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The Board in the Suitcase

The board came to the Green in a suitcase, wrapped in a bath towel, between a winter coat and a bag of Efua's daughter's shoes. It was the only thing in the suitcase she had carried on her lap at the airport instead of letting it go through.

It was not a beautiful board, if you did not know it. Two rows of six hollows cut into a block of dark wood, with a larger hollow at each end, the wood worn pale along the edges where three generations of wrists had rested. A crack ran across one corner and had been mended, a long time ago, with something that looked like glue and might have been sap. When you shook the little cloth bag that lived inside the lid, the seeds made a sound like rain on a tin roof.

Efua put it on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, behind the good plates, where it would be safe.

Kumasi

Her grandmother had carved the hollows deeper with a spoon.

That was the first thing Efua knew about the board, before she knew anything else. Nana Akosua had been given it as a young woman, already old, and had decided the houses were too shallow: the seeds jumped out when you sowed them fast. So she had sat in the courtyard of the family house in Kumasi, under the mango tree, and scraped each of the twelve houses with the edge of a spoon until the seeds rattled when they landed and stayed where they fell.

She had taught her son on it. Efua's father, Kwabena, used to describe those afternoons with a particular look on his face, half fond and half still indignant. His mother had beaten him for years, he said. Every afternoon. She was not cruel about it. She played slowly, so he could see every move, and sometimes she stopped and played a move badly on purpose, to show him what would happen, and then took it back and played properly and beat him anyway.

"Two rows of six houses," Kwabena would say, setting it up. "Four seeds in each house. How many seeds?"

"Forty-eight," Efua would say, aged seven, aged ten, aged fourteen.

"Good. And you never forget it. Because when you know how many there are, you know how many are left."

London

Her father had brought it to London in 1974 in a different suitcase, and he had played it on the bus.

He drove, later, but at first he took the bus to the hospital where he worked as a porter, forty minutes each way on the top deck of the number 36, and he played oware on his knees against anybody who would sit beside him. Most people would not. Some did. A Jamaican man who worked on the same ward played him every Thursday for eleven years and never won once, Kwabena said, and never stopped asking for a rematch.

He taught Efua at the kitchen table in their flat, and his rule was simple. Before you lift the seeds out of a house, count them. In your head. Then you know, before you sow a single one, where the last seed will land.

"That is the whole game," he said. "The last seed. Where does it fall? Does it make two? Does it make three? If you know before you lift, you are playing. If you find out after, you are just moving beans about."

The capture rule was the one she remembered best. You sowed anticlockwise, one seed in each house, and if the last seed you dropped made one of your opponent's houses exactly two or exactly three, you took those seeds. You needed twenty-five to win, which was more than half. Her father would hold up twenty-five fingers' worth of seeds, laboriously, to make the point: more than half, and it is over.

Toronto

Efua had taken it to Toronto when she married, and she had not played it much there. That was the honest truth. She had played twice, maybe three times, with her father when he came to visit. She had meant to teach her husband. She had meant to teach the baby, when the baby was old enough. And then the baby was old enough, and there was a job, and another job, and then the move across the ocean again to the Green, and the board had gone into a suitcase wrapped in a towel because it was the one thing she could not bear to lose.

So she had put it somewhere it could not be lost. Behind the good plates.

The Green

It was two years before anyone took it down.

Abena was ten. She had a new friend, the girl next door, whose family had moved in at Easter, and the two of them had worked their way through every game in the house: the cards, the draughts, the jigsaw with the missing corner. On a wet Saturday in October, Abena stood on a kitchen chair, looked along the top of the dresser and said, "What's that?"

Efua's first feeling, she would admit later, was not pleasure. It was a kind of alarm. That board was not for playing on a wet Saturday with a ten-year-old and the girl next door. That board had come from Kumasi and London and Toronto. That board had been scraped with a spoon.

"It's your great-great-grandmother's," she said. "Be careful with it."

Abena got it down very carefully. She opened the lid. She untied the cloth bag. She counted the seeds onto the table, two by two, the way children do.

"Thirty-seven," she said. "Is that right?"

It was not right. Efua counted them herself. Thirty-seven. Somewhere between the suitcase and the shelf, between Toronto and the Green, eleven seeds had gone. She never found out where. Perhaps they had fallen out of the bag in the towel. Perhaps they had rolled behind the good plates. Perhaps, years ago in London, her father had lost them on the bus.

She felt, absurdly, like crying. She had kept it safe, and in keeping it safe she had lost part of it anyway, and her daughter had never once played.

Beans

Abena did not cry. Abena went to the cupboard.

She came back with a jar of dried beans, the speckled kind Efua used for soup, and counted out eleven of them, and put them in with the seeds.

"There," she said. "Forty-eight. The beans are new." She looked up. "Is that allowed?"

Efua thought about her grandmother with the spoon. "Yes," she said. "Somebody always changes something."

"Then teach me," said Abena. "Properly. And then I'm going to teach Mina."

So Efua taught her, at the kitchen table, the way her father had taught her. Two rows of six. Four in each house. Sow anticlockwise, one in each. And before you lift them, count.

Abena was quick. She was much quicker than Efua had been. By the end of the afternoon she had the girl next door round, and Efua stood in the doorway and listened to her daughter teach the game in words Efua had never used.

"You go round this way," said Abena. "Like a clock going backwards. And if your last one makes their house two or three, they're yours. Two or three. Not one, not four. Two or three. Count before you pick them up, or you'll get it wrong."

"What if I get it wrong?" said Mina.

"Then I win," said Abena, and Mina laughed, and they played.

The card in the lid

That night, after Mina had gone home, Abena challenged her mother.

Efua sat down at the kitchen table with the board between them, the old seeds and the new beans mixed together in the houses. She counted in her head before every move, the way her father had taught her on the top deck of the number 36. She played as well as she knew how.

She lost. Twenty-six to twenty-two.

"You counted," said Abena, delighted. "I saw you counting. And you still lost."

"I did," said Efua. "Your great-grandfather would be very cross."

"Why?"

"Because his mother beat him every afternoon for years," said Efua, "and he never let anyone forget it. And now it's happened to me."

Before she went to bed she found a plain card and wrote on it, small, in pen: Kumasi, London, Toronto, the Green. Four generations. The houses were made deeper with a spoon. Eleven beans replace eleven lost seeds. She put the card inside the lid, on top of the cloth bag.

The board did not go back on the shelf. It lived on the end of the kitchen table after that, under the fruit bowl, where anyone could reach it.

The question for your own table

Is there something in your house being kept safe that would be better kept played? What would it cost to take it down?

Something to do

Mancala games need nothing but two rows of hollows and some seeds or beans. Use an egg box for the board and dried beans for seeds. Learn the oware capture rule together, then let the youngest teach it to someone else in their own words. Write down the one thing your family changed.

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