Sankofa(4)

I had only come for sausages, but I found apples and soup and ice cream in my basket. I had lost weight on a diet of takeaways or nothing. I did not like to eat by myself, hunched over a foil pack with a plastic fork, brittle enough to bite through. I must have appeared eccentric to the young Asian man I gave my twenty-pound note to. I had worn my coat over my pajamas and my hair was uncombed. He was already looking past me to the next customer, preparing his “How are you today?”

I fried two sausages when I got home. Their skins ruptured, hot mince spilling out like lava. I covered them in baked beans. I forgot to buy bread. I fetched Francis Aggrey from upstairs when I was done. He was familiar to me, a friend, almost.


I have been thrown out of my lodgings. Thomas came here the other day and made a racket. He turned up my record player and stomped around until my landlady herself came to knock. I felt chastised when I saw the old lady, not far from my grandmother’s age, woken from sleep to ask us to keep it down. But Thomas shouted at her, “Ma’am, now you have a real complaint for your racist son!”

Reprisal was swift. The son came two days later with a tough behind him. He won’t have any coons insulting his mother. Clear out or they’ll break my bones. I made a meek protest, citing tenancy agreements and contracts. Then he decided to become violent. He pushed me in the chest and so I pushed him back. I have not wrestled with street boys in Segu to have an English midget shove me about. I was ready to fight them both when the useless back-up said, “If you give any trouble, we’ll call the police and get you done for assault.” I have chosen not to test the impartiality of the London police force. I am writing this from Thomas’s flat. As he was the one who began my troubles, I will stay here until I find a new place.



I want to cheer for young Francis. He would have taught me how to fight, how to make a fist and throw a punch. Not like my mother, who raised me to have nice manners no matter the provocation. I was told to shrink from conflict even when it sought you out, even when it thrust its finger in your face and said, “Go back to your fucking country.” Tell them this is your fucking country, Francis Aggrey would have said.

He wrote about living with Thomas, two young men in close quarters. My father was the tidier of the two, the more domestic. Thomas arranged their social affairs, dragging my father to meetings with what he termed the “British left.” Francis was skeptical but he went. He had traveled some distance from the Francis sitting alone in the British Museum, ogled by strangers.


I have had a letter from home. It is my mother asking how my studies are. I have not set foot in a lecture hall in two weeks, while my poor mother is in Segu, trading fish up and down the coast so I can pay my fees and have a little spending money. Thomas is a bad influence. We are out till the early hours of the morning and we spend our days dissipated as drunks. I must find new lodgings.



Grandpa Owen was the only grandparent I knew. He taught me some chess strategies and called me Shirley Bassey when I sang off key. I would have liked Francis to write more about my grandmother, but he was too busy discovering London with Thomas.

Francis and Thomas attended a lecture on West African decolonization and Francis’s tone grew fierier. He bristled at an English woman being an expert on West Africa, and Thomas was pleased that his protégé was “waking up.” It seemed my father had fallen prey to politics in the end.


I have been introduced to a man called Ras Menelik. He is Thomas’s mentor, and I have been kept from meeting him because Thomas did not feel I was ready. Perhaps he is right. Had I met Menelik two months ago, I might have laughed in his face. No barber has touched his hair in years. He is like John the Baptist in the wilderness, or one of the mendicant men rooting for food in the rubbish of Segu. He has a bevy of young English girls around him, typing his ideas into articles and pamphlets and chapters. They are the secretaries of his movement, which is to emancipate Africa. I took two of his pamphlets away: “Africa: A New Dawn” and “Sunrise in Ethiop.” I cannot tell if it is bombast or visionary. He sends his writings all over the world. People are reading his ideas as far as Tokyo, Thomas tells me.

I have been a few more times to Menelik’s flat. It appears I am the first man from the Diamond Coast to join their circle. I was deliberately sought out because there are few students from the Diamond Coast in Britain. We are a poor colony. “Why is that?” Menelik asked me yesterday. “You say you are from the Diamond Coast and yet you are poor?” The truth is, few of us in the D.C. have anything to do with diamonds. In my mother’s tribe we are fishermen. We have no diamonds on our land and we pay little heed to what goes on in the diamond towns of the north. We fish as our ancestors have always done. Menelik showed me photographs of what he said were miners in Mion. They go down the mines in rags, Menelik says. They die in the tunnels and their bodies are left to rot, or they are blown up if the tunnel is still in use. They are paid too little to live on and are forever in debt to the mining companies for food and other basics. And what am I to do with this information, I wondered, as I stared at the bony limbs of my compatriots.



Run, you foolish boy, I thought. The world would always have people like this Menelik, trying to press guilt on you, forcing pamphlets with gory pictures into your hands, holding you personally responsible for wars, famines, genocides. Why not be of use to those around you? Why rile my father with atrocities he could do nothing about?