Sankofa

by Chibundu Onuzo

  “Pardon the mess,” she said. “I live and work out of here sometimes. So what’s it like in there?”

  “It’s open to the public,” I said. I was Kofi’s guest. There was a certain discretion I owed him.

  “Not the tourist attractions. The palace itself. I’ve heard the bathtubs are made of gold.”

  There was no air-conditioning in her car. We rolled down the windows and the sound of crickets calling for their mates poured in.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To the village first, then a bar. Gbadolite didn’t have much happening here before Sir Adjei built that monstrosity. Now there are a few hotels just outside the village for tourists, and some small bars and things.”

  “You don’t like the palace?”

  “The money could have been better spent. Don’t print my name if you use my quote.”

  It was too late to explain I was not a journalist. Marcellina would think me foolish for pretending in the first place. I let the misinterpretation stand.

  The streetlights did not stretch far beyond the village entrance. We passed the square, silent now after the congress. The deeper we drove into the village, the worse the road became, until the asphalt dissolved into the earth.

  “We have to walk from here. Otherwise my car will get stuck.”

  I was wearing the wrong shoes. The flimsy pumps sank into the mud.

  “The trick is to walk like you’re swimming,” Marcellina said.

  “I don’t know how to swim.”

  There was no moon. It was a pre-industrial night, of a type long vanished from Europe. The slaves shipped from Cove Coast would have come from a village like this, would have been force-marched from here to the ocean. I wasn’t very athletic. I would have died on the way, been buried by the wayside or not buried, left on the surface to rot, to return to the soil. I took off one shoe and let my foot drag in the earth.

  The air was heavy against my face, like a thin film or a strip of gauze. Was this the authentic Bamanaian experience? More real than my life in Segu, than at Kofi’s palace?

  “We’re turning right,” Marcellina said.

  I did not see the house until we were almost touching it. It was built in the traditional style with thatch roofing that hung down like matted hair. I put out my hands and felt the mud walls. They were cool and surprisingly firm.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  “Inside, please.”

  There was an opening in the wall, the size of a slim person. She passed through and I stood outside in the dark. I did not know Marcellina, yet I was not afraid. Nothing in Bamana had harmed me. I followed.

  Inside it was warm and claustrophobic. We were not alone. The creature, the person, had a smell of meat just gone off, sweet and rank.

  “Abena, it’s me. Marcellina.”

  “Yes.”

  I started at the voice, which came from the ground. “What’s going on?” I said.

  Marcellina switched on her phone torch and I squinted at the light. A girl lay on the floor, a kafa cloth drawn like a blanket around her. I did not see the chain until she sat up. It ran from her ankle to a stake in the ground, a thin, iron snake. There were bones piled in the corner in a small pyramid.

  “Abena,” Marcellina said, “I brought someone to meet you.”

  “Ma, when can I go?”

  “Soon.”

  Marcellina turned to me.

  “This is Abena. Her uncle accused her of being a witch. She has been here for four days now. I’m working to rescue her. The police are not responsive. I’ve spoken to an orphanage in the next town. They will take her, but only if they know that nobody will attack them for it. You can ask her your questions.”

  I shook my head.

  “Your questions for your article,” she said. “Are you not a journalist?”

  “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  I was at her mercy. I could not get back to the main road, let alone return to Kofi’s fortress without her.

  “Even if you’re not a journalist, you have access to Sir Adjei,” she said. “Talk to her.”

  I was an obroni. That was all Marcellina saw. Obroni were always looking for Africans to rescue. We were no use beyond that. But what could I do for this chained girl?

  “Good evening, ma,” Abena said.

  There was a gash above her eye. A scab had not yet formed. The wound glowed red. I was too far above her, too tall. I crouched. The smell was stronger around her person.

  “Good evening,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, ma.”

  She was not fine. Be of use, Anna. Be a useful obroni. I calmed my breathing, steadied my thoughts. Marcellina was right. I did know Kofi, and if he was still powerful enough to pack a village square, he would surely be able to free this girl.

  “Who put you here?” I asked.

  “My uncle.”

  “Why?” It was a foolish question. There was no answer that could justify her present state.

  “He said I am the reason why his business is failing. He said I should change what I have done, then he will release me.”

  What else could I ask? I looked to Marcellina but she was sending a text.

  “How have you been eating?” I said.

  “He brings food for me in the mornings. He just says I should fix his business, then he will let me go.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  I stood up and backed away to the entrance.

  “What’s the matter?” Marcellina said.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” She knelt by the girl and checked where the chain gripped her ankle. They spoke in their language softly and under their breath. She stood up.

  “Okay, let’s go.” She was brusque, businesslike. The obroni had proved a disappointment.

  “We can’t leave her here,” I said.

  “I can’t take her tonight. Let’s go.”

  One foot was still bare. I tapped at the ground with my heel. It was soft, would shift easily. I bent and began to dig around the stake.

