The factual, emotionless way the five-year old Godsway reports how he lost his eyes, dwarfs the fact that it was his mother who actually plugged them out.
“My mother broke a plastic plate and pierced my eyes with it several times” he reported his own trauma with a dryness of a professional journalist. No gory detail. No painful recollection twitched on his face. No change in his body posture to signal that what he just revealed is one of the most traumatic stories of domestic abuse.
The news is nuclear. It erases any memory you have of how bad a mother can be. It left the audience sick in the stomach. The 5-year old boy was pinned to the dust with adult force one Tuesday in Amasaman. He must have thought that as long as it was his mother and not a murderer, the worst he could get was a spanking. Maybe a few lashes would drain the anger out of her.
He lied there supine, his gaze fixed on mother until a sharp object in a spilt second cut through the iris, spluttered blood over his eyes to announce a coming blindness.A very unfamiliar rush of danger flushed through his body. This was not a spanking, he immediately realised. His tiny arms instinctively tired demonstrate his protest. But they were quickly finished off as her mother broke the arms in two.
And left Godsway with the only one defence – a feeble plea to a sick mother – stop, stop, stop.
Loud pain trapped in his head found free expression through his mouth. The boy screamed and screamed as his vision of the sun dimmed, dimmed and – dimmed.Going, going, gone. The only witness –the sun – was shut out for the last time in Godsway’s life.
“I don’t know what I had done. I didn’t do anything. I beg her but she didn’t stop”, he spoke in twi during the interview with Joy FM’s Kojo Yankson.“She said I wasn’t her son”, he revealed the trigger of his brutal attack. Godsway’s eyes are gone but his innocence is intact.
His version of the account was scanty – too scanty and begging for some more rational reconstruction.His father told Kojo Yankson that he left his son to the care of the mother after a client called him in need of his carpentry.
About five days later, his brother called to alert him of his wife’s weird behaviour. She was acting mad, he said.The alarm was followed by the dastardly act a couple of days after. “When they called me, they were weeping…I thought my son was dead”.Godsway was taken to Amasaman hospital and later to Korle-Bu.His arms broken, his eyes swollen – and it oozed with a foul smell after five days in the hospital. Five days later, Godsway’s eyes were surgically removed. The effect of her mother’s ways was complete after days of showing signs of mental instability.
Godsway’s father believes a spirit may have entered his wife because before the incident, she had shown no signs of violence towards anybody at home. And she prayed a lot.
His father said his wife is still living in denial of the act. She has a jealous love for the son. She still thinks her son is fine. She believes the victim is rather another child from a different relationship the carpenter had with another woman.
Godsway wears shades today. It is no tribute to fashion but a tribute to a mother’s wickedness bothering on dementia.She told Kojo Yankson that he wants to watch TV again. It was a playful expectation, an innocence that the wrong can be made right, the light can shine on his eyes again.
His innocence fuels his hope and maybe that is why he doesn’t express any anguish. But adults are not innocent. That’s why many weep at Godsway plight in the depressing knowledge that the evil deed is done. But maybe that’s why Godsway is called Godsway – because many believe it is only God who can make a way.
