Sankofa

by Chibundu Onuzo

  Jesus is alive, amen,

  Jesus is alive.

  Yesterday, today, forever,

  Jesus is alive.

  Around me eyes began to close. An old lady, the most proper in the bunch, was the first to raise her hands. I thought she was signaling someone. Then slowly it spread through the room. A man bent till his torso lay parallel to the floor. A woman twirled once. Her skirts rose and settled. Katherine neither raised her hands nor danced. She was not the only one standing still but I wondered if my presence was inhibiting. I closed my eyes too, but the music had taken them to a place I could not follow. I could sneer at it all, their suspension of rationality, their gullible thirst for the supernatural, but Katherine had been kind to me and her kindness came from this place.

  There was a segment for prayer. They prayed for nations at war, for the Amazon rain forest, for children in the inner city, and then a tiny window to pray for ourselves. I, too, decided to suspend disbelief.

  “Please let my mother’s flat sell so I won’t have to ask Robert for money to go to Bamana.”

  It was a selfish prayer. Its chances of success were therefore limited. When it was over the vicar returned to the stage. This was more familiar. There was no lectern nor was he using notes, but it was a sermon, this much I recognized. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not boast. The mic was clipped on, barely visible as he moved from one side of the stage to the other, pacing and stopping. His manner was engaging, funny even, when he told a story about the first time he changed a nappy. We moved from this bouncing sermon to the solemnity of Communion. The chalice was raised to the light. Violence was done to the host. It was snapped in two—the sound of breaking, the wafer brittle as bone. It was theater, as all religion was theater, but it was well done. When the velvet collection bag was passed around, I placed a five-pound note inside.

  “You don’t have to,” Katherine whispered to me.

  “I know.”

  Katherine was in charge of the refreshment table afterwards. There were tea, coffee, hot chocolate, biscuits, and store-bought muffins. Perhaps this was why she was so popular. I stood by the table with my coffee and biscuits, watching as she spooned sugar with one hand and wiped spills with another. I could imagine her trotting up and down a banking floor, efficient but distant. The children were back from their Sunday school. They ran in between the legs of the adults.

  “Hello, there.” It was the vicar, descended from the stage and walking now, amid his flock. He put out his hand to shake me.

  “Carl Offor.”

  I motioned that my hands were full.

  “Anna Graham.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “It’s my first time.” I felt the need to offer some confession. “I haven’t been in a while.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  I expected him to turn away, but he remained by my side.

  “I hope you enjoyed the service.”

  “It was lovely, really. Short and sweet. Things used to go on a bit when I was a child.”

  “There’s been reform in the Church of England.”

  “I can see.”

  He snorted, and I glimpsed the gap in his teeth.

  “Well, I hope you come again, Anna. This is your home.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was trite, but in a sense true. The Church doesn’t pay tax.

  He moved on. A woman who must be his wife came up to him. She touched his arm and said something into his ear. She had dreadlocks that fell down her back in thin ropes. The ends had been dipped in honey dye. Of course he was married. The pool dwindled with age.

  Later, I helped Katherine clear the refreshment table and fold its stiff metal legs. We were among the last to leave.

  “So, what did you think?”

  “The vicar asked as well.”

  “He’s new. Only been here about a year.”

  “It was a good sermon,” I said. “He seems nice and his wife is pretty.”

  “Yes, very pretty. So, same time next week?”

  “A lot of it was familiar.”

  “Except the biscuits, surely? We never had such good biscuits at mine.”

  “Except the biscuits,” I say.

  “So, you’ll come next week, then?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you’ll let me know if you find out more about your father. Imagine meeting him after all these years. It would be a wonderful experience.”

  “I hope so.”

  I unlocked my front door and stepped on a folded sheet of paper. It was a note pushed through my letterbox while I was in church. My name was on the flap. The handwriting was Robert’s, large letters all the same size, perfectly formed as though with a stencil.

  My breath was uneven from Katherine’s brisk pace or from the latent excitement my husband could still arouse. I flicked his note open.

  Just wanted to make sure everything was all right. I returned your call and left a message. You’ve changed the locks or else I’d have waited for you to come home. Let me know you’re okay.

  All my love, Robert

  I found out about his affair by chance. He went on holiday with his mistress but told me he was traveling for work, to Brussels or some other bland decoy. They’d taken pictures together. Afterwards, she sent a photo while I was texting Rose from his phone.

  At first, I’d admired the woman in the bikini, the muscle definition in her stomach, the large sunglasses perched on her head. And then I wondered why a bare-chested Robert was next to her, arm around her hip, lips pressed to her blond weave.

  You think it can never happen to you. It is the hubris that makes daily life possible. The bomb explodes for someone else; the sky always crashes on their head, until the ticking parcel stops with you.

  Self-pity threatened to sweep away the pleasant residue of the church service. All Robert’s love. How trite. I tore the note into pieces.