  “We’ve tried that already. It’s cemented to the ground. Stop. The uncle will know someone has been here.”

  “We can’t leave her.”

  Abena’s hand on my arm was light, like a butterfly perching.

  “It’s okay, ma. Sister Marcellina will help me.”

  Marcellina stamped the soil I had dislodged back into place.

  “Let’s go.”

  I wore my shoe outside. We did not speak until we returned to her car.

  “I just assumed. Most of the foreigners we get here are either journalists or aid workers. You didn’t seem like an aid worker,” she said. “Mama Christie’s next?”

  I remembered why I was always suspicious of people with causes. Their self-righteousness could justify almost any behavior. I was angry and still a little frightened.

  “No, please take me back to the palace.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where we were going. Let’s go to Mama Christie’s. I’ve shown you the worst of the village. You must see something else.”

  Mama Christie’s was close to the main road. Meat roasted on an open brazier, skewered over hot coals. There was indoor and outdoor seating. Indoors, patrons huddled around a television, watching a football match. Outdoors, colored bulbs wound around poles like Christmas lights. We sat outside on plastic chairs. There was an ashtray on the table, half-full.

  “Your face is still long,” Marcellina said. Her eyes had taken on the mood of the bar, twinkly like a garden gnome.

  “Sorry, I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll be okay. I’ll get her out by tomorrow.”

  “Everyone is so cheerful, and just a few miles away there’s a little girl chained in a hut.”

  “Don’t people do bad things to each other in your country?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And d
on’t people still get on with life?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s no different.”

  She was right, of course. I felt I had witnessed the depths of darkness tonight, but I had never thought of the cases of abuse I read about in London, of babies found in quiet suburbs with cigarette burns on their skin, as the “depths of darkness.” My obroni prejudice was revealed, and by a woman not yet thirty.

  There was shouting indoors. A ball tumbled into a net in Europe and, in West Africa, people rejoiced. Mama Christie herself brought us two beers and meat on sticks. The meat was spicy, the beer was strong.

  “How do you find living here?” I asked.

  “In Gbadolite? I was born close by. I’m a government scholarship kid. That’s one thing Sir Adjei did for my generation. Gave with one hand, took with the other.”

  “What do you think of him? Sir Adjei.”

  “I thought you are not a journalist?” Her tone was teasing. I relaxed into the bar ambience, pulled away from the horror of Abena.

  “I’m curious about the country,” I said. “I’m half Bamanaian.”

  “Which side? Your mum or your dad?”

  “Dad. I never knew him. My mother was a single parent. I came back to try to reconnect to the country.”

  “Have you seen your dad?”

  “Yes. We met for the first time this year.”

  “Wow. So how did you end up in Sir Adjei’s palace?”

  “I came as a tourist.”

  “I didn’t know tourists were allowed to sleep there. Anyway, I suppose for obroni tourists it’s different. Me, if I tried to spend the night, they’d kick my black ass out. You were asking what I thought about him?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “He did some good things. My parents’ generation love him. Daasebre. It’s a title that means ‘we can’t thank you enough.’ He freed them from colonial rule, gave their children free education, all of that. But I can’t think of him without remembering the Kinnakro Five. I wasn’t born when it happened but I’m into history.”

  “I read about them,” I said.

  “So you know. Found dead in the dorm room of Patrick, their leader. Police said it was armed robbers or cultists. A few of their parents are still seeking justice, but they’re old. It was a big scandal back then. People even thought the international pressure would make Sir Adjei step down, but it didn’t happen. Bamanaians moved on and forgot.”

  “Why was there no trial?”

  “Which judge would try the president that appointed him? And even if they did, how to link him directly to the murders? It would not have been his hand that killed them.”

  “So you were glad when he stepped down?”

  “Yes, I was fourteen in 2008 and he was the only president I’d ever known. It was time for him to go. But I’m no longer sure that Owusu is any better. Inflation is crazy. Two years ago a loaf of bread was five cowries. Now it’s ten. Most of my classmates are in Canada now.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Canada is cold,” she said. “Are you married?” The swerve in the conversation made me laugh.

  “No,” I said, erasing Robert from my life. I wanted to keep Rose, though. “But I have a daughter. You?”

  “I have a fiancé. He’s a doctor. We’ve been engaged for one year. He wants me to move back to the city. Maybe emigrate after we marry. Bamana is not a place to raise children, he says.”

  “What do you think?”

  “We were raised here. Are we not normal?” she said. “What do you do over there?”

  “I studied architecture.”

  “What have you built?”

  “Not much. I couldn’t even build a fake journalism career,” I said, matching her banter.

  “You’re funny. My parents want me to emigrate too. They don’t understand what I’m doing only twenty kilometers from where I started. I have a university degree. I should be earning more.”

  The match was over. A few couples opened the dance floor. I was too old to learn how they moved, leading with the waist and hips, not the arms and feet. The energy they expended seemed reckless.

