Yerro’s rage bounced off the stillness of the night like a stone thrown against water. It rippled through the compound, stirring dogs from sleep, making the chickens rustle uneasily in their coops. Lamps flickered in nearby rooms. Somewhere in the distance, a baby whimpered and was hushed.
Nata had returned home without warning.
She stood at the entrance of the compound, her wrapper dusty from travel, her eyes hollow, her posture rigid with a resolve she had never worn before. She had just buried her third pregnancy—another child carried to the eighth month, another body that had entered the world without breath. This time, she had not waited for instruction. She had not sought permission. She had walked away from Bukari’s house and come home.
“It is over,” she said quietly. “I am not going back.”
The words fell into the compound like a broken pot.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Borogie stared at her daughter, already reaching inward for understanding. Nenneh Dado sucked her teeth softly, sensing storm. The children, Bubel and Khadja Bobo,froze.
Yerro rose.
He did not shout at first. His voice was low, controlled, carrying the weight of lineage and law.
“What do you mean, ‘over’?” he asked.
Nata lifted her chin. “I no longer want to be married.”
The sentence was simple. But in that house, it was revolutionary.
Yerro’s face darkened. “Marriage is not a shirt you remove when it no longer fits.”
“I have buried three children,” she replied. “My body is breaking. My spirit is already broken.”
“And so you abandon your husband?” he demanded. “You shame him? You shame me?”
Borogie stepped forward gently. “Yerro, let her breathe. She has just lost another child—”
But Yerro raised his hand.
“This is not a matter for women,” he said sharply. “This is lineage.”
In his world, divorce was not merely rare—it was almost sacrilegious. Women endured. They stayed. They bent, healed, prayed, and endured again. A daughter did not decide her fate. A father did. A household did. Marriage was not romance; it was structure. It was continuity. It was obedience woven into identity.
Children did not have voices in such matters.
Yerro was the jarga of his house—the pillar. It was his duty to think, to decide, to speak for all who carried his name. A daughter who chose her own path threatened the order that had held generations together.
“You will return to Bukari’s house at dawn,” he said. “This madness ends here.”
Nata did not move.
“I will not go,” she said.
That was when the storm broke.
Yerro struck her.
Once.
Then again and again and again…
Not with cruelty for cruelty’s sake, but with the belief that discipline could still restore order. In his mind, this was not violence—it was correction. A father’s right. A guardian’s duty.
Borogie cried out, rushing forward, but Nenneh Dado held her back. “Let him finish,” she whispered. “This is between father and daughter.”
Nata did not scream. She staggered, but she did not fall.
“I have buried three children,” she said again, her voice shaking but unbroken. “You cannot beat more life into me.”
Yerro stared at her, breath heavy.
“You speak like a woman without roots,” he said. “You forget whose blood you carry.”
“I remember too well,” she replied. “That is why I refuse to die slowly.”
Silence followed.
Not the soft kind. The dangerous kind.
……………
A few days earlier, Yerro had moved his family out of Jeshwang.
The decision had not come lightly. Jeshwang had once been wide and generous, its soil fertile, its air unburdened. But the years had changed it. Banjul had grown tight, and like water escaping a sealed pot, people began to spill outward—first into Serrekunda, then Jeshwang, then beyond. Compounds multiplied. Footpaths became roads. Farms became homes. What once stretched open before him now felt hemmed in, crowded, exhausted.
Yerro felt it in his bones before he gave it words.
He was a farmer. He needed land that breathed. Land that welcomed seed. Land that answered effort with abundance. The plots in Jeshwang were shrinking, overworked, stripped of their promise. Each season, he planted with more prayer and harvested with less certainty.
So he went to his uncle, Ousman Bah.
Together, they walked. They spoke to chiefs. They stood on different patches of earth, letting silence speak where words could not. The first offer came from Busumbala. The alkalo there received them well and gave Yerro a vast stretch of land. It was wide—wide enough for cattle, for groundnuts, for a future.
Yet Yerro stood on it and felt nothing.
The land was good, but it did not settle in his spirit. It felt empty. It lacked a soul.
They moved on.
