by Kola Boof
“Pray for me, beautiful sister, to deliver Africa from the bondage of her greedy black army dogs and fat stupid dictators. Pray for my journey to yield a good crop. Pray for every drop of my blood that goes into the ground to rise up a new son. Pray for all of us—we, the true Africans—we who go with the landscape.”
I hold his hand and I posit us in the direction of the white moon over the sea. I pray for his safety.
“Amen,” we say. Then Sea Horse explains to me that he originally hated rap music and sang traditional songs; but the white record company executives were only looking to sign Africans who could rap. So he taught himself to mimic the flow and style of the black Americans he’d been able to hear on cassette.
Then he begins to sing with the smoothest, most soul-tingling voice, masculine and rich as tobacco. He sings of the blisters on our people’s hands and of the illnesses that women get cutting cassava. He sings about being born and leaving this earth with one’s whole life taxed by the government. Of course, because I come from a laboratory and not from the people, I know very little about the Africa he talks about. I have been sheltered and raised in relative ignorance.
When we part, I hate to say goodbye.
“Goodbye, beautiful sister,” he offers. “You give good prayer. It was better than sex.”
LONDON
It’s several months later and I’m sitting in the back of James’s Daimler as the chauffer takes me to do a layout for Brazzaville Vineyard’s Wine. Opened on my knee is the latest issue of M magazine with the completed feature article about me. In America and Europe, the article seems to have made a big splash. I am now receiving offers for supporting roles in what my agent calls “arthouse prestige films.” I reread my favorite thing that I said in the entire interview: “Beauty is when you look like your own people. That way, everyone is beautiful.”
The car is passing Big Ben, and all of a sudden the announcer on the radio is saying: “You crazy blokes and bints have gotten biscuit-whipped over his sensational rap hits, but now he’s gone and made a love ballad—it’s number five in the UK this week—King Sea Horse Twee singing ‘One Night Angel.’”
His voice covers me with goosebumps and I think I might pee on myself:
I found a girl so black she doesn’t need clothes
I tried to find where I left her, but nobody knows
I’m hardly the perfect mate, I have an awful lot to hide and
Now I guess it’s too late
But just for a moment—she gave my heart an earthquake
I was loved by that girl … the one who goes
the one who goes
with the landscape
The Heat of African November
American and European guests figured it was mildewed mesquite they smelled over dance music and the clinking of champagne glasses at state parties, or perhaps animal fat wrapped in gasoline rags that had accidentally fallen into Colonel Botha’s barbeque pits. But no, it was human flesh that they smelled—the crackling burn of nappy crotches and scalps wafting on the night breeze to arouse their palates. The charred bones and roasted guts of journalists and editors who’d published the wrong news stories, village mothers who’d sung the wrong chants, desperately unemployed fathers, uncles, and older brothers of starving little sisters who’d come beating on the double doors of the presidential palace demanding liberation.
These were the Africans whose bodies slow-cooked just yards away from the hoop skirts and shiny black loafers that crowded Colonel Botha’s dancefloor.
—Euggi Damel, Negro Journal, 1968
DRIVE SLOW
The reason that I’d so nervously clung to the door handle in the back of the Mercedes as we coasted along from DakCrete Airport to the state-sponsored ball at Yaw Ibrahim’s presidential palace was because I’d been learning the hard way that it’s the insecure people, the ones with so-called low self-esteem, who actually rule this world. They not only set the style and bring about change, but they can make the most immature and destructive behavior socially accepted as cool or normal. They can take a perfectly natural human being and reduce that person to the rags they’re wearing or the religion they don’t understand or the mush and water in their bellies—and, in kind, whatever is touched by the insecure becomes unstable as well. I was sure that’s what had been happening to me all along.
“Identify yourselves,” ordered a black soldier at the palace gate with a machine gun over his shoulder, as he leaned his head into the driver’s window of the car and glanced around.
“Supermodel Eternity Frankenheimer,” my chauffeur said, handing the soldier my invitation from Spy Control.
