Sankofa

by Chibundu Onuzo

  “I think you should speak to him first.”

  My half sister had not expected to find me reasonable. I was pleased by my calm. I was becoming used to the unexpected in Bamana. I dialed Sule.

  “I’m in the library with Kofi’s daughter,” I said. “Please tell him we’re waiting. Thank you.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “He’ll explain everything.”

  The rain had stopped, and the room was quiet except for our breathing. My half sister was breathing like air had been trapped in her lungs for hours, like a whale surfacing. I turned my back to her and took a book down from a shelf, a hardback copy of Great Expectations. Its pages sprang open, swollen with moisture, like ticks with blood. Mold grew over the frontispiece, mottling the “i” and “n” in Dickens. I put it back in its place.

  Kofi arrived at a stroll. I imagined him pausing at the door, willing himself to appear relaxed. Over his career, he had mastered entrances and exits.

  “Afua, I see you and Anna have met,” he said.

  “Who is she?”

  “No greeting for your father?”

  “I will not greet you. This is a disgrace. How can you bring her here at this crucial moment?”

  “You are forgetting yourself, Afua,” he said, lowering his voice. The effect on my half sister was immediate. She hung her head.

  “I’m sorry, Papa, but you are here with this . . . this woman who is young enough to be your daughter.”

  “She is my daughter,” he said.

  Afua’s eyes twitched between Kofi and me.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Afua, this is your sister Anna. Your older sister.”

  “Papa, what are you saying?” She looked ready to charge but I was not sure who she would rather trample first.

  “I know. It came as a shock for me, too,” he said. There was mockery in his voice. He was enjoying her discomfort. “Sit down if you need to.”

  “But she is a half-caste,” Afua said.

  “What a keen eye you have. Her mother was white. We met when I was a student in London.”

  “How long have you known? How long?”

  Kofi drew himself up. “Since when do you demand explanations from me?” His voice boomed and Afua flinched.

  “I’m sorry, Papa.” She curtsied. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  I should have left the room and given them their privacy.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Kofi said. “A new sister. There should be rejoicing, not recrimination. Go and lie down until your mind has grasped the good news. Then join us for dinner. Come, Anna. There is something I want to show you.”

  Afua gathered her kaftan robes and swept out of the room. She would never like me. She was proud like our father, and I had witnessed her shaming. Her anger would turn on me first, instead of finding its more obvious object: Kofi.

  “She is most like me in temperament,” he said.

  “How did she find out?”

  “A blog. We shut it down, but a photograph is circulating on the Internet. A picture of us in the golf cart. Innocent enough, but people these days have such filthy minds.”

  Panic welled at the thought of my face multiplied across a million screens, mistaken for a mistress. That was the only explanation for an anonymous woman being beside a powerful man.

  “Don’t worry. It will blow over. A real scandal will emerge and you’ll be forgotten.”

  “But who did you say I was?” I asked.

  “It’s not necessary to put out a statement over online gossip but, of course, if I were asked a direct question by a reputable journalist, I would say you are my daughter. Which is what you are. Come,” he said. “Let me show you the lake.”

  “I need to get back to London.”

  “The matter is over, Anna. Forget it. Please come with me.”

  After days of neglect time had suddenly appeared in his schedule. He would have been an inconsistent father, appearing between rallies and speeches, a father only when it was convenient. I had been better off with the quiet, steady presence of my mother.

  Outside, the sun was back and the rain was making its reverse journey to the sky. Sweat streamed from my face, pooled in my clavicles, gathered in the folds of my knees. My father owned a palace, a zoo, a plane, and now a lake. We walked through a part of Gbadolite that was wilder than the rest. Damp grass tickled my bare ankles. Wet plants slapped my arms.

  It was a large lake, so large that figures on the opposite bank would appear small. Trees hung over the water, their reflections broken by the ripples of small fish swimming beneath the surface. The air was fresh. The world was cleansed after the rain.

  “Lake Makgadi. It used to be sacred for the villagers. We enclosed it in the compound because of some practices.”

  “Practices?”

  “Relating to the supernatural. Some were harmless. Women believe if you drink from here, you will be cured of infertility. The same as the waters at Lourdes.”

  There were pleasure boats painted in primary colors stacked under a shed, the colors of boiled sweets. Kofi took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers, and began to drag one to the water. I left my shoes on the shore and joined him, pushing from behind, wading knee-deep into the lake. The water was cold and clear. I could see my feet distort as light passed from air to water. My toes looked like bleached slugs.

  Kofi held the boat steady while I climbed in. The bottom was littered with dead leaves and shriveled insects. The oars were old and starting to splinter. We sat facing each other, our knees a few inches apart. He took the first turn with clean strokes. The blades dipped and rose with almost no splash.

  “So is our modest city of Gbadolite to your liking?”

  “It’s unusual. Very different from the village,” I said.

  “The villagers wouldn’t want to live in a place like this. They have a very separate conception of the world. One must respect that.”

  “What are your other children like?”

