ii
When I was twelve I met my father’s father, FatherGrandpa, for the third time. He was a man who laughed at his own jokes. After a stint as a bookkeeper with the Governor of the Gold Coast, he became a merchant. No one knows how he amassed the wealth he was famous for, but he claimed to have profited from the Second World War. As a direct result of his trading activities, the Ribeiro Trading Company had children in many major port cities in the world: Monrovia, Liverpool, Port of Spain… He kept a list. He came to visit GeeMaa who had just had a hip operation. It was the first time he had come to our house. He sat. Raised his long, heavy legs onto a patterned sheepskin cushion on the floor. He reached for the water my mother brought him and drank. Sunlight from the living room window cast slatted streaks across his balding head. My father, mother, Naana and I stood in order of decreasing height in front of him. He repeated an old joke as if it was new. “Ah, Kojo, I see you inherited my taste for fine women!” He laughed and slapped his left shoulder with his right hand. The sound of his glee was reminiscent of the gurgle of an emptying bath. We barely smiled, but he carried on. “Where is the beautiful cripple?” Our parents sat down in the cane armchairs to FatherGrandpa’s left. “Go and get GeeMaa,” my father instructed.
Naana and I went to GeeMaa’s room to call her. Because of the newness of the operation she walked with the slant and rhythm of a wink. We heard FatherGrandpa laughing as she approached the living room. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and went to sit under the neem tree in our front yard. The neem tree was familiar territory although I hadn’t been to it for a while. It was where I cut chewing sticks for GeeMaa and myself until I went to boarding school. I didn’t want to be teased in school for chewing sticks while everyone else used fluoride and toothbrushes, so I stopped chewing the sticks. I had felt no ill effects, but I had been unhappy. GeeMaa’s health had been bad since I left for school and it worried me. I looked across at Naana and smiled. We were still close even though, as my father put it, she was a woman with a vote now. She passed me a stick of green Wrigley’s chewing gum. “Thank you.” The tree filtered a net of sunlight that dappled our faces and we sat ensnared within it. “I’m glad GeeMaa made our names Oppong-Ribeiro.” I understood Naana. Plain Ribeiro would mean immediate association with our cavalier grandfather. Naana was studying at the University of Ghana, a place where reputations were made, and her image was important to her. I didn’t care much about image, but I understood. FatherGrandpa summoned me as he was leaving. He opened his red address book (the one that held details of his children) and gave me an address in Trinidad. The
book was indexed by name, age, profession and mother’s name. It was well worn but tidy inside. “Ebo, I saw one of your photos on the wall. That address is for your uncle Sanjit in Trinidad. He is an artist. He will like it.” “Thank you.” His height made me feel humble. Though seventy-seven years old, he held himself like an eager cadet. “Don't thank me,” he laughed. “You have thirty-three uncles and aunties. You have to start knowing them early!” As he said that I imagined that Miss Havisham would definitely have had her own child if he had been engaged to her. Then she wouldn’t have had time to wallow in self-pity and become so mean. The thought made me smile. He slapped my back and made me stumble. Then he laughed harder as he sauntered to his chauffeur-driven Lincoln.
I wrote to Uncle Sanjit the next day; a long letter, written on good blue writing paper from my father’s office. The office was simply a table fitted into one corner of the dining room. In the letter I explained to Uncle Sanjit how I got his address, then drew a family tree to show how we were related. For his mother’s name, I drew a dash. I asked for the meaning of his name and added a selection of the pictures I had taken in the five years since Auntie Dee Dee died. His reply came in a large flat package that my father drove all the way to my boarding school to show me. My school was the Prince of Wales College in the days
when Ghana was still called the Gold Coast, but by the time I got there it was called Achimota School. It was my father’s alma mater. My father helped me open the package with a screwdriver from his glove compartment. It contained a painting and a short note. I painted the picture I liked. It was a pastel rendering of the hills of Aburi at sunset. I had taken that picture during a school trip to play football with the students of Akosombo Secondary School. P.S. My name means he who is always victorious. Keep in touch. I stared at his interpretation of my picture. Surely he had smelled the evening mist with me, heard the firm crunch of gravel under the tyres of the school bus, seen the sky change from blue to orange to purple. Uncle Sanjit revealed in his next letter that he had studied Art in London and New York, and now ran a small gallery below his studio in Port of Spain. He thought that I had a very good eye and could become an artist if I chose to. For days, I reread his letter, trying to imagine myself as an artist. I loved reading, and taking photographs was something that had helped channel my confusion after Auntie Dee Dee's death – something I had come to love. In the light and shades of its practice, I had come to better appreciate the travel of thoughts across faces. The extra filter it gave to my visualisation enriched my reading and I had come to value storytelling even more. But I didn't think of photography as art, and I had never thought of myself as an artist. I was entranced. I wrote to Uncle Sanjit every two weeks. He wrote back – about one letter for every four I wrote. They were long letters that described every corner of our separate worlds in delicate detail; the way lizards in Ghana dart around in daytime sun like couriers, how the green of the trees in Trinidad seemed to have
