New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  “We were never really happy, you know.”

  I shook my head as though commiserating with her but I didn’t buy it; they were happy at one point because if they were only pretending then we all were, the entire group of us married folk would have been pretending. Something had to be true, I couldn’t let her continue so I changed the topic, just a little.

  “How is Maya coping?”

  “At that age, all she knows is that Mummy and Daddy are now living in separate houses and Uncle Paul is spending a lot more time with Mummy than he used to.” Sarah tried to laugh it off, and I smiled too, but none of it seemed really very funny.

  “We never argue in front of her, we’re really very good about that, so I’m not too worried, they say when you get divorced and the kids are young it doesn’t affect them as much as if they were teenagers or, you know, more aware of what’s happening.”

  I had no proof of this but I agreed, Sarah needed me to agree.

  “When you get divorced wives don’t invite you to their parties any more, I’ve been taken off of the list.”

  “I invite you to all of my parties,” I said in mock defence.

  “I didn’t mean you. The others, you know who I mean, I think they think divorce is contagious, either that or they’re afraid that I am about to steal their husbands.”

  “Or both.” Yeah exactly and we both laughed. Sarah was beautiful and sexy enough to steal anybody’s husband; I kept this thought to myself.

  I ordered another beer, she was still nursing her glass of wine. Migrating was something we were both thinking about, and we shared dreams of setting up houses in London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, anywhere but the Caribbean. Sarah felt that Maya would have a better life, more options. I said yes but didn’t totally agree, the Caribbean was still a good place to raise a child, and we had family and friends to call on in times of need.

  “Would Barry let you take her?”

  “Probably would put up a fight, but eventually he’d give in.”

  I really couldn’t tell how serious she was about this although I knew that she had always wanted to live abroad. Having married at a young age, Sarah had never had the opportunity like some of her friends (I was included in that group) to have lived and studied abroad. Maybe now she was finally ready to go.

  “This place can be suffocating,” she said.

  This time I was in total agreement, “Yes it can be.”

  “A small place,” Sarah said.

  I was thinking of Jamaica Kincaid’s book which I was sure Sarah had not read, she had never been a reader like me.

  “You know, like that book,” Sarah said.

  “What book?” I asked still unable to accept that Sarah had possibly read a book from cover to cover, far less a writer like Jamaica Kincaid, or even knew who Kincaid was for that matter.

  “By that Jamaica woman.”

  “Jamaican you mean?” I was still unbelieving, and now deliberately trying to throw her off track.

  “No, her name is Jamaica.”

  “Oh, you mean Jamaica Kincaid.”

  Of course, she always got names wrong, she offered. “We all do,” I said condescendingly but Sarah didn’t seem to notice the tone.

  We stayed a little longer, and we saw the crowd begin to come in, all well dressed for an evening lime at a posh drinking hole. Sarah and I were still in our tea clothes, lighter colours as opposed to the black now filling the place. We recognized a few faces, said a quick “Hi” then “Goodbye”.

  By the time I got home the effect of the beer and the conversation with Sarah left me in a cloudy, uneasy state. That night in bed I kept replaying the Kincaid thing in my mind, how could she have known about Kincaid’s A Small Place? It had to have been Paul’s influence but I had never heard him refer to one single writer or book in the many years I had known him. And Sarah didn’t even look as unhappy as I thought she would have. In fact, Sarah looked as though she had finally found the man of her dreams. In Paul of all people. Somehow Sarah had won again, the way she always had since our high school days, in a race that she didn’t even know she was running.

  Rebecca Walker

  She is the author of the bestselling memoirs Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love; the novel Adé: A Love Story; and editor of the ground-breaking anthologies To Be Real, What Makes a Man, One Big Happy Family and Black Cool. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bookforum, BOMB, Newsweek, Vibe, Real Simple, Essence, and Interview, among many other magazines and literary collections. She has spoken at over 400 universities and college campuses including Harvard, Facebook, TedXLund, and JP Morgan Chase. Time magazine named her one of the most influential leaders of her generation. She lives in Los Angeles.

  From Adé: A Love Story

  We stepped off the bus with our backs kinked and mouths dry. The twists and turns of the road from the city to the coast, the loud yelling of the bus driver and his obvious addiction to an herb pulled obsessively from a wrapper of old newspaper had left us skittish and raw. The other passengers did not seem to notice the careening into darkness, the hypnotic beat of imported hip hop pumping through the threadbare seats, the angry outbursts of passing motorists.

  Miriam and I tried to let our bodies sway with each lean and brake, tried not to conjure images of mangled bodies and buses overturned by the side of the road, but found we could not help ourselves. We sat the whole sixteen hours clutching metal bars crudely nailed into the sides of our seats, rivers of sweat streaming from our armpits. We glanced meekly from time to time at our fellow passengers, men and women who awoke from naps refreshed and took pity on us, offering cigarettes and bottles of hot cola as we quaked.

