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.
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
