I
Arise on the Backs of My Ancestors
A young woman negotiates between her English
and Ghanaian identities.
By Naa-Adei Kotey
When the drummer calls the tune
And the dancer drums the earth,
Who is the master of the soul?
When the dancer finds the song
And the story comes,
Who is the master of the earth?
When the soul recalls the past
And the story embraces the earth,
Who is the master of them all? 1
Storytelling to my people is an art form. It is an energetic impulse
that courses through our veins. We have told countless tales through
the music of the calabash drums and the beats of the fetish dancer
as his feet pummel the dusty terracotta earth of Ghana. This sacred
mating of song and dance in their multiple formations communicates
our many “once upon a times.”
In my family, storytelling links the generations. It unifies members
separated by the seas and by circumstance. It collapses the sphere
of time, so that those who walked the lands when the seeds of the
baobab trees were planted many moons past can commune with those who
now enjoy their fruits. Whenever we come together to tell our stories,
our family’s history is consecrated, our future is foretold,
and our present is celebrated.
Every house had a gate on the street where I lived as a child. I would
often pass by these, drawing upon a mental list of who lived at each
one. The doctor whose chickens I had once shooed from our house lived
behind the black gates topped with the golden spears. The red gates
that swung lazily on their hinges belonged to Teacher, my mother’s
closest friend. Kujo’s family lived beyond the silver gates.
Our own were a soft blue, dulled by the hard Ghanaian sun. The purpose
for these, as far as I was ever able to determine, was to protect
the families from an encroaching modern world.
I took such pride in being allowed to walk home by myself from the
top of our road. I enjoyed this freedom because I was safe in the
realm of my family. The people I passed along my way had been present
at each birth, marriage and death that occurred in our house. We were
a community, a village, a tribe that protected each other from strangers
and foreign ideas. By keeping the gates firmly closed to outsiders,
we could deceive ourselves into ignoring the signs of change.
More people were sending their children away from Ghana to foreign
classrooms. In itself, this was not new. A few selective summers abroad
in England enhanced a young man or woman’s character, it was
said. But these summers soon extended into months, then years. With
one sibling away, parents perceived the others as disadvantaged, and
they too were adroitly dispatched to join brothers and sisters. Once
established in England, children of Ghana were often reluctant to
return to their first home.
____________________________________
We
were a community, a village, a tribe that protected
each other from strangers and foreign ideas.
____________________________________
In the spring of 1985 I accompanied my aunt and uncle on a business
trip to England. By autumn I was enrolled in a primary school, temporarily
of course. By winter, I began to count the gates of the terraced houses
on the street I lived on. Each gate was the same as the one before
and the one after it. They were homogeneously small, black, and wrought
from iron. I did not know the names of the people who lived behind
them; their faces were unrecognisably dim. The purpose for their gates,
as far as I was able to determine, was also to protect their families
from the encroachment of a new world.
London, a coldly elegant place, has become my family’s home.
For its other immigrant population, just as for us, it is an empty
body waiting to be operated on by hands from many lands. We, its new
citizens, are transforming the city. Londoners arrogantly conceive
of the city as the heart of England; the English are unshaken in their
belief that England is the head of the kingdom; therefore by our presence
in the capital we have performed a miracle upon the whole body of
the nation. We infuse the land with our flavors, our sounds, and our
struggles.
My family was not forced to migrate to England. Unlike many that were
carried to the West aboard slave ships, centuries later ours was a
willing passage. Nevertheless we were shackled by dreams of an improved
future. With our country drained, our resources depleted, we had to
chase after a new dream. The irony lay in our choice of destination,
our former “master’s” home, a land whose people nearly
destroyed us.
It is difficult now to admit that one’s ancestors have bloodied
their hands - that we were complicit in the sale of our own kind.
Survivors of the trade experience both guilt and relief that they
were not among the Castle’s2 guests. As
a descendent of one of those who missed the boat, I am thankful. But
fate never fails to deliver her punch line: the freedom enjoyed by
those left behind on Ghana’s shores was illusory. It was snatched
by colonisation: perhaps this was the country’s penance for their
Cain-like betrayal. First came the Portuguese, but they failed. Then
the Dutch arrived. Theirs was a partial victory. My maternal great-grandmother
was a product of such success. Mr. Mills-Quashie, a merchant, I believe,
became attracted to my great-great-grandmother. Not accustomed to
being denied, he took what he wanted, and thus ensured a line of Ghanaian
Mills-Quashies. The undisputed champions of the scramble for Africa
however were the tenacious British. For 101 years they ruled Ghana,
imposing upon us their language, literature and religion. In Ghana
then as now, over 46 languages are spoken, but just one (English)
subordinated all. Ghanaians have become conditioned to greeting each
other with a pallid “hello” instead of our lyrical welcome
Serfee, two syllables pronounced like a gentle expulsion of air, as
easy and as satisfying as a sigh that asks, “How are you?”