The car began moving again, my eyes fixated on the long stretches of melancholy baobab trees and dusty red road. I shuddered at the thought of being anywhere near President Yaw Ibrahim or any member of my country’s government. But then to decline the invitation to so important an event might have made them suspicious of my political loyalties and could’ve caused them to harass my mother’s clinic, or put me through hell whenever I tried to enter or leave the country.
Slowly, like a casket on wheels, my Mercedes glided forward, the feast of the nation opening up before my eyes as I saw fireworks delivering blue, pink, and green flower sparks from behind the presidential palace— which in our country, like in many African countries, is called the White House. And out in front of the White House hung the flag of West Cassavaland, flowing majestically from the fourth-story balcony, flapping across the Greek columns of the first-floor veranda before resting in all its five-colored splendor against the grassy knoll; the color green for the cassava crops, ocean-blue for the Ajowan tribe, solid black for the God tribe (now called the Oluchi), blood-red for the armed forces, and canaryyellow representing the Pogo Metis Signare mulatto elite.
Chained around the White House as a kind of human rope were soldiers bearing machine guns. The huge double doors of the palace were open wide with a red carpet leading up the marble porch and into the foyer where massive French and Portuguese chandeliers hung from a twenty-foot ceiling, while in the foreground there was a great ceremony of what is called the national class (the dark-skinned black majority), beating bongos, slicing coconuts open with machetes, and performing extravagant tribal dances for the benefit of fascinated white foreign dignitaries while calling out one of the most traditional election-time chants known to West Africa: “He killed my pa, he killed my ma … but I will vote for him!”
The drum orchestra filled up the landscape with an earthquakelike BOOM! as several soldiers happily fired gunshots in sync with it. Then the people chanted again: “He killed my pa, he killed my ma … but I will vote for him!”
“Let the Gods be born!” sang a regiment of dancing Oluchi women, to which the men hollered the traditional reply, “You go put die!?” which was followed again by BOOM! Then from the second- and third-story balconies, tuxedoed and ball-gowned white, yellow, and tobacco-brown party guests sipped crème de cacao from Ming Wa tea cups and leisurely flicked the ashes from their thinly rolled marijuana cigarettes onto the festival of Africans below.
My Mercedes came to a stop in front of the White House, and it seemed as though a million eyes fell across its spiffy exterior in anticipation of who it might be carrying. I truly was scared to get out, but then a valet wearing white gloves opened my door, and I heard someone announce over the loudspeakers, “One of our nation’s most beautiful daughters—Miss Eter—”
Before he could get my name out, the crowd thundered—their love and excitement literally washing over my body like a vibe-shower. As my vermillion Dior heels swung out of the car and crunched down against the dirt, it felt exhilarating to realize for the first time that I had “made it” in the eyes of my people, and that I was now of that tiny class that meant something good and hopeful to the masses of insecure people in my country.
With the heat of an African November night completely cocooning my skin in a fiery blanket from heaven, the valet gave to me the customary Oluchi w
elcome, “No evil?”
“Only goodness,” I replied. I waved as democratically as I could to those who were cheering me and peered up at the white-tuxedoed, red-carnation men standing around the palace entrance—and noticed immediately a very handsome but menacing Pogo Metis Signare.
He was banana-yellow with a ski-slope Eurocentric nose, dark Ajowan jungle lips, and the wavy hair of a Spaniard. He was staring right into me as though he’d been waiting all his life for me to get there—and in the next two hours he would alter my life’s course forever.
Should I start believing in God now? After all, here is the antithesis of everything my scientific upbringing had ever raised me to believe, the irrefutable larger-than-life coincidence, what I suppose Christians would call a miracle. Yet I wasn’t surprised. You see, I knew in that moment that you would be born.
