Sankofa Read online

  How did she feel living in the same house with him? Had she tried to avoid him too?

  Things have fallen apart. Menelik has been arrested and charged with treason. They say he bought arms illegally from a Russian dealer and plans to sell them to the ANC in South Africa. His flat was ransacked and sealed, his papers seized. They are looking for his contacts. “It is best to stay low,” Thomas said. Blessing is angry that Thomas has put them in danger by associating with what she calls riff-raff. Menelik is from Guyana. His real name is George Hamilton.

  Riff-raff fraud.

  Thomas advised me to burn you. His words. “Burn that book you’re always snitching into.”

  Another thing Thomas said to me before we parted. Never marry.

  With my mother, Francis was predator. With Menelik, he was prey. He had naively fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Was this why he had left England? To escape arrest?

  I have found a note slipped into my room. It says:

  I didn’t want you to stop.

  This is what I have drafted in reply:

  Dear Miss Bain, You must forgive my taking advantage of you. I am seven years your senior but alas lacking in both wisdom and common sense. It was an abuse of the hospitality your father has shown me. Please let us not speak of that evening again.

  I still felt she was too young, too easily swept away by attention from this urbane, older man. He would have seemed that way to her, a teenage department-store attendant with no university education. At least the relationship appeared to be consensual.

  We have kissed. I am playing with fire.

  And my mother had gotten burned. A single mother before she was twenty.

  The matter is done, through no working of mine. Friday evening. Mr. Bain was out. I climbed up to my room and discovered the door ajar. I turned on the light and found her inside, barefoot in her dressing gown, the belt of the robe untied. I am a man like—

  Two thirds of the page has been blacked out. My mother had wielded the censor’s pen and erased the details of their first night together. She was always mildly prudish. She said intercourse instead of sex.

  She was a virgin. This I discovered after the deed was done. In Segu a man does not take a woman’s maidenhead lightly. The family can force the culprit to marry her.

  Francis’s writing about the affair is feverish. He is distracted from his studies. He is infatuated with my mother. He is ashamed of the secrecy and yet the affair continues. They fantasize about what their child might look like. He wanted a boy. Despite his revolutionary politics, he was still a traditional man.

  I have had a telegram from Segu. It is from my uncle. It says my mother is very sick and I must come home. I fear she is dead. The Akan people do not announce death directly.

  Bronwen came tonight, but it is a day she must avoid me. We spoke instead of my mother. I am her only child by my father, a man many years older, who died and left her a widow when she was still young. I do not remember much of my father. He seemed always sick to me. My sharpest memory is of him hawking up blood and sputum into a calabash cupped in my mother’s hands. She is both parents to me and I have never felt the lack. She bought her first fishing boat at twenty-five and now owns a small fleet. I cannot bring myself to talk of her in the past tense.

  Francis is now an orphan, alone in the world. I am sorry for his loss, my loss also, a grandmother I never met.

  I have paid for my passage and gone to bid Thomas farewell, who I found calculating the cost of a pram. Blessing is pregnant and they are happy despite the curtailment of his freedom. He is now almost absent from the circles of the British left. “I have moved to the outer radius,” he said. Bronwen has a premonition that I will not return. She dreamed that I drowned at sea. I told her it is not so easy to sink ships these days. I will leave this diary in her keeping. I do not want her to read it, but I will like her to hold it until I return.

  The remaining pages are blank. I flip through them twice. It is the end of my father. Francis Aggrey is gone and I don’t know if we will ever meet again. This is a portion of the grief my mother must have felt.

  I settle the bill, tip my waiter, and step into the cold. The streets are full and the evening lights are on. I join the throng of workers marching in step, trying to still my thoughts and loosen the constriction in my chest.

  Why had he not come back? I imagine him in Segu, writing off his affair with the obroni and moving on with his life, while my mother waited in London, frantic and disgraced. Did he find out my mother was pregnant? Did Thomas or Blessing get news to him? Did he reject me before I was born?