– “How have you been since last we spoke?” – “How
was your journey?” and expresses “I hope you and those you
have left behind are well and blessed.” The English in their
wisdom, and we in our complicity, say “hello.”
Our schools teach their Shakespeare and Dickens and Kipling and Austen
and Chaucer and Spencer and Eli. To study our own authors and poets,
we must be graduates of comparative literature. Even after the British
had “officially” left Ghana, their books remained. It would
be futile of me to deny Shakespeare’s brilliance, or to refute
Austen’s power over me as a romantic teen reader. However, English
literature was and is one of the most insidious and effective weapons
against my people. On the intellectual and academic plane, by studying
such literatures our own were constantly undermined. The indoctrination
began as early as kindergarten. At Association Airport International
School in 1980 I was taught to read by following the exploits of Dick
and Jane, blond-haired blue-eyed siblings. My class was expected to
appreciate their early December sleigh ride across a snow-packed English
countryside. It did not occur to any of us sitting in that hot room,
with the whorl of ancient ceiling fans churning arid air at plodding
intervals, to object to these stories. None of us had ever played
in snow. The closest thing to it is in the mountain region of Akosombo
that is covered with fine shavings of ice, nothing like the thick
pallet of whiteness depicted in our reader.
____________________________________
Ghanaians
have become conditioned to greeting
each other with a pallid “hello” instead
of our lyrical welcome Serfee.
____________________________________
I landed in London asleep in my Aunt Millicent’s arms. If I dreamt,
the visions are locked from my adult self. I have little memory of
that day: 9:37 a.m. March 26th 1985, only slivers of disjointed images.
I know it was cold. I remember sleek, frosted pavements whizzing past
the car’s windows. England’s terrible winter dampness scratched
its way into my bones. I loathed my first English meal, rice and turkey.
I can still taste the meat fat, the way it congealed in my mouth.
My cousins talked so quickly I could not understand them. I hated
England.
English is a foreign language in London, a sign of our postcolonial
invasion. You can ride the subway in any direction and hear other
languages spoken simultaneously. In my home, English is a secondary,
sometimes even tertiary, tongue. Now that my brother and I have mastered
English, our mother refuses to speak to either of us in anything except
Ga (a Ghanaian native language). She reserves Twi (another native
language) for those times we are at our most difficult. When we were
younger this was not only frustrating; it sent a signal confused with
static. We went to English schools, learned about the Glorious Revolution
of 1648 and came home to March 6 1957, Ghanaian Independence Day.
My first home economics creations were scones. When I brought them
home, my mother countered them that evening by teaching me how to
make joloff.3
We may have imbibed Englishness by living in the country, but because
of our mother, we were educated morally and socially as Ghanaians.
At eleven I committed a grievous sin. Conveniently I suffer from selective
amnesia about such things. I was however punished in a typically Ghanaian
way. Firstly my mother chastised me. It is impossible to determine
which was worse, the look of disappointment in her eyes, or her words.
She was ashamed to see how much I was changing - to talk back to a
parent was not our way. On one level I was defenceless against such
accusations - I had changed, I was changing, and I would continue
to change. But surely this is normal. If a race does not grow and
evolve it does not survive. I was only making way in my Ghanaian body
for an English counterpart, an exercise most émigrés
perform, but I don’t think my mother was quite willing to engage
in a dialectic about hybridity. To her I had betrayed Ghana. The real
torture began when Auntie Anu telephoned and lectured me for half
an hour on how a good Ghanaian girl should behave, especially one
living away from the moral safety of her country. Uncle Sammy came
to visit the day after. I received a variation on the theme of goodness.
My spirit was drenched with such family “talks” days following
the incident. In their own way they were trying to preserve my Ghanaian
soul. We may have left behind one family in Ghana, but there was an
abundance of people waiting to fulfil their roles.
