They stole his name of Kwabena, drizzled river water over him, and baptized him Peter. They taught him enough reading, writing, and ’rithmetic to make a catechist out of him, but my father, although nominally a convert, did not much care for the celibacy of the Irish brothers. He became a manservant or “boy” to an English commissioner, one John Aggrey, whose surname my father adopted. The new name was a sign of his connection to a powerful white man and also a symbol of how far he had come from that village boy. In the Yabo of that time, they did not care much for surnames. A man was known by his deeds, not his ancestors.
When John Aggrey was posted to Ceylon, he helped my father secure a clerkship in the railway office, and there he remained for the rest of his life. He married a girl his parents sent him from Yabo, but she was sickly and bore him sickly children that died one after the other. European science, I am sure, can offer many explanations for those infant deaths but the Akan also have an explanation: kwasamba or spirit children, who are sent to the world to torment their parents by living and dying over and over again.
The wife eventually went the way of her children and my father was a widower for many years until he met my mother, Clara, a fisherman’s daughter and, at sixteen, twenty years younger than him. She was unschooled and could not even write the English name her mother had borrowed from a popular cosmetic powder, but she was beautiful. He married her and they had one son, whom they called Francis Kofi Adjei Aggrey.
He did not add, “and thus a legend was born,” but he meant it. Only a vain man could write an autobiography at forty, in the middle of an active life. Kofi had traveled very far from the thoughtful, introspective Francis.
I still thought of my father as Francis, although I could guess at why he changed his name. It was a historic reversal. Kwabena to Peter, Francis to Kofi. I wonder what my grandparents would have made of Francis’s mixed-race daughter. He wrote of my grandfather’s death.
I don’t remember him ever being in good health. He was always a coughing presence in a back room and I had to play quietly so as not to disturb. He died of tuberculosis probably, even though this is only an educated guess. He was never admitted into a hospital, as the “colored” hospitals of the time were badly run and unhygienic.
He was a kind man. At his funeral there were many relatives whose school fees he had helped pay from his meager clerk’s salary. As his only son, I led the procession to the grave in red and black robes, and my mother, walking behind me, had to pinch me in the back to stop me smiling so broadly.
He wrote of his time at school in a manner that seemed geared to highlight the latent greatness in young Francis.
I was a bright but restless student. My teachers would often send me home with top marks and torn clothing. On such days my mother would lament the death of my father. What I needed was a strong hand to give me a firm beating. Sometimes she would send me to her brother for a thrashing, but he, too, also felt pity for the poor fatherless child and often let me off with a stern talking-to.
I led my peers in both sports and academics. They used to call me “Boy Wonder.”
I did not know what my mother was like at school. I never thought to ask. She was probably not a girl wonder.
Francis made his way through school in the Diamond Coast and worked as a railway clerk before he made the great leap to England for further studies in engineering, a move that he said won him great admiration.
I did not expect the cold nor the blandness of English food. I was also not popular with the ladies. Some of them expected an African man to be a sort of tour guide, a whistle-stop cultural exchange. Mr. Aggrey, how is the weather in your country? How is the food? I preferred a woman I did not always have to be explaining myself to. Why do you, Why do you . . .
He wrote briefly of the political scene in London. Menelik was given a lesser role in my father’s life. He was portrayed as a curious figure that Francis had come across rather than the mentor he had seemed in the diary. My father wished it to appear that he had engineered his political awakening on his own.
There was no mention of Thomas Phiri or, for that matter, my mother or Aunt Caryl. Instead, a few chapters later, was a wholesome account of the romance with his wife, Elizabeth, begun when he returned home.
I noticed Sister Elizabeth right away. Even in the plain lines of her nursing uniform, you could see her small waist and shapely ankles. I was sad that I was only admitted for one week. Once I set eyes on her, I would have been happy to lie in that hospital bed for a year.
My father first tried to join more orthodox politics when he returned to the Diamond Coast in 1969. He secured a railway job in the north, the diamond region that Menelik had once challenged him for knowing so little about. The role was mundane and there was a ceiling to his progress, as he had not completed his degree. He joined the Diamond Coast Congress Party, but found its northern leaders snobbish and more interested in socializing with British officials than in seeking independence.