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That first winter the wind gusted in from the North Sea, swirled around the harbour like a furious sea god and rushed straight up Union Street in the centre of town. Just when my father thought the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse, it snowed until the black city turned white, like a negative of a photograph. The next day the sun shone strongly for the first time in weeks and the sky was like a stretched sheet of sapphire silk, the colour of the Atlantic.
The unpredictable northern European weather systems left the West African students battered and freezing; they felt like pioneers battling up the north face of the city; Michelin men dressed in so many layers of sweaters. At home they spent the best part of their grant money on shillings for the gas and at night they slept with their overcoats over the counterpane.
In Sierra Leone the rains begin on 1 May every year. From then on it rains at eleven o’clock every night, gradually moving forward in the day until the rain falls almost continuously. As the season advances, so the rain recedes at exactly the same pace. Next the sun shines for seven months until the clouds come back again. On 2 May, if for some reason it did not rain the night before, people in the marketplace might remark, ‘The rains are late this year, not so?’ This, in Sierra Leone, is what passes for a conversation about the weather.
Few of the African students could afford to go home for the holidays. They spent Christmas in each other’s company, but New Year was a very different matter. My father and his friends suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of dozens of invitations from their neighbours; they accepted them all and went from house to house downing malt whiskies, enjoying their sudden popularity. The young doctors were already accustomed to locals who crept up to them in the street, reaching out furtively to touch their black skin – for luck, they explained apologetically if they were caught out. Any of the Africans who thought they’d have a quiet night at home spent the early hours of New Year’s morning answering the doorbell to revellers hoping to win a little luck in the coming year by catching sight of a black face on Hogmanay.
Mohamed and Maureen were together for two years before her father passed them on the other side of Union Street one afternoon. When she arrived home she found him maroon with rage. He told his daughter that he would not tolerate her seeing or being seen with a black man.
Later, in the little attic flat my father shared with Dan Sama, he listened to an account of the scene from my tearful mother and knew exactly what to do. ‘I’ll call on your father at home,’ he told her, confident he could put things right.
Gairn Terrace is a row of plain semi-detached houses built on the edge of Aberdeen close to the river Dee and the road to Perth. There is nothing to distinguish one house from the other, except the colour of the woodwork that brightens pebbledash facades the colour and texture of porridge. The Christisons’ window frames were painted pale yellow and two net-curtained windows faced the street, one above and one below. Curiously, in a world in which appearances mattered, the houses were built with no proper front door, just an entrance reached by a dark side passage.
When my mother was growing up there was an army training ground opposite and, farther on, a crater where a fighter plane had been downed during the war, in which wild blueberries grew. In 1935 Robert Christison bought one of the new houses for four hundred and twenty pounds and from then on he kept three boxes on the dresser. For the next eighteen years he put two and sixpence into each one every Friday to pay for the mortgage, insurance and bills. In all respects life in number 38 was equally regimented.
My grandfather’s chair was closest to the fire and faced the bay window onto the street. To the left was the wireless, which replaced the old crystal set after the war. It was a magnificent piece, in two-tone polished mahogany, and stood about three and a half feet tall, occupying the entire corner of the room. From his place my grandfather could reach it comfortably. Its prime location was really the only outstanding feature of my grandfather’s chair, which was just one part of a three-piece suite, upholstered in rust and sufficiently yet not excessively comfortable. A lace-edged antimacassar covered the headrest. My father, wearing a suit and tie, took the chair opposite.
My mother and grandmother stayed in the kitchen – Maureen preparing the tea things and Lydia smoking Woodbines – while my father asked Mr Christison’s permission to continue seeing his daughter. Mr Christison listened, though not with his lean, sparse body nor with his brisk blue eyes; he sat with his arms crossed and never once looked my father in the eye, but he didn’t interrupt either. My father spoke fluidly and directly, describing his many aspirations, including his plans to specialise in obstetrics.
