Sankofa(3)

I have joined a union for African students. I came to England to bowl with the English, and dance around their Maypoles, but the English will not have me. Not for tea. Not for scones. I attended my first meeting today. It is all young Africans like myself in worn shoes, and carefully brushed suits and big talk about politics. Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya have their independence. South Africa and Rhodesia must soon follow. Ghana has left the sterling standard and rightly so. Nigeria should align with the Communists. I sat in a corner and listened. They have had big men come out of this students’ union: a president in Central Africa, I have heard, although you could not tell it from the building. Crumbling walls and damp. “Where are you from?” a Rhodesian called Thomas Phiri asked when I got up to leave.

“Diamond Coast,” I said.

“That’s a slave name. Named for what they stole from us.”

It’s the only one I know.



In the photograph, Francis looked young, not far from Rose’s twenty-five. As I read his diary, my feelings were almost maternal. I was eager for my father to settle down, to make friends in his new playground, to stop feeling so rootless. I hoped this Thomas would be a good influence.


I have seen Thomas Phiri again. He is not so bad the second time around, a bit forward, but London does one of two things to a black man: cows him or turns him into a radical, which is what I think Thomas is. Compared to myself, at least. In the Diamond Coast, the politicians say we are too small for independence, that Ghana or Nigeria will try to swallow us up if we cut ourselves off from the British Empire. Nkrumah talks of a United States of Africa, but who will be the head of this United States? Not tiny D.C. Thomas does not agree with these arguments, which are not necessarily mine, but which I offer to counter his strong opinions.



The next page detailed Francis’s run-in with his landlady and her son. First, the mother complained about the noise, and then the son came to put the unruly black tenant in his place, or that was how Francis saw it.

I knew well the hours of agonizing that could follow such an incident. A woman crossing the road to avoid you. A shopkeeper who did not notice that you were next in line. Was that racist? Was it not?

My mother mostly erred on the side of not. People were rude, people were ignorant, but only racist if they called you an ape outright.


I have had the flu. Two days in my room with no one to attend to me, eating bread and water and feeling sorry for myself. I am my mother’s only child. I am used to being made much of when I am sick.



My mother never went to work when I was sick. She would sit by my bed and hold my hand, even when I was asleep. It was one of my earliest memories, waking up and feeling her hand in the dark.


Thomas has invited me for a meeting of the British Communist Party. I don’t think I will go. It is illegal to be a Communist in the Diamond Coast, and while a meeting in Russell Square may not get one arrested, it is sure to come to the notice of the government authorities in London that are rumored to keep an eye on foreign students.



Francis Aggrey was cautious like me. I’d always avoided large groups of people swimming in the same direction with one mind. I could never agree with all the tenets of a movement and so I could not join, but merely sympathize with feminists, with socialists, with Christians, with atheists, with vegans.


I really cannot see what threat communism can pose to the world order, at least not as it has done in England. So much jargon, so much theory. Proletariat, bourgeoisie, hegemony: what do these words mean to the fisherman in Segu? I said this to Thomas afterwards and he replied that the meeting was a necessary part of my political education. All I saw was a gaggle of Englishmen playing revolutionaries. There were some members of the working class present, oil on their hands, straight from some factory job or the other, but for the most part, it seemed to be the bourgeoisie they are trying to destroy. One speaker said Labour is killing the movement with its cheap housing. The proletariat are being lulled into complacency with indoor plumbing and central heating.



It appeared Thomas was trying to politicize my father. I’d never seen the point of politics in Britain. There was no choice, only the same men who had gone to the same schools, pretending to believe in different things. I hoped Francis did not succumb.

It was already noon and I was still in bed with the diary. Francis Aggrey’s writing was not always easy to read. When his tone was angry, his letters shrank into thin black strokes. I spent a quarter of an hour trying to decipher a paragraph.

I got out of bed but did not open the curtains. There was nothing to see in the room. I was hungry but I had no food in the house. There had been a flurry of resistance when the supermarket chain opened at the top of my street, but we all shop there now, grabbing the bargain cuts and combination deals. The store had made us all richer, pushing the value of our houses over two million pounds.

I stepped outside into the cold. I did not like the area much when we moved in. We were on the cusp of the countryside. In spring, when the wind changed direction, you could smell the manure. The street was like a car showroom now. Low, sleek sports cars that never went at full throttle, tethered birds in our suburbia. The neighborhood children didn’t play on the streets anymore. I saw them strapped inside 4x4s but I rarely heard their voices.

I saw my neighbor Katherine by the shop entrance and swerved into the vegetable aisle. Of all my neighbors, she was the only one who came to knock on my door after the ambulance came home with my mother. She brought us food that was too rich for my taste. I did not know how to respond to her kindness. She invited me to her church, but I declined. It was too much to exchange for cream of mushroom.