Sankofa(15)

“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 Bennett, 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.