Mr Christison was not impressed by the black man’s credentials. Nor did he like his forthright manner. ‘Arrogant’ is how he would dismiss him later. He stated his position, an entirely simple one: ‘I’m not prejudiced. I’m sure you’ve done well enough. But I won’t have Maureen going about town with any man of a different colour. It’s my view you stick to your own. There are black women for black men, Chinese women for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men.’
‘Forgive me, sir, but if Maureen dated a teddy boy, would that be all right…as long as he was white?’
‘I wouldn’t tolerate that either, as a matter of fact. But that’s as much as I have to say to you on the matter.’
Mr Christison stood up, shaking the newspaper from his lap. He was much taller than my father; he once tried out for the Rhodesian police. He said: ‘Thank you for stopping by.’ Their eyes still did not meet and he excused himself from the room.
While the visitor was still in the house Mr Christison remained outside, standing on the steep slope of his garden digging at his rhubarb. His wife fed the visitor angel cakes and tea and chattered nervously all the while. If her husband was unimpressed, Lydia Christison was secretly delighted by Maureen’s African doctor, who in that hour charmed her entirely. For years afterwards she defied her husband, paying visits to her daughter carrying petits fours and children’s clothes, and allowing my mother and her little ones back for hot baths in the years we lived without a bathroom.
Afterwards my father told my mother what had transpired in his conversation with my grandfather. And I can imagine exactly how my grandfather behaved during the exchange, because almost forty years later, shortly before he died, he was the same way with me when I asked him about the day he met my father for the first and only time. There we sat in the very same room, the decor barely changed in all that time. A clown doll made by my grandmother after she had her stroke sat on an occasional table. A set of tiny ornamental sabres I used to play with as a child had gone. Those were the only differences I could see. He sat in his chair and I, cross-legged on the floor, my back leaning on the chair where my father had sat. Between us on the leather pouf was a great pile of photographs and a tape recorder.
My grandfather was preparing to die: emptying drawers, sorting through closets; he had even finally given away my grandmother’s clothes. The next day the two of us took a trip up the coast towards Inverness. By then he was over ninety, had trouble walking and had been forced to stop driving, but he read the map and worked out different routes there and back that carried us through the finest scenery. On the way up we stopped at a roadside tea room – a lodge, he called it – and told me how he used to bring my grandmother there. Among the trinkets for sale I found a pretty rococo coffee cup and saucer, but when I showed it to him he called it tat and said I was daft to want to buy it.
In the morning I stopped by Gairn Terrace to say goodbye: I was on my way back to London. He called me upstairs, to one of the bedrooms. Inside, piled on the bed were dozens of different household objects: framed pictures, coat hangers, an old heater. He handed me four yellow and black coffee cups and a set of tea cups in the same florid style as the single coffee cup I had chosen at the lodge. They were my grandparents’ wedding gifts, entirely unused in almost seventy years.
I smiled and kissed him and he hugged me back. Three months later I was up in Aberdeen again, in the snow and sleet, this time for his funeral.
The end of my father’s first year in Scotland coincided with the culmination in Ghana in 1957 of years of brokering between the Ghanaian leaders and British rulers over a new constitution which would bring self-government to the colony. After the Second World War Britain had promised her colonies independence in return for their military assistance. Hundreds of thousands of black and brown soldiers died and, though India was granted independence in 1947, the African nations remained colonies. Virtually overlooked by the Marshall Plan, which gave millions to rebuild Europe and the Far East, impoverished by the low, fixed prices paid for cash crops while European middlemen grew fat, African leaders began to rally their people against the inequity of colonial rule.
In Ghana the independence movement was led by a charismatic former teacher called Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist who had been imprisoned for several years by the British. Nkrumah was Scottish-educated, and during the 1940s a leader in the influential West African Students’ Union. It was inside WASU that the seeds of pan-Africanism and anti-colonial politics germinated, fuelled by the hostility of British society and the humiliation of the colour bar. Later these sentiments were re-imported to Africa, where they ultimately flowered in rebellion.
