Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  ‘They come from all over the world. Everything ends up here. See that building there? Cotton on that ship will go into that mill today, come out as fabrics tomorrow, get loaded on the same ship and head back to the colonies for us to buy.’ Ruwa made a money-counting motion with his fingers. ‘That’s how they make money.’

  ‘Ah ya, ya, ya! They’re too rich.’

  ‘Tsk, this is nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  Ruwa did not respond because Abu was gawking and being backward and not hiding it.

  ‘What’s that smoke doing coming out of buildings; won’t they catch fire?’

  ‘In this country, you have to light fires to keep warm.’

  ‘You mean people are in there roasting themselves right now?’

  ‘Kdt.’

  They docked.

  A clock across on a building claimed 8.30 in the morning but the sun was nowhere. The world’s ceiling was low and grey, the air was smoke-mist, the soil was black. After a silence of disbelief, Abu whispered, ‘Where is the sun?’

  Ruwa laughed.

  ‘No wonder these people are just too eager to leave this place: the sun does not come out?’

  ‘Sometimes it does. Mostly it rains.’

  ‘All this wealth but no sun?’

  ‘That’s why they love it at ours too much. Always taking off their clothes and roasting themselves.’

  Abu wanted to stay on the ship until it was repaired but Ruwa, who had been to Manchester several times, held his hand and led him into Salford. Abu, twenty-one years old, gripped Ruwa’s hand like a toddler. They set off for a seamen’s club, the Merchant Navy Club in Moss Side, where they would know where his friend, Kwei, a Fante from the Gold Coast, lived. Even though he told Abu, ‘Don’t fear; Manchester is alright even to African seamen. It even has African places—Lagos Close, Freetown Close, where Africans stay, I’ll show you,’ they walked all the way from Salford to Manchester City Centre to Moss Side because Abu would not get on a tram.

  ‘I know how to behave around whites,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to South Africa.’

  ‘The British are different, no segregation here.’

  ‘Who lied you, Ruwa? Their mother is the same.’

  For Abu, being surrounded by a sea of Europeans in their own land brought on such anxiety that for the first time he regretted running away from home. To think that it all began with a picture on a stupid war recruitment poster—Our Allies the Colonies. At the time, all he wanted was to join the King’s African Rifles and wear that uniform. To his childish eyes the native in the picture looked fearless and regal in a fez with tassels falling down the side of his face and coat of bright red with a Chinese collar of royal blue edged with gold. That palm tree trinket on the fez with the letters T.K.A.R. Abbey coveted it. He wanted to hold a gun and hear it bark, then travel beyond the seas and be a part of the warring worlds. He had heard his father talk about the European war with breathless awe. He had wanted it so desperately he could not wait four years until he was eighteen to enlist. In any case, the war might be over by then. Besides, at fourteen, he was taller than most people. And the British were notoriously blind. Often, they could not tell girls from boys. Also, they were desperate for recruits because recently some Kapere had started to ask men who turned up to enlist ‘Sex?’ which the translator turned into ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ The men just walked away: who had time for that?

  Unfortunately, a friend of his father saw him and pulled him out of the queue. When his father found out, he warmed his backside raw. That was when he swore to enlist in Kenya. After the war, he would come home elegant in his red uniform and fez and he would be made head of the royal army. Then his father would eat his words.

  With a few friends, Ssuuna had jumped on a train wagon and hidden among sacks of cotton. What he remembered most about that journey was not the incessant, jarring and grinding or screeching of rail metal, but the itching of sisal sacks. No one had warned them that Nairobi was frosty in June, especially in the morning. The boys had never known such cold. They thought they would die. And then the British turned them away. Ssuuna was told to come back in two years—the British were blind by two years—and his friends were told to go home to their mamas!

  That was when his troubles began. Returning home was out of the question. Where would he say he had been? His father wanted him to stay in school, but studying was not for him. He wanted to be a soldier, shoot a gun, throw bombs and blow things up, and win a war.

  While they waited to grow up, Ssuuna and his friends travelled to Mombasa. Everyone said that there was more life in Mombasa, the gateway to the world. He renamed himself and got a job as a deckhand on ships sailing at first to Zanzibar and Pemba Island, then to southern Africa’s ports and later to West Africa.