I rebelled in the smallest of ways: our mother spoke to me in Ga but
I answered in English. Even this is a tenuous victory. When out in
public I resort to Ga to shield my thoughts and my comments from outsiders.
My friends from Zimbabwe, Iran and Bangladesh are as well versed in
this private ritual as my brother and I. They slide from Hindi or
Arabic or Shona (African native language) back into English without
interrupting their thought flow.
London is a hybrid city. Its people jostle to balance its disparate
parts. My friends and I continually fought for cohesion of our parts.
Whether by deliberation or accident, those of us at school who were
not born in England, or whose parents refused to allow us to think
of ourselves as English, gravitated toward each other. We clung together.
We were safe and reassured in our numbers. We did not have to explain
to each other that we lived in brick and cement houses, not mud daubs,
or that we rode cars and not tigers or elephants to school. Surprisingly,
the first time I ever saw either animal was at London Zoo during a
school excursion. Amongst ourselves, we could comfortably eat with
our fingers. There was no mystery involved in the process of gathering
morsels of rice and stew into perfect little balls and placing them
upon the tongue.
Outside of school the foreigners I knew orbited together as one. Black
immigrants were sprinkled liberally about the North West of the city.
Harlesden and Willesden positively hissed with our concentrated sexiness.
In August the vapourous sultriness exploded like steam from a pressure
cooker, spewing its contents over fashionable Nottinghill in a frenzy
of weekend partying - the largest street carnival of its kind in Europe.
Our new neighbour Mrs. Henry, a Bajan (Barbadian) woman raising her
two sons by herself, introduced my family to the carnival. On a street
that was predominantly white and English, it was natural for my family
to form an affinity with hers. My mother too was bringing up her children
without the support of a husband. Both women understood the challenge
they had set themselves in deciding to live away from their homes.
Their friendship, like that of my friends and me, was based upon an
unspoken understanding of the immigrant’s circumstance.
____________________________________
We
did not have to explain to each other that we lived
in brick and cement houses, not mud daubs,
or that we rode cars and not tigers or elephants to school.
____________________________________
Rainbow-coloured whistles were slung around the necks of the hedonistic
carnival goers. As an excited 12-year-old, I blew out my cheeks making
my whistle scream in a syncopated response to the atmosphere more
so than the music. All about me large buttocks quivered frantically
to the calypso and soca rhythms twinkling from the steel bands as
audaciously decorated floats cruised by. I marvelled at the costumes,
diaphanous miracles of engineering moulded to lithe bodies. I could
not help but hold my breath, willing the constructions to remain on
the wearer.
Ostensibly the carnival allowed me to forget that I was in England.
With my eyes closed, I imagined myself on other streets. Although
the calypso was in a different tempo, I immediately recognised from
the tendrils wafting over me the familiar sweet tinkling sound of
percussion and brass that is West African. Calypso’s roots are
grounded in Africa, but its sound is a transformed one, as are the
people who created it. Lacking the drums of Africa, Trinidadians took
metal pans, hollowed and moulded them, refashioning them into musical
instruments that seemed to carry on their notes the hibiscus-perfumed
winds of the islands.
Black and white neighbors gorged themselves on patties and chicken
from the food stands. Through familiar food we reminisced about the
motherland. For us, the food was a connection to all we had left behind.
The cuisine was a reminder of eating and talking after church. Service
began in the morning and extended leisurely into the afternoon, after
the pastor was certain his congregation’s souls had been sufficiently
saved by the twentieth repetition of “Hosanna!”
Scotland Yard’s finest were always present, eternally vigilant.
They were there to contain our heat and passion, to keep the festive
throng from bursting into violence. The people about me found release
in the music and the dancing. But altercations were inevitable. Once
the noise of celebration dampened, I heard about the fights. For a
period of the carnival’s history violence blazed out of control.
It became a channel for London’s black and white population to
play out the drama of racial tension that society tried to ignore.
____________________________________
For us, the food was a connection to all we had left behind.
____________________________________
As the Harlesden Jamaican All-Star Band pumped out “Brown Girl
in a Ring” and I went wild tra-la-la-la-laing, a 19-year-old
joined in the chorus by plunging a knife into a white man. Even though
the killer disappeared like a ghost from our midst, he was hunted,
arrested, locked away.