All the African students watched and waited as one after another the colonies were granted independence. Shortly after my parents met, Nigeria celebrated its break from the empire, alongside thirteen French colonies – practically the entire Francophone empire, with the exception of Algeria, which remained sunk in a bitter and frustrating war of liberation. For the West African states autonomy was not so much a question of if as when, and the anticipation ran like a fever through the exiled students.
Gradually the topic began to dominate every gathering; people turned the record player off at parties the better to be heard and huddled over the paraffin heaters in each other’s apartments late into the frosty night. For Maureen the talk soon palled. Mohamed, on the other hand, was already deeply politically committed, a member of the British Labour Party and president of the local chapter of the West African Students’ Union – although in truth Aberdeen was never able to boast more than a handful of members.
In the years before full independence was finally granted Sierra Leone had moved slowly towards self-government, a wind of change that revealed schisms hidden under the sand of white rule. In Freetown the Creoles had fought for self-rule since the founding of the colony by the Nova Scotian blacks in 1792. They were former slaves who fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. After the American victory they were forced to emigrate to the British settlement of Nova Scotia in Canada and thence given passage to Sierra Leone with the promise of land and freedom. But Britain double-crossed them: Freetown was given first to the profiteering Sierra Leone Company and later turned into a crown colony. A hundred years on, during the scramble for Africa, the rest of the country was brought under British protection.
Freetown soon flourished. In the fifty years up to 1900 the city, holding onto the south-westerly curve of the continent, became known as the Athens of Africa. The Creole emphasis was on education and professional achievement, their aspirations essentially European. They looked outward, across the sea, rather than inward to the hinterland, sending their children to Britain to be educated. Freetown had a flourishing free press; the first university in Africa founded at Fourah Bay; and at that time there were more children in school in the colony than in England itself. When Britain became the dominant colonial power they looked to the Creoles, in their starched bibs and laced boots, to fill positions in civil service administrations throughout West Africa.
On the whole the Creoles did not view themselves as Africans. They opposed the creation of a single state of Sierra Leone and objected to the right of people from the protectorate to sit on a new post-war legislative council in Freetown. The Creoles already enjoyed separate status as British subjects and they wanted this fact to be acknowledged in any new constitution, a wish that was ignored by Britain. In 1957 Sir Milton Margai, an elderly doctor from the provinces, successfully led a broad-based coalition to become the country’s first prime minister; a year later all British officials relinquished their government posts.
During the university vacations most of the African students took the train to Norfolk and worked in the Smedley pea factory, filling and labelling cans. At night they slept together in long dormitories of bunk beds, up to a hundred young men side by side, above and below. The factory was some way out of town, and evenings were quiet. Among the gathered students from universities all over the country and as many different nations, talk turned frequently to the question of independence.
At that time most of the African students studying in Britain were still young men from privileged families, town dwellers. Mohamed Forna was the first Sierra Leonean from the provinces to be admitted to Aberdeen University. Sitting on a suitcase at the end of his bed, Mohamed described existence in rural Africa, the total absence of basic life-giving amenities, the yawning disparity between the city and the people of the provinces. He was convinced that Africa’s poorest were already being cut out of the future.
When the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba was murdered, my father cried. At the time the popular leader’s death was blamed on Katangan secessionists led by Moise Tshombe; not until decades later was it actually revealed to be the work of the CIA and the Belgian government, who had a deal with Tshombe to exploit the vast mineral resources of Katanga. It was the only time anyone heard my father swear. ‘Moise Tshombe is a fucker!’ He shook his head in despair.
He joined the British Labour Party and began to attend student meetings regularly. Even among his peers he had a reputation as a firebrand. One evening Bernard Frazer, who took a more languid view, challenged Mohamed. If he thought all the politicians back home were doing such a poor job, why didn’t he run the country himself? I will, replied his friend, rising to the provocation, if I have to.
In 1960 a series of meetings began to be held in London to agree a new fully independent constitution for Sierra Leone. As a representative of one of the student unions, my father was invited to meet the Sierra Leonean delegates. They gathered in the tense and heady atmosphere of Lancaster House to weave a constitutional framework for the future.
