In any case there wasn’t much to tell. I knew no great political secrets. I didn’t even know much about what happened, and what I knew it was hard to remember. In the years since then this meeting in Manchester of the Africans who were going to lead the struggle for independence became legendary. At the time I was half of my father’s opinion, that they were dreamers unhinged and deceived by the education they had pursued among the whites. On the other hand, there was something extraordinary about this gathering of black men who were so conscious of their own importance, and of their mission. Makonnen had somehow persuaded the mayor of the city to open the conference, and I don’t know whether he understood that the whole purpose of the participants was to kick white men on their asses out of the continent, but, flanked by Dr Milliard, the black doctor who had his surgery in Salford, and the writer James, he was effusive in his welcome. In any case, it was hard for the people of this time to take the prospect of colonial freedom seriously, even though they recognised the distinction of the visitors. This was years before Mau Mau became a familiar newspaper headline, and to see Kenyatta in that time it would have been impossible to guess at his future. I had no time for guessing, though. I was busy, running up and down, distributing flyers, criss-crossing the city with bundles of paper for the printers, and meeting people at the train station. I didn’t receive any wages, although Mak sometimes gave me some pocket money. I ate at the Cosmopolitan and slept in a room at the top of the house where Osageyfo stayed. Kenyatta was also staying there, officially, but as I remember it he rarely slept in the place, spending late evenings in the Cosmopolitan or the Belle Étoile talking to a table of people who seemed to come over and over again just to listen to him, his booming roar echoing through the rooms. Afterwards he would disappear. Everyone knew he had women in the city and in various parts of the country, and he was famous for his sexual techniques, which, they said, caused women to swarm like bees. According to Mak, one of his best friends had been a white man, an anthropologist named Malinowski, who studied the customs of Africans, and was so fascinated by Kenyatta’s stories about sex among the Kikuyu that he insisted on examining and measuring his penis.
These were the stupid stories I remembered and which I told Hussein as we strolled through the broad passageways and grand halls of the Moscow metro, a city beneath the city. On our way to visit Krasnya Ploschad, Red Square, we would descend at the University Station, heading in a straight line for Lubyanka and the centre of the city. At first I was alert, every sense tingling in anticipation of trouble. Being alone in a city of whites takes some getting used to, and I was never entirely at ease, but until I walked with Katya no one seemed to take any special notice of me, and moving among the throngs of people it struck me that I had met with more curious stares and furtive jostling as I walked through the streets of London.
‘What happened to you?’ Hussein asked abruptly.
We had just emerged from the well of the stairs into the vista which faced the golden domes of the Kremlin and St Basil’s. Against the grey metal of the sky they shone as if they were being reached by invisible rays of light. It gave me a feeling I had not experienced since I stood with my father looking out over the stern of the ship at night. An immensity, strange and solemn, in which I shrank to a tiny speck, the world swaying and spinning beneath my feet. I would have liked to look at the scene in silence, but I knew that Hussein had seen it many times before and I struggled to find a response, although I hardly understood the question.
‘Nothing happened. I was only a kind of messenger.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘I mean since then. From stoker on the boats to a student of history in Moscow is a big step.’
At last I understood. Perhaps he didn’t mean to, but in that question Hussein sketched the gap between us, the descendant of Arab rulers and a man like myself, one foot still planted in the slums of Accra. In the days when Osageyfo employed me to run his errands around Manchester this had also been part of how I understood my role. He had kept me close to him, telling everyone that I was his countryman, and by implication, his protégé. A big man of his sort had to have followers. An urchin off the boats, an ignorant stoker’s ignorant son, who dogged his footsteps, was like a demonstration of what he would come to be. For the moment I was a symbol for all those masses who would adore him later. I wasn’t so ignorant that I didn’t know he was patronising me, but I also knew instinctively that if he became my patron it would be my best chance in life.
