New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

rubbing sleeping infants’ cheeks to see if this wanting is catching.

  I think I know when I became immune.

  As a small child myself I’d been the one sent to fetch

  when the new mom couldn’t move,

  confined as much by tight stitch as tongue.

  Don’t let anyone visit.

  Don’t eat from the family bowls.

  Let no one but these women hold the child.

  Often she’d stare at nothing except the baby in her arms

  and the log at the gate meant everyone knew

  only their good wishes could enter;

  their bodies, their diseases, all that chatter they could keep

  well outside the yard and its doughy new guest.

  Even the father wouldn’t see it till its knotted cord fell off.

  He knew nothing of all the bloody screaming,

  the noisy stench and mess of it all.

  For three months there’d be this dance,

  too much seeing by one and not enough by the other,

  the language of ritual and taboo an old fence.

  For years I frowned at the old ladies and their fraying ways.

  How they kept the father out

  dancing his own dance despite knowing

  how sometimes a girl who’d never had other women

  stare between her thighs with brisk empathy

  would hold his eye and think him a ship in that distant light.

  I know now

  what the old women knew then—

  how sore the new mother was

  and how greedy the infant

  and the one who helped her make it.

  Edwige Renée Dro

  A bilingual Ivorian writer, translator and literary activist, who worked in England for more than a decade before returning to Abidjan, she is passionate about bridging the literary communication gap in Africa. Her writings have been published by Bloomsbury, Africa no es un pais, Popula, and This is Africa, among other places, and she also features in the new Casa Africa anthology. She was one of the 2015 judges of the PEN International Short Story Prize and was also a 2016 judge of the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is currently working on her first novel and researching the stories of the Amazones of 1949, the women politicians who marched against the colonisers in Côte d’Ivoire.

  Courage Became Her Friend

  The buzzing of the phone woke Sandrine. She stretched her arm to grope for it across the bed, the effort to reach it a struggle. She had only got home at 2 o’clock this afternoon, having done her nightly eleven-hour shift at the care home, grabbing a coffee at Starbucks at 6:30 that morning, then going to do her cleaning jobs. Beat wasn’t even the word for how she felt.

  Brrr–brrr! The buzzing noise carried on, regardless. For a moment, she thought it was her alarm but she had only just closed her eyes. She managed to grab the phone and quickly answer it before it rang out. At this precise moment, she hoped it was the agency calling to cancel her shift tonight. She would actually have paid good money for that to happen. OK, not good money, since she was trying to save the little she earned, although that was proving difficult. There was always something. The obvious things like rent and food, of course, but last week, she had had to buy new tyres for her bicycle. She’d hoped they would last a bit longer. Not so—and £80 went just like that!

  Then there was the money she had started sending for her father’s medical bills in Côte d’Ivoire, which she was glad to do. The last time she saw him, she had been eighteen. She was now thirty-two; in the years between, there had been only photographs, and his voice on the telephone. Nowadays, even that was becoming rare. Her mother was the one Sandrine spoke with, not her father: it was always that he was sleeping, he’d just popped out, he was taking a shower. Then when she called specially, with the express intention of talking to him, come what may, he was put on the phone.

  But his voice sounded tired—“Ah, Maman, tu vas bien?”—and tears filled her eyes. How could she be well when she had not seen him in fourteen years and his photos no longer looked like him? Who was that thin, ashen man who had replaced her vigorous father? A few times, she had wanted to say Fuck it and just go there; but go and then what? Because she wouldn’t be able to come back.

  “Hello?”

  “Allo? Sandrine . . .”

  The line crackled but she recognized her mother’s voice, and her mother called her Sandrine instead of Maman. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

  “Allo? Allo, Maman? Can you hear me?”

  The line went dead and Sandrine cursed the phone. Now she had to go out and buy a phone card to call overseas, which meant that her sleeping hours were being eaten into. Perhaps just for tonight she would call in sick. This working all the time was killing her. In summertime, it wasn’t too bad, but in these winter months she just wanted to stay under her duvet. The care home jobs, the live-in care jobs, the cleaning jobs—all cash-in-hand and none of them requiring any immigration status checking.

  She threw a coat over her jumper and put on her Converse trainers, while keeping an eye on the phone. If her mother had tried calling her again, the call hadn’t come through. And Sandrine wouldn’t rest until she had spoken to her. Her mother had tried to keep the worst from her, but Sandrine’s siblings kept her informed: about their father’s blood pressure shooting up, about the comas he had been in, about the dialysis, about the fact that he had gone blind. For all those reasons, she dreaded getting phone calls from back home. She threw her scarf around her neck and went out.

  As had also become a common occurrence lately, tears started flowing. Tired, that’s what she was, but it had nothing to do with the crazy hours she was doing. At least if she was making something of her life here . . . but nothing. She was renting a room that was so badly heated she had to wear a jumper, woollen tracksuit bottoms and socks, and then throw a thick duvet over herself to be at all comfortable. She had just begun saving money when her father’s illness came. Tension—high blood pressure. So her little savings had been sent back home, meaning that she had to stay here. Because if she couldn’t save, she couldn’t go. And courage became her friend. If anyone had told her that she would need courage to speak to her family, she would have called them mad. What was the need for courage there?