  But within a year he had lost interest in the European war. It was not just the cynical Arabs, it was seeing Indian coolies, Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanganyikans return on ships from Burma maimed. Lost limbs, lost sight, lost minds, lost comrades whose bodies were abandoned on foreign battlefields like they had no mothers. Apparently, one moment you were whispering to your friend, the next he was shredded meat. A man told of a soldier he saw gathering little pieces of his friend and then starting to put them back together as if bombs were not raining around him. When Abu found out that some of the soldiers never fired a gun but got blown up anyway, he was disgusted. Many of them were mere porters carrying European soldiers’ luggage. Most heartbreaking was the fact that none of the soldiers returning wore the red jackets Abu had seen on the recruiting poster. The King’s Rifles wore khaki and shorts. Apparently the red jacket was for Europeans only; can you imagine? The British were the very Kaffirs! Full of lies. And the way Arabs sneered at Africans who went to die in a war that did not touch them—‘Europeans are killing themselves, and you Africans want to die for them, why?’ the nahodha of his boat had once laughed. Abu had cast his warrior dreams into the Indian Ocean.

  • • •

  It was approaching ten o’clock when Abu and Ruwa arrived in Manchester. The city centre was at once beautiful and scary. Here was his wish to travel beyond the seas coming true, without him even fighting in a war, but he was petrified just to walk through Manchester. The infrastructure alone—of brick and stone—was forbidding. The skyline—dotted by conical, sharp church steeples and tall chimneys—made him feel trapped. There was a church at every turn. Arches and arches, above doors and windows and on walls on every building. In Mombasa, Zanzibar and the Arab culture along the East African coast had conjured a Muslim heaven of domes and large empty rooms with carpets and muezzins. Manchester brought to mind a Christian heaven of arches and arches, spires, steeples, pews and church bells. But why would the British sculpt snarling devils on their walls when they lived in such dark misty environs? Statues, some larger than humans, some tiny, some on horses, some gleaming black, frowned and grimaced. Everywhere he was surrounded by such tall buildings he was dizzy from turning and looking up. Neither gods nor spirits would ever make him go up there.

  His neck started to ache.

  At ground level, shops had bright striped canopies as if to cheer up the atmosphere. They sold glittering jewellery and sparkly watches and shimmering things Abu did not know what for. White women dressed in long blanket coats and wide-brimmed hats walked with their arms linked with their men’s arms. Abu still hung onto Ruwa. Ruwa kept yanking him off the road, which was dangerous, especially those motorcycles with sidecars whizzing past, not to mention cars and buses everywhere. Then, once in a while, the horses and carts, especially that freaky horseshoe noise coming from behind you. But the pavements were not safe either; you could slip in horse dung or walk into the water and food troughs that had been put out for the horses.

  Once they got away from the overpowering spectacle of the city centre Abu exhaled. Now, bomb sites—former churches and houses—started to appear. Some were being cleared, some being rebuilt, some untouched.

  ‘Did you see how th
e men hold the women’s hands?’

  ‘Because it’s cold: that’s how they keep warm.’

  He laughed. ‘But this coldness rules them too much!’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Ha, but if Manchester, a younger city, looks like this, what is London like?’

  Ruwa clicked his tongue Like you even ask? ‘This Manchester is rags. London is where King George lives. At night, London blinks like a woman, even on the walls, mya, mya.’ He made signs of flashing lights.

  Abu pondered this, realised he could not picture a city that blinks like a woman and changed subject. ‘But why does everyone build similar houses? Does the king not allow different fashions? You could get lost here.’

  ‘They don’t build their own houses: the king does it for them.’

  ‘What, he spoils them like that?’

  ‘Stop asking stupid questions. They pay him, and look, all houses have numbers; you can’t get lost.’

  ‘Numbers? Like they are too stupid to find their own houses?’

  Ruwa shook off Abu’s hands. ‘Walk by yourself; you’re annoy-annoying me now.’