  What difference will it make if Francis Aggrey knew of me? With or without Francis Aggrey, my life has run to this moment where I am standing in front of the London School of Economics struggling to breathe with tears on my cheeks.

  London sidesteps me, the stream of workers flowing around an obstacle. A woman crying in the street is nothing new. I call Robert. He does not pick up.

  Rose is in Mumbai. I call my neighbor Katherine. She had left her number on my kitchen table, alongside a Tupperware box of pasta, with the words: Call me if you need anything.

  “Hello, Katherine speaking. Hello?”

  “It’s Anna from Windsor Street.”

  “Anna. How lovely to hear from you.”

  “I still have your Tupperware. I’ve been meaning to bring it back.”

  “I didn’t even notice. How are you?”

  “I’m in front of the LSE building in Holborn. I think I’m having a panic attack.”

  “Right,” she says. “Are you close to the station?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you can get on the tube or will it aggravate things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you walk to the station?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “What did you get up to today?”

  “I went to the British Museum.”

  “That’s nice. Did you go to see anything in particular?”

  “Some African artefacts. A couple of masks. Some beautiful leopardesses.”

  “Are you walking now?”

  “Yes, I am,” I say.

  “What else did you do?”

  “I ate alone in an Italian restaurant.”

  “What did you have?”

  “Pasta.”

  “Nice?”

  “A little dry. I’m at the station now,” I say.

  “How long do you think it will take you to get home?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “I’ll see you on the other end, then.”

  “No, I couldn’t possibly ask that of you.”

  “Get on the train. I’ll see you soon.”

  There are no free seats. I stand with strangers packed close, holding on to a bar drenched in germs. A passenger rises to leave; another slides into his place. It is a game for the young and agile. I stand all the way to my stop. I feel numb. The whirlwind has passed. When I get outside Katherine is waiting with a flask.

  “I thought you might like some tea. Did you manage all right?”

  5

  Katherine sits opposite me in my kitchen. Her hair is tied-back brown that is going grey. She is older than me but slimmer, with the rangy physique of a runner. Her clothes are casual: sweater and jeans, but expensive. Cashmere. I have nothing to offer except expired crackers and chocolate ice cream.

  “I’ll have the crackers, thank you. The date’s always a suggestion.” In the familiar space of my blue tiles and granite worktops, I wonder if I have made it all up.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know if I have the words. I’ve never felt that way before. I don’t feel that way now.”

  The urge to confide in someone presses. I would rather Rose or even Robert were here, but this kind stranger is all I have.

  “I found a diary that belonged to my father among my mother’s things,” I say. “She died six months back, if you remember. Francis, m
y father, returned to West Africa before I was born. I don’t think he knew about the pregnancy. He may not even be alive.”

  “Are you sure it’s his diary? Your mother never mentioned it?”

  “I’m sure, and for whatever reason—maybe a good one—she kept it from me.”

  I do not want her to think ill of my mother. Already I feel I have shared too much.

  “Did you like what you read in his diary?” Katherine asks.

  “Yes. I liked his writing voice very much.”

  “You’ll want to find out more, then.”

  Of course. I may not be able to go to Bamana immediately, but some of the dramatis personae may be somewhere in London this very moment: Thomas Phiri, Blessing, perhaps even Menelik, if he ever got out of jail. Katherine’s suggestion is sound.

  “What do you do?” I ask her.

  “Full-time home manager or housewife, according to the census. I worked in banking until my third child. I hung on for as long as I could.”

  “I was an architect. Gave it up not long after I married. A mistake,” I say.

  “Everything happens for a reason.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes. During the crisis, my husband, Simon, lost his job in the City and he couldn’t find work for two years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “No need,” she says. “That’s when we started going to church. Before then we were always playing keep-up, always one step behind someone. We sold our boat. We didn’t need one. I’m scared of the open sea.”