  She wiped her tears. The wind was blowing and leaves littered the ground. During her first autumn in England, she had slipped on leaves similar to those and had fallen. Twice! And she didn’t know why, until the following autumn, a whole year later, when she realized that her fall had everything to do with her shoes; with their soles smooth as a baby’s skin, she had been destined for a fall. The reminiscence of it made her smile as she entered the shop with its familiar smell of dried fish, akpi, and palm oil. It seemed a new delivery of smoked pork meat had arrived.

  “Good afternoon, Tantie!”

  “Hey, Sandrine! You have become a stranger, hein. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Tantie.”

  “Ahi? All this time, I have been asking myself where has that girl gone? I even thought you’d gone back to Ouattara’s country.” Tantie laughed, referencing the Ivorian president.

  The shopkeeper was a staunch supporter of his opponent, Gbagbo, although when she had left the country, Gbagbo was in hiding in France, travelling on fake passports.

  “How’s your aunt?”

  “She is fine, Tantie. She greets you.”

  Sandrine had not in fact seen her own tantie in two months; she was avoiding the woman. It seemed as if since she was the one who had brought her into the country, Tantie was now expecting Sandrine to bail her out. Sandrine, send me some phone credit. Sandrine, put £10 in my account. Sandrine, can you believe my electric card has run out? The demands had stopped only because Sandrine has changed her telephone number.

  “Ah, that’s good. Next time she comes here, tell her to come and spend some time with me at the shop. If there’s one thing I miss in Peckham, it’s that. Here is the place of Ghanaians, and you can’t
be with them like with your own people. But at least, there’s no I’ll pay later with them,” the shopkeeper said, and burst into laughter. Sandrine laughed with her for politeness’ sake, before asking for the phone card she had come to buy.

  “£10 or £5 one?”

  “£5, please.”

  “How’s your family?”

  “They are all well.”

  “That’s good. Greet them from me.”

  “They will hear.”

  It always puzzled Sandrine, that thing of sending your greetings to people you had never met and were probably likely never to meet. Even when she was still in Côte d’Ivoire she had, for some reason, thought that when she landed in England all that would disappear, along with the smell of akpi and plantains and djoumgblé in a shop. How terribly mistaken she had been, and taken in by the Parigos who descend upon Abidjan during the holidays, making out that they were all that.

  Her own auntie had done the same, wearing jeans and little dresses, sunglasses always on “to protect her retina” or perched atop her head, French peppered with English words. Even she who was doing a BTS did not speak French the way Tantie Georgette—who hadn’t even finished primary school—spoke. She approached her before her parents even had the idea. Wêrê wêrê or not, it was Tantie Georgette whose skin shone from living in Europe, and she couldn’t have been that wêrê wêrê if she was still with the same man she met on a beach in Grand Bassam. Then, she was wêrê wêrê because she got up one day and decided that she was going to Grand Bassam to get her white man, and for three months solidly went without fail to Grand Bassam every week-end. But then when she put her claws into the white man, she stuck. And as Sandrine’s parents acknowledged, were she such a wêrê wêrê woman, she would have left that man and got herself another man, and another man, and another man. “Georgette has come down. Ahi, can a person be and not settle down?” her mother had said. And the sentence had been the seal of approval needed to put into action the plan of Tantie Georgette.

  “I can’t be a guarantor for her visa, but you can send Sandrine on one of these colonies de vacances to England,” Tantie Georgette told Sandrine’s parents.

  “Colonie de vacances?”

  “Yes, there are travel agencies here who do that. To every country, and embassies aren’t so particular about checking papers for things like this because only rich people’s children go on this sort of trip . . .”

  And the plan was made. Sandrine’s father took a loan and the two million CFA Francs was paid for the three-week trip. At least, for the other rich kids it was three weeks, but for her, she was going for ever. On their first trip to London, after a week spent in Cornwall being bathed into English culture, she slipped into the McDonald’s at Piccadilly Circus and went straight to the toilets.

  “Sandrine!”

  “My God, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  Sandrine didn’t say anything because she felt that, despite the bravado of Tantie Georgette, she was ashamed. The stylish woman who only left Abidjan some two months previously had been replaced by a woman whose weave-on seemed to have been thrown on her head, her jeans were too baggy to be a style and the once-shiny skin looked ashen. The trainers were proper running shoes with thick soles to match, and not the wonderful Converse trainers which she had come to associate with British casualness.

  “You wait! In this country, you pound the pavements.”

  Although she now knew that to be true, Sandrine had refused to go down the road of chunky running shoes and cheap weave-ons worn because looking after afro hair in London cost a small country’s budget. Sandrine had pair after pair of Converse shoes, and as for hair, her own hair that she twisted every weekend did the job.

  Now she scratched the phone card and began to compose the number that would help her talk for more than an hour to her people back home. Her phone rang before she had even finished.

  “Allo?” she picked up, bowed at the tantie shopkeeper and left the shop.

