self. What she finds is at once a relief as well as a burden. Some things have changed and others have stayed the same. As she opens this door to her life, she is able to realize that Nana’s proverbs always had a deeper meaning. When she was admonished to learn to cook because she couldn’t eat her beauty, Nana was warning her that looks don’t last. Her stubbornness would get her into trouble was what Nana meant when she told the proverb about
the stubborn chicken getting its come-uppance in the hot soup. Abena is shocked to find that while she thought she was tuning the old woman out, she was, in fact, embracing wisdom. She is now ready to understand Nana’s legacy; that of purpose embodied in the proverb of the leopard’s spots. She had been born with purpose and no matter what ‘rains’ fell on her, that purpose would always be there.

She just had to come back to the place where it all began…and claim her inheritance.