‘I’m not looking for one.’ I got out of the car.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Not everyone’s like you, Saba. Some of us want to be our own—’
‘Shh…’ she said, as a young man with grey-white hair in a dark blue suit and blue shirt walked past. ‘That’s your cousin’s business associate. Now, he’d make a good match.’
David stood in the entrance with another man, and had taken off his polo shirt; they both wore long blue boubous over their shorts and went in at the gate when they saw us. We followed the men – like good wives, I thought, and stopped.
‘What are you doing?’ Saba asked.
‘I’ll catch you up.’ I looked at the large garden, with its flamboyants and frangipani, banana, mango, palm and pawpaw trees. Everyone, young and old, in varying shades of blue and white, looked smooth-skinned and shiny-haired. To my left, there was a large clear swimming pool; to my right, a long white-cloth-covered table with platters of jollof rice, spicy chicken, fufu, soup, kontomire stew, apim and fried plantain. A Lebanese man in a white gold-embroidered boubou came out of the house. ‘My brother,’ he was saying to David, opening his arms. They bumped chests.
‘Is that Michael?’ I caught up with Saba.
‘No, it’s the bride’s brother.’
‘Does she have a name?’ I asked, but Saba was already in the house.
I entered the large box-shaped villa, draughty with air conditioning; it had the gold chandeliers, stone floors and silk sofas of affluence that could have been in Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong. Everyone was dressed in blue-greens and white here too. The blue-greens were mostly Ghanaian, sitting on the left side of the room, and those in white, mostly Lebanese, were on the other. Against the blue and white, my little black dress felt very short and very black. After all these years, I was still the outside-inside girl, still getting things wrong. I pulled the hem down towards my knees.
‘Do you know where Kojo is?’ I asked Saba.
‘Will you shut up?’ Saba turned and saw me tugging at my hem. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, let’s find him, so at least I can have some fun.’ She walked towards a group of middle-aged women on the left and started shaking each one’s hand. She stopped at the end when she got to a stern-looking woman with a very glossy wig. I followed suit.
‘Auntie Oti, how are you? This is my sister from London.’
The woman looked me up and down. ‘Why is she wearing black? Does she think she is at a funeral?’
I looked at Saba. ‘I wasn’t told, Auntie.’
Auntie Oti closed her eyes. ‘You girls have plans to marry soon, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, Auntie,’ we said in unison.
‘Well, your weddings will be grander than this, your mother will make sure of that. They’ve ruined everything. They had the knocking this morning.’ She shook her head.
‘How would it normally be done, Auntie?’ I asked.
She looked around the room. I was used to having my questions ignored. ‘Auntie, what’s a knocking like normally?’
She closed her eyes again and opened them, then sighed. ‘The groom and a delegation from his family come to the bride’s family home to knock. They wait to be given permission to enter. They bring schnapps.’ She waved her hand.
‘He says he’s seen a beautiful flower that he wants to uproot,’ Saba said, ‘and make it his own…’
‘Yes, yes, then the bride’s family,’ Auntie Oti leant forward and lowered her voice, ‘is supposed to have time to investigate the groom’s background, his family history. Only then should the rites be performed. It is never done on the same day. Never.’
The sound of loud drumming from outside interrupted her, and the doors opened. Men and women entered the reception room with wrapped goods on their heads. They carried whisky and kente and lace and wax prints and paraded them in front of those sitting on the right-hand side of the room.
I crouched next to the bewigged woman. ‘Auntie, have you seen Kojo?’
‘He was here for the knocking this morning.’
I got up. Saba had disappeared. I went out into the garden, where mostly young people sat at white-clothed tables under white-and-blue striped awnings. Saba was with David and others, who all had the same air of affluence. The drumming started again and I walked towards the pool. The cameras rushed towards the gate. The bride was coming. I craned my neck to see her. She was young, picture-book beautiful, eyes large with cartoon eyelashes.
