New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  of migrating, certain of your manhood

  Took some time settling in

  Enough time to sever ties

  enough to know when you’ve been lied to

  at least on the sunny turtle back island

  you could walk slow

  Too much sun to rush,

  The nurse whispers, “He hasn’t eaten much,”

  Here the mortal hush

  something rustling.

  a reminder, a soft alarm

  like the syrupy resonance of a familiar calling,

  a hunger, a wondering— “Back ’Ome”.

  Back then

  never knew

  how you were gonna get back home

  just held a spirit

  that wanted forward

  Knew there were doors to treasures that swung open inward

  And your ambition is mighty currency and curiosity knocks loudly

  And England knew, you opened up, let it in

  Gave it home, it the migrant

  You welcoming . . .

  Now, amongst the others

  the other fragile catacombs

  whose chairs are positioned to face a TV

  who sit so still so still, so as not to disturb the dust

  you see them, familiar strangers who smile as they approach you

  —your daughter and her child, they say.

  You talk and they listen

  and you know you forget things but they don’t seem to mind

  besides they feel warm and want to know you

  they feel like home

  and every time they make their farewells, you tell the girl child,

  “Look after your muddah” and that you thank them for coming

  cos you’re not long for this world, you’re just waiting,

  “Waitin’ on di Homedi Lawd.

  Waitin’ on di Lawd to call me.

  To call me to come Back ’Ome”

  Four (and then some) Women

  In tribute to Nina Simone. For Sara Reed

  Both mothers, both women with mental unwellness

  Writing art in a pleasant land

  about how an Archipelago’s children

  would bleed back into the pipelines

  stories that pummel our identities

  like we are punch bags of pigment

  our skin, an invitation to

  be interacted with violently,

  an unbroken contractual continuum

  we hand no hand writing in

  What sounds did your body make?

  Did it call to an ache of the centuries,

  of chains clinking on the auction block

  Now clanking keys in prison cell locks

  An ugly chime of time.

  How to make it stop?

  What melodic possibilities

  Did your skin make to him?

  The ones that Nina sings?

  (Kiddies practised the strum of his prejudice

  upon a black woman’s body

  England’s uniformed Brave

  told us what we always knew.)

  And I wonder did Officer Kiddie take a bow

  when the curtains of inevitability

  were drawn aside

  only to trail another veil

  stitched to its wake

  Sarah’s long sleep

  is crimson secrecy after seconds

  till we only see her silhouette on pages for a day

  denial falls like a dusk of muffled thuds under scuffling feet

  Listening to Nina Simone sing Four women this morning

  Peaches appeared beside me at my kitchen sink

  Had to grab the edge to steady myself

  Clasped my throat to find the breath snatched from it

  Peaches said her name over and over—Sarah Reed. Sarah Reed. Sarah Reed . . .

  She said “My name was never meant to be swallowed sweet,

  And neither is this Sister’s.”

  There are no words with sugar on top to talk about

  the beating of flesh

  the sinking of blood in ocean depths

  the splatter on urban streets

  like signatures that spell delete

  I have no candy coated metaphors

  for the mental gore and shock

  of the body rent from its psyche

  to be smashed open and left raw.

  11th January cold in a cold prison cell

  2nd February—#sayhername through the twittersphere

  8th February—the first vigil

  I had not yet shed a tear for the deaths

  my social media timeline had fed me

  I was angry, technically.

  So many had marched for “black lives in the US matter”

  So few, why so few knew that it was time to march for Sarah?

  Humanity stretched thin between the pauses

  as the black women and girls went up to the coughing loud hailer

  one after another and another and another and another

  on this cold cold night

  Gave account of the uncounted Sarah Reeds

  My body wanted to walk away

  hands and feet frozen, but above that biting sting

  was the frightening bruising

  that rose to the surface of my skin

  As their words sank in

  “I am a black working class woman

  who has suffered from mental health”

  Lost my way to Holloway

  walking down dead ends, roads of empty warehouses

  a North London girl, who knows these streets

  like she knows the meaning of mallet pulses her temple

  who wanted to deny the needle on the record

  that would scratch out that sample

  i am a black working class woman who has suffered from

  mental health

  i am a black working class woman who has suffered from

  mental health

  As these women spoke

  My feet forced me to stay, hands snap the thread

  for the key around my bent neck,

  opened the doors and go inside her cell

  and just for a moment

  see all of her

  sit beside her

  our breaths made misty tears of frost

  for a lost child and Nina’s guttural squall—“Peaches!”

  could be heard along the steely cold walls

  #SayHerName Sarah Reed

  #SayHerName Sarah Reed

  #SayHerName Sarah Reed

  And deep, deep down in me

  I feel

  she would have thought

  in there,

  she would have thought

  she might see

  her last days.