  7

  A bronze Isaac Newton sat naked and bent over a compass in the British Library courtyard. The building was overwhelmingly brick. A child might have put it together with pieces of toy blocks. Inside were pale marble and white columns, airy and light, a surprise after the dense exterior. Registration was on the second floor.

  “Good morning. How may I help?” asked a man with a row of black pens in his breast pocket. His shirt was white, his suit navy blue. A pair of glasses hung from his neck by a rainbow cord, a sharp burst of personality.

  “I’m researching Kofi Adjei, the first president of Bamana.”

  “And are you a PhD research student or an academic?”

  “Do I have to be? The website didn’t mention that.”

  “No, but we’d like to know for our records.”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what books you’d like to view?”

  I read out the titles: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter and Bamana: The First Hundred Days.

  “May I see your ID and proof of address?”

  He lowered his eyes to my passport and then raised them to me. The Anna Brangwen Graham in the photograph was plumper and, to her knowledge, adequately married.

  “If you’d just look into the camera.”

  My startled face was printed on a plastic card, along with a bar code and my full name.

  “There you are, Ms. Graham. All set.”

  “Bain.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Bain. I’m thinking of changing my surname back to my maiden name.”

  “Right. Well, if you do, let us know so we can update your details. Next, please.”

  The Asia and Africa Reading Room brought to mind neither Asia nor Africa. Rows of heads bent in quiet study, feet resting on hushed grey carpet, eyes flicking to muted cream walls. There were no windows. All the light in the room was artificial, giving no sense of passing time.

  Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter by Kofi Adjei was a slight volume, thinner than I had expected. Bamana: The First Hundred Days by Adrian B
ennett, the LSE lecturer in Menelik’s circle, was three times its size. I sat down at desk number 129 and began with my father.

  I was born in Segu, the son of a humble fish trader and the lowest grade of civil servant the British imperial machine could create. My father, Peter Aggrey, had his first contact with the British as a young man. He was pressed into the labor gang that built the railway from the diamond mines of Mion to the port city of Segu. The British called this kind of work “forced labor” but it was really slavery because it was a job one could not quit. Living conditions were very poor for forced laborers. They often died of malaria, snakebites, and a combination of overwork and malnutrition. One night, my father escaped, taking with him the damaged lungs that would plague him for the rest of his life.

  He could not go back to his village of Yabo because the chief, a collaborator, would have him whipped and sent back. So he set off from his family and kinsmen for the city of Segu, a young man on his own. Nowadays, this is a journey many rural youth take with little trepidation, but for my father it would have been like setting off to the moon on foot. He arrived in Segu with little English and fell into the hands of some Irish missionaries.

  They stole his name of Kwabena, drizzled river water over him, and baptized him Peter. They taught him enough reading, writing, and ’rithmetic to make a catechist out of him, but my father, although nominally a convert, did not much care for the celibacy of the Irish brothers. He became a manservant or “boy” to an English commissioner, one John Aggrey, whose surname my father adopted. The new name was a sign of his connection to a powerful white man and also a symbol of how far he had come from that village boy. In the Yabo of that time, they did not care much for surnames. A man was known by his deeds, not his ancestors.

  When John Aggrey was posted to Ceylon, he helped my father secure a clerkship in the railway office, and there he remained for the rest of his life. He married a girl his parents sent him from Yabo, but she was sickly and bore him sickly children that died one after the other. European science, I am sure, can offer many explanations for those infant deaths but the Akan also have an explanation: kwasamba or spirit children, who are sent to the world to torment their parents by living and dying over and over again.

  The wife eventually went the way of her children and my father was a widower for many years until he met my mother, Clara, a fisherman’s daughter and, at sixteen, twenty years younger than him. She was unschooled and could not even write the English name her mother had borrowed from a popular cosmetic powder, but she was beautiful. He married her and they had one son, whom they called Francis Kofi Adjei Aggrey.

  He did not add, “and thus a legend was born,” but he meant it. Only a vain man could write an autobiography at forty, in the middle of an active life. Kofi had traveled very far from the thoughtful, introspective Francis.

  I still thought of my father as Francis, although I could guess at why he changed his name. It was a historic reversal. Kwabena to Peter, Francis to Kofi. I wonder what my grandparents would have made of Francis’s mixed-race daughter. He wrote of my grandfather’s death.

  I don’t remember him ever being in good health. He was always a coughing presence in a back room and I had to play quietly so as not to disturb. He died of tuberculosis probably, even though this is only an educated guess. He was never admitted into a hospital, as the “colored” hospitals of the time were badly run and unhygienic.

  He was a kind man. At his funeral there were many relatives whose school fees he had helped pay from his meager clerk’s salary. As his only son, I led the procession to the grave in red and black robes, and my mother, walking behind me, had to pinch me in the back to stop me smiling so broadly.

  He wrote of his time at school in a manner that seemed geared to highlight the latent greatness in young Francis.