“Why are blacks so violent?” For weeks after the incident,
any newspaper I read contained this question, or one similar to it.
I was enraged that one young boy’s action was suddenly representative
of an entire race, and confused about our being perceived as violent
because of the carnival fights. Those were isolated incidents. The
majority of immigrants lived too much in fear of being deported to
draw unsavoury attention toward themselves. Even after being granted
Permanent Residency, the veiled threat of being forcibly evicted from
the country was too real. Most immigrants lived quietly. I was becoming
suspicious of having become an invisible black entity in that city,
without agency, without voice, and such headlines “Why are blacks
so violent?” only confirmed my fears. As one of London’s
recent settlers, I soon acquired an answer to the enigma of so-called
black violence; doing so meant my survival. My brother, who should
have been too young to comprehend such matters, formulated a response
to the question of black violence: it was also essential for his survival.
This continues to be a riddle others must solve for themselves.
It would be wonderful to claim that as a child I was oblivious to
the difficulties of being black and foreign in London; unfortunately
my mother taught my brother and me that lying reflects a criminal
mind. Each time we seemed too comfortable, too settled, the National
Front4 reminded us that England was not our home. I had been living
in London for six years without venturing far beyond my school or
house. I thought to remedy that over the summer holiday. Armed with
a camera, a one-day travel card and a map of London, my brother, my
friend Fiona and I took to the city like intrepid explorers. We had
only reached Embankment when we noticed the mounted police and the
shouts. Right-wing nationalists were protesting our presence in their
country. Ironically, if they had consulted with my mother, they would
have been saved this effort - she made us daily aware that we were
only short-term guests of Her Britannic Majesty.
Britain had certainly not invited my family over; we took the initiative.
In Ghana guests do not give prior warning: they arrive and remain
for as long as it is convenient for them. A Ghanaian is always prepared
to receive visitors.
I became a teenage activist in a bid to have my feminine African voice
heard. At school I demanded recognition. African history could not
be summed up in a chapter detailing the irrigation and scholastic
achievements of the Egyptians. Nor should slavery be relegated to
two glossy pages complete with reproduced engravings of fishing canoes
carrying slaves to waiting ships. Having it so, I felt as though my
kind were being violated all over again. Egypt accounts for only a
minor portion of Africa’s past. Worse, the way Egypt was presented
by my teachers, I would be forgiven for believing one could have stumbled
across it when rambling about the English moors. The various excursions
to the British Museum did not dispel my misconception: seemingly endless
rooms were packed with sarcophagi, pots, jewellery, statues taken
from archaeological raids of Egyptian tombs. I took it upon myself
to introduce Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah5 to the school. The lessons
I received at home about my heritage were filtered to my peers in
assemblies and over lunch. I aimed to redress the imbalance of my
history books.
____________________________________
The
way Egypt was presented by my teachers,
I would be forgiven for believing one could have stumbled
across it when rambling about the English moors.
____________________________________
I spent the last days of secondary school writing insincere wishes
in the yearbooks of classmates I had not liked. Maneba, my friend
from Bangladesh, did not invite a single comment in her book. She
told me she was being sent to Bangladesh to meet her husband. I was
surprised. At sixteen I was consumed with A-level selection and universities,
not marriage or motherhood. Her father, a doctor in London, allowed
her to be educated because she would be responsible for the early
instruction of her children.
English journalists reported two years ago of a young South Asian
woman whose mother and brother had beaten her to death because she
refused to marry a boy from back home and bring him over to London.
This girl was born in England, had received her bachelor’s degree
and was employed as an accountant. The killing incensed London. The
girl’s family and community attempted to justify the killing.
As far as they were concerned her refusal to marry was an act unworthy
of a good daughter. The boy’s uncle had helped to bring her father
to England and had established him in his business. I understood that
her family owed a debt to the boy’s family and accounts had to
be settled. Repayment of one’s debts is both good business and
helps achieve a balanced karma. For them, death was the only atonement
for such a disgrace.
My by then English half was angered by the notion of an arranged marriage.
