Sankofa(17)

“I’m researching the Aba Women’s Riot,” he said. “Eastern Nigeria, early twentieth century. It’s a leisure project. My great-grandmother was one of the so-called rioters.”

The thirty minutes I had allotted for lunch were almost over. “I hate to be rude, but I must get back inside.”

“Of course. It was nice to meet you—?”

“Anna,” I said.

“Alex. Alex Obosi. All the best with Adjei. It’s a shame how he turned out.”

“How?”

“Badly. The crocodile, that’s what they called him in Bamana when I was there. He was ruthless, cold-blooded, deadly.”

“When did you go?”

“Oh, over twenty years ago now. Beautiful country. Beautiful women,” he said. His eyes flickered to my breasts.

“Interesting.” I stood up to leave.

“Take my card,” he said. “Let’s stay in touch. You’re a lecturer, you said?”

“No. Leisure researcher also.”

“Even better. We should have coffee one day we’re both in.”

Alex Obosi, Consultant, the square of cardboard said. To reduce this hulking man to a name, job description, and telephone number seemed a shame. I remembered the lawyer’s words. There was life after divorce, although not with Alex Obosi. Too married. I put his card in the bin on the way out.

I turned to Adrian’s book when I got back to my desk. I had gotten a feel for Francis Aggrey’s memoirs. There was nothing of my mother, but there was also nothing of the man I knew from the diary. He had bared himself in those pages and now he hid his real self in these, crouching behind a legend of his own construction.

Adrian’s book was also written in the first person. It was a travel memoir, a white man on a motorcycle, gunning his way through Africa. It would have been fresh in the seventies, but it had been done so often since then that it all seemed a cliché. There were chapters on food and women and dances and rituals, but the book was really about the Bamanaian Camelot that Francis Aggrey was trying to build in those first hundred days.

My father was a man of action according to Bennett. He was popular with the people, some of whom ascribed godlike powers to him. He was popular with foreign investors who flocked to Segu, filling the hotels, desperate to be part of the Bamanaian miracle my father was promising.

There were only five thousand registered automobiles in the country, but there would be more. Only four hundred qualified doctors, but there would be more. There would be more of everything, more for everyone. “Switzerland in West Africa,” those were Bennett’s words.

My father hated committees, and long meetings and civil servants. He was always leaving Segu to tour the rural areas, to show the people his face, a retinue of young men trailing after him. Few women, not even his wife followed him. Elizabeth Adjei stayed in the capital, cutting ribbons for the new government buildings that her husband was erecting.

The photo insert showed a series of black-and-white photographs of Bamana. In the rural areas were huts with thatched roofs, half-naked children, women fetching water from a stream, the Africa of charity appeals and Comic Relief. In the capital, Segu, were grandiose buildings, columns of concrete and glass, gleaming automobiles, nightclubs, jazz bands, stylish young women with trim waists and full skirts, glamorous as film stars.

There were pictures of my father, dressed in a suit, dressed in kente, dressed in overalls on a construction site, and always smiling; not pensive like the Francis Aggrey in my mother’s photograph but smiling, smiling, smiling at the new world he was building.

Around me, the other readers were gathering their things, limbs unbending after hours sitting in the same position.

“The library will be closing in fifteen minutes,” a voice said over the PA system.

I was seeing Rose tomorrow for the first time in two weeks. If I left now there was still time to go grocery shopping.

I closed Adrian Bennett’s book. Why had he written it? He believed in the legend, it seemed, an early European convert, but the Messiah had morphed into the Crocodile. The religion had failed.





8


I smacked Rose in public once when she was a child. She was willful, always on the verge of those rages that toddlers pitch themselves into without warning. She screamed and beat her fists on the ground. Strangers threw glances. Finally, I pulled her to her feet and swiped her bottom. Most of the blow glanced off her nappy but the surprise was enough to quiet her.

“Does her mother know you hit her?” a woman said, marching up to me with her own matching blond child in tow.

“Yes, she does,” I replied, too stunned to claim my daughter.

I am reminded of that incident now, as she sits opposite me in my kitchen. In most lights, Rose looks white, although it is obvious to me that she is my child. Her loose light-brown curls, when all of Robert’s family is lank-haired, her full lips, even her blue eyes, are from my mother—Bain blue.

Lamb and potatoes lie roasting in an oven that has lain cold all these months. We wait at the kitchen table, studying each other.

“Mum, you look beautiful. You’ve lost weight.”

“You look beautiful as well,” I say, squeezing her hand.

She is bronzed from her trip to India and she, too, has lost weight. “Delhi belly,” she says, when she sees me looking at her wrist, which my thumb and forefinger could encircle easily.