  “Care to dance?” He was younger than Rose. He wore a metal chain around his neck, silver links looped in a tight circle. I could see the yellow of his eyes, jaundiced and bright. When he smiled, his teeth were even and small, like niblets on corn.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Why not? I like my women mature.”

  “I like my men the same,” I replied.

  He wandered off to try his luck elsewhere.

  “You know, it used to be just the young girls who went after the foreigners, but now the young boys are doing it too. I hear in the bars in Segu you’ll see a seventy-year-old white woman and a nineteen-year-old Bama boy.”

  “Gender equality,” I said. “Isn’t that what you’re fighting for?”

  “Better life for girls, not worse life for boys.”

  I had never felt as rich as I did sitting at that plastic table opposite Marcellina. At the Palace Hotel in Segu and in Kofi’s Gbadolite castle I was dwarfed by the wealth on display, a middling tourist who could only gawp, but here in this dirt bar, only a few miles away from a young girl chained in a hut, I realized that perhaps to many Bamanaians, the money from the sale of my mother’s flat made me as rich as Croesus. I could build my own manor, pick vassals from the natives, turn them into serfs. Why was Bamana so poor when the country had diamonds? It was a question Menelik had asked Francis Aggrey, a question Kofi Adjei still could not answer.

  “I should go. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  On the journey back we listened to country music. Marcellina was a Dolly Parton fan. Down the flat road, from more than a mile away, we could see Kofi’s folly blazing. The closer we got, the stronger its light became until, as we parked by the walls, it was as bright as noon.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. Please remember Abena. Do what you can.”

  She drove off with her broken taillight. Sule was waiting for me in the guardhouse.

  “You did not inform me that you were going out,” he said.

  “I didn’t know I had to.”

  “Please. For your safety. Who did you go with?”

  “A friend. How long have you been waiting?”

  “Never mind. Please follow me.”

  Sule drove us in a golf cart back to the palace. I sat at the back like a teenage truant. When I got to my room, I washed my feet in the bathtub. The soil ran off, staining the marble black.

  24

  It was raining and I had exhausted Gbadolite’s attractions. I had not seen Kofi since the congress three days ago. He was no longer president, but he was still sought out, still busy, Sule assured me when I asked to see him. I did not bother asking him for canvas or paints. The mood had left me. How long Kofi intended to stay in his fiefdom I could not tell, but it was time for me to return to England.

  I was no longer at ease in Kofi’s wonderland. During the day I drove in a golf cart, joining the traffic of tourists and holidaymakers that came to visit the zoo, the water park, and the different museums.

  A cable car circled the entire property. I went up with a family of four. The mother would not open her eyes, even when our glass egg cut through a flock of birds and scattered their formation.

  At night I slept fitfully. I woke up drenched in sweat, the air-conditioning blasting cold air. I locked the door and heard noises in the dark. The young men of Kinnakro. Five ghosts to haunt the corridors of Gbadolite, see-through specters passing through walls, seeking revenge.

  Marcellina texted me. She had rescued Abena. I felt relieved, and then ashamed of my relief. I should have found Kofi, wherever he was holed up in this palace, and demanded that Abena be freed. I should have done more.

  Or perhaps it was better in the end that Marcellina engineered her rescue and not me, with my clumsy attempt of playing the obroni savior. I remembered with embarrassme
nt trying to dig the stake out of the ground, a mistake that would have endangered Abena even further.

  I thought of calling Rose but I did not really feel like speaking to my daughter. Her voice did not belong here. My life in England was one world, and my life here was another, two planets that must not collide.

  I watched the rain from the library. It drummed on the roof and windowpanes. The water ran into concealed drains and did not settle in pools. Kofi had achieved here what he could not achieve in Segu. Gbadolite was the dream of urban planners, a city built from scratch, humans added after the fact, sidestepping the warrens and hovels they erected spontaneously.

  “So, this is where you are hiding.”

  The woman who walked in was tall and dark-skinned like Kofi. Gold earrings dangled from her ears, brushing her shoulders. I rose to greet her.

  “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I said.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Kofi told you about me?”

  “Kofi? He’s your age mate.”

  You could tell she was Bamanaian but her accent was glossed with something British, something clipped and slightly braying. It was strange to hear that voice here.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Anna Bain.”

  “Very good. Anna Bain, you will pack your things and leave Gbadolite this afternoon. I don’t know what sort of adventurer you are. I can see from your looks that you are foreign. Wherever you came from, you must go back there and never come within a hundred miles of my father. Have I made myself clear?”

  “I am Kofi’s guest,” I said. I would not be intimidated by her bluster. I had learned from dealing with Kofi.

  “A guest? The latest whore is wagging her mouth.”

  “Is that what you think this is?”

  “A woman your age with my father. What else can it be?”

  “I see,” I said. “It’s best for you to speak to him in private.”

  “The only thing I’m going to do is personally escort you to your room so you can pack your belongings. Your bags will be searched before you leave.”