I was born at 37 Military Hospital in Accra in late August 1977.
On the day I was born, many people died.
Years later, my mother died in the same ward where she had brought me into the world.
The evening my mother died, the bats were already blackening the trees outside.
At Thirty-Seven, everybody knew the bats. They knew the hour better than the ward clocks. First a few dark shapes high in the branches, then hundreds, then so many the leaves seemed to disappear behind fur and folded wings. By the time visiting hours were almost over, the trees around the hospital looked burdened with a second night. Nurses passed beneath without looking up. Soldiers passed beneath without looking up. Relatives carrying flasks of soup, plastic bags of oranges, sachet water, soft bread for patients—everybody walked under them as if such things were ordinary.
My mother was the one watching.
She lay under the long row of louvre windows at Yaa Asantewaa ward, her face turned toward the trees, listening to the bats begin their evening racket.
“They were there that day too,” she said.
“What day?”
“The day you were born.”
She rested one hand on the bedrail and looked around the ward as if she had returned to a house she knew too well.
“Same ward,” she said softly. “Same windows. Same trees. This place remembers.”
Then she said, “On the day you were born, many people died.”
The complete story is available to signed-in readers after purchase. GHS 30 per story or GHS 100 for the six-story collection. Checkout availability is shown in the interactive reader.