‘Uncle Sam’ was a one-time church minister in Freetown who arrived in Britain in the 1930s to train as a doctor. He flunked and switched to law; flunked that too. With the last of his savings he managed to buy a four-storey house in Paddington and he set about restoring it in a haphazard manner. In the meantime he lived quite well renting out rooms to a tidal population of students. Uncle Sam’s house was where most young men from Sierra Leone who were short of cash but wanted to see the big city ended up staying.
What Sam made on the house he regularly lost on the horses and at those times he would go round the house emptying gas and electricity meters of shillings, and shrug soulfully at the bitter complaints of his young tenants.
Some years back Sam won the love of Dora Fossey, an English hospital matron who lived several doors down and regularly bailed him out of his financial straits. Dora and Sam never dared to marry or even to go out in public more than once in a while. Instead, when her shift at St Mary’s ended Dora spent every evening at Sam’s, watching television and cooking him English meals. Anyone who knew no better would imagine they had been married for years, but their relationship was conducted entirely within the narrow world of the crumbling West London terrace.
One afternoon Mohamed came back to Uncle Sam’s to find one of his many cousins standing in the kitchen. Brima Sesay, nephew of Chief Masamunta, was a nursing student making a tour of the country. Neither could believe the luck of the coincidence and they crossed the floor to embrace. Afterwards Brima took Mohamed to Shepherd’s Bush market, where they bought slippery okra, palm oil, tiny stinging scarlet peppers and blackened, smoked grouper. That night they stayed in with Uncle Sam and feasted on rice and plassas. They hadn’t seen each other since they used to play on the Fornas’ farm during the school holidays. They had lost touch when my father was eleven, at which point one of his teachers had asked the family permission to take him away to the south as a ward in order to complete his education. Soon afterwards Brima had been adopted into a group of missionaries who brought him to England.
Brima called my father Moses, explaining to a mystified Dora how the mission teachers went round the class on the first day of school changing the names of the children for their own convenience. Around the same time my father chose his birthday: November, which coincided with tarokans. The date, the 25th, he decided on himself. A name the bureaucrats could spell and a date of birth: these were the first essentials on the path to westernisation. My father dropped Moses the day he left the primary school; but Brima used both his names: Alfred Brima.
Days later my father caught the train from King’s Cross back north and Brima went on to Birmingham. When Alfred Brima was back at college in Portsmouth, a letter arrived. It was from Mohamed and contained bad news. ‘Remember Maureen, the girl I told you about?’ Mohamed wrote. ‘A terrible thing has happened. She is pregnant.’
Mohamed wanted advice from his cousin, someone who knew the family. He had thoughts of marriage but worried about Maureen’s father who, he supposed, would detest this solution as much as any other. His greatest fear was that Mr Christison would report him to the university authorities and try to have his scholarship revoked. Then there was the matter of the Fornas. He remembered the Conteh cousins who returned from Britain, one after the other, each with a white wife, and the indignation and upset that the women managed to provoke within the family.
Brima didn’t hesitate. Marry her, he said. The older members of the family aren’t going to live for ever. But, he warned, you must make sure the family never have reason to resent her. And if you take her from her own country, to a place where she is a stranger, you will have to be utterly loyal to her, too.
Maureen and Mohamed married at the register office in Union Street on 28 March 1961. She was nineteen years old and he was twenty-five. Charlie Renner acted as a witness and Dan Sama was my father’s best man. Dan’s Scottish girlfriend had given birth the month before, but she had disappeared back to her family and given the child up. She dropped her classes; no one had laid eyes on her since. Bernard Frazer came along and proposed several toasts in the Union building after the ceremony.
On her wedding day my mother, dressed in a pale-blue suit, left Gairn Terrace with a packed suitcase in her hand. She didn’t tell her parents she was getting married, though she found out many years later that they already knew because someone had seen the banns up on the board in town. But within the house no one spoke of it.