This is how it had turned out. As it happened, the changes in the direction of my life were so gradual and seemingly random that I was hardly aware of where I was going, and talking to Hussein was, in fact, the first time I had seen it as a logical pattern where one thing led to the next. After the conference I went back on the boats and within three years I was a mess boy, working on a liner assisting the stewards, dressed in a white coat, barely sweating except in the hottest weather and far away from the hold. My father had only taken one more voyage with me, after which he remained in England, and it was the last time I saw him that I decided to leave the sea and take my chances on land. This was in the period after one of those moments that you remember always. It was a trivial occasion, an idle conversation when I had been talking to the chief steward, a man who had the reputation of being a strong supporter of the white seamen’s union, although he had a kindly manner and spoke gently to the African boys. For some reason he took an interest in me, and one afternoon, sitting in the lounge where I took him his tea, he began to question me about myself and about where I had come from. I was already different to most of the other boys because my contacts with the politicians and intellectuals who flocked around Mak had, over the years, loosened my tongue and emboldened my spirit. When the chief steward asked me what my future would hold I told him that I wanted to be a steward. I don’t know whether or not I meant it, but it seemed the only thing to say. He didn’t tell me what he must have believed, which was that a black boy like me would never be a steward, a piece of discretion for which I was grateful when I remembered it much later. Instead, he raised his eyebrows in surprise, then smiled at me. ‘You’re a hard worker, Kofi,’ he said, ‘but if you want to get somewhere you’ll need an education.’ Later on I understood that these were mere words to him. To me it was like a signal for which I had been waiting. I had been more than six years on the boats. The opening of a new decade had come and gone. It was 1951. Time for a change.
At the end of that voyage I looked for my father. I found him at the Belle Vue Amusement Park in Manchester in a cage. I’d already heard that he had become some kind of performer. A kai show, they called it, and it was the career he had planned for himself even while we travelled to England on my first voyage. Although I didn’t know it at the time the job he’d got for me then was his legacy. He knew, I suppose, that he would be leaving the coast for good, and he wanted to do something for me before he turned his back. It was a fortunate circumstance, because within a couple of years my mother had died of a tumour inside her, and then there was nothing to keep me in Accra. I’m grateful to my father now, and sometimes my pity for what he became brings tears to my eyes, but one of my permanent memories is the desperate anger which flooded through me as I stood in front of the cage in which he crouched below a sign – ‘Wild Savage of the Fever Coast’. He was naked, except for a loincloth made of some spotted animal skin, and from time to time he leapt up at the bars, growling and barking. Watching this I was embarrassed, it is true, but more because his performance was grotesque, his animal imitations inconsistent and foolish, than because he was my father. Sometimes he waddled like a chimpanzee, sometimes he jumped and snarled like a tiger. No one except a very naïve child could have been convinced and it struck me that the pleasure of the spectacle must have been in observing his humiliation rather than because anyone imagined they were looking at a genuine ‘wild savage’. I had arrived at the moment when he was due to be fed, a highlight of the show, and there was a mob of spectators,
children, giggling couples and drunks, crowding the aisles, shouting ribald remarks and gasping at the sight. A bell chimed and the fat red-haired woman whom I knew later to be his wife appeared from round the back of the cage, dressed in a battered pith helmet and a faded safari jacket, and carrying a dish full of raw meat, which she proceeded to push through the bars, piece by piece. My father grabbed each one as she held it out, roaring and growling and tearing at the meat, rubbing the red juice over his face and looking up to snarl at his audience. In the meantime, three little ochre-skinned girls, my sisters, walked among the crowd holding out tin cans which they rattled as the coins piled up in them. I stood transfixed, an indescribable sensation in my chest, as if my heart was leaking blood. Had I been able to move I would have dashed the plate from the woman’s hand and slapped her to the ground. I must turn away, I told myself, but my feet refused to stir from the spot. Instead, I took half a crown out of my pocket, all the money I was carrying, and dropped it into the tin that the smallest child was holding in front of me. At this moment my father looked up and saw me. His eyes flickered and for an instant his face fell and rearranged itself into its normal lines. I didn’t wait to see any more, turning quickly and pushing my way out of the crowd which closed behind me like foliage in the jungle. That was the last time I saw him alive.