In Farato, they met Baa Bocar, a Fula man from Fulladu who had come years earlier and settled into leadership. When Yerro spoke, Baa Bocar listened—not just to the words, but to the story behind them. He understood drought. He understood hunger. He understood the ache of leaving home and the longing to rebuild it elsewhere.
Without ceremony, he pointed to a stretch of land bordered by young trees and open sky.
“Here,” he said simply.
Yerro accepted.
And so began the work.
Hut-building in those days was never a solitary affair. It was labor, yes—but it was also belonging. Neighbors came, though they were few. His uncle came. Trees were cut and shaped into walls. Clay was dug from the earth, mixed with water and straw, molded into blocks by bare hands. The sun baked them hard. Each brick carried the warmth of hope.
Within a short while, a single-room hut stood. It was modest, round, humble—but it stood.
Yerro moved into the first hut with Nenneh Dado, his second wife, while the larger family home took shape beside it. Borogie, his first wife, remained behind in Jeshwang. She had children rooted there, a garden that fed not only her household but others, and a rhythm of life that could not be lifted and carried in one motion. Uprooting her at that stage would have meant tearing away more than soil—it would have meant undoing years of labor, of relationships, of quiet authority she had built with her own hands.
Nenneh Dado, on the other hand, was lighter in her attachments. She had no children of her own, no fields that anchored her. She moved with him willingly, preparing his food over a small hearth, fetching water, tending to the simple needs of a man building a future from bare earth. In those weeks, she became his daily companion in the wilderness of beginnings. She watched him leave at dawn with his hoe and return at dusk with dust in his hair and fire in his eyes. She listened as he spoke of walls yet to rise, of rooms that would one day shelter laughter.
It would have been impossible for him to travel from Jeshwang to Farato each day. The distance was not only in miles but in exhaustion. The road cut through heat and bush, through long hours that drained strength before work even began. So he stayed. He slept on a mat in the round hut, beneath a roof that still smelled of fresh grass and rain. Each morning, he stepped outside and saw open land instead of narrowing paths, horizon instead of fences.
The work was slow. Clay had to be dug, bricks shaped, left to dry, turned, stacked, lifted. Timber had to be cut and carried. Walls rose inch by inch, obedient only to patience. Some days, progress felt invisible. Some evenings, his arms trembled as he ate, his back burning with fatigue.
But every brick he laid returned something Jeshwang had taken from him: purpose.
Here, his effort was not swallowed by congestion or competition. Here, his sweat became structure. His labor left a visible mark. Each wall was proof that he still shaped his destiny with his hands. Each beam was a promise to the family that would one day gather beneath it.
In Farato, Yerro was no longer shrinking with the land.
He was expanding with it.
Each wall rose like a promise.
Each roof beam felt like a declaration.
He was building again.
Not just a house—but a life that could breathe.
And in that labor, in that dust and sun and sweat, Yerro felt restored in ways no harvest had given him in years.
……………
Once the family hut was completed, the time came for Yerro to move his whole household to Farato. The news spread quietly through the compound in Jeshwang, settling into corners like dust. Goodbyes were made with the measured composure people learn when departure is inevitable. Neighbours came with bowls of rice, with handshakes that lingered, with blessings folded into ordinary words. Even the children sensed the weight of it, clinging longer to playmates they might never see again.
But Yerro had no way of knowing how deeply this leaving would cut Nata.
For her, Jeshwang was not merely a place. It was refuge. The only reason she had endured Bukari’s house at all was because her parents lived just next door. When nights grew unbearable, when grief clawed at her chest, when her body reminded her of what it had failed to give, she could slip into her mother’s room and rest her head against Borogie’s knees. Her pain had a place to land. Her sorrow had witnesses.
Now that place was being taken from her.
Without her family’s nearness, especially without Borogie’s steady presence, marriage became something else entirely—an enclosure without air. The thin thread that had kept her tethered to Bukari’s house snapped quietly inside her. She realiSed, with a clarity that frightened her, that she did not want this life. She did not love him. She had never chosen him. And now, even endurance felt like betrayal to herself.
To be continued…