  I was a bright but restless student. My teachers would often send me home with top marks and torn clothing. On such days my mother would lament the death of my father. What I needed was a strong hand to give me a firm beating. Sometimes she would send me to her brother for a thrashing, but he, too, also felt pity for the poor fatherless child and often let me off with a stern talking-to.

  I led my peers in both sports and academics. They used to call me “Boy Wonder.”

  I did not know what my mother was like at school. I never thought to ask. She was probably not a girl wonder.

  Francis made his way through school in the Diamond Coast and worked as a railway clerk before he made the great leap to England for further studies in engineering, a move that he said won him great admiration.

  I did not expect the cold nor the blandness of English food. I was also not popular with the ladies. Some of them expected an African man to be a sort of tour guide, a whistle-stop cultural exchange. Mr. Aggrey, how is the weather in your country? How is the food? I preferred a woman I did not always have to be explaining myself to. Why do you, Why do you . . .

  He wrote briefly of the political scene in London. Menelik was given a lesser role in my father’s life. He was portrayed as a curious figure that Francis had come across rather than the mentor he had seemed in the diary. My father wished it to appear that he had engineered his political awakening on his own.

  There was no mention of Thomas Phiri or, for that matter, my mother or Aunt Caryl. Instead, a few chapters later, was a wholesome account of the romance with his wife, Elizabeth, begun when he returned home.

  I noticed Sister Elizabeth right away. Even in the plain lines of her nursing uniform, you could see her small waist and shapely ankles. I was sad that I was only admitted for one week. Once I set eyes on her, I would have been happy to lie in that hospital bed for a year.

  My father first tried to join more orthodox politics when he returned to the Diamond Coast in 1969. He secured a railway job in the north, the diamond region that Menelik had once challenged him for knowing so little about. The role was mundane and there was a ceiling to his progress, as he had not completed his degree. He joined the Diamond Coast Congress Party, but found its northern leaders snobbish and more interested in socializing with British officials than in seeking independence.

  Next, he joined the National Union of Railway Workers and quickly rose to the position of secretary general. It was a more radical organization but still not radical enough for Francis. The British must go, and they must go immediately. And so in 1971 he founded the Diamond Coast Liberation Group.

  I am often asked how freedom fighters passed the time while waiting for a window of opportunity to strike. A cell could spend weeks roving in the bush before a plan could be put into action. We thought of freedom and our families, but mostly what we thought of was food.

  There is much in the bush that is edible if one would let go of finicky Western prejudices. The first time I was presented with a mopane worm, I considered downing arms and returning home. Me, the only son of my mother, who was only ever fed the choicest cuts of meat, to eat a grub dug out from the ground. Yet I grew to appreciate these worms that we would snack on during the day. They could be eaten raw or slightly roasted. There were also some excellent hunters in our group, skilled at setting traps for bush rodents and other smaller creatures. Once in a glorious while, someone would trap an antelope and we would eat chunks of meat, whose fat and gristle would stoke our memories for weeks.

  It was lunchtime and, one by one, the other readers drifted out, and I followed them. The café was an open space of mushroom-top tables with the muted buzz of people who could not forget they were in a library. I was too shy to join anyone. I bought a salad and circled until an empty table appeared. I set my tray down and speared a beetroot with my plastic fork. Opposite me was a wall of books trapped behind glass. I tried to read the gold lettering on the spines while I ate, but the print was too small. They were objects, carefully chosen for their style, like the lamp fittings.

  “May I join you?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  The stranger was over fifty, going grey but
with unlined skin. Not handsome, but large and at ease in his frame. A thick musk of cologne billowed out from him. My eyes roved to his left hand and caught a gold band. He put his tray down. He was eating a proper meal—rice and curry with peas on the side. I looked into the leaves of my salad. I was suddenly aware of the bovine crunch of vegetables in my mouth. I chewed faster, eager to leave.

  “So, what are you researching?” His voice was deep and attractive.

  “Me?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Francis Aggrey. Or Kofi Adjei, as he is better known. He was the first prime minister of Bamana.”

  “I know him,” he said.

  “Personally?”

  “I mean I know of him. I was in secondary school when he became prime minister. In Nigeria we sent money for the liberation struggle in what was then the Diamond Coast.”

  I dated a few African men at university—the type that had a knee-jerk attraction to my skin tone, dark when placed next to my mother’s, light when placed beside theirs. There was a Nigerian boyfriend whose mother did not like me. I didn’t like her, either.

  “I’m researching the Aba Women’s Riot,” he said. “Eastern Nigeria, early twentieth century. It’s a leisure project. My great-grandmother was one of the so-called rioters.”

  The thirty minutes I had allotted for lunch were almost over. “I hate to be rude, but I must get back inside.”

  “Of course. It was nice to meet you—?”

  “Anna,” I said.

  “Alex. Alex Obosi. All the best with Adjei. It’s a shame how he turned out.”