PASSION’S NAKED EYE
My dear son … In retrospect, there will be those who claim that I never deserved the love of Sea Horse and that I was just a whorish bitch, the worst kind of African woman—a womanist—but rubbish! The God’s truth is, I possessed the most death-defying soul and didn’t even know it. One life simply hadn’t done it justice. And until that night, I had never really understood what an African is, or what the land is, or what a woman’s purpose really is after she gets done dismissing the bullshit lies that men ordain and distribute out of their insecurity. I was very, very young, believing that I had no soul. Then right there, in the clearest moment of all my moments, I knew that you were coming.
I wasn’t sure when or how you would be conceived. It never occurred to me to even think about which of my men would be the one to impregnate me—but as I walked up that red carpet, I became caught up in what I now call the Moment of God—the moment of coincidence. I didn’t believe it, but it was real. I was being summoned by the stare of my own brother, Tiberius Perrina.
Tiberius.
At seven years old he’d watched helplessly as I was kicked to death in the streets of DakCrete, and then later lifted away by the arms of Stevedore, carried off never to be seen again. So to find him again was utter affirmation of my purpose in a second life. And so it is for you, my son, that I’ve been telling this story. Tiberius Perrina, the undeniable symbol of coincidence and the possibility that God is real, was to become the homing pigeon—the messenger.
YOU GO PUT DIE?
After I’d been bashed in the head with a sockful of gravel and stuffed into the trunk of Tiberius’s automobile, the air leaking in as we sped across the African savannah awakened me. And though I wasn’t yet aware of the identity of my kidnapper, I backtracked in my mind, trying to retrace where I’d been and what had been happening.
A trickle of blood running past my ear and across my nose reminded me of sauntering into the sunken great room of President Yaw Ibrahim just in time to witness his tall but stout figure standing in the center of a circle of about fifty people, mostly men, as his voice projected across the room hyperbolically, “Here’s to our mother, the mighty West Cassavaland. May her light be the light of the world!“
Clink.
One of the few African women allowed in the room, a maid, handed me a glass of champagne as she passed by. I felt uncomfortable because a presidential aide a few feet behind me was explaining to people why I had been invited by the White House. “She’s become world famous despite her color,” he half-whispered apologetically. It was embarrassing and hurtful.
In our country, you don’t see a charcoal woman mingling in ballrooms with the yellow class, the Pogo Metis Signare.
Of course, had I been a charcoal-complexioned male, no one would have batted an eye. But for a female so absolute in blackness to be present as a “peer,” it generated alarm. I copped an attitude. Then, just as the yellow Africans began rolling their eyes, in walked the mysterious mulatto, Tiberius Perrina. His stare homed in on me as though I were some prized cobra rising from a basket.
I sipped my champagne, definitely remembering him from somewhere. But who was he, and why was he affecting me so strongly? Out of fear, I refused his stare and convinced myself that his aim was probably to rape me, as so frequently happened to unescorted women at these balls. And with that, I dismissed him, instead pretending to listen intently as President Yaw Ibrahim capped off his nomination speech with the dire statement: “You can either agree with me … or be wrong.“
A few of the white men chuckled, but the majority of us knew he was dead serious. Our nation was run by greedy, shiny-faced, chocolate fudge—colored criminals, some of them like President Yaw Ibrahim professing Christianity, others Islam—but for all of them, money was their true religion; the white man and the Arab man their Gods, foreign women or young boys their secret sexual pursuits, and Western imperialism, Arab imperialism, and Chinese imperialism the only understanding through which they could gain validation. They were no different than our final European president during colonial times, the infamous blue-eyed flesh-eating Colonel Botha, who’d been forced by the World Court to sign us over to independence, thus granting our first democratic elections. But all for naught, of course, as the people’s elected choices had been quickly forced out in coups by the national army—coups that were funded by invisible outside power brokers with faces and identities that couldn’t be proven.
