Sankofa(9)

At last, my mother appears, and I am glad Francis Aggrey found her beautiful. She was beautiful, although she carried her beauty with downward looks and a hesitant manner that somewhat effaced her features.

Yet Francis had noticed her and picked the shy sister. Perhaps my mother hid this diary to protect me. It was better to know nothing of my father than to discover him on the first page and lose him again by the end.



I set my alarm and wake up early. I am going to the British Museum. I went for the first time as a teenager to sketch the Elgin Marbles. Ms. Rendell, my art teacher, took a small group of us on a Saturday. I remember the stone rippling like cloth, the lithe torsos of centaurs, the naked display of muscle.

The morning rush has passed and the street is deserted. My tube carriage is empty apart from an elderly couple in tweed. The man holds a large, folded umbrella the height of a small child. I have forgotten mine. I sit on a newly upholstered seat, holding a fresh copy of a free newspaper. It is mostly adverts interlaced with gossip for the commuters before they plunge into the grey haze of office work. The carriage sways as it moves through the tunnels, tons of earth above us, Londoners walking on our grave. I feel ill. I stare out the window, counting the stops to Russell Square.

There are arrows in the station pointing to the museum. Even in November, the tourists are here: the orderly pack of Japanese, the elastic sprawl of Americans. The museum’s fa?ade is Grecian, built in rational lines. Inside, the glass ceiling is curved and modern, crisscrossed with steel, held up by a thousand minute calculations.

The Africa collection is in the basement. The noise from outside melts into a hush of spotlights and glass. A cloth of gold is mounted on a wall, draped in glittering folds, ceremonial robes of a great chief. It is an illusion, I see, when I draw closer—not cloth but tiny strips of metal, joined close until they look like fabric. El Anatsui, the placard says. Ghanaian. 2001. Francis Aggrey did not see this.

I move towards a display of sculptures. There is a small wooden man who has come from Bamana, an idol in a boat with a tiny pipe in his mouth. He is to bring fishermen luck. Francis Aggrey’s mother dealt in fish. She might have prayed to this Bimba.

I stand in front of a wall of masks. There are masks for death here, jumbled with masks for love and weddings and fertility. The placards do not explain much. Birth mask. Twin mask. How were they used? For sacrifice? For blood?

I bring out my notebook to sketch a pair of nineteenth-century ivory leopardesses. A ring of coral encircles each waist, the haunches caught in motion, padding to their prey. I am shading in the hindmost spots when an American couple walks in.

“Well, aren’t these creepy?” the wife says. She is sheathed in a grey puffer coat. Her blond hair straggles around her face like tassels of corn.

“Wouldn’t want to wake up to that, would you, honey?”

They are standing in front of the wall of masks.

“They are not meant to be stared at,” I call out from my bench.

They turn. There are only three of us in the room. The wife steps towards me.

“Are you a guide?”

“My father is from West Africa.”

“So what are they for?” It is the husband asking.

“I don’t know.”

I return to my leopardesses and they move on to another part of the exhibition. I have drawn the waist of one leopardess too thick. Even in pencil, I cannot replicate the litheness the artist has rendered in ivory. By the time I have penciled in the whiskers the couple is gone. There is something domestic in the cats I have drawn, suburban tabbies not jungle creatures.

It is lunchtime and I venture outside to the main road. The shops are selling Union Jack kitsch: mugs, clothing, stuffed bears. There is a bunting of international flags on the Italian restaurant I choose. A bell goes off. A waiter approaches.

“Table for one, madam?”

I am ushered to a table for two and Robert’s place is cleared away, napkin, knife, and fork. The menu is placed before me. It is written in green flourishes, curling vines on white stone. I order pasta. I have brought Francis Aggrey’s diary with me. I bring him out. Lunch with my father.

He writes of meeting Blessing for the first time. She is unimpressed by her husband’s politicking. I like the sound of her. She seems the first practical person that Francis has met. Perhaps she will be the one to finally break Menelik’s hold over him.

Menelik has gone on a speaking tour of the country, attempting to set revolutionary fires in damp hedges and lanes. My father is left alone in the attic room. On some evenings, he hears my mother play the flute. I remember the mournful airs in minor keys. She tried to teach me but I hated the way spit bubbled through the notes and had to be drained after each piece.


I spoke with Bronwen for some length today before she went off to her noon shift. Her name means “the white one,” a fitting description. She is only eighteen and says she will not work in a shop forever. She plans to design and sell her own clothes on Bond Street. She has made the red dress, the one I admire.



My mother wanted to design clothes and sell them on Bond Street. I never knew. I did know the meaning of her name. My grandfather named her Bronwen and gave me the middle name Brangwen, which meant “pure and dark,” my mother’s opposite. There was a darkness that shone, he used to say, the gleam of an onyx, the luster of black marble.

Grandpa Owen was a kind landlord. He invited my father to a Sunday roast with Aunt Caryl and my mother. He included Francis briefly, perhaps dangerously, in their family.