  Later, after Abu had become Abbey and settled into Manchester and the city became less forbidding, he would go to Albert Square on a Sunday, when all shops were closed, and sit on a bench. He would marvel at the beauty of the Town Hall. Such intricate masonry. Sometimes he visited Piccadilly Gardens and sat on the slopes, a riot of colours—precise and controlled—below him. The backdrop of brick and stone made the flower gardens seem fragile. Who knew that living in a concrete city would make him yearn for nature? Who knew that one day he would roast himself in the sun? Now he could tell the British apart just from their clothing. If you saw a man wearing a white collar and a suit and a hat, those were the masters, the ones sitting in offices writing and giving orders. They spoke English the same way as the British in East Africa, smooth. The rest were workers. Their English was hard to understand when you had just arrived.

  Occasionally, a man, a woman caught his eye and smiled discreetly. British humanity, when it flashed, took you by surprise. A stranger chatting to you about where you came from: Let me buy you a cup of tea…What are you doing in England?… How do you chaps really feel about us being in your country? and you said We’re very lucky, sir; you’ve brought for us civilisation and salvation, and he shot you a look, clearly not buying your gratitude. It was a colleague asking about your leg, after a metal detergent bottle you nicked from work—to use as a bed-warmer—burnt you during an exhaustion-induced stupor. It was going to hospital sick with pneumonia and the doctor and nurses treating you delicately and the ambulance dropping you back at your house after you recovered without asking for any money. It was the ticket master at the booking agent for your travel back home who told you about cheaper tickets on a different ship with more comfortable berths, who knew you’d be overwhelmed by the procedures and did everything for you and said, ‘My name is Mitch; when you’re ready to travel, come and confirm your ticket, ask for me and make sure you don’t wait too late because this ticket will expire in six months’ time.’ Then you asked yourself, But who are these other British people?

  • • •

  Abbey crossed Lloyd Street. On his left, on the site of a bombed-out church, children held sticks like guns, shooting Germans out of the sky and off the rubble and out of the burnt-out car nearby. When he reached the Royal Brewery, he turned left onto Princess Road. Down the road was the smaller of the two shopping centres at the heart of the black community in Moss Side. He crossed the road.

  Halfway down the road, he caught sight of the Merchant Navy Club. From his side of the road, the club looked like a lazy woman waking up late. A touch of resentment crept up on him as if the club had conspired with Heather Newton to take his child away. The club had been at the centre of his life in Britain. The Africans who ran it had lived in Manchester for a long time: some had come as early as the 1910s, some had fought in the first war, some in the second; all were married to Irish women. They looked out for each other, especially the newcomers. They tipped each other off on available jobs and housing. When a ship arrived from Africa, the club got wind of it first. When seamen Abbey knew arrived from Mombasa, it felt like home had come to visit. Now, as he walked past the club, Kwei’s drunken warning when he and Ruwa had first arrived taunted him. On hearing that the Montola was to be scrapped, Kwei had had laughed, ‘Don’t stay here in Moss Side if you want to return to Africa; go somewhere like Stockport or Salford.’ At first, Abbey thought it was Kwei’s clumsy attempt to get rid of them because he and Ruwa were crowding his tiny room, but Kwei explained, ‘Moss Side is a cruel mistress, pa! You know you have a home to go back to, but she treats you so right you keep saying tomorrow.’

  Abbey had laughed. The idea of staying in cold Britain, where even ugly women crossed the road when they saw you coming, was absurd. Ruwa, who saw himself as a son of the sea, shook his head.

  ‘Me, I can’t stay here; the ground is too wobbly.’

  ‘And the sea is steady?’

  ‘That rocking, the swaying you feel on a ship, is steadiness to me.’

  ‘You see,’ Kwei had carried on drunkenly, ‘in Moss Side people smile so wide, and talk so loud, pa!’

  But later Ruwa had whispered to Abu, ‘Me, I’m not working in a place where I am paid half the pay like a woman, however white,’ and moved to Southampton. But Abbey knew that Ruwa had money on him and was returning home. Kwei took Abbey to the labour office on Oldham Street, where he registered as Abbey Baker, got a labour exchange card and National Insurance number. Abbey gave himself two years to work and save for his passage and return home. That was four years ago.

