Opening Passage:
From behind the rusty bars of a cell in Monrovia's South Beach Prison facing the Atlantic Ocean, I can now try 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 1957.
It rose over the discovery in a cassava patch, of the mutilated body of Tene, the daughter of a well known Dewoin family who live in Bendabli, just a stone's throw from Amina, the former Paramount Chief's town, twenty miles from Monrovia on the Monrovia-Bomi Hills motor road.
Summary: Gortokai, or Kai, for short, is in love with a beautiful local Bendabli girl, Tene. There is something about the relationship to begin with. While they are not physically related, Kai and Tene were raised as brother and sister, because Tene's parents took him in when he was young. When Kai decides he wants to marry Tene, some people think it wrong, but technically it is not against any of the rules; the primary problem is that Kai has no family, so he has no family to represent him in the negotiations over Tene's brideprice. He has to rely on Kema, Tene's sister. Something is off about Kema's role in the matter, too; she is very obliging, and suspiciously so. Because Tene is so beautiful, and because she is, it would seem, not the sort of girl to lack for suitors, Kai is easily convinced by friends that he needs to take steps to make sure that Tene loves him, and so he goes to an old sand reader, Bleng, who confirms his suspicions and offers to provide him powerful love medicine to conjure her love. All of this is rolling, in a chain of events, to a bad end, the bad end with which the story opens.
Murder in the Cassava Patch is in a sense a story about a society falling apart -- rather ironically, because the story takes place during the period of William Tubman's national unification policies. But it is precisely this that is creating problems. Liberia is modernizing and becoming, slowly, wealthier, but the cracks in traditional Liberian like Bendabli are beginning to show. The younger folk don't take the old traditions quite seriously, but they have not come up with anything that actually replaces them, so there is a kind of lost quality to all the young people in the tale. But there is a more immediate factor, and that is drink. There is rum or palm wine on almost every page. Even Kai's name, Gortokai, means 'Brown-Jug Man'; he is literally named after the jugs in which Dutch gin was stored. The drinking is not purely social; it is extensive, and often associated with bad judgment. Alcohol can dull pain or boredom, but it also dulls your ability to pull yourself out of your problems.
Murder in the Cassava Patch is a tale of scheming arising out of blind desire. One of the interesting questions throughout is how much we can trust anything Kai says; indeed, almost everyone in the novella seems to be dissembling in one way or another. Kai wants Tene; Tene wants out of Bendabli; Kema wants money. These goals lead them each to hide what they are actually doing, and in each case it ends up being counterproductive. Neither Bleng nor Kai's friends seem entirely above-board about anything. But Kai is our narrator, and at times there seem reasons to think that he is spinning parts of the story in his favor. The overall story at a glance can seem quite simple, but at every turn Moore has layered in psychological complexities until everything is a tangle.
Favorite Passage:
Bleng placed the bag on the mat and began to unfasten it. I had my eyes glued on every movement he made. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the sand reader poured the contents of the bag into the mat. They were an assortment of quartz crystals, large yellow beads, smooth pebbles and some strange-looking beans. One of the pebbles rolled under my stool. I tried to reach for it. Bleng stopped me.
"No one is allowed to touch these sacred objects unless I give them permission. God gave them to me in a dream and taught me how to use them to help mankind. He told me not to let anyone touch them, else they would loose their magic power.“
The contents of the bag were collected and tossed into the air and allowed to scatter on the mat again. Bleng viewed the objects with penetrating eyes for a minute or two without uttering a word. He broke the silence, by murmuring the word "Tene“ to himself several times, nodding in between. The old man cleared his throat and offered to tell me what he saw in the crystals. For some reason which I cannot explain, I turned pale and felt nervous. Bleng looked straight into my eyes; "young man,“ he uttered. I felt a sudden thump against my chest. It was my heart, beating like a machine. "Tene's heart is divided.“ The old man revealed.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.