One month later, in April, the British flag was lowered in Sierra Leone and replaced by the green, white and blue tricolour. My father organised a sherry party in the beautiful stone British Council building in the harbour at Aberdeen. At the end of the evening, flamboyantly drunk, he staggered away under the weight of several crates, declaring there was far too much sherry to leave behind. On the top floor of the bus he lit six cigarettes and smoked them all, three in each hand. Someone teased that he wasn’t even a smoker. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom, man.’ He blew out great gusts of smoke. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom.’
At the end of the evening my mother, pregnant and sober, pushed him up the stairs while he leaned back so far he was almost horizontal. Then she put him to bed with a bucket by his side.
5 (#ulink_55b37904-6e56-551b-a01e-2d86289e80a7)
My mother was one of the only white people in Koidu. The only other one I ever saw was her boss at the Volkswagen franchise, Franz Stein from Bischofstauberville in Germany. One day, soon after we arrived to live in the town, my mother appeared in his showroom to buy her first car, a sky-blue Beetle. Franz Stein was just about to lose the bank manager’s wife, who did the accounts for him, and so he asked my mother if she wanted a job. Our clinic had barely opened and we could do with the money, so she agreed.
In the mornings, after we dropped Sheka and Memuna at school at the Catholic Mission, my mother left me at home in the care of my cousin and namesake Big Aminatta while she worked at the garage calculating the repair bills. The mechanics told her how many men had worked on a car and for how long. Then she added up the cost of the parts and computed the tax; when the bills were paid she totted the figures up exactly in a big accounts book.
In addition to Volkswagens the showroom also sold Porsches – at least in theory. The same car was on display the entire time we lived in Koidu. Every day people came inside to look at it, but no one ever wanted to buy it. There was barely a few inches’ clearance beneath the low-slung undercarriage, little use in a town which could not boast a single tarmacked road. But Franz Stein said he kept it there, buffed and polished and looking about as improbable as a pair of stilettos on a nomad, because it attracted so many people into the showroom.
In the afternoon my mother drove around town in her car asking people to pay their invoices for the clinic and sometimes I was allowed to accompany her. We drove from house to house, along the corrugated roads, rocking up and down on the car’s springy suspension.
In the 1920s Koidu was a rural village of no more than a hundred or so people, built around an intersection of roads heading east and south, in the cup between the Nimini and Gori hills. The people who lived there were mostly farmers, descendants of the same clan, who had lived identical lives for generations.
Almost overnight during the 1950s the population of the tiny hamlet flashed to twelve thousand as people converged from all over the country, drawn by a silent siren’s call. Government clerks left their desks in Freetown and took to the road; teachers walked out of the classrooms to dig in the mud of river beds; so many farmers abandoned the fields that the price of rice rocketed. Within months there were nationwide riots.
Diamonds. They washed up in the water of streams, hid in the soft silt beds, even glinted underfoot on the roads and pathways. It was said that in Koidu people didn’t look where they were going but walked everywhere with their heads bent down, gaze permanently trawling the ground for stones; people called it the ‘Koidu crouch’. Eventually, the government was forced to declare an emergency and even offer to raise salaries to woo their civil servants back.
In many ways Koidu was like a town in the old Wild West. The cinema even had a bullet hole in the middle of the screen where someone in the audience lost patience and shot the baddie. There was only one road that constituted the town; it had a single mosque; next door to this was the nightclub – really just a bar selling beer and spirits – and farther on a few Lebanese-owned shops.
The Lebanese merchants were very sociable and always gave a tiny cup of coffee with cardamom and a piece of baklava to my mother, and a Fanta to me, while they went over the doctor’s bill. When time came to pay, my mother told me, they always asked for ten per cent off, sometimes twenty. In the beginning she felt obliged to agree because they had been so hospitable, but after a short while she got into the practice of adding ten per cent before she presented the bill. The whole transaction was executed with displays of excellent humour, smiles, more sweet, black coffee and, for me, another fizzy drink.
