Murder in the Cassava Patch

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Bai T. Moore's Murder in the Cassava Patch is Liberia's best-known novel. Published by Ducor Publishing House (Monrovia) in 1968, it remains required reading for every Liberian high school student, and is widely regarded as the one real Liberian literary classic ^[1] in a very small literary tradition^[2].

1 Plot introduction
2 Plot summary
- 2.1 Incest and the age difference between Gortokai and Tene
3 Footnotes
4 External links

[edit] Plot introduction

This novelette (less than 16 thousand words, divided into three chapters) deals with the relationship between Gortokai, a young Liberian man, and Tene, the girl he hopes to marry. We learn on the first page that Tene has been murdered most horribly, and that Gortokai is in jail for it. The story promises "to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country one bright Sunday morning in the year I957."^[3] The story begins in the fictional village of Bendabli, off the Monrovia-Bomi Hills road, but the action is quite wide-ranging, ranging from Gbarpolu County in the west as far as Gbarnga and Sanniquellie in the north, while places such as Bomi Hills and Firestone feature offstage as the source of the hard currency that proves such a lure to young girls such as Tene and her sister.

Taking the form of a first person narrative, with a narrator (Gortokai himself) who is fairly unreliable, the novelette makes use of Liberian English and Liberian customs, and deals particularly with how those customs came under pressure in the 1940s and 1950s as young Liberians adapted to the prospect of material advancement offered by the western world. As an indigenous Liberian who had been educated in a US university, Moore was well-placed to explore the tension between these worlds, but he does so in a way that is critical both of materialism and of traditional local culture.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Gortokai is raised by old man Joma and his wife Sombo Karn, alongside their daughters Tene and Kema. According to Gortokai, he is unaware that he is not his parents' "real" son until Tene herself tells him during a game of "Mama and Papa": "...suddenly Tene came up to me and asked me to hold her tight in the waist. I shivered and recoiled. Gortokai, can't you see that we are not brother and sister? It's a secret Mama told me."

[edit] Incest and the age difference between Gortokai and Tene

There is an obvious suggestion of the taboo of incest in the relationship, beginning with Gortokai and Tene's first game of Mama and Papa. Gortokai claims that Tene makes the first move, and that he himself is initially repulsed by the idea of a sexual relationship with her. Taken at face value, this appears to be a game between children of a similar age, in which Tene is the more knowing child both sexually and literally, in her knowledge of Gortokai's true parentage. Gortokai also appears to accept without question that his being adopted makes the relationship perfectly acceptable. It is worth noting that this view is not shared by everyone in the village: "Some felt that my desire for Tene was immoral, but they could never convince me on what grounds."

Incest is the most obvious reason for the villagers' objection. However, there is also a considerable age difference between Gortokai and Tene, to which he never directly alludes. Gortokai joins the Poro society in the third harvest after the outbreak of the Hitler war, which means late 1942 or early 1943. Thirteen years later (1955-6), he begins to look for a wife, at which point Tene is thirteen years old. In other words, Tene was born at or around the time that Gortokai was in the bush being initiated into the Poro, and he is older than his intended bride by precisely the age he was at the time of his initiation.

One may be initiated in the Poro at quite a young age. However, the internal evidence suggests that this was not the case for Gortokai. His Poro initiation was "something every young man in Dewoin country looks forward to", and he is initiated into the Zowolo - the highest Poro degree achievable. All of this suggests that he could not have been much younger than eleven years old at his Poro graduation, and is probably at least a year or two older than that. This would make him in his mid twenties when he begins to look for a wife. It also means that their game of Mamas and Papas takes place when Tene is a pre-pubescent girl, and Gortokai is in his early twenties.