  I don’t know how to respond to this edited version of life. In a few years I might be sitting across from a stranger, telling of how my husband cheated, and of how my mother died, and it might be the best thing that happened to me.

  “I should leave you to get some rest,” she says. “Call me if you need anything.”

  After she is gone, I take out my phone. Robert has returned my call and left a message.

  “Hi, Anna. Sorry I was out. Everything all right? I hope it’s not the boiler. Sometimes the start button can get a bit fiddly. Do you remember when we first bought the house and the heating broke down in winter and we all slept in the same bed? Anyway, I can come and have a look if you want . . . Rose texted me she’s in Mumbai. We always wanted to go to India, didn’t we—?”

  I cut the line and go upstairs. The second book from my mother’s box is in better condition than Francis Aggrey’s diary. The spine is smooth. The cardboard cover is dark green, almost black. I open it. My mother’s hand has glued a press clipping to the first page, a short piece from The Times.

  “MASTERMIND” IN MION KIDNAPS IS EX–UNIVERSITY OF LONDON STUDENT

  Police in the Diamond Coast are seeking the whereabouts of Kofi Adjei, who is suspected of planning the kidnap of three English mine owners in Mion. Two years ago, Adjei (formerly known as Francis Aggrey) was a student at University College London, although he did not succeed in taking a degree. A former lecturer described Adjei as “quiet and reserved.” The mine owners were released last Friday after a ransom of £30,000 was paid. [March 12, 1971]

  The articles got longer, the headlines more alarming

  KOFI ADJEI ESTABLISHES DIAMOND COAST LIBERATION GROUP FROM HIDING [June 4, 1971]

  MION POLICE STATION ATTACK CLAIMED BY DIAMOND COAST LIBERATION GROUP [September 16, 1971]

  MION MINE OWNER SHOT AND IN CRITICAL CONDITION [December 3, 1971]

  My father was a terrorist and he had been radicalized in England by Menelik.

  INSIDE THE BARBARISM OF THE DCLG [February 2, 1972]

  KOFI ADJEI, DCLG LEADER, ARRESTED [August 17, 1972]

  For the first time there was a photograph accompanying one of the articles. It was Francis Aggrey, unrecognizable from the dandy in London. They had stripped him to the waist, and he was seated on the ground with his legs stretched before him. He was thin and unshaven, his hair wild and uncombed.

  They tried the “Terror of Mion,” on January 13, 1973, two days after my third birthday. In April 1973 they sentenced him to twenty years in prison.

  They had planned it all in Menelik’s flat and here it was: the liberation of Africa, Francis Aggrey brought low, sitting in the dust. Did his old friends read of it? Did Thomas and Blessing Phiri sitting in some suburb in London see him in the news? The clippings continued.

  In September 1975, Amnesty International protested my father’s inhumane treatment in jail. The following year, peace talks began with the Diamond Coast Liberation Group. The turnaround was swift. My father was released in 1977 after serving five years of his sentence. Elections were scheduled. By November 1977 Kofi Adjei was the front-runner.

  KOFI ADJEI SWEEPS TO VICTORY IN DIAMOND COAST

  On Tuesday morning more than three hundred thousand Diamond Coasters went peacefully to the polls, and yesterday night the results were announced. Kofi Adjei, once the Terror of Mion, has won the first general election in the Diamond Coast and shall become the first prime minister. In June he will be sworn in as leader of a new country: Bamana. [January 11, 1978]

  It was Francis Aggrey, transformed from the fugitive of a few years ago. He was bare-chested and powerful, a cloth worn over his shoulder like a toga. In an outstretched hand, he was holding a fly whisk, the tip pointing triumphantly at the sky: an image of a great chief. My father was the first prime minister of Bamana.

  6

  This was what my mother had hidden from me, buried in this box and locked away. It was not a secret I could have kept in my childhood. I was too hard-pressed on every side to not draw out this trump when I was called a wog or a nigger, to not shout back, “My father’s a prime minister.”

  And who would have believed me? Who had heard of Bamana anyway?

