Unravelling Oliver(37)

These are the ‘facts’, as they were told to me:

My father was a young missionary priest who was sent out with three others to establish Catholic schools in rural villages along the Zambezi River in the early 1950s. In a particularly deprived and destitute village called Lakumu, where he was stationed for a year, he formed a friendship with a local native girl called Amadika.

Oh, no. My father was a paedophile priest? Oh, no. What has this to do with me?

Father Daniel was at pains to insist that Amadika was not a child. She was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. They had a platonic relationship. She was apparently a very smart and diligent student, and it was known that my father favoured her with school prizes and allowed her to cook and clean for him.

He used her as his slave? Is that it? What has this to do with me?

The school was heavily oversubscribed, and a rule was introduced that only the younger children could attend. Amadika’s mother begged my father to allow her to continue her studies, but my father refused. He could not break the rules for anybody.

Apparently, Amadika was sent by her mother to sexually seduce my father in order to bargain for her right to stay in school. Father Daniel says that the natives had nothing else with which to bribe their educators, and the girl’s mother hoped that a good education might secure her future. It seems that my father was a particularly devout priest with ambitions, but that on this one occasion he yielded to natural urges and slept with the girl. He rejected her immediately afterwards, banned her from the school and ended their association.

Of course he slept with her. She offered herself. And then he was ashamed. What does this have to do with me?

Amadika’s pregnancy caused a scandal when she claimed that Father Francis Ryan was the child’s father. He strenuously denied it until the girl gave birth to a purely white baby – me.

No.

Impossible. No.

At this point in Father Daniel’s narrative, I reeled first with disbelief, and later, shock. I had always assumed, because of what my father had said, that I was the result of an affair with a prostitute, and so had never wanted to explore the issue too deeply, especially after my birth certificate seemed to be a work of fiction, but this was just too fantastical to be credible, I thought. I was white. Father Daniel admitted that he too had found it difficult to come to terms with, but swore this was the story he was told by the other priests. He insisted that Amadika was not a prostitute but rather a person forced by poverty, desperation and circumstance to use the only thing she had at her disposal to make a better life for herself. Somehow, that rang a bell with me, but I simply could not accept it.

‘You have no proof!’ I whispered. ‘You said there are no records!’

‘There are none,’ he admitted, ‘but I really can’t imagine why those who told me would lie about such a thing. I am the only person left alive who can tell you.’

I paced the room, processing what I had just been told, but it made no sense.

‘Maybe I was wrong to tell you, but I thought you should know what was said. It was kept very quiet.’

I did not believe it, and told him so in no uncertain terms. He apologized for causing any distress, and I could see that he was in anguish about having told me such a tale.

‘You can just carry on as normal. It is only we who know.’

‘What happened? To her?’

I tried to make sense of a tale that made no sense as Father Daniel continued his story. My story?

Amadika rejected her baby straight away. Nobody in the village had ever seen a white baby before. She was terrified of it and shunned by her friends and her neighbours in the village, who thought that the baby’s pale sickliness had brought a curse upon the tribe. Apparently, she left the child at the door of my father’s hut and left the village with her mother. Nobody knows where she went. Nobody knew her last name.

My father had a mental breakdown. According to the other priests, he had been particularly devout. Father Daniel suggested that my father must have found it exceptionally difficult to have broken his vows. He was insistent that he had never initiated sexual contact. His lofty ecclesiastical ambitions were ruined. He was forced out of the priesthood and returned to Ireland with his unwanted son. However, because of strong connections to the Archbishop’s Palace, my father was hired as a financial adviser and was warned to keep me as removed from him as possible, so as not to raise questions or provoke a scandal. They assumed, as the baby grew, as I grew, that I would develop physical signs of my black roots, that my hair might curl or my nose might flare, but I confounded their expectations by maintaining my Caucasian appearance. Most of those who knew of my existence were told I was an orphaned nephew, but my father subsequently met and married Judith within a few years and abandoned me to St Finian’s.

If Father Daniel was right, if it was all true, I am a freak of nature. My eyes are dark brown and my pigmentation is a little more sallow than the average Irishman, but in every respect I am a white European. I chose not to believe it.

I told nobody, and when Father Daniel died a year later, I let the ridiculous story die with him. It made no difference to me now, and there was nothing I could do about the past. Who knows what went on in Africa? A little bit of private research revealed that my father had been in Northern Rhodesia at the time, and there was a village called Lakumu, but that was as far as I was prepared to go. It didn’t matter.