Adrian’s book was also written in the first person. It was a travel memoir, a white man on a motorcycle, gunning his way through Africa. It would have been fresh in the seventies, but it had been done so often since then that it all seemed a cliché. There were chapters on food and women and dances and rituals, but the book was really about the Bamanaian Camelot that Francis Aggrey was trying to build in those first hundred days.
My father was a man of action according to Bennett. He was popular with the people, some of whom ascribed godlike powers to him. He was popular with foreign investors who flocked to Segu, filling the hotels, desperate to be part of the Bamanaian miracle my father was promising.
There were only five thousand registered automobiles in the country, but there would be more. Only four hundred qualified doctors, but there would be more. There would be more of everything, more for everyone. “Switzerland in West Africa,” those were Bennett’s words.
My father hated committees, and long meetings and civil servants. He was always leaving Segu to tour the rural areas, to show the people his face, a retinue of young men trailing after him. Few women, not even his wife followed him. Elizabeth Adjei stayed in the capital, cutting ribbons for the new government buildings that her husband was erecting.
The photo insert showed a series of black-and-white photographs of Bamana. In the rural areas were huts with thatched roofs, half-naked children, women fetching water from a stream, the Africa of charity appeals and Comic Relief. In the capital, Segu, were grandiose buildings, columns of concrete and glass, gleaming automobiles, nightclubs, jazz bands, stylish young women with trim waists and full skirts, glamorous as film stars.
There were pictures of my father, dressed in a suit, dressed in kente, dressed in overalls on a construction site, and always smiling; not pensive like the Francis Aggrey in my mother’s photograph but smiling, smiling, smiling at the new world he was building.
Around me, the other readers were gathering their things, limbs unbending after hours sitting in the same position.
“The library will be closing in fifteen minutes,” a voice said over the PA system.
I was seeing Rose tomorrow for the first time in two weeks. If I left now there was still time to go grocery shopping.
I closed Adrian Bennett’s book. Why had he written it? He believed in the legend, it seemed, an early European convert, but the Messiah had morphed into the Crocodile. The religion had failed.
8
I smacked Rose in public once when she was a child. She was willful, always on the verge of those rages that toddlers pitch themselves into without warning. She screamed and beat her fists on the ground. Strangers threw glances. Finally, I pulled her to her feet and swiped her bottom. Most of the blow glanced off her nappy but the surprise was enough to quiet her.
“Does her mother know you hit her?” a woman said, marching up to me with her own matching blond child in tow.
“Yes, she does,” I replied, too stunned to claim my daughter.
I am reminded of that incident now, as she sits opposite me in my kitchen. In most lights, Rose looks white, although it is obvious to me that she is my child. Her loose light-brown curls, when all of Robert’s family is lank-haired, her full lips, even her blue eyes, are from my mother—Bain blue.
Lamb and potatoes lie roasting in an oven that has lain cold all these months. We wait at the kitchen table, studying each other.
“Mum, you look beautiful. You’ve lost weight.”
“You look beautiful as well,” I say, squeezing her hand.
She is bronzed from her trip to India and she, too, has lost weight. “Delhi belly,” she says, when she sees me looking at her wrist, which my thumb and forefinger could encircle easily.
“And stress. God, there was so much work.”
“Smells delicious,” she says when I place a plate in front of her. She tells me about India, of a festival in the streets that she could only watch from her balcony because of a deadline. I am relieved when she asks for seconds. Maybe it is just stress.
“Enough about me, Mum,” she says. “What did the lawyer say?”
“We had a good conversation. Where did you find her?”
“Imogen. She came here a few times when I was at Wickham. Her parents got divorced and she told me Anna got her mum half of everything. You gave up your career for Dad so he’s going to owe you shedloads in spousal support. Also, how weird is it that you’ll have the same name as your lawyer?”
“She’s not my lawyer yet,” I say, ready to move the conversation along. “By the way, I went to church the other Sunday.”