  “Afua, who you have met, is a judge. Kwabena is in the UN—peaceful, diplomatic, as befits his job. Benita, named for my wife’s mother, is the youngest, an artist of some sort. I don’t understand the work myself but her art is popular in Sweden. Kweku works in an oil company.”

  “What would you have named me?”

  “If I had been there at your birth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would have called you Nana. It means ‘Queen.’”

  The air over the lake was still. The noise of our rowing was the only sound. Two crescents of sweat darkened the armpits of his shirt.

  “Would you like a turn?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The oars were heavy. My strokes fell at an angle that met the most resistance. The boat moved off course, away from the line Kofi had set. I had never been so close to Kofi’s face. I had his nose. I had the strong jaw that was too wide for a woman, an artist once told me. Kofi had shaved that morning but his chin was already sprouting silver.

  “Don’t fight the water, Anna. Relax your shoulders. Use your arms. That’s better.”

  I could feel the drag of the oars in my stomach and thighs. I drew in air through my mouth, in audible breaths.

  “I have been thinking about what we spoke of in Segu,” Kofi said. “I want you to know that immediately after my mother’s funeral I did consider returning to England to complete my degree and, of course, marry your mother. What stopped me was the thought of our children. If I raised them in England they would be completely lost. Like you described.”

  “I wasn’t completely lost.”

  I was suddenly protective of my mother. There had been no one to teach her how to raise a black child. She had done her best. She had dared to keep me where others gave up.

  “Well, I wanted all my children to be raised here,” he said.

  “She could have moved.”

  “How could I bring a European woman to my family home in 1969? To an outdoor kitchen. Food b
ought from an open-air market.”

  “You could have done the cooking.”

  “Well, yes. I didn’t think of that. I was quite a conventional young man.”

  He laughed and showed the open cave of his mouth, his pink tongue scraped clean.

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I could have gone to the market and done the cooking, and everyone would say a white woman had bewitched me.”

  “She was very beautiful.”

  “Yes, she was. Eyes like the Atlantic at noon.”

  He had read Francis Aggrey’s diary as closely as I had. Like me, he had gone through its pages and picked out favorite phrases.

  “What would I have known if I had been born here?”

  “That the world was made in four days, not seven. Abbana made land on the first day. Animals on the second. Birds on the third. When he saw the beauty of his creation, he wept on the fourth day and his tears made the ocean. Abbana means Father. We had a revelation of a loving God long before the missionaries came. In fact, their version was rather harsh.”

  His voice had a soothing cadence, modulated for storytelling. He would have been good at bedtime.

  “What else would I have known?” I asked.

  “There are initiation ceremonies for girls. At thirteen you would have been inducted into womanhood.”

  “That seems young.”

  “People lived shorter life spans in the old days. My daughters took part in the ceremonies. As a man, I am not privy to the exact details, but it is mostly symbolic. They went back to school at the end, not to a husband’s house.”

  He dabbed his forehead with a fresh handkerchief. He was careful of his person, still in some ways the dandy Francis Aggrey had been. I was ragged next to him with my crumpled cotton dress, stained with sweat.

  “You asked me some questions in Segu, and now I would like to ask you a few also,” he said. “Why did you come to find me?”

  “It was the diary. I recognized the voice and I felt like that man, Francis Aggrey, would recognize me, too. He was an outsider, wasn’t he?”

  “And Kofi Adjei, how does he compare to Francis Aggrey?”

  “He is different.”

  “How so?”

  I considered my answer. I did not want to offend but I did not want to lie.

  “He is in the center of things now,” I said. “He is used to being worshipped.”

  “The villagers do not worship me.”

  “What of the congress? Daasebre?”

  “The pronunciation is poor. But, yes, I am that to them. It is a title to show their appreciation. Almost every road in Bamana, I built. Almost every school. Do not be deceived by colonial propaganda. The British left almost no infrastructure. I have brought wealth to this country.”

  “But they are poor.”

  “Is that what you see? They are not poor. They are just not flooded with cheap foreign goods. They make their own clothes. They eat the food they have grown. They are healthy. Their children are literate. Where is the poverty?”

  “Bamana has diamonds,” I said. “It should look like Sweden.”

  “We do not own the diamonds. They are in the hands of European companies. When you are outside government it is easy to say, ‘I will nationalize everything,’ but once you get into power, you realize the whites stick together. Nationalize one of their companies and none of the rest will do business with you.”

  His Rolex gleamed on his wrist, its diamond-studded face catching the sun.

  “But Marcellina said . . .”

  “Who is Marcellina?”

  “No one,” I said. “I heard about a girl in the village. She was chained in a hut because her uncle thought she was a witch.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Just someone I spoke to at the congress. She’s been rescued now, but I was shocked by the story.”

  “Yes. That is regrettable. The villagers still hold on to some of the old harmful beliefs. I do not approve, of course, but it is hard to stamp them out. Even with legislation.”

  “Why not just arrest people for tying children up?”

