1957 Abakrampa, Ghana

Fanny Efua-Dontoh

1942

Abakrampa, Ghana

Interviewed on February 21, 2021

By Enyo Adoboe

Gone with the Wind. I think I was in my teens, early teens. I can’t remember the scenes, it’s just the name that I remember. I remember that somebody passed away and the mother and the child, you know, after the funeral moved away; they went somewhere else. I liked it. When I was young, the fact that I got to see the movie, I just loved it. I didn’t know not to like a movie. It’s only when I came here that I saw movies I liked and some that I don’t like because there’s always an education going on. 

I saw the movie in Ghana, in Abakrampa, but we saw one of my teachers. I went to help her in the house and then she…it was like a treat for me to sit down and watch the movie with her. That was in…I think 1957 or so. The teacher and her children were there with us. None of my classmates were. The teacher liked my parents, and I was very respectful and I was smart, so she told my parents, my mom, and I go to her house and then they come and pick me up later according to the time the teacher gave them. The title, it says Gone with the Wind, so that’s what I was hoping to see. It lived up to my expectations because I didn’t know any better. I just…I was excited, I was going to see who was taken by the wind.

They made some fried plantains with peanuts and we all ate together. I would go early noon, but I stayed longer. I think something happened and we cried. During the movie, there was a vulture or something. It was flying and landed on the house of the teacher and the children all ran outside to see what it was, so I went with them. The landing made a very big noise so we all went outside to see what was the noise. She had four children. In Ghana, the teachers, they teach all the subjects. 

The teacher was called Wood and her name just stuck with me, Miss Wood. Her kitchen floor, it wasn’t cemented, but they used mud to level the house. It was clean but it was muddy that it didn’t disturb you; the mud was dry. They had a big coal pot for charcoal and then where they used the wood, it’s like a little house where they kept it. When the fire was going down they asked me to go outside to bring more charcoal and more wood and I brought them with the daughter. I would go there quite often because they liked me and I liked them. I grew up, they come from Ebu, a town near Abakrampa, and they left. The woman went back home because her mother was very old so she went and stayed with her. 

Every time we would go, we went to see Gone with the Wind. They all liked it; the neighbors liked it and sometimes the neighbors would come. It was a system they adopted with each other. If the woman is going somewhere, she sends her children to that woman and vice versa. It was fun. I went there once with Rose. We closed from church, it was Sundays, and then we went with the teacher.

Sometimes we eat fried fish and kenkey. I liked the kenkey and fried fish. Because I was familiar with it, that’s why I ate it. The teacher was a little bit afraid of my mother so she wouldn’t give me anything that I would go and report on. The school and the church were in the same area. The walk to her house was about 5-10 mins from the church. We watched in the living room. They had the family pictures there, dresses, and stuff like that. It’s a very neat house, if not my mother would not let me go there. The teacher sews the children’s clothes. The community was very close. Everybody knows everybody. So that’s why the children can’t misbehave because the parents relay to each other. Something I remembered, the woman, she prepares beads and sells them, so I got a nice necklace with earrings.