The carriage was warm, my window seat narrow. At 7:00 the train jerked forward. We sped past empty glass buildings, open-plan floors, vacant desks. There were apartment blocks painted in primary colors, designed by architects who obviously enjoyed playing with Lego. I saw bicycles on balconies, a naked face at a bathroom window, stacks of council housing, shopkeepers rolling up metal grilles, a boy in a hoodie pedaling sharply around a corner. Moments later, we burst out of London and into brown fields where trees and pylons dominated the skyline.
I searched flights to Bamana on my phone; prices began at seven hundred pounds with an eight-hour layover in Istanbul. Decent hotels—hotels with clean bathrooms and fresh linen, hotels with three-star reviews and above—started at a hundred pounds a night. I might be able to afford it all with a credit card. Three weeks was how long I imagined I would need to find Francis/Kofi, to meet him, to establish some sort of relationship.
I looked down at the magazine. It was wrapped in a plastic film that would choke a dolphin in six months. For every page of content, there were at least two of adverts. Mixed-race models abounded, our khaki skin en vogue now. I was once as pretty as these girls, prettier perhaps, but without knowing it. I was born before my time.
The cover woman was a pop star from the eighties, now retired to the countryside. They had photographed her in her garden with loose clothing and minimal makeup. Beside this was a smaller picture of her on stage, twenty years younger and wearing a leotard. Even with no one watching, she was still reinventing herself.
I leaned my head against the glass. The windowpane would flatten one side of my hair. I would need to fluff it up with my fingers before we reached Edinburgh.
I had stopped straightening my hair when Rose went to secondary school. Robert was shocked by my new curls, not quite an afro in the round mushroom style, but still too thick for him to run his hands through when we had sex. He grew to love it, he said, even though it meant people stopped asking if his wife was Mediterranean.
I woke to rain falling soundlessly. Droplets raced across the window. The view of scraped fields was blurred. I had a one o’clock appointment with Adrian Bennett, professor of postcolonial history at the University of Edinburgh. He had written other books. He had married and had two children. He had taught at Harvard and spent a year at Makarere in Uganda. There was a photograph of him on the university website, squinting and silver-haired, and an e-mail address.
After his first response, I suggested a meeting time. He replied by asking about my university affiliation. Professor Bennett, it seemed, had become cautious in his old age: not the Adrian of his memoir, held at gunpoint by a Bamanaian police officer on suspicion of being a spy. I told him I was an “independent researcher of Welsh and Bamanaian origin.” I hinted at a possible family connection to Kofi. The date and time were fixed.
In the week leading up to our meeting, I returned to the British Library. I went to church with Katherine but left before the sermon. I watched a YouTube video of Kofi Adjei speaking at some sort of rally in 1988, a decade into his rule. He was flamboyantly dressed: gold buttons, silk pocket square, and a leopard-skin hat angled forward. The crowd cheered after almost every sentence, stopping only when he raised his hands to quiet them.
I read Amnesty International reports and looked at its human rights rankings. Bamana’s position was nearer North Korea’s than Sweden’s. Freedom of speech was a flexible concept. Outspoken journalists were regularly detained. I reread Kofi’s Wikipedia page and lingered at the section titled “Controversies.”
In May 1988 five student activists, known as the Kinnakro Five, were shot dead on the campus of the Kinnakro University of Science and Technology after agitating for President Adjei to resign. It has been alleged that Adjei is linked to their deaths, although he has never been charged and no evidence has been brought forward.
I clicked on Kinnakro Five. Their brief entry began with a disclaimer: Additional citations required for verification. Someone had pasted their head shots into one photograph: five close-ups that looked like mug shots. They seemed young to have been in university—only one had a beard, the rest as hairless as my palms. They were shot at close range in the dorm room of Patrick Dumelo, their leader. Three of them had bullet wounds to the head, faces mutilated, closed-casket funerals. The authorities said it was an armed robbery. Nothing was stolen, not even the brand-new Walkman that Patrick’s uncle had sent him from Hamburg.
The man in the diary was my father and the man on Wikipedia was also my father. If he had done what the internet alleged, then he was to be feared, not sought out. I was repelled by Kofi and drawn to Francis.