“Yes. We met for the first time this year.”
“Wow. So how did you end up in Sir Adjei’s palace?”
“I came as a tourist.”
“I didn’t know tourists were allowed to sleep there. Anyway, I suppose for obroni tourists it’s different. Me, if I tried to spend the night, they’d kick my black ass out. You were asking what I thought about him?” she said.
“Yes.”
“He did some good things. My parents’ generation love him. Daasebre. It’s a title that means ‘we can’t thank you enough.’ He freed them from colonial rule, gave their children free education, all of that. But I can’t think of him without remembering the Kinnakro Five. I wasn’t born when it happened but I’m into history.”
“I read about them,” I said.
“So you know. Found dead in the dorm room of Patrick, their leader. Police said it was armed robbers or cultists. A few of their parents are still seeking justice, but they’re old. It was a big scandal back then. People even thought the international pressure would make Sir Adjei step down, but it didn’t happen. Bamanaians moved on and forgot.”
“Why was there no trial?”
“Which judge would try the president that appointed him? And even if they did, how to link him directly to the murders? It would not have been his hand that killed them.”
“So you were glad when he stepped down?”
“Yes, I was fourteen in 2008 and he was the only president I’d ever known. It was time for him to go. But I’m no longer sure that Owusu is any better. Inflation is crazy. Two years ago a loaf of bread was five cowries. Now it’s ten. Most of my classmates are in Canada now.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Canada is cold,” she said. “Are you married?” The swerve in the conversation made me laugh.
“No,” I said, erasing Robert from my life. I wanted to keep Rose, though. “But I have a daughter. You?”
“I have a fiancé. He’s a doctor. We’ve been engaged for one year. He wants me to move back to the city. Maybe emigrate after we marry. Bamana is not a place to raise children, he says.”
“What do you think?”
“We were raised here. Are we not normal?” she said. “What do you do over there?”
“I studied architecture.”
“What have you built?”
“Not much. I couldn’t even build a fake journalism career,” I said, matching her banter.
“You’re funny. My parents want me to emigrate too. They don’t understand what I’m doing only twenty kilometers from where I started. I have a university degree. I should be earning more.”
The match was over. A few couples opened the dance floor. I was too old to learn how they moved, leading with the waist and hips, not the arms and feet. The energy they expended seemed reckless.
“Care to dance?” He was younger than Rose. He wore a metal chain around his neck, silver links looped in a tight circle. I could see the yellow of his eyes, jaundiced and bright. When he smiled, his teeth were even and small, like niblets on corn.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Why not? I like my women mature.”
“I like my men the same,” I replied.
He wandered off to try his luck elsewhere.
“You know, it used to be just the young girls who went after the foreigners, but now the young boys are doing it too. I hear in the bars in Segu you’ll see a seventy-year-old white woman and a nineteen-year-old Bama boy.”
“Gender equality,” I said. “Isn’t that what you’re fighting for?”
“Better life for girls, not worse life for boys.”
I had never felt as rich as I did sitting at that plastic table opposite Marcellina. At the Palace Hotel in Segu and in Kofi’s Gbadolite castle I was dwarfed by the wealth on display, a middling tourist who could only gawp, but here in this dirt bar, only a few miles away from a young girl chained in a hut, I realized that perhaps to many Bamanaians, the money from the sale of my mother’s flat made me as rich as Croesus. I could build my own manor, pick vassals from the natives, turn them into serfs. Why was Bamana so poor when the country had diamonds? It was a question Menelik had asked Francis Aggrey, a question Kofi Adjei still could not answer.
“I should go. Thank you for your hospitality.”
On the journey back we listened to country music. Marcellina was a Dolly Parton fan. Down the flat road, from more than a mile away, we could see Kofi’s folly blazing. The closer we got, the stronger its light became until, as we parked by the walls, it was as bright as noon.