The place that my father had never quite occupied in my life was filled by Makonnen. Many of the Africans who knew him, in the West African style, addressed him as ‘Father’, in recognition of a philanthropy which had become more and more formidable, based as it was on a politics of African unity and solidarity. Whenever the boys on the boats had a problem it would be Mak who was their first port of call.
For the next couple of years I worked for Mak, and I found out that his generosity didn’t extend only to Africans. The manager of the Cosmopolitan was a Hungarian Jew, and many of his employees were from the same origins, people who had fled from everywhere in Central Europe, along with Mediterraneans, Cypriots and the like. Being with Mak was like entering a new era in which the world came flocking to your door.
By this time Osageyfo and Kenyatta had been long gone. We read of them in the newspapers, of course. More and more often the men from the boats talked about Dr Nkrumah, then later his name became the single word, Osageyfo. Sometimes they brought letters to Mak which he would read in his office with the door shut. There were no messages from Kenyatta, and no one talked about him openly. We knew, though, that he had acquired a new name – Mzee. In the days soon after he left for Kenya, when women came to ask how to get in touch, Mak would shrug his shoulders and say he didn’t know. This was a wise move, because over the next few years plainclothes policemen came repeatedly to ask whether he had heard from his friend Jomo, and from time to time they searched his house and examined his papers.
Padmore came sometimes, and I heard him say that Nancy was in Paris. Now that I was a grown man, in my early twenties, I would have loved to see her again and to try my luck, but she never came. I drifted, impatient and restless, uncertain of what to do with myself, when Osageyfo was imprisoned and released by the British for the first time. We demonstrated and celebrated in rapid succession. Then when they set up self-rule and he became prime minister I talked to Mak about going back. Mak must have written to him, because a note came in one of his letters. It said that he remembered me well, and as yet he had no useful role for me. The best thing was for me to complete my education in England and then in a few years return to serve my country. At that time he could promise me that I would be part of his plans.
The sentiment was so familiar that from the beginning I suspected Mak had written this, although it seemed to be the firm slant of Osageyfo’s handwriting. On the other hand, I wanted to believe, and I did what I was told, enrolling in evening classes and planning a route to the point where I could join the university. I was still drifting but I was now able to persuade myself that I had a purpose. Not that it changed anything much about my life. The problem was my youth. In my mind time was an endless loop, and the honest truth is that I hardly ever thought more than a few days ahead, or imagined that events could abruptly alter the way I lived. When it happened it was like the blast of a grenade, an impact which tore up the ground beneath me and flung me off my feet.
I came back to the house one night and found Makonnen waiting. Without preamble he told me that I was one of a number of students chosen by the CPP, the Convention People’s Party, to take up a scholarship abroad. Osageyfo himself had recommended me, and all that remained was for me to get on the plane to Moscow. I was more than shocked, and my first reaction was to say no, I knew nothing. Almost five years had gone by and I had five GCE passes, but I knew that this couldn’t be enough to study in a foreign language in a new country. And why Moscow? I would have jumped at New York or Los Angeles or Paris, but Moscow was at the ends of the earth. Mak responded with impatience.
‘This is a great opportunity,’ he said brusquely. ‘Osageyfo thinks you might make a diplomat, and we need our most trustworthy people in that city. We’re not letting the Communists send anyone, and it’s a soft option. They wouldn’t let you into those other places. Not yet, but in Moscow no one will question your qualifications because the graduates from Achimota and the boys at Oxbridge or the LSE won’t want to go there. Never mind that. In ten years’ time matters will be very different. The Russians will be fighting the British for trade and influence on the continent, and how many Ghanaians will there be who speak Russian? Don’t be a fool. Grab it with both hands.’
It was after I said yes that Mak told me he was about to sell up his properties and leave England to join Osageyfo. This too was a bolt from the blue, and it seemed then that I had no choice. Only a couple of months later I was standing beside Hussein in Red Square telling him the story of my life.
Hussein looked at me with searching eyes, as if trying to discern the qualities which had made me a favourite of the men I described.