  What does it mean

  to hold that question inside you?

  Aminatta Forna

  Born in Scotland, she was raised in Sierra Leone and the UK, also spending periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. Her novels are Ancestor Stones (2006, Hurston-Wright Legacy Award), The Memory of Love (2010, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2002 she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. She is the winner of a Windham Campbell Award and has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the IMPAC Award. Academic positions she has held include Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, and currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University. She was appointed an OBE in 2017 for services to Literature.

  Santigi

  Santigi was a foundling. Or at least Santigi was as close to being a foundling as you can imagine. None of us, not even Santigi, knew his origins. He knew the name of the village where he was born but had never been back there. He did not know the names of his mother or his father. He called himself a
Loko, for the reason that he understood the language, which was his only tie to his beginnings. “Santigi, the Loko,” we’d call him and he would bang himself on the chest and say “Loko!”

  My step-mother Yabome’s first memory of Santigi was when he met her off the train from school. At that time Santigi had come to live in the house with Yabome and the grandmother who raised her. At that age Yabome never thought to ask where Santigi had come from, and when her grandmother died the old lady took whatever knowledge she possessed with her. It was rumoured that Santigi’s mother had borne him alone, had left him with neighbours while she went to find work scratching for diamonds in the eastern mines, that she had died there. When she failed to return the neighbours had given her young son to the old lady to raise. The story makes some kind of sense, but still it is hard to imagine, in a country where kinship is everything, where ties of allegiance are what binds, in a small country where everybody knows everyone else and their business, that a woman could be so alone. As for Santigi, if you asked him, all he ever told you was that he was a Loko. He made my step-mother Yabome his family. When she went away to Scotland to college on scholarship and came back, Santigi was waiting for her. And when she married my father, Santigi came along too.

  Nobody knew how old Santigi was. In her first memory of him, of being met by him off the train from her boarding-school, my step-mother would have been twelve and guessed him to be a few years older, perhaps sixteen. In those days we had cousins living with us whose school fees my father paid. My father was a medical doctor, a politician and activist, with a high regard for learning, he had ambitions to raise the academic standards of his family, having been the only one of his generation to go to school. His father, a Regent Chief, a wealthy farmer and landholder, was a man who believed in the old ways and held modernity in contempt, thus he had sent none of his children to the new mission and government schools, with the exception of my father for the reason that his mother (my grandfather’s sixth wife) was dead. Even then, he did so under duress and in answer to a mandate from the Paramount Chief that each family submit one child to the new mission school in the next village. Yabome’s father, on the other hand, who had been a merchant who traded in gold, was possessed of unusual foresight for the time, and had made sure every one of his children went to school and to university. It was a story repeated all over the old world, the aristocracy, holding on to outdated modes of thinking and tied to the values of the land, only to be overtaken by the rising middle class. Santigi wanted to go to school but my father said he was already too old. Instead he sent Santigi to adult education classes at night. Often when I came back from school in the afternoon Santigi would sit next to me at the dining-room table while I did my homework and copy out the questions and answers into his own exercise book.

  If life had gone on in that way, maybe Santigi would somehow have realised his dream to go to college, though I don’t remember his ambitions being taken particularly seriously. His enthusiasm for learning was not, it seems, matched by aptitude. And even if it were, it would not have helped, for all our lives were about to change. By 1970 Sierra Leone was a nascent dictatorship, a one-party state was on the rise. My father was arrested and jailed for his opposition to the prime minister. Our household was scattered. The cooks and stewards, the driver—all departed. My cousins went back to live with their families. Mum, my sister and brother and I went into hiding and then into exile in London, where we would stay for three years.

  Only Santigi stayed on. Living in the empty rooms of our house, he guarded our possessions against thieves and every week he went to the Pademba Road Prison where my father was being held. Santigi brought my father food and clean clothes and took away his washing, returning it ironed and folded the following week. In times like those, loyalty is hard to find, and Santigi earned our family’s loyalty in return for his. But to me, looking back, what he did was more powerful than mere loyalty. Violence was on the rise, our home had been stoned by political thugs; those same thugs raided newspaper offices, threatened journalists, university professors and lawyers, beat up anyone who dared to oppose the prime minister in his determination to become president-for-life. All our household staff had been held and detained at CID headquarters, my step-mother too, and Santigi. Santigi had been badly beaten.

  As he waited at the prison gates Santigi would have been taunted by the guards, I am sure, as were the prisoners themselves. His visits to my father were an act of loyalty and of courage; they were also an act of resistance. Like the Mothers, now the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who come out every day in Buenos Aires to march in memory of their disappeared sons and daughters, so Santigi came every week to the prison gates to remind the authorities that my father was not forgotten.