‘Is this your bride?’ a man was asking the groom, shorter and darker than the bride, well-chiselled to her gloss.
I looked at the clear water in the pool. Across it, on the other side of the garden, I saw the man Saba had called Kojo’s business associate standing apart from the crowd, texting.
I walked round the pool towards him. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’ He looked up, put his phone in his pocket.
‘Do you agree to marry this man?’ The MC was holding the microphone too close.
‘I’m Maya. I’m Kojo Agyata’s cousin.’
‘Pleasure to meet you. I’m Gideon.’
‘Do you agree to marry this man?’ the MC was asking again.
The bride’s answer was inaudible.
Perhaps the MC could not hear her either, or she was losing her nerve. ‘Do you agree to marry this man?’ The question hung in the air a third time.
‘How long does this go on for?’ I asked Gideon.
‘I’m not sure. I think it’s over,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that one of your uncles?’
A man with a kente cloth of white and gold wrapped around him like a toga, wearing large gold wristlets, sandals and anklets, was walking towards the stage. Another was twirling an enormous velvet and kente umbrella over his head. There were drummers drumming ahead of him and a procession of young men followed.
‘Looks like it. What’s he doing up there?’
‘I think Michael’s from your region.’
The richly dressed man put some schnapps into a glass and began pouring it onto the ground. ‘Grandfather Kuntunkunku drinks for you,’ he said in Twi.
‘Ampa, ampa,’ his spokesman interjected.
‘Yeboa of Adanse drinks for you,’ he shouted, with the same projection and rhythm and flow of an actor reciting Shakespeare, pausing for effect.
‘Ampa, ampa.’
‘Grandmother Musa drinks for you,’ he said, calling on our first ancestress.
‘Ampa, ampa.’
‘You descended from heaven by golden chains.’
‘Sio, sio.’
‘It was through perseverance, unity…’
‘Sio.’
‘…and wisdom that you became…’
‘Sio, sio.’
‘…the first builders in Akanland.’
‘The Asante would squabble with that one.’ Gideon leant sideways towards me, almost toppled.
‘If people actually learnt our history instead of second-guessing, there wouldn’t be any squabbling,’ I said to him.
Gideon’s mouth twitched.
I bit my lip. ‘Sorry. It’s the weather. It makes me hot. You’re working with Kojo?’
‘That’s right,’ he said, taking his phone out of his pocket and looking at it.
‘So am I.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Will you help me find him?’
‘I could call him.’ He looked bemused.
‘Oh, could you? Please, I’ve tried and tried and I can’t get through.’
‘Your cousin has four phones, only one of which he answers.’
My uncle had invoked God, the earth, my clan and the groom’s family ancestors. ‘Yen nyinaa nkwa so,’ he was concluding, ‘may we all live long.’
The guests responded: ‘Mo ne kasa.’ He had spoken well.
‘Yes, hello there,’ Gideon said into the phone. ‘Yes … I have your young cousin here. It seems she is looking for you, rather desperately … yes, still here … right…’ He hung up. ‘We’d better go.’
‘Where?�
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‘I’m going to drop you home. I have to be back before the groom notices I’m gone.’
As we went out of the gate, a priest and an imam were getting onto the stage to give their blessings.
‘Do you have to tell anyone you’re going?’ Gideon asked.
‘No.’
We got into his new-looking, racing-green Range Rover. He told me that he too was Lebanese, though not like the bride’s family, born and bred in Ghana, but in London. He had been sent by his father to lead the construction company he had built; first in Senegal, now here. He had tried multiple other businesses of his own, he said, succeeded, then failed, but this, helping Kojo to build the museum, was by far his favourite. Kojo had never mentioned Gideon in our conversations. I looked at him.
‘You can drop me off here,’ I said when we got to the top of our lane. ‘Thanks a million.’ I was out of the car almost before he had stopped it.
