The Basket Weaver’s Daughter | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: The Basket Weaver’s Daughter | Previous Challenge Entry
By Folakemi Emem-Akpan
04/24/26
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The Basket Weaver’s Daughter

There were many things wrong with her father. First, he had been born a cripple and had spent his childhood learning basketweaving alongside his sisters instead of going fishing or hunting with the men. He should have been trashed at birth, and the villagers often pilloried his parents, particularly his father, for allowing such a disabled child to live. And to condemn him to women’s chores—who did that?

He would become the best basket weaver in the village, so skilled that folks came from other villages to purchase his wares. Becoming that successful—so successful that he had his own hut before he had lived twenty sun cycles—was a wonder. Folks soon forgave him and his parents for his crippledness.

He’d marry a quiet, innocuous young girl who’d die in childbirth, not in itself odd because women regularly died in childbirth. What was odd was his decision to raise his daughter by himself. He bathed her himself, rubbed neem oil into her skin to repel flies. He cooked, he cleaned, and he got on with life.

Everyone waited for him to remarry. The unwanted cripple was now a very eligible bachelor, and mothers sent their daughters to him with lunches of roasted yam and palm oil or early dinners of fufu and okro soup. Before he caught on to their wiles, he accepted the meals and sent his thanks. But after one wink too many, he started receiving such visitors outside, where they’d meet him cooking his own meals; he’d reject theirs with grace.

After a while, they stopped trying and left the man alone.

Her name was Olamilekan and her earliest memories were of her father’s stubbly face peering down at her in her raffia basket, the warmth in her heart when he hoisted her onto his useless legs, his gentle voice when he talked about her mother, a woman he had loved in a time when men did not love, only tolerated, women.

He started teaching her his craft when she was four sun cycles old. By the time she was six, she could out-weave any woman in their little village. Their hut expanded into three, and it was a sight to see. Even the village head had just two huts, one for himself and the other for his three wives and all their offspring.

Olamilekan and her father slept in one hut, kept their palm fronds in another, and did their cooking in a third.

In the evenings, they would cut, soften and bend the strips, often going to bed with bleeding palms. In the mornings, they would interlace the strips into circular or spiral patterns depending on the basket’s use. Food or harvest baskets were loosely woven, as were fishing baskets. Decorative baskets (which only the affluent could afford) were more tightly woven. And when her father conceived of the idea of creating a lightweight fishing boat using fronds, they achieved their aim by coating it with tar.

“You will not marry just because it is something a girl has to do. You will marry because you love the boy.” He was very radical, and this view, which he expressed again and again, was something no one in the village understood.

She wanted to marry a man just like her father but was hard pressed to find one, and it was not long before she became the talk of the town. She was proud. They all knew it; there was nothing natural about a man raising a girl all by himself. He had filled her head with nonsense; no wonder she was seventeen sun cycles old and unmarried. Who had ever heard of such nonsense? What crock! What arrogance!

Olamilekan would listen to words never spoken directly to her face but that she heard anyway. She would smile, call out a greeting, and continue on her way. She knew her worth. She was someone to be cherished. And she was waiting for the man who would treat her as delicately as her father treated his baskets.

She would wait for as long as it took, even if she was twenty and it had not yet happened. Her father had told her it would happen for her… and she believed him. He had yet to tell her his first lie!

*Set in an ancient African village
Proverbs 22:29 - “Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before obscure men.”

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