  When my father was released—taken to the prison gates and let out without warning—he had no money for a taxi, but a passing driver recognised him and gave him a lift. When he arrived home, there was Santigi. It was Santigi who cooked my father’s first meal as a free man.

  In the year that followed, the pleasure of being reunited, of my father’s freedom made us giddy. We danced to that year’s hit, “Kung Fu Fighting”, we sang and we punched and kicked the air. We, the three children and our older cousins: Morlai, Esther, Agnes and of course, Santigi.

  Santigi got religion around that time and changed his name to Simon Peter and then to Santos. He carried a Bible around, and he also talked about his dream of becoming a photographer, even though he had never owned a camera. I would, in my university years, buy him a camera and for a while, he would have a small booth where he took portraits. But all that was some years off.

  A year after being freed, my father was arrested again, this time on charges of treason. A year after that he was executed.

  Our landlords gave us notice, Mum had trouble finding anyone who would rent her an apartment or give her a job. When she eventually succeeded in both, she didn’t earn enough money to look after all of us and Santigi, too. Santigi found work elsewhere, and came every Sunday to wash our clothes, even though Mum couldn’t pay him. He told me often that he would keep coming until the day I graduated from university. And he did.

  In time Mum remarried and Santigi was given a job as head steward in the new household. But by then he had begun to drink. He had one failed marriage and then another; each produced a daughter. He named the first Yabome and the second Memuna Aminatta after my sister and me. He showed little interest in either girl. Eventually Memuna Aminatta’s mother met a man who made her happy and she disappeared from our lives. Santigi’s first wife Marion married again too, but remained a friend to Santigi, although it’s hard to say whether he deserved her loyalty. What it was he was searching for at that time, I don’t know. He dyed his hair with boot polish and when he sweated in the heat, the polish ran down his face. He insisted he was younger than he was, until he knocked so many years off his age that, if he were to be believed, he would be younger than my step-mother and soon almost as young as my elder brother, on whom he certainly had twenty years.

  Santigi became a figure of fun among the children in the neighbourhood. And he kept on drinking. He remained trustworthy in every way, except one. When my parents were out, he helped himself to the contents of the liquor cabinet. He frequently turned up to work intoxicated and, after several warnings, my step-father lost patience and Santigi was suspended.

  He did everything to win his job back. In Sierra Leone there exists a custom whereby a person of lower status who has offended a person of higher status will appeal to someone of equivalent or, better still, even greater status than the offended party, pleading for that person to intercede on their behalf. To “beg” for them, is what we say in Creole. In the decades he had lived and worked with my family Santigi had met dozens of people of influence and remembered them all. Now he visited their homes, waiting patiently for an audience. He explained the circumstances of his suspension, persuaded each of his contrition and asked them to “beg” my step-father on his behalf
to lift the suspension.

  My step-father would tell the story amidst much laughter, how for weeks to come at every cocktail party, lunch or dinner he attended, every restaurant he entered, it seemed, somebody came up to him to discuss Santigi’s case. My step-father remained adamant, however, until one day he attended an international banking conference. As the delegates gathered, the governor of the state bank approached him and asked to have a word. My step-father thought the governor must have something confidential to discuss. They stepped aside. In a low voice the Governor said: “It’s about your steward, Santigi . . .”

  Santigi was found a job as a messenger in the offices where my stepfather worked. The job gave him a decent income and a pension, and removed him from the dangers of the liquor cabinet. He still dyed his hair and now wore dentures too; he also lied on his application form about his age, partly perhaps out of vanity, but no doubt believing this might give him an advantage. What it meant was that he was obliged to continue working well after his retirement age.

  Santigi would live to see the country all but destroyed by war, and survive the invasion of Freetown by rebel forces in 1999. When I returned home in 2000, he was there to greet me. I kissed him and he seemed overcome with shyness. I wrote of him and my cousin Morlai, who was there that day to greet me too, in the memoir of my family that I published two years later: “I remember them both as confident lads: the flares, the sunglasses, the illicit cigarettes, the slang.” Santigi didn’t say much during our reunion. He watched and listened awhile as Morlai and I laughed and chatted; then, picking up the pair of chickens Morlai had brought me as a gift, he slipped away to the back of the house. When I published the book a launch was held in Freetown, at the British Council. It was a formal occasion, as book launches in Sierra Leone generally are. Santigi turned up drunk. I gave him his own signed copy. He kissed it and he slapped me on the back and he kept on slapping me on the back, hearty blows, even when I was trying to sign books.

  I saw Santigi a good few times over the years to come, he would visit when I was home, not once was he sober. Mum didn’t want me to give him money, she said he spent it on moonshine, so I gave the money to Marion for his daughter Yabome instead.