  “Allo, Sandrine.”

  “Maman? Let me call you back. I had to go out and buy credit.”

  “Oh, don’t worry.”

  Her mother’s voice was so cold, and so distant and, as was always the case, Sandrine found herself holding her breath and gripping the phone. “Is everything all right?”

  “Ahhh.” Her mother sighed.

  Sandrine stopped walking.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” What’s the matter?

  “C’est Papa. He’s gone.”

  But even before she heard that other part of the sentence, she knew. Parti. Gone. Passed.

  “Je vais venir. I’m coming.”

  Reni Eddo-Lodge

  An award-winning journalist, author and podcaster, born and raised in London by a Nigerian mother, she was listed in 2014 by The Guardian as one of the 30 most exciting people under 30 in digital media, and she appeared in Elle magazine’s 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root’s 30 black viral voices under 30. Her debut non-fiction book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was published in 2017 to critical acclaim, becoming a Sunday Times bestseller, and winning the 2018 Jhalak Prize. The book was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards (non-fiction), voted non-fiction book of the year for 2017 by booksellers at both Foyles and Blackwells, and was selected by actress Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf book club read in January 2017. Her podcast, “About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge”, premiered in March 2018.

  Women, Down your Tools!

  A friend of mine once told me an interesting tale. Her mother had arrived home from a long day at work, only to be confronted by a sink full of dishes. Instead of asking her family why no one had lifted a finger to help, she calmly opened a kitchen cupboard, pulled out every piece of crockery, and smashed it onto the kitchen floor. The family ended up eating off paper plates for a while. “I think Mum’s gone mad,” my friend confided in me.

  Looking back, I’d argue that that moment was the final straw on the camel’s back.

  Today, new research shows that women are still responsible for the vast majority of housework in the home—nearly twice as much as men. A poll of users of the parenting website Mumsnet has very similar findings. Nothing about this is new. In 1972, the legendary socialist feminist activist Selma James formed the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Together with founding members Brigitte Galtier, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, Selma James argued that the running of a home forms the basis for all work in society. Children will not make it to school if they are not washed and dressed and fed. Husbands would crumble if they returned from work to an untidy house, with no dinner on the table. This labour underpinned all labour, yet it was heavily gendered, unpaid, and undervalued.

  “We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle,” wrote Silvia Federici in Wages Against Housework, published in 1975. Indeed, research by the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour has found that younger couples argue about housework the most. After being told that the world is for our taking, we find ourselves playing out the same acts as our mothers did a generation before us.

  It was in 1963 that Betty Freidan identified this unpaid, undervalued labour as “the problem that has no name”. White, educated middle-class women had been sold a lie. They were told that suburban housewife living would be fulfilling, that they were supposed to enjoy dedicating themselves to a life of unpaid work. In today’s era, the twenty-first century, the dynamics of work have changed drastically.

  We are all working now, while women who claim benefits are chided for their failed work ethic. Popular feminist struggles have switched from the struggles of women at the bottom to the concerns of women at the top—penetrating parliament, and occupying spaces on corporate boards. Fewer women are being raised solely with housewife aspirations. We are more likely to be able to make a genuine choice on the matter.

  But the reality is, many of us are do
ing two jobs. In 1971, Selma James reported for a BBC documentary on women’s labour called Our Time Is Coming. In it, a female shop worker explains: “I set my alarm at 6 in the mornings and do some of my housework. I leave home at 8.30 a.m., reach work at 9. Finish at 3.30 p.m., reach home at 4.30 p.m., start the cooking, and the rest of work I do until about 6.30–7 in the evening, until supper.”

  That’s a thirteen-hour day, with only some of that work valued enough to be paid. Can we honestly say that this is no longer the case for many women? As Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey wryly comments: “Times have changed. Women are no longer trapped in the home. They can go out to work then come back and start the housework.”

  Of course, couples and families with enough disposable income can hire a cleaner. But that just puts a sticking-plaster over the problem, outsourcing to low-paid, working-class women who are overwhelmingly employed by agencies on zero-hour contracts. It is the opposite of feminist solidarity. Who is looking after the cleaner’s kids, caring for her home? The answer is, too often, her friends, family, or in the worst-case scenario, no one. In late August, a busybody Twitter user broadcast a picture of a child cleaning a Hampstead branch of estate agency Foxtons late at night, calling it “child labour”. Further investigation found that the girl was helping out her mum.

  To assume that a woman’s position in the home is unrelated to her social and economic capital is wilfully naive. The current set-up is unsustainable and structured for burnout. Selma James was organising to change society. She recognised that to ease the burden on women’s backs, we needed a fundamental overhaul of gender roles to transform the home. Capitalism pulled its con trick by isolating women home workers—Selma brought them together in consciousness-raising meets so that they could realise they were dealing with a common problem.

  Today housework is not talked about much among friends. But, as in the time of the Wages for Housework campaign, this disparate isolation is the basis of denying women labour rights. Housework is work. Have you ever wondered what amazing things you could have done with all the energy you’ve dedicated to housework, propping up the lives of people who don’t even notice that you’re doing it?