Sankofa Read online

  Everywhere I turned, I was reminded of my relative paleness. Sellers called out to me, “Obroni, obroni, obroni, come and see.” I was as conspicuous here as I had been in my childhood.

  I bought a dress, a quiet print with only three colors—blue and orange circles on a black background. I wandered until I chanced on an open-air salon.

  “Obroni, you wan’ make your hair?” the hairdresser asked. She was young and heavily pregnant.

  “Okay,” I said. “But not braids.”

  “Which style you want?”

  “Corn rows.”

  “Sit down. I’ll make it fine for you.”

  She sat on a high stool while I sat on the lower. Her touch was gentle when she undid my hair from its bun.

  “Your hair is very thick. And long. And soft. Me, I like half-caste hair. If my baby can have hair like this, I will be so happy.”

  There was something in her tone that made “half-caste” almost seem a compliment. She rested my head against her thigh. She was warm, like a pebble left in the sun. She smelled of fish and smoke. Her wooden comb slid down my scalp, dividing my hair into sections. Halfway through each track, she bent forward and I felt her breath on my neck.

  My mother was afraid of my hair. When she washed it, it would knot. When she brushed it, it would shed. I bit her once, after a bristle snagged on a knot and she kept pulling. Aunt Caryl read somewhere that oil was good for black hair and so, for a month, my hair was doused with vegetable oil in the mornings. There was no improvement, except that I left smears of oil on every surface I leaned against.

  Some hawkers paused with their wares.

  “Obroni, biscuit?”

  “Obroni, lipstick?”

  “Obroni, chewing gum?”

  They stared openly at the curious specimen in front of them. I remembered those stares from walking down the street with my grandfather. A neighbor used to say, “There goes the Welshman and his coon.” There was no shade for me anywhere. Not here. Not in England. I began to feel faint.

  “Are you almost done?” I asked.

  A few moments later, she gave me a hand mirror. My face was exposed, every single hair scraped back. My eyes looked larger, my forehead wider. She’d wound gold thread through each corn row, like seams of ore.

  “You like it?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  I stared at my reflection. I didn’t recognize myself. I looked foreign.

  18

  The days passed. Monday grew closer. If Adrian’s schedule was free, we went around Segu, sometimes by bus, sometimes with the driver, and always with Adrian’s voice providing background, history, context.

  “Liberty Square, where Kofi was sworn in, 1978.”

  It was an Olympic-size stadium with seating on three sides. The fourth was open to the ocean, and the breeze that blew in served as a sort of air-conditioning. The design was clever.

  “The euphoria of that night,” Adrian said. “The place was packed. The whole country wanted to be here.” I imagined the stands full of people waving flags and cheering for my father.

  I didn’t always mind Adrian’s trivia. I liked knowing that Segu taxis were once black, but after independence, in a show of patriotism, drivers repainted them blue and white for the flag.

  Other details were more obscure, for example, “Bamana has forty species of sunbird, a close relation of the hummingbird.”

  It was like traveling with an encyclopedia, novel at first but grating by lunchtime. Adrian had not lost any confidence. He was a white man in Britain and a white man in Bamana.

  Sometimes I wanted to shake him off and attempt the city on my own again. After all, half my DNA was from here. If I were a wild animal, I would have some instinct for the place, but each time, I remembered that first trip to the market and the chorus of “obroni” that had rung after me with every step. With Adrian, at least, we were a pair of obroni.

  While Adrian was teaching, I stayed in the hotel and took my meals in the French-themed restaurant. I loitered in the lobby. There was some art for sale: tourist pieces—bright paintings of village scenes, crude wooden replicas of the intricate carving I had seen in the British Museum.

  I was reminded of my first exhibition, in a Hampstead gallery just off the high street. It was run by Robert’s manager’s wife, Martha Reuben, a tall, elegant woman who wore silk scarves to hide the wrinkles on her neck. The Reubens came to dinner. I cooked and Robert carved.

  “What do you do?” Martha asked.

  “I’m a housewife.”

  “And an artist,” Robert added. I couldn’t tell whether he was being supportive or whether he was trying to make me seem more exciting to his boss.

  Reluctantly, the canvases were brought out. Martha insisted on buying one. It was her way, I thought, of showing gratitude for the seasoning of the lamb. The next day she called to ask how many canvases I had, could I paint more, did I want a solo exhibition?

  The works didn’t sell. At the opening, Martha invited a crowd that pressed into the medium space, their backs turned to the canvases, their eyes tracking the flutes of champagne drifting through the room.

  Martha said my work was ahead of the market. I painted subjects cut out of newspapers and magazines. I labored over their hands, their watches, their shoes, but instead of faces, I painted a storm of color.

  The work was too figurative for those who loved abstraction and too abstract for the figurative crowd, and there was nothing particularly black about it, which confused another type of buyer.

  Perhaps I gave up too easily. The paintings were still in my garage. I could have brought one for my father. I should have come with a gift.

  The day before our meeting, my period arrived unexpectedly, brought on by the stress of anticipation. It was only a matter of time before it ceased altogether. I had no mother to take me through this last great change, not that she’d been that adept at taking me through the first one. There’d been some mumbling about sanitary napkins and the dangers of sexual relations without a sheath. Aunt Caryl had filled in the details.