My mother told me a story about her visits to our Lebanese clients. They always pressed her to accept a drink, but my mother rarely touched alcohol. One day she laughed and declared: ‘I only drink champagne.’ They took her at her word and the very next time she visited a bottle of champagne was brought from the fridge and opened. Of course, she had to accept. Gradually the word that the doctor’s wife only drank champagne spread and everyone began to keep some in the fridge just for her.
They liked to spoil her. When she shook hands to go the men would hold onto hers, patting it, and look directly into her face; they smiled, showing gold teeth. The women complimented her clothes. They treated her as though she were special, as though she were one of them.
The autumn after my parents were married in Scotland, my brother was born. My father delivered his first son himself. He graduated soon after and almost exactly a year later my sister came along. Then the family moved to Glasgow, where my father pursued an extra qualification in obstetrics.
All this time my mother had been turning slowly from white to black. At the university in Aberdeen the African students were considered exotic. People knew they had gilded careers waiting for them; they were the chosen ones – at least where they came from. Out in the city there were few enough blacks for them to be considered rare birds and accorded a measure of tolerance.
But with each child my mother found her skin darkened, almost as though it were a side effect of pregnancy. By the time we moved to Glasgow she was virtually transformed into a full-blooded Negress. People began to treat her the way they sometimes treated my father. They stared at her as she walked with me in the pram, my sister perched on the back and my brother following behind; and they cast remarks under their breath, barbed like a fisherman’s fly, deftly designed to land just within earshot.
When my father was with us men would yell, ‘Look at the darkie!’ and spit the word ‘whore’ with guttural emphasis. If we were alone then quite often old ladies would come up to say how cute we children looked, and stroke our heads.
Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where I was born, served the working-class outlying Lanarkshire suburbs. It was a massive concrete edifice, entirely surrounded by council houses, like a factory producing baby Glaswegians by the score. I went back only once in my life on my way through from Aberdeen to London, when I looped round the country via Glasgow to see my first home. As I walked into the maternity hospital I was forced to squeeze past a group of heavily pregnant women, dressed only in pastel dressing gowns and slippers to guard against the damp October air, chain-smoking outside the front entrance.
Outside our bungalow in Ardgay Street I sat in my car, waiting, trying to make up my mind whether or not to knock on the door and explain to the inhabitants that I had once lived in their house. My drive through the neighbourhood had told me it was poor, but beyond that I hadn’t much idea of what sort of people lived here. I had seen no black or brown faces, but then again there had been few people on the freezing streets. I dithered, folded and refolded my map. I reached for the door handle. At that instant the door of 19 Ardgay Street flew open: a man with a shaved head, holding a piece of wood, stood there and seemed to stare straight at me. A Rhodesian ridgeback bounded past him and up to the front gate. My nerve failed. I started the ignition and drove away.
Back then we were broke and we were black. We survived on my father’s grant, stretched to meet the demands of each new baby. It was tough to find anyone who wanted to rent us a place to live. Lots of the advertisements specified ‘no blacks’; sometimes it said ‘no foreigners’, which was another way of saying the same thing.
Searching for a house could be so difficult that one medical student put a large advertisement in the local newspaper in capitals: BLACK DOCTOR SEEKS ACCOMMODATION. He said it cut short the process of going to see apartments which were always gone the moment you showed your face. My father went to Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where he was taking up his internship, found another black doctor who was leaving to go home, and asked him if he could rent his apartment.
The five of us lived in two rooms in Ardgay Street. The Shettleston house was owned by a couple who ran a driving school and lived in the other wing. Above the door was an inscription to ‘Our Lady of Fatima’. There were times on a Saturday night when a brick would crash through the two windows facing the street; but my mother said it was because they were Protestants and thought we were Catholics, not because we were black.
The hospital where my father did his rounds and delivered babies was a different world; he was treated with great respect and his patients adored him. People talked about his wonderful ‘bedside manner’. It was years before I understood what they meant. I imagined my father sitting next to his patients, eating from a table elaborately laid with every kind of silverware, de-boning a sole or delicately peeling a peach with a knife.