West Cassavaland, like so many African nations, just couldn’t get its act together. The white ruling colonialists moved out, and the tiny mulatto elite (barely numbering fifty thousand in the whole nation) braced in horror at the thought of being ruled by the very blacks they’d been bred to look down upon. The pure-black majority found that their sudden freedom tasted like bile, as poverty and lack of leadership spiraled out of control, entombing their dreams of having a real country down into the rotten ground, without seed, so that nothing could grow. And in all these years, even with the land deals our government struck with the oil conglomerates, nothing did grow.
President Yaw Ibrahim, a former general of the army who couldn’t do math and didn’t believe that white men had landed on the moon, but rather that they had landed on a studio soundstage in an elaborate world hoax, was soon smiling broadly and thanking all of us at the ball for his imminent reelection. He’d already ruled more than a decade, to the point where he owned an island near the one that Marlon Brando had owned and kept a Tudor mansion with a white mistress in London and a chateau with a white mistress in the south of France. His boiled orange—colored African wife, First Lady Marionette, dripped in diamonds and spent most of her time poolside, ordering her maids about and boasting that all fourteen of their children were attending university in the West. Not a thing about their lives was in common with the masses, yet no matter how the Cassavan people suffered and begged for change, Yaw Ibrahim the Black was always elected.
Dutifully, we each got in line to meet the president.
“Good job,” said the American oil company executive up front, shaking hands and patting Ibrahim while a British ambassador proclaimed, “Your leadership has been very beneficial to our vision for Africa. You’re an excellent president.”
I looked around, wondering about King Sea Horse Twee and half-expecting to see him somewhere in the room, since Ibrahim had made it a point to invite any West Cassavan who’d become famous at something. I saw football players, recording stars, and people who’d run in the Olympics. But nowhere in sight was our nation’s biggest superstar—and then, amazingly, it was my turn.
“Greetings, dear president,” I said graciously. I curtsied and bowed. The president nodded, smiling dismissively. Then the first lady shook my hand, commented that I looked even more stunning in person than I did on magazine covers, and that was that.
I continued down the carpet past the soldiers and out the back patio doors, my entire body relieved by the warmth of the night air as the tumbling bossa nova of the jazz band played in the palace garden where Africa’s richest politely socialized.
“Sister … may I have this dance?”
When I turned around I
wanted to faint. The face of the handsome mulatto was close enough to touch, his astonished cognac-colored eyes calling out beyond the nakedness of his birth, as right away I remembered every inch of him! Tiberius, my brother.
Dear God! In my first life as Orisha, I had been the one to pull him from my mother while she begged God that he come out stillborn. I had been the one who changed his diaper until he was potty-trained, had braided people’s hair to afford banana for his porridge, and had held his crying, shaking body across my shoulder when our mother refused to.
This man was not a member of the elite Pogo Metis Signare, to which almost all of West Cassavaland’s yellow people belonged—he was my little brother from my other life; a rape baby who had stuck out like a sore thumb among the poor black inner-city Ajowans. The last child of my mother, Nonni.
Yes, her name came back to me … Ma Nonni. Oh my God! Our mother, the dollmaker!
I almost reached out and grabbed him into my arms, almost held and kissed him. Vividly, the dollmaker walked into my field of remembrance as though she’d never been gone. Her head full of plaits and her skin the deep, dark reddish-brown of coffee beans; her jolly cheekbones and lips full of syrup, and the flat, wide nose that Pa called “sexy.”
“Orisha,” the mulatto man whispered through trembling lips. He thought I was Orisha. But then again, what else could he think? “I’ve seen you on the magazine covers, modeling. It is me, Tiberius, your baby brother … I’m a man now.”
I could scarcely stand to be looked at once more by the same eyes that had witnessed me being kicked to death. Yet through his eyes I could recall the dolls lined up around the walls of the tiny thatch-roofed house where cracks in the narrow street outside, wide as rubber leaves, kept a constant traffic jam about which all of Pa and Ma Bedee’s children had grown up dust-covered and laughing, shiny black as Arabian horses while we played jump rope or hide-and-seek or went to the field of the Christ Church to watch the Ajowan boys play football.