blood pumping in them. He told me that his mother was of Indian origin with Hindu roots and ran a food hut by the port. He tried to convey in writing the enchanting singsong rhythm of Trinidadian speech, while I translated and wrote short volleys of Ghanaian proverbs, explaining their origins when I could eke the information out of my parents or Auntie Aba, the waache seller. He ended his letters with quotes from an endless list of luminaries. Benedict Spinoza, Patrice Lumumba, Indira Gandhi. I hadn’t heard of half of them so I found myself spending even more time in the library at school just to keep up. I told him that because he was only twenty-six, I thought of him as my bruncle – a hybrid of brother and uncle. I sent Uncle Sanjit hundreds of pictures; insects splattered startled on the windscreen of a truck returned from the countryside, electric pylons straddling rubbish dumps, barefoot children playing with handmade footballs, the fragilelooking wooden shack that was our local corn mill, two-toned sunsets, reeds, flowers and trees caught from unusual angles. It must have taken a lot of his time, but he often replied with short notes and prints of paintings of his favourite shots. I sold some of the prints he sent to my father’s friends, but most of them ended up either on my bedroom wall or with Naana. When GeeMaa died two years after her hip operation, I sent him pictures of the funeral. GeeMaa’s coffin was designed in the traditional Ga manner. Carved and painted as an ambulance to honour her forty years of service as a nurse and midwife. Because she was over seventy years old her funeral was of a light mood. “She had all her time on earth.” “She has gone to a better place.”
“God called her.” “She has gone to help HIM.” Condolences wore clichéd chrysalids. People came wearing white smiles on dark faces. Clothed in black and white; black to signify the death of a friend, white to celebrate her passing on to a better life. A few of the women had glittering white damask and chiffon with black lace scarves thrown artistically across their shoulders. I took a picture of one of them. Head-shaking guests of all ages came. They came bearing nothing but their empty bellies, which they proceeded to fill with food bought with my father’s hard-earned savings. Some claimed GeeMaa had delivered them as babies. Others claimed she had healed them. Every last person had a story to tell. Piecing these anecdotes together, I tried to construct the parts of GeeMaa's life that she had not told me about. Things she had perhaps considered too mundane to share. One of the second intake of British-trained nurses, she had been the only child – boy or girl – from her fishing community sent to the mission school. As she tuned her ears to the clipped tones of sunburnt priests, her playmates and their parents saved treats that the fishermen gave away from the canoes coming in – eels, didɛ bibii and tsile – and waited; first, to hear stories of peculiar behaviour by the missionaries, then, to listen to her reading and translating from her books. She repaid them, after she had qualified as a nurse-midwife, by treating their sick out of hours and teaching the young to read. By 1935, successful young men, social climbers, emerging business magnates and charlatans were camping outside her father's door, hoping to win the affections of the woman one of her friends called 'the best Charleston dancer in
Accra'. As such, there was a collective sigh of dismay when FatherGrandpa went to Korle Bu with a broken finger and walked out with a plaster cast and GeeMaa's heart. These stories floated around on the suspension of grief and remembrance, maintaining a steady hubbub on our courtyard. In every corner, a story; not always believable, but a story nonetheless. “Oh, she was a great woman. Always smiling…” “Ei, she was good oh! Better than some of the doctors.” “I have a photo of her with my Kwame when he was born. Look at him now.” The black and white clad bundle of mothering flesh pulled her boy towards her by the sleeve. “Isn’t he handsome?” Kwame smiled one of those smiles designed to support the social efforts of preening mothers. Lifting his cheeks slightly as though he were swallowing a bitter pill. By nine a.m. our courtyard was full of chattering mourners. Our square creampainted house was like a piece of sponge cake besieged by flies. I took a picture from a distance. On the large veranda that led to our front door, GeeMaa’s body lay in state. As the visitors glided past the neat corpse, they stopped and shook hands with my father and his siblings. Auntie Patience, Auntie Ama and Uncle Tommy had all insisted on a big funeral, yet none of them offered to help with the cost of organising it. “But she died with you,” they said. As though my father had somehow killed GeeMaa.
I overheard my father telling my mother that they were already arguing about who would inherit GeeMaa’s two houses in Adabraka. Yet they sat there, looking fashionably solemn in matching fabric permutated into different outfits. Matching envelopes of discontent – to be opened after the funeral.