Lost In Thought

The story recounts the life of old Mensa (as he came to be affectionately known not because he was aged but because of his sagacious skill in arbitration).

As a child, Mensa lived with his father, Old Anan, his mother, his brother(Tete) and his sister in the village of Botoi and he seem to run into one trouble or another and was sent off to live with his “uncle – teacher”(Mr. Lomo) in Accra to be trained to be a “Christian gentleman”.
However, this was not to be as Mr. Lomo soon realized that Mensa was “ingenuous and spoke freely like an uneducated boy from an uneducated village” and it was with this attitude he grew up which earned him friends and foes though both factions admitted he was a man of integrity.


Several themes run through the book of which I will highlight a few.

Hypocrisy: Mensa’s village, Botoi is touted a “Christian village” yet the seemingly influential members of the village are hypocritical. One such character is Ataa Quarshi (the church bell-man). He is a meddlesome interloper with a holier-than-thou veneer and is revered in the town by all yet is exposed after an encounter with Mensa’s mother as a coward who absconded a war.
Tete is exposed as hypocritical after questioning the integrity of the teachers at the school Mensa’s son, Nee attends, when he had himself, though he had had a sound “Christian education”, seduced his wife while she was still in school only to end up in shotgun marriage. Also, when Mensa questioned his pilfering attitude at his workplace, Tete insisted that “trade is trade. If you don’t cheat you don’t survive”.
Mr. Lomo also comes across as hypocritical when after admitting that Mensa was simply outspoken, he concluded that such an attitude “if allowed to flourish will give a lot of trouble to a civilized society”. Mr. Lomo further asserts “the good life demands lying. It has been so, it should be so and it must remain so.”

Education: Mensa as a child retorted to his mother during a conservation that teachers, together with doctors and lawyers were “great me” but this notion soon changed. Mensa now hated the teachers in mission schools. Even Mensa’s friends (both childhood friends and those he met at Mr. Lomo’s household and Torto at school) carried the same notion. The reason they loathed the teachers was because of the copious and often unwarranted lashing they received at least provocation from Mr. Lomo and at every whim of Mr. Abossey and the host of other teachers they met at the secondary school.
Mensa loathed these mission schools the more after his daughter, Odole, was whipped by her head teacher because she didn’t show up to do her laundry. This led to a scuffle with the head teacher in front of her husband, a means Mensa decided on since he reasoned that was the only way to convey his displeasure with such needless corporeal punishment which had become an enshrined tradition.
Another aspect of education was the effect it had on Mensa’s children. Odole went to Achimota College with Tete asserted was one of only three best schools in the country. Though she was “mannered, gentle, charming”, she also become supercilious and felt she was better than everyone in the neighborhood. Nee went to the Accra Broadway School and appeared to be somewhat “crude, earthly but socially better adjusted. He got on well with everybody, particularly with the illiterate folks in the area yet was in some ways he was different from them”. But in the end, both children pass their exams.

Parenting: The people of Botoi deemed it necessary to see to the upbringing of children whether they were one’s own or not. This can be deduced from Ataa Quarshi’s concern over the boy’s mischief and his later attitude in financially supporting Mensa through his secondary education. Mr. Lomo also underscores this theme when he agrees to be young Mensa’s guardian at a lower sum than originally offered by Old Anan.


Mensa can aptly be tagged “The Strange Man”. He was a maverick though not in the eccentric sense of the word but more thoughtful. A quality I believed he inherited from Old Anan and his mother. He simply refused to conform to the mould society made for everyone by not living to people notion of how one ought to be.

Whatever you do, by all means, read this book!


LostInThought
Michael