  To finally climb aboard the ferry that took us away from the mainland of Kenya was to step into a dream. We were never so glad to leave tar and cement, metal and glass, profane music and men who did not take precautions. The boat was not big, but it was old and looked to us seaworthy, though of course there would have been nothing to do had it been otherwise. It was painted white and a calming pale green, and once it began to move, groaning loudly as the waters churned beneath us, it did not take long for the coastline to disappear, and for the fumes and chaos of the dock to fade from view.

  I was worn out, but had never seen a swamp before, and certainly not the vivid mossy green of mangrove forests, the bent reddish-brown trunks rising up out of the muck, miraculous as lotus blossoms. Again, I felt a sense of belonging—the slow, irrational dissolution of the self I had known, and another, core truth of being emerging in concert with the landscape. I wanted to know about the small islands we were passing, were they inhabited, did food grow there? But I knew better than to talk to the women cloaked in black and laughing insouciantly at their own jokes, wrapping and rewrapping their coverings while staring nakedly at me as if I were no more than a life-size cutout of a woman, and not the real thing.

  * * *

  Soon, the landmass appeared on the horizon, and then all at once we were upon the tiny village, a string of flat, tin-roofed buildings, and the boat was roped to the hooks on the cement pier by a barefoot man old enough to be my grandfather. I noticed the Portuguese influence, the squat columned structures reminiscent of the slave trade, but it was not my first thought, nor did it take hold for long. I was already caught up in what was going on around me.

  It was mango season, and mangoes were everywhere: loose and spoiling on the ground at my feet, carried in bulging sacks on the backs of men, bright orange and dripping in the hands of children along the sea front. Women were covered from head to toe in black, strolling unhurriedly in groups of four and five. Young, shirtless men with dreadlocks and surfboards were scanning the ferry passengers for rich white tourists. Older men in neat white shirts and embroidered skullcaps were walking briskly to and from mosques that dotted the small town.

  I don’t remember how we got from the pier to the guesthouse, but our bags were tossed onto the concrete, and we were escorted from the mouth of the
boat onto the firm ground of the pier. Miriam and I stood there for a few moments amidst the orderly confusion, too tired to check the guidebook buried in our baggage, and too happy standing still to rush to movement. Then a young, brown-skinned man with thick-rimmed black glasses approached us with a mixture of boredom and pity, picked up our bags without a word, and led us through the narrow, winding streets to our new home, a few tiny rooms off a rooftop courtyard, completely hidden from the street but for a narrow stone staircase winding up from the curb.

  Adé did not appear until many hours later, after the sun had melted into the sea and the sticky heat of the day had settled into a breezy cool. I had unpacked the contents of my bag into an old wooden chest that stood beside the thin mattress on the floor, and hung my brightly colored scarves on hooks pounded into the cracked, dry walls. The sheet on my bed was faded and flowery, and I stretched out on top of it in the dimly lit room, hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer and thumbing through a book of poems, The Captain’s Verses, by Pablo Neruda. The tightness in my neck and in the small of my back relaxed, and my mind began slowing to the pace of the island, downshifting from the screeching city chaos to the gentle lapping of the sea that beat like a pulse through the tiny town.

  Gradually the opening and closing of doors and the shifting of furniture outside my door grew into laughter and talking and the sound of food and drink being served. It was Ramadan; the sun had gone down, and the music had begun to play. That night the fast was broken with a melodic Lingala, and I immediately put my book down and let my head fall back into my pillow. I had not heard Lingala music before, and the newness of the sound affected me. I was used to the haunting whines of the griots from Mali and Senegal, the polyrhythmic chants of pygmies from Central Africa. But Lingala was different. It was music born of African rumba, a child of Afro-Cuban fusion that took hold in the Belgian Congo in the forties, and made its way east to Kenya and Tanzania in the seventies and eighties, absorbing influences from Congolese folk music and Caribbean and Latin beats. On the Kenyan coast it leapt again, and with three or four guitars, one bass, drums, brass, and vocals, evolved a new offspring, benga, or the Swahili sound. Lingala was dance music, hypnotic and polyphonic, full of movement. It brought to mind the sound of bottles tinkling at a bar, and women and men sweating and dancing hip to hip under colored lights. The sound was so infectious, so sexy, it drew me out of my room and into the movement of it, into the ecstasy of its freedom.