They were still pounding next door and playing High-life from a transistor radio. I looked down at the red earth coating the platform of my shoes, did not at first see the Terrano jeep that stood outside the door. It was only when I reached the porch and heard a male voice – ‘And what kind of greeting is this?’ – that I saw Kojo. I ran to where he sat on the sofa and put my head in his chest.
‘I brought you something.’ He picked up a hamper wrapped with a big red bow. Inside were packets of spaghetti and cans of concentrated tomato paste, chocolates, and a bottle of sparkling wine. ‘For the vegetarian,’ he said.
I put my face in his chest again. ‘Thank you,’ I said silently, to the rhythmic pounding of the fufu in the half-house next door.
‘Get dressed, we’re going to the Odwira.’
‘The what?’ I asked, knowing, but reluctant to move my face from his chest.
‘Odwira. You English call it black Christmas. Do you have any traditional cloth?’
‘No…’ I looked up at him. ‘I’m not English.’
‘Then wear something smart. No black. Hurry. It’s already late.’
I ran up and changed into a pink 1950s-style cocktail dress with a silk strapless body that went in at the waist, with chiffon shoulder caps. I almost tore it in the rush to get it on. I put on my platforms and grabbed a beaded black clutch bag. I had a smile on my face that shrank when I came down. Kojo was sitting on the sofa with his head in his hands, his shoulders hunched.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
He looked up. ‘Let’s go.’ He stood almost painfully.
‘What happened?’
‘I … I have many things on my mind.’
We drove down the Legon road past the white-walled, red-roofed university campus. The dense exhaust fumes of blue-and-yellow painted taxis and trotros mingled with the stifling dry dust of the harmattan winds.
‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’ Kojo looked straight ahead of him as we passed a truck turned over on its roof.
‘Kojo, what’s wrong with you?’
He didn’t answer. Maybe the harmattan had entered his bones. We drove past large black gates that seemed to stand all alone amidst the thick green foliage.
‘Did you know that Nkrumah built all this?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘The university. The atomic power station. And still we hated him.’
‘Nkrumah, the first president? I don’t hate him,’ I said. ‘He’s my idol… “Free us from the shackles of neocolonialist tyranny… Lead us from Babylon to the promised land…”’
‘I think you’ve got your Kwame Nkrumah and your Bob Marley mixed up.’
‘Same difference.’
‘I wouldn’t let your parents hear you talk like that.’
‘About Bob Marley? Why, because they’ll think I’ll grow dreads and develop a taste for marihuana?’
Kojo laughed. ‘No. You know that Nkrumah might be even worse for them than that…’
‘Worse than that? Isn’t he the reason they went abroad in the first place?’
‘Yes, but he also killed their uncle, and my father.’
I looked at him, and thought of the two of us weighed down since childhood, by centuries of legacy and obligation. I followed his gaze, past the cocktail of trees spread out on the hills. ‘You’re driving very fast, Kojo,’ I said.
‘How is your father?’
‘I don’t really know. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He calls every so often to give me advice that’s meant for some fictional daughter.’
‘You and your father used to be inseparable, you know. You used to follow him everywhere he went. The two of you would go on secret trips to museums … he’s a good man.’
‘Yeah. He still left, though …’ I stopped myself, looked over at him. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
We were driving through a town. There was the sound of drums and people shouting. We drove through the throng of people wearing printed cloth and kente, their narrow strips catching the sun in their greens, whites, reds, yellows, oranges and blues.
‘What is going on?’ I asked.
Kojo stopped the car behind others, crowded with people. He got out. I wanted to reach out, pull him back in, tell him that it was still possible to escape this path, to walk our own. I stared at the people surrounding the car. I looked down at my pink vintage cocktail dress and pulled at my chiffon shoulder caps. I wished I had worn sandals instead of platforms. The sound was deafening. My heartbeat sped up to match the sound of the drums beating their rhythm of welcome. The energy of the people jostling, dancing and laughing, waving their white handkerchiefs in the air, seemed to come from a different plane. I opened the car door, and stepped out into the crowd.