When I was six months old a letter came from the family in Sierra Leone. It was from our father’s father. Ibrahim, one of my father’s elder brothers, had died; our grandfather begged Mohamed to come home at the earliest and help take care of the family.
We sailed on the passenger ship the Aureol. It docked in the Canaries, where the crew filled the pool on the deck with sea water; then we set sail for Freetown. The other passengers were mostly returning former colonials, who played cards, organised a fancy dress party and sat at each other’s tables in the evening without ever inviting us to join them.
When the ship docked alongside the massive warehouses of the Queen Elizabeth II quay, the first thing my mother saw was the fedora belonging to my father’s friend Dr Panda bobbing in the surging crowds. She stepped off the boat and into the throng of Africans and she was transformed, once again, into a white woman.
In Freetown people stared at her wherever she went, especially when she rode by on her bicycle. ‘Look! White woman dae ride bicycle!’
White again, my mother was accepted, on certain conditions, into the ex-pat community in Freetown. She joined a Scottish dancing group that met at the Railway Club and at the exclusively white Hill Station Club. Before independence black people were not even allowed up to Hill Station unless they worked in one of the big houses. A special train was sent down every day to bring the workers up to the hills. Certainly, there were no African members of the Hill Station Club. My mother was popular there: she had grown up performing songs and dances and she entranced everyone with her outgoing personality. Her only disappointment was that at the end of the evening the other members never invited her to their houses for drinks or supper, and she made her way home alone.
Marriage to my father turned my mother into a multi-hued chameleon. He, by contrast, had been a black man in Scotland and was a black man in Africa. Once I asked my mother how my father regarded her patronage of the Hill Station Club. She said she didn’t know.
‘What if he’d wanted to come too?’ I pressed.
‘Well, he wouldn’t,’ she replied. ‘He didn’t know the Scottish dances.’ That was the way she thought about these matters. It was as simple as that.
My father’s visiting brothers were kind to her, especially Uncle Momodu. He had an appetite for all things western and always wore western clothes. He came down to Freetown ‘on business’, he stated enigmatically, and, when he wasn’t at one of his assignations, he flicked through the magazines my mother brought with her from Britain, questioning her about life ‘over there’. Momodu wandered in and out of the house, played with the babies and loved to tease his serious younger brother’s wife. But Maureen felt frozen out by the wives of my father’s friends who, she thought, disregarded her, though she could never quite put her finger on the problem because it lay in what was missing from their welcome rather than what was present.
Soon after we arrived Pa Roke, my grandfather, came to visit, bringing with him several live chickens, some sacks of rice and one of his junior wives. He cast an eye over my mother: ‘So you went to the sea and turned into a fish,’ he said to my father in Temne. He’d warned his son not to come back with a white wife. There were a lot of local families who would have liked to make a match. ‘How much did you pay?’ He meant how much was the dowry. She was young; her breasts hadn’t fallen yet.
‘Ten shillings,’ my father replied straight faced. That was what he’d been charged at the register office on the morning of the wedding. Pa Roke smiled: he was pleased. His son’s wife might be white, but she had come at a good price.
In Koidu as we passed people waved and called out to my mother and me. Young men offered to carry her packages; shopkeepers ushered her over to look at the latest imported fabrics. Everyone recognised her. She was the doctor’s white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.
6 (#ulink_b76e0ec0-c7bd-57bc-9d22-87b0501439e5)
A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn’t walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.
Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it’s too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.
The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman’s and the boy’s symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.
My father didn’t have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.
My father didn’t come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn’t understand the basic principles of infection, spread and cure. Outbreaks of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.
When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn’t have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother’s throat. My father wasn’t due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.
Eventually a colleague of our father’s was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.
In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.
When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.
The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.
Following Ndora’s death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.
We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn’t pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.
In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country’s reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion’s share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.
After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.
The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn’t bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he’d be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.
Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill through to my mother to prepare and he instructed her to charge the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.
Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.
Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.
A few weeks later my mother was out at night She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn’t see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a torch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car’s headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.
As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.
‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.
By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father’s name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.
