he was waiting for the results of his scholarship application to read medicine in the UK he taught the junior years. Alongside his formal education the years at Bo gave him an understanding of the men who ruled his country and their values and their history, or at least the version taught in England’s public schools.
Before they boarded a cargo ship bound for Liverpool at Freetown’s docks, the only understanding of Britain most new pioneers possessed was through their first British Council induction seminar. The arrivals from the provinces were herded into a darkened hall, where they watched reels of black and white short films entitled An Introduction to British Life and Culture.
In one short film, Lost in the Countryside, two young Africans in old-fashioned tweed suits amble through a pastoral scene. Their skin is so dark they almost look like they’re white actors in blackface, and their hair is brushed straight upwards. Suddenly they realise they can’t find their way back and a crescendo of mishaps parallels their mounting panic. When they emerge from a haystack pulling strands from their hair an authoritative voice cuts in: ‘If you become lost in the countryside do not panic. Find a road. Locate a bus stop. Join the queue [and there, in the middle of nowhere was a line of people]. A bus will arrive, board it and return to the town.’ The film ends with the Africans looking mightily relieved sitting on the bus, surrounded by smiling locals.
They were given a map of the London Underground, a train timetable, and a talk on expected etiquette, including how to behave in a British home. Visits should be undertaken on invitation only. Never walk into a British household and sit in the chair belonging to the man of the house. In Britain visitors are expected to maintain a flow of conversation. It is polite to decline a second helping of food. And on it went.
So very different from the African household in which I was raised. On the weekends and even the weekdays my aunts and uncles appeared at all hours and sat on the veranda for lengthy periods, just keeping company. They talked for just as long as someone had something to say and then lapsed into companionable silence. Every now and again one of my aunts would break the silence to begin the routine of greetings all over again. When they’d finished, people would snort with serene satisfaction; my aunts would adjust their head-dresses and lappas; and settle even more deeply into themselves. Conversation is a whim, not an art. Of me no one expected anything except a respectful silence and the appearance of listening. If I’d begun to try to amuse them with stories and precocious attempts at conversation, the way children in England did, they would have exchanged sly glances. ‘How dis pickin dae talk so!’
In time, very often when most people had already been there for half the morning, the cook would begin to prepare food. I’d be given a plate with a man-sized helping and if it was a special occasion we were all expected to go back time and time again to taste each dish: mounds of jollof rice, cooked in tomatoes so that the rice turned pink, sour sour or stewed sorrel, okra stew, chicken fried with fresh Scotch bonnet peppers, deep-fried plantains. At the end of the day half the visitors left carrying a tin dish wrapped in cloths to take home for the rest of the family.
From Freetown to Liverpool, then by train to Aberdeen, where the green and ochre of Africa was replaced by shades of blue and grey. In winter the sky over northern Scotland turned to black and the granite of the buildings glittered like silver. And the cold, it was alive! It stung legs, bit cheeks, pinched fingers and toes. It was like going for a swim and being caught in a flurry of jellyfish. The newest arrivals were always obvious: they wore old-styled cotton suits made by their provincial tailors, neither customer nor tailor imagining for a moment that they would not be thick enough to stand the coolest weather. By the end of the first week their smart new suits were packed away in tin trunks for good.
No traveller arrived in Britain from Africa without being suitably awed by his first sight of a terraced row. The houses were built in a single row that ran the entire length of the street like a set of dentures. A rich man in Africa builds his house to stand out from every house around it. In Britain people owned their homes, but all the houses looked the same. A story was told of an undergraduate on his first day in Aberdeen who was taken to his friend’s student digs in a terraced row. He thought his friend must have made good and exclaimed on the length of the house. When the others laughed and pointed out that the building was in fact many houses, he was crestfallen. Now the house began to looked cramped. But once you were inside you saw there were more rooms than you could ever guess at from the narrow frontage.
My father discovered the sin of sweet things for the first time in his life, munching his way through packets of Opal Fruits. Muslim or not, his newly awakened sweet tooth extended to an enthusiasm for sweet alcoholic drinks: sherry or brandy mixed with ginger ale. In Aberdeen he had his first toothache, followed by his first visit to the dentist and his first filling.
The short, round African vowels that fell off the front of his tongue moved further back in his throat and lengthened into local Aberdonian rhythms; he began to draw out his ‘e’s, to emphasise his ‘r’s and then to roll them; and finally he adopted the local idiom, talked about patients turning ill and taking scarlet fever, asked them where they stayed. For the rest of his life he spoke with a curious hybrid accent that puzzled some and brought a smile to the lips of others.
In his first year as a student my father spent much of his time on his own, walking up to his chemistry and biology lectures in the Old University buildings in the north of the city. The next year there was a batch of new arrivals from Sierra Leone: Bernard Frazer, a confident Creole, was wealthy enough to fly to Britain when he started at university (generations of his family had been educated in the UK); Dan Sama, a Mende also from Sierra Leone, was dark and serious and had a long-term love affair with a Scottish student. There was Charlie Renner, who sped around Aberdeen in a green Mini; and the Guineans Henry Blankson and David Anamudu. David’s square face and glasses earned him the nickname ‘Mr TV’ and he skated fearlessly over the wet, black cobblestones on a Vespa scooter. They were all studying medicine.
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