  Kofi Adjei Prime Minister Bamana I typed into Google. I’d never searched for Francis Aggrey’s name on the Internet before. By the time the technology was available, I no longer thought about him much. Kofi’s Wikipedia entry was long.

  Kofi Adjei was the first president of Bamana, serving from 1984 to 2008.

  The dates didn’t match the newspaper articles, although the man in the picture could be him: clean-shaven, elderly, with a tuft of mustache on his upper lip. He was more weathered than the young Francis Aggrey but it was a good likeness.

  Kofi Adjei was born in Segu in 1944 to Clara and Peter Aggrey. Adjei was christened Francis Kofi Adjei Aggrey but changed his name to Kofi Adjei when he began the liberation struggle.

  It was him. Much of the biography was now familiar. I had a grandfather who died when Francis Aggrey was young. My grandmother was a businesswoman. There was a sentence for the missionary schooling at CMS Segu; a paragraph for his time at UCL. I knew of his friendship with Ras Menelik. There was no mention of Thomas Phiri.

  In later life, Adjei reflected on the racial prejudice he received from landlords in London.

  That was all there was in possible reference to the Bains.

  Adjei was sworn in as the country’s first prime minister in June 1978. After a constitutional change in 1984, he became the first president of Bamana. In 2008, after thirty years in office, Adjei stepped down.

  Thirty years in office was too long. I did not know much about African politics, but to remain for three decades in power would surely make him some sort of dictator.

  There was an African family: Elizabeth, his wife, a nurse who smuggled bandages and penicillin during the liberation struggle; Afua, Kweku, Kwabena, and Benita Adjei, my half siblings. It seemed presumptuous to claim them as such. To find out at forty-eight that my father was alive and a six-hour flight away. I felt giddy, like I had stood up too fast after sitting down for hours.

  I am going to church with Katherine. She rang to ask me this morning if I wanted to come and I had no plausible excuse. I did not want to sit at home brooding over my discoveries about Francis Aggrey, and church seemed as good a diversion as any. When I was younger, I had faith, a flickering thing that came on in times of great need.

 
When my bell buzzed at 11:45, I was ready by the door in boots and gloves, a sweater and a coat. In the daylight I saw the wrinkles around her eyes and the brown spots on her hands. She was greyer in the sun, and gaunter. Her jeans could be a size smaller. The fabric sagged around her knees like loose skin.

  “I’m so glad you’re coming.”

  She walked like a runner, bouncing and trotting. Fog streamed from my mouth and I grew warm under my layers.

  “So, how’s the search going? Have you found anything new about your father?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  I don’t mean to make a secret of my discovery, but I am not yet ready to share, not even with this kind stranger.

  “That’s surprising. It’s almost impossible to hide with the Internet these days. Have you tried Facebook?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should. Even my mum’s on it and she’s in her seventies.”

  It was a stone church with stained-glass windows and a tended cemetery bereft of flowers. Inside was modern and warm: padded chairs instead of the long, bony pews I remembered from childhood. The cross hanging behind the altar was made of lightbulbs: art installation rather than sacred object. The flagstones were covered in rugs.

  “Modern.”

  “Yes, our vicar used to be an artist.”

  Katherine knew a lot of people.

  “This is my neighbor Anna,” she said, introducing me to each one. I was a prize. A possible new convert. Everyone was in jeans and trainers and hoodies, except a few elderly women holding fast in twinsets and pearls. I was surprised by their youth, their slim vigor. They hugged Katherine and smiled widely when they grasped my hand.

  The vicar was black. Perhaps this was why Katherine had brought me. He was tall and spare, and welcomed us in an accent that I could not place. All that was priestly was the white collar that glinted in the open V of his fleece. Two boys and a girl got on stage, the girl with a guitar, the boys with their hands empty. They led us in song. The lyrics appeared on a screen, a few lines at a time, karaoke-style. There was a man working the projector at the back, clicking to the next slide a second before we needed it.