The women had undone the top layer of their cloths when Kojo got out, and were waving them in front of him, as if clearing a path for a king.
Kojo smiled, lifted his hands and moved his hips in a subtle dance.
They raised two fingers above his head.
I knew that crowds at festivals and gatherings made this kind of display for anyone who carried the aura of importance in the air around them, but there was something more in the way they treated Kojo, and in the way he stopped and greeted them; in the way he danced and in the way they danced in response. He was himself again, weaving his stories silently, carrying all along with him.
‘Come,’ he said, leading me through the jostling crowd.
Three drummers came to our side and played in short rhythmic bursts, until Kojo pulled some cedi notes out of his wallet and plastered them onto their foreheads. They stopped drumming to catch them before they fell to the ground.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
He put his arm around me. ‘To the palace.’
I had not been to this hillside town before. As we approached, I saw that the palace was not as large as the one in my hometown, and that its once-white paint was peeling. Two men holding gold-handled daggers between their teeth, wearing dark red mudcloth tops with leather pouches sewn into them, guarded the gates that blocked out the crowd. I knew that in the past these men had some special function, that each pouch and stitch and colour of their costume meant something, but I did not know what. I looked up at Kojo, his face stern and concentrated. When the men saw him, they soundlessly opened the gates; he took out more notes and handed them over. Outside, the throng was heaving, but inside the walled courtyard all was quiet. I stood and looked back at the dense crowd, through the gate that made me feel safe, as well as sad at the separation. My mother and Saba took it for granted that they were special. Even to Kojo, it was natural and unquestioned, though he tried to bridge the gaps. Only I seemed to feel the strangeness at being so through no merit of my own. It rattled me as much as when people told me I was beautiful, then gave me access to things and places I felt I had done nothing to deserve. I had become accustomed to people treating me according to the way I looked. It no longer burdened me. But this other privileged access was still weighted with my ignora
nce.
‘Come, Maya.’ Kojo’s voice was impatient. He was standing looking down at me from a balustraded landing.
Outside a large door stood two men wrapped in toga’d cloths.
‘Ohenenana Ohene,’ they greeted Kojo. I knew this meant ‘grandchild of the King’, and I stood up straight in my platform shoes and smiled at the two men. The men looked back, unsmiling.
Kojo took my elbow as we went in. ‘Do as I do,’ he said to me.
Inside there were mostly men, wrapped in royal kente togas; a few women with the sumptuous cloths, head wraps and beads of queen mothers. At the front of the room was an old man, the King. Everything around him was gold: his brocade cloth, his crown and stool; the amulet around the neck of the small boy in white cloth sat by his feet on a leopard skin; the long staff topped by an egg. Again the signs of histories I did not understand.
Kojo had started to the right of the room and was shaking hands with everyone, bending down and whispering to some.
I watched him, aware that a natural move on my part could easily be taken as transgression by the others. I followed, shaking hands, nodding and smiling as he did.
Some of the old people put their heads together and said to each other, ‘Yaa ba, Yaa’s daughter,’ pointing at me as if I was not there.
I was no longer I, but a small girl, the daughter of Yaa, granddaughter of the Gyata and cousin to Kojo, the family’s rising, most important star. As I went, shaking hands, I tried to play the role this particular history had picked for me, knowing that those I greeted were looking at me; as one of them, one who inherently knew the hierarchy of rules and mores; and as an outsider, ignorant of their deeper meanings. When we reached the King, my cheeks were stiff with smiling, the corset of my dress tight from the constant bending to greet. The room was hot and muggy with stares; I longed to be swimming in a clear cool stream. Kojo said something to the man with the golden staff, who bent over to the King and whispered.
Kojo said, louder now, so I could hear, ‘This is Maya, daughter of Yaa, granddaughter of the lion, our sister.’
The man with the staff bent down again, said something quietly in the King’s ear.
The King nodded slowly, imperceptibly.
I stepped forward and curtsied. Was this what you did? I turned to Kojo.
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