  “We have prosecuted some of these cases, but how many can you arrest? I believe in education, changing minds then changing actions, which is why I led one of the widest education programs in Africa. In a generation or so, those beliefs will be gone. They are already on their way out.”

  “Not fast enough for this girl,” I said.

  “Perhaps not. But fast enough for her daughter. You must understand, I cannot force change. Only guide it. It is part of why the people respect me. I recognize the limits of my power. Like your British queen.”

  It always came back to the mighty Daasebre. We were at the center of the lake now and I could see to the opposite bank. A man looked out to us, naked except for a loincloth. His skin was covered in white chalk.

  “That is a woyo,” Kofi said. “The whites would have called him a witch doctor, but he is a powerful healer. His knowledge of herbs is as extensive as any pharmaceutical company’s. He also understands the deeper psychological and spiritual roots of ailments.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “To gather plants, or perhaps just to pray. There is a gate to the lake on the other side. A security risk, but we cannot completely stop the use of the lake. We can only regulate it.”

  The woyo scooped water in his hand and then let it trickle through his fingers.

  “What is he doing?” I said.

  “Pouring the sacred waters over our lives.”

  Kofi put his hand in the lake and repeated the gesture.

  “Give him your blessing too.”

  I blessed the woyo and then I blessed Rose. The water ran through my fingers twice, flashing in the air before returning to the lake. We let the boat drift after that. There was nothing to bump into for miles.

  At dinner, Afua and I sat facing each other in an empty banquet hall. Afua wore a black sequin blouse and white silk trousers. I looked shabby in comparison. She dabbed at her mouth after each bite. Lipstick bruises formed on her napkin. She was too prim, too proper. I imagined growing up in a household with the Daasebre, marked by the force of that character, perhaps bent by it.

  “How is the fish, Anna?” Kofi asked.

  “Very good, thank you.”

  “It was caught in the lake this morning. You know, the two of you, your grandmother was a fisherwoman. It was catching and drying fish like these that paid for my expensive education. Afua, you are not asking your sister any questions.”

  She speared a morsel of fish with her fork. “What do you do in London?” Her voice was flat with disinterest.

  “I studied architecture.”

  “When will you be returning to work?” she asked.

  “I don’t practice anymore.”

  “She has a daughter, my oldest grandchild. Twenty-five years old,” Kofi said.

  “Maybe Papa will update the family tree that hangs in the house in Segu.”

  “What a wonderful idea. Will you oversee it?” he asked Afua.

  “There is no need for that,” I said. I did not want to become a pawn in their struggle.

  The table was set with enough silver to back a currency. Gloved servants watched the levels in our glasses, refilling them once they dipped. The wine was a good vintage, a fragrant accompaniment to the fish. I could feel myself lifting off from sobriety.

  “I must return to London soon. I haven’t spoken to my daughter in almost a week. She’ll be worried.”

  “Let her come,” Kofi said. “She, too, must know her roots.”

  “And where is the father of the child?” Afua asked.

  “My husband? He’s in England.” I reinstated Robert into my narrative. I suddenly wanted to look respectable in front of these Adjeis.

  “You haven’t spoken of him much,” Kofi said. “He needs to come to Bamana to pay your bride price. That is the way we do things here.”

  “We do things a little differently in London, thankfully. I might
not have survived over here.”

  “What do you mean?” Afua asked.

  “Someone might have accused me of being a witch,” I said.

  “Where did you get that idea from? A Western liberal newspaper? They’re always looking for some barbarism to campaign against in Africa, isn’t that so, Papa?”

  “There was a girl chained in a hut for witchcraft, just a few miles from here.”

  “An isolated incident. Such things are obviously illegal. Tell her, Papa.”

  “We have discussed this,” Kofi said. “I will look into the matter as and when I see fit. Do not speak of things you do not understand.”

  “What is so difficult? It’s barbaric. It must be stopped.”

  “Barbaric? So the villagers are savages?” Kofi said.

  “The man who wrote that diary, what would he have made of such a thing?”

  “What diary, Papa?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “A diary he wrote as a young man, when he wanted to change this country for the better.”

  “But Papa has changed things for the better. You should have seen the state of Bamana at independence. Bama people are more literate, have a higher life expectancy, are wealthier even.”

  “Don’t you see?” I said.

  “See what?” Afua asked.

  “That he is too rich.”

  “You want me to be poor,” Kofi said. “Is your queen poor?”

  “Did Francis Aggrey want to be this rich?”

  “The people wanted him to be. You do not understand our ways. You are my daughter, but at the end of the day you are still an obroni.”

  “What’s difficult to understand? That killing people is wrong?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Kofi said.

  “The Kinnakro Five.”

  “You have been speaking to my enemies.”

  “What happened to those boys?”

  “Who made you judge over me?”

  He stood up before a servant could pull back his chair. Afua rose more gracefully. Kofi’s hand was raised. Would he strike me? I gripped my table knife. But his hand was merely raised in farewell.

  “Good night,” he said.

  I did not leave with them. I was not an Adjei. I finished my fish, avoiding the bones, each one a choking hazard.