  That night, I stayed up to read the diary. A passage from the beginning of their affair.

  In the evenings Caryl’s sister plays the flute. Her room is below mine and I hear the low mournful sound that is made in Segu only when a chief has died. The music has taken me back to my childhood, the night procession of masquerades with flaming torches, dragging their smoke through the town until everywhere smells of burning. They have come from the spirit world to escort the chief home and the roads are emptied for them. Even the British officials respect this law. I used to watch from the window while my mother lay down with her eyes shut. A woman cannot look on this sight and live.

  My room faces the street and I see Bronwen when she leaves for work. Her clothes are beautifully made. I particularly like a red dress with pearl buttons running down the back.

  And an entry a few pages later when things had progressed.

  What kind of love is this for a girl, never to be seen walking out with her man, to be sneaking to my room at night like ours is a transaction? Yet I lie in my bed each night waiting for the sound of the door opening. I go through my lectures in a daze. I no longer visit Thomas. I saw my results and was neither pleased nor displeased by them. It is only Bronwen I think of.

  Feverish as his tone was, Francis Aggrey’s affair with my mother was not a grand passion. If he wanted to stay in touch, he could simply have written a letter. He had rejected my mother. There was nothing to suggest he would not reject me tomorrow. Any expectations must be tempered.

  Kofi Adjei might demand proof. Adrian had warned me of this. The diary, the photograph given to my mother, even my jawline, might suggest that my story was true. But I should prepare for a DNA test. Men in my father’s position were besieged by people like me, people making claims, people asking for something.

  “But I don’t want his money,” I said.

  “You’re still asking for something. Your very existence deman
ds an explanation.”

  I dialed Rose. She didn’t pick up. I went down to the lobby. The bar was closed. The doormen had gone home.

  “Is everything all right, madam?” It was the lone receptionist. She had been slumped against the front desk, but now she smiled and stood up straight.

  “Yes. I just wanted to sit here for a minute.”

  They’d switched off the fountain. Without the water pumping you could see to the bottom of the marble basin. It was streaked with limescale.

  “Are you waiting for someone, madam?”

  “No.”

  I chose an armchair made in the Chesterfield style—stuffed leather, sunken navel buttons. The fountain came on. It spurted the colors of the Union Jack, red, white, and blue. I sat back and closed my eyes.

  “Good morning, madam.” It was the receptionist standing over me. “I think you’ll get more rest in your room.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost six a.m. Guests will be coming down soon.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I have an important meeting today. I was restless upstairs. Nervous, a bit.”

  “It will go well, madam.” She beamed at me. The staff here were trained to smile.

  “Thank you. Do you have children?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But, please God, one day I will have some.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, madam,” she said.

  “Anna. That’s my name.”

  “We are not allowed to address guests by their first names.” Protocol was never far off in the Palace Hotel.

  “I’m sorry. Madam is fine,” I said. “I wanted to ask if it’s taboo in Bamanaian culture for a man to abandon his child?”

  “Are men praised for leaving their children in Europe and America?” I was pleased by the jab of sarcasm. It was the first real note she had sounded.

  “No, of course not, but is there some special stigma? Let’s say he doesn’t want to marry the mother of the child and so he abandons them?”

  She considered for a moment. Her unguarded face was serious, almost stern.

  “We have a saying: no child is a bastard. Even if the father and mother are fighting, it is not the business of the child. A man must take care of his children. How are things over there?”

  “The same. We call it child support.”

  An elevator pinged. The first guests were descending. The smile returned to the receptionist’s face.

  “I should go up,” I said. “Thank you. I can’t remember your name.”

  “Christina.”

  In my room I slept for two hours, then woke up and showered. I wore the dress specially chosen: peach cotton with cap sleeves and a fitted waist, smart but not formal. It made me look young, young enough to still need a father.

  What did I want from him? What do children want from absent fathers? It was too late for any encounters with Francis Aggrey to be formative. I was too much of an adult for him to erase the confusion of my childhood. And yet, if I truly believed this, why was I here?

  At 9:00 the telephone rang. It was Adrian.

  “Anna, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Kofi’s secretary just called. We’re going to have to reschedule to next Monday. He decided, at the last minute, to honor an invitation to the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa.”

  “I suppose I could have followed him to Ethiopia.”

  Adrian and I were outside the slave fort in Cove Coast. We had driven an hour over roads crowded by dense forest. The forests were not empty, Adrian assured me. In their depths lived the Bonoma people, whose lives had not changed significantly in the past five hundred years. They were protected by UNESCO, along with Stonehenge and the Great Barrier Reef. In other words, they were doomed.

  The slave fort overlooked the beach. It was a looming, solid structure, built from stone. The walls were white, the steps were decorated with balustrades, and the roof was a pleasing shade of terra-cotta. With lower walls and a garden, it could be a summer palace in Europe. There were a few cars in the car park and a bus from which tourists disembarked, clutching cameras and water bottles. They were from America, black America. Only a few were dressed in Western clothing, but all appeared to be obroni like me.