  I opened the door, and saw a man in the center of this exuberant stream of sound. He was inside the benga. Standing with his back to me, among a dozen or so other strikingly beautiful bodies, I saw his slender hips first, the clean white kikoi wrapped neatly around his waist, the tails of the turquoise button-down Oxford shirt modestly covering his behind. Adé’s was the first body I saw, and then my eyes were captivated by others: a handsome African-American man I later learned was from Boston, a thin, olive-skinned beauty from Brazil, a serious exchange student from Tunis, five or six diffident-looking young men from the island. Everyone was talking, drinking, laughing, and sharing survival stories from months on the road.

  * * *

  I exhaled and looked past him at the moon rising, huge and luminous behind us, from the other side of the island. I motioned to it and he twisted around to see. We stayed like that for what seemed a long time, watching its ascent in silence.

  Eventually he turned back to me and asked if I was hungry. I was not, but again, just as with the women in the boat, something stopped me from responding as I might have, loudly and without respect for the sanctity of the moment. I said yes quietly, almost in a whisper, and watched him carefully take the thin sheet of tin off of the plate. As I parted my lips and waited for the forkful of noodles he offered, I glanced at his muscular calves, and his large and handsome feet resting in sandals made from the faded black rubber of old tires. And then the spaghetti reached my tongue. It was sweet! It was cooked with sugar! It was one of his mother’s favorite recipes, he said. It was special for Ramadan and meant to remind us of the sweetness of life, of God.

  I nodded, pondering this new being before me, feeding me the taste of his mother’s hands, her offering to God, and I had the urge to touch him, to feel that he was real. And then the sweet spaghetti was finished, and he said he had to work early the next morning at the woodshop. He was a fisherman first, but also a carver, he said, and chiseled rosettes into the massive wooden doors announcing the thresholds of the larger houses in town. We had seen some of them, I said, on our way to the guesthouse. He nodded. I wanted to kiss him, waited. He folded the square of tinfoil covering the plate and put it into his shirt pocket. I stood closer to him, and we walked together to the steps. He was taller than me by several inches, and I felt some indescribable protection there, in his imagined embrace.

  After he left, I lay on my thin mattress thinking about the unusual potency of our attraction. I knew nothing about him and yet I wanted to see him again. I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two.

  Not long after, I heard a quiet knock on the door, and for a moment thought he might have returned. But it was Miriam who entered without waiting for my response. She spread out next to me, humming a tune from the Lingala, as I gushed excitedly about the moon and the sweet spaghetti, about young men giving money to their mothers. She talked about the invisibility of women in the Old Town, and the claustrophobia she felt walking down the narrow stone streets. She said that for the first time in her life, she missed seeing cars, a way out.

  I tried to stay awake, but was tired and did not like what she was saying. I could not imagine we were on the same island. I started to say something, to defend this small place and its people, but I could not bring myself to do it. I had only just met this one boy. The story of the world was too big to reverse in one night. My mind and then my body grew heavy. I pressed myself against her, and drifted off to sleep.

  1970s

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  An acclaimed Nigerian author, she has had her work translated into more than 30 languages and has contributed to numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) which won the Orange Prize, was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and was adapted as a 2013 film directed by Biyi Bandele, and Americanah (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. She is also the author of Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and the 2009 story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, is one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. She divides her time between the US and Nigeria, where she was born.

  From We Should All Be Feminists

  Okoloma was one of my greatest childhood friends. He lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother: if I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma’s opinion. He was funny and intelligent and wore cowboy boots that were pointy at the tips. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist.

  I was about fourteen, we were in his house, arguing, both of us bristling with half-baked knowledge from books we had read. I don’t remember what this particular argument was about, but as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, “You know, you’re a feminist.”

  It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone—the tone with which someone would say, “You’re a supporter of terrorism.”

  I did not know exactly what this word feminist meant; and I did not want Okoloma to know that I didn’t know. So I brushed it aside and continued to argue. The first thing I pla
nned to do when I got home was to look up the word in the dictionary.

  Now fast-forward to some years later.

  In 2003 I wrote a novel called Purple Hibiscus, about a man who, among other things, beats his wife and whose story doesn’t end too well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist and his advice to me—he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist, since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.

  So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.

  Then an academic, a Nigerian woman, told me that feminism was not our culture, feminism was un-African, that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been influenced by Western books (which amused me, because a lot of my early reading was decidedly un-feminist: I must have read every Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I try to read those books called “classic feminist texts” I get bored, and I struggle to finish them). Anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would call myself a Happy African Feminist. Then a friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant I hated men. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men. Of course, a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek, but that word “feminist” is so heavy with negative baggage. You hate men, you hate bras, you don’t have a sense of humour . . .

  Men and women are different. We have different hormones, different sexual organs, different biological abilities. Men have testosterone and are, in general, physically stronger than women. About fiftey-two per cent of the world’s population is female, but most positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, “The higher you go the fewer women there are.”