  • • •

  Abbey arrived at the shopping centre. Outside Nelson’s Electrical Repairs, a group of West Indian men formed a circle, talking in patois. Abbey hurried around them. Black men standing in a group like that was the quickest way to get arrested, but West Indian men were defiant. Maybe it was okay for them to be defiant; after all, they had been invited to come and work after the war. Kwei had told him that back when the war ended, the British themselves went to the West Indies and asked people to come and help in the recovery of the mother country. But on arrival, doctors were turned away from hospitals, teachers were not allowed to teach in schools and engineers could only drive trains. Only nurses, cleaners, posties and drivers were wanted. Their children were told they could aspire either to singing, dancing or sports in school—nothing else. Abbey shook his head at the moniker ‘mother country’ because England was one wicked mother. But deep down he blamed the West Indians; why would you trust a mother who had brutalised you from the moment she laid eyes on you just because she had said Come, I need your help? Now many were stuck in poverty with no hope of going back home. He walked past the BP petrol station and crossed Great Western Street.

  When he saw the tip of the tower on the bus depot, he slowed down. Most shops were closed. Empty buses whizzed past, drivers impatient to go home. Most bus services stopped at eight. The latest services, those going to hospitals and Ringway Airport, stopped at 10 p.m. Then they all drove back to the depot to be checked, cleaned and fuelled. As he crossed Claremont Road, the clock on the tower read 8.34 p.m. He stopped; now what? He had twenty-five minutes to burn before his shift started. He was contemplating running home to drop his bag when he heard, ‘Abbey, my friend!’

  Berry walked towards him, his arm extended.

  ‘Is your name still Abbey, as in Westminster Abbey?’

  Berry was one of those we’re one people, one black nation, revolt against Babylon oppression kind of people. He was well-meaning but a troublemaker nonetheless. He had wild, wild ideas of being equal to whites in their own country. He was a continual tenant at Greenheys Police Station, something which he wore as a badge of honour. Every time he came out of police custody he bragged about preaching to the policemen about their Babylon and how it was falling.

  Berry made Abbey nervous. Not only because being wi
th him could earn Abbey a stint in a Greenheys police cell, but because where Berry was a preacher man, Abbey was a chameleon, a no need to aggravate your circumstances kind of person. He was about to say that all he could remember from history at school was Sir Samuel Baker and Westminster Abbey, where Dr David Livingstone was buried, when Berry added, ‘Africans take naming seriously; could your father have named you after Westminster Abbey, the seat of oppression, and Samuel Baker, the oppressor?’

  Abbey looked away, his mouth twitching.

  ‘Okay, I’ll not hold you, my friend, but be true.’ Berry shook his hand again.

  That’s the problem with Berry, Abbey thought as he walked away. Berry had a way of making him feel horrible about his name, but what would he say? That it was better to be West Indian than African? People like Berry did not realise that being black and African was too much. West Indians were ‘at least’ because there was a bit of Europe in them. To be called ‘bongo bongo’ was okay, but to hear Do those chaps still eat each other or Even fellow blacks can’t stand them was crushing.

  Another glance at the tower clock said that he still had fifteen minutes. Abbey stopped outside Henry-George’s Garments to kill time. He caught the eyes of Henry’s ‘almost-white’ wife through the window and looked away. That woman, Henry-George’s wife, hated blacks more than white people. Her George fought with the RAF, but he runs that shop now. People suspected she and Henry of being spies for the police. One tiny thing happens and the police swoop—how? But they denied it, claiming that Moss Side folk pick on them because they happen to be pale. The previous year at the queen’s coronation, she carried on all euphoric and fluffy, decorating their shop and flag-waving like she was entirely white. Even now, in the window of their shop, she displayed a large portrait of the queen when she had still been Princess Elizabeth, with her children, five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Anne. Abbey stared at the picture. Princess Anne had been born just over six months after he arrived in England. That evening, Emmet their landlord had invited him and Kwei into his lounge to see the occasion on television. Gun salutes in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London, large crowds out to see the royal family, and Emmet cursing, ‘Another one born to piss on our heads!’ Abbey was so shocked to hear a white man curse the royal family he couldn’t believe it. He had seen the notices NO BLACKS, NO IRISH, NO DOGS or HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY, but he could not tell Irish from Scottish from Welsh from English. Who knew that Britain had tribes, who knew they suffered from tribalism? Still, every time they watched the Remembrance Day commemorations on television, Abbey looked at Emmet as former soldiers marched past being thanked. The fact that Emmet did not know about the coolies and Africans, the fact that those poor souls died for neither Africa nor their mothers but for an oppressor who thought they were less human anyway, churned his stomach.