I have had a letter from home. It is my mother asking how my studies are. I have not set foot in a lecture hall in two weeks, while my poor mother is in Segu, trading fish up and down the coast so I can pay my fees and have a little spending money. Thomas is a bad influence. We are out till the early hours of the morning and we spend our days dissipated as drunks. I must find new lodgings.
Grandpa Owen was the only grandparent I knew. He taught me some chess strategies and called me Shirley Bassey when I sang off key. I would have liked Francis to write more about my grandmother, but he was too busy discovering London with Thomas.
Francis and Thomas attended a lecture on West African decolonization and Francis’s tone grew fierier. He bristled at an English woman being an expert on West Africa, and Thomas was pleased that his protégé was “waking up.” It seemed my father had fallen prey to politics in the end.
I have been introduced to a man called Ras Menelik. He is Thomas’s mentor, and I have been kept from meeting him because Thomas did not feel I was ready. Perhaps he is right. Had I met Menelik two months ago, I might have laughed in his face. No barber has touched his hair in years. He is like John the Baptist in the wilderness, or one of the mendicant men rooting for food in the rubbish of Segu. He has a bevy of young English girls around him, typing his ideas into articles and pamphlets and chapters. They are the secretaries of his movement, which is to emancipate Africa. I took two of his pamphlets away: “Africa: A New Dawn” and “Sunrise in Ethiop.” I cannot tell if it is bombast or visionary. He sends his writings all over the world. People are reading his ideas as far as Tokyo, Thomas tells me.
I have been a few more times to Menelik’s flat. It appears I am the first man from the Diamond Coast to join their circle. I was deliberately sought out because there are few students from the Diamond Coast in Britain. We are a poor colony. “Why is that?” Menelik asked me yesterday. “You say you are from the Diamond Coast and yet you are poor?” The truth is, few of us in the D.C. have anything to do with diamonds. In my mother’s tribe we are fishermen. We have no diamonds on our land and we pay little heed to what goes on in the diamond towns of the north. We fish as our ancestors have always done. Menelik showed me photographs of what he said were miners in Mion. They go down the mines in rags, Menelik says. They die in the tunnels and their bodies are left to rot, or they are blown up if the tunnel is still in use. They are paid too little to live on and are forever in debt to the mining companies for food and other basics. And what am I to do with this information, I wondered, as I stared at the bony limbs of my compatriots.
Run, you foolish boy, I thought. The world would always have people like this Menelik, trying to press guilt on you, forcing pamphlets with gory pictures into your hands, holding you personally responsible for wars, famines, genocides. Why not be of use to those around you? Why rile my father with atrocities he could do nothing about?
I have made friends with one of Menelik’s secretaries. She is a bookkeeper during the week but comes to Menelik’s flat on Saturdays to lend her hand to the liberation. She is the first obroni woman I have spoken to in any depth. Her hair is the color of ripened tomatoes, which makes her almost as rare as I am on the streets of London. I asked why she cares so much about Africans. She says she is from a colonized people herself. By that, she means she is Welsh.
A redheaded, radical Welsh bookkeeper. It must be Aunt Caryl! So absorbed was I in Francis’s London life that I had almost forgotten that he must meet my mother at some point.
It seemed he had met Aunt Caryl first. She was always a few steps ahead of her younger sister. Four years older, a head taller, and first to Francis Aggrey, too. My mother was more beautiful, but Aunt Caryl had the glamour, a certain recklessness.
There were some more entries about her. They’d had a romance of sorts. Thomas, used to dalliances with white women, encouraged the match. He also had a wife in Rhodesia, a woman Francis was hearing of for the first time. I wonder what my father thought of his friend’s philandering. The diary didn’t say.
Francis’s attachment to my aunt seemed shallow. He was curious about white women but cautious. He had a fear of being turned into a black sex object. He “walked out” a few times with her but there didn’t seem to be more. Still, my aunt might have been my mother, or some other person like me, Bain and Aggrey mingled. She was better equipped perhaps to have a mixed-race child, but my mother was softer, the more maternal.
How did the sisters get on after sharing a man? How did they live with it? They were like the Boleyn girls, except Francis Aggrey was not a king, just a poor student living in a single room.