I feared seven years too late for Maneba. What if she had defied her
family and her culture? Would her punishment have been the same as
this faceless girl, also from Bangladesh? But the compulsion to preserve
one’s heritage that spurred this horrible act is something I
am uncomfortably able to recognise but not condone. Pride in my roots
has been poured into me to the extent that I am surprised its residuals
do not attach themselves to the carbon dioxide molecules and leak
from my pores as my skin respires. I am expected to carry myself as
a Ghanaian. Family always comes first. Before marriage your parents
and siblings are your life. You have a duty to them. After marriage
this duty shifts to your children and husband, the new family. A friend
jokingly remarked to her mother that if she (the mother) were not
careful, she would be placed in a nursing home. I could never threaten
my mother in this manner, not even in jest. Your parents are responsible
for you until marriage. In their old age the role is reversed; you
look after them. There will be no nursing homes for my mother. The
disgrace of placing one’s parent away is something I will not
bear.
____________________________________
I am expected to carry myself as a Ghanaian.
____________________________________
The same pride makes me adamant not to marry a white man. It is not
a black/white conflict; I could not for example choose a Nigerian
either. My family does not forbid marriage to non-Ghanaians. They
have lived too long in England and will happily accept any man I bring
home, provided he is from a good family. No, this is my decision.
Growing up in England was difficult enough. I constantly straddled
two worlds, two realities. By birth I am fully Ghanaian, but by circumstance
I have been made somewhat English, despite my mother’s efforts.
Adding another race only increases the number of realities to be juggled.
I will not put any children I may be blessed with through this hopscotch
existence. London may be considered a cultural ragout; I would like
a less complicated stew for a future life.
Realistically, being viewed as British in certain circumstances is
beneficial. I love to travel, but until recently I did so on my Ghanaian
passport. Except in Africa, this passport produces a predictable routine:
scrutiny of my passport photograph, then of me, back to the photograph.
The extensive questioning about my visas, all of which are in perfect
order, as the immigration officer could see if he would look to the
relevant page and not at my photograph, again. The not so polite “How
long do you intend to remain in the country?” when my visa clearly
states allows entry for two weeks. Then the inconvenience of being
pulled from the queue to have my passport photocopied and my identity
verified (in case their verifications are later proved inaccurate).
With my brand new burgundy European Union, United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland passport, my picture (and it is a good
one) remains unseen. Neither have I missed any flights because a photocopying
machine was not sufficiently warmed.
My mother always talked about going back home. It is an anthem all
immigrants sing. Most of the time it is said with promise and longing.
Occasionally it was also a threat to my brother and me. Eight years
after leaving, my family planned a visit to Ghana. I knew exactly
what to expect. All my friends and relatives would have remained the
same, embalmed by time until my return.
The night of our arrival, it seemed the entire neighbourhood was at
the airport. Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac I inhaled the
thick humid air and began to cry. The faces before me were elongated
and contorted by my tears. I happily received hugs and kisses from
people I had dreamt about for so long.
____________________________________
I felt helpless knowing I could not live in Ghana
and guilty for being comfortable in England.
____________________________________
But my family members had grown and changed. I felt like a stranger
in a country that was supposed to be my home. I could not even speak
my own language properly. My now heavy English accent refused to mould
itself around Ga letters. I participated in the ritual of return with
a weary spirit. When Mr. Hammond poured the libation onto the threshold,
asking atonement for our long absence and welcoming us back, I knew
with painful clarity that I had not returned as my mother had returned.
For her Ghana was still home. Eight out of forty-three years away
had not made such a wrenching difference. I however had spent most
of my life in England. I felt helpless knowing I could not live in
Ghana and guilty for being comfortable in England, relegating the
land of my birth to the occasional holiday destination. Each time
I write about Ghana, my family, my road with gated houses, I attempt
to appease the void that exists within me. I implore my ancestors
to watch over me and to guide me, even as I walk about Baker Street
instead of Danquah Circle. I am Ghanaian by birth and by tradition,
but by fate I have been made English.
Footnotes:
1 These verses are adapted from the song “Sabela” on the CD
Ancient Evenings, performed by Sibongile Khumalo.
2 Elmina Castle was the fortress in which slaves were held and from
which they were transported. It resides at Osu in Accra. The Portuguese
built it in the 15th Century.
3 A West African rice dish where the rice is cooked in a tomato and
vegetable gravy.
4 A political organisation that advocated for an England for white English
people, with the removal of all immigrants.
5 Hero of Ghanaian independence.
 |
Naa-Adei Kotey was born in Ghana and at age seven moved with
her family to London, England, where she grew up. She attended
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and is currently
an English Master's Candidate at Georgetown University.
|
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