‘So that explains it,’ he said. ‘I thought there was something about you.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked at me thoughtfully, his eyes still weighing me up, and I guessed there was some revelation coming.
‘They shifted things around a little before you came,’ he said, ‘and you ended up with Valery. That’s interesting in itself. He’s in Komsomol, the Party’s youth wing, the cream of the cream. He spent a year in Komsomolsk, which goes to show you he’s number one with the Party.’ He caught my enquiring look. ‘Sorry. Komsomolsk is a city in the East, up in that corner near Japan. About twenty years ago Komsomol got in a ship they called the Columbus and sailed up there to found a city in the middle of a big swamp. Now they’re building secret aircraft there, new MIGs and Yaks, submarines and tanks, all that kind of thing. They don’t let foreigners go anywhere near it. So you can see that he’s trusted. He’ll tell them everything they want to know about you, and stuff you don’t know about yourself.’
‘Who are “they” supposed to be? The police?’
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but it was hard to imagine that there was anything about me which would repay so much effort and planning. He shook his head from side to side, smiling as if amused at my ignorance.
‘The police? They’ll be at the end of the list. There’ll be the warden at Cheryomushki to begin with, then Komsomol and the regional Party people, the foreign ministry, the college administrators and maybe the KGB.’
He burst out laughing at the look on my face.
‘You don’t have to worry about the KGB. Not till you’re ready to go back home. That’s when they’ll try and recruit you.’ The thought seemed to sober him up. ‘The point is that you’re different. Most of the Africans here come through their party organisation. A lot of them are dunces grabbing a chance they won’t get offered in Britain or the States. They do what they’re told and go back home. The Party stays in charge. You’ve been sent by the people who’re going to form the next government and the Party ca
n’t tell them what to do, but the foreign ministry wants a way in. If they had the chance they’d probably run every boy from the Gold Coast who could write his name through here. So you’re in for the treatment. Take care.’ He paused, thinking about it. ‘Look. With a push from the big man you should do fine with whatever they’ve got in mind for you when you get back. As long as you can survive this place.’
I didn’t know what he meant at the time, although when the first snows fell it was clear that surviving the winter would take more effort than I could ever have imagined. That afternoon I was walking back through the gates of the university with Valery. Ahead of us was the avenue of limes and birches leading to the nearby street market. Above us the skies were covered with a bruised and swollen blanket of dark clouds. There was a kind of dark, bluish-grey mist in the air. Suddenly, without warning there were flakes of snow, soft and plump like tiny feather cushions, tumbling straight down past the skeletal black arms of the trees. By the time we had walked the short distance to Noviye Cheryomushki, we were treading a soft white carpet of snow, the stuff gathering inches deep on our heads and shoulders, as if some giant hand had carefully sifted icing sugar over the figures on a cake. That morning Katya, the youngest of our teachers, had been drilling us in recognising the alphabet and pronouncing simple words. Many of the students, she told us, laughing, made mistakes which were hilarious to Russian ears. For instance, some of them persisted in reading Cyrillic as if the letters were English: ‘Peck-to-pah,’ she said, giggling. In English, of course, this was exactly what the word for restaurant looked like: PECTOPAH In Russian it was exactly the same word, restaurant, except that the letters were different. Listening to her and watching her bosom heave, and her lips sweetly framing the words, I had resolved to go back to Cheryomushki and practise my pronunciation. Instead I ended up sitting on my bed, hunched in a blanket, looking out at the whirling dance of the snow as it covered everything in a soft and glistening whiteness. It fell throughout that night, then in the morning it was freezing. It was worse than freezing. The cold was like being smashed over the head with a pickaxe handle, like walking into a brick wall naked and unprotected, like the all-out attack of a personal enemy, sudden, deadly and vicious. I had lived in England, a cold country, for more than half a dozen years and never experienced anything like it. Outside the door it was piled more than three feet deep. The world was silent, not the silence of night, but a sort of deep hush, the usual daytime noises of the street missing or muffled.
A Shadow of Myself Page 16