  “The fort was built by the Portuguese,” Adrian said.

  “I can tell.”

  It cost fifteen cowries to enter and another ten to take a guided tour. Adrian bought a third for our driver, Kwesi, who had never been inside, although he knew it was popular with obroni. The guide was an old man. He wore a jerkin made from coarse fabric. Around his neck, an amulet hung from a leather strap.

  “Welcome to Elsantos Castle. I am Bonsu, and I will be your guide for today. The castle was built in 1490 by the Portuguese. Before that, there was a village here, which was demolished to build the castle. It started off as a trading post for gold and ivory, but the Europeans soon began another trade in a priceless commodity: human beings. More than three hundred thousand Africans passed through this slave market. They were transported to the Caribbean and to the Americas.”

  “A few ended up in England. Olaudah Equiano, for example,” Adrian whispered to me. I went to stand with the Americans. Bonsu led us up a flight of stairs. The woman climbing beside me asked, “So did you get your DNA done?”

  “Sorry?”

  “To trace your ancestry here.”

  “Oh, I already know it. My father is Bamanaian.”

  “Well, I traced mine. I’m only seven percent from Bamana. I’m fifteen percent from Senegal and twenty percent Nigerian, but Bamana has the best tour packages. I came with my friend Rita. She’s fifty percent from here, which is really high. Oh wait, he’s starting.”

  “These were the governor’s and senior officers’ quarters. As you can see, there’s a nice view of the ocean, fresh breeze, nice holiday. Back then, these rooms would have been furnished luxuriously. They could come here and relax with their wives.”

  “There were European women here too?” an American tourist asked.

  “No. They married African women.”

  “African women are the best. They have the best shape.” It was our driver Kwesi, a patriot.

  Cameras clicked around us. A Bamanaian couple dressed in matching denim took a selfie.

  “Would you like me to take a picture for you?” I asked.

  “Yes, please. It’s my birthday today,” the woman said.

  “And you came to the slave fort?”

  “Yeah. We thought we’d try something different.”

  They posed with their arms around each other. Robert and I used to pose like that, one organism with two heads.

  “It’s time to go to the dungeons,” Bonsu said.

  They were the only part of the fort that felt untouched, although this itself was an illusion. The walls and ceiling were dirty, as they would have been when the dungeons were in use, but the floors were clear of blood and there was no smell of shit. It was cool. The walls were thick stone, soundproof.

  “How many people do you think were put in here?” Bonsu asked.

  “Two hundred.”

  “Three hundred.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Sounds like an auction.”

  “One thousand human beings,” Bonsu said. “They were pressed close like cargo, like bales of cotton. People could stay here for months before they were transported.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “The tribes farther inland, when they went to war against each other, they brought their captives here and sold them for guns, or beads, or Manchester cotton.”

  “So Africans sold other Africans.”

  Bonsu cleared his throat. “They weren’t Africans then. They were Fanti, Ashanti, Bambara, Mandingo, foreigners to one another. Let’s go to the church.”

  It had been deconsecrated now. The cross was gone but not the empty pews. Bonsu let us wander around the courtyard where bodies were haggled over. How much would I have cost? I was flat-footed and not very fer
tile, but I still had all my teeth. Finally, Bonsu gathered us at a door carved out of the perimeter wall. It led to the beach.

  “We will end by walking through the door of no return. Slaves linked in chains passed in single file through this door to where boats were waiting on the beach to take them to the ships that would carry them away from Africa forever. After you crossed this point, there was no going back.”

  He walked through and we followed in single file. When it was my turn, scenes from Roots and Amistad filled my mind. The Bamanaian couple were the last to pass. They took pictures and struck goofy, inappropriate poses.

  On the beach, the Americans grew quiet. A man with a sonorous voice announced, “We would like to sing a few songs for our ancestors whose spirits are here with us today. We thank them for their courage and their will to survive so we could one day come back home. You are all welcome to join us.”

  They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “By and By,” and Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon” slowed down to a dirge. Some of them began to cry. I left then and walked towards the ocean. The couple were running in the shallows. Our ancestors had not been sold.

  I sat on the sand and brought out my sketchbook. I drew across a double page, the slave fort on the left leaf, the beach on the right. The cluster of Americans, singing and crying. The couple wading in the water and laughing. A lone figure with a sketchbook, drawn in the crevice where the pages met, so she would disappear into the binding.

  I was too working-class for art school. Ms. Rendell encouraged me to go. I had a talent, she said, for the human figure, an eye for color, a skill with draftsmanship, but what were these when leveled against the need to support myself? “Try architecture, then,” she said. “It’s a second choice for artists.”

  The ocean was calming. I felt settled, the most at ease I had been in Bamana. The heat, the smells, the jostling of Segu, and the waiting to meet Francis Aggrey had produced an agitation that dissipated on this shore, dispelled maybe by the suffering that had occurred here, much greater than mine.

  The outcome of my journey was uncertain. My father might postpone our meeting again. I might come this far and never meet him. I would be disappointed, but the trip would not be a waste. I had seen other things: the markets of Segu, the slave fort of El Santos, and the overconfidence of white men in an African country.