For Africa to me is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
- Maya Angelou
The Beginning
The morning scratches her claws across the dusty blackboard of the night. The sky is slung low in Africa, if you could stretch your arms just a little further, your fingertips might graze something soft and black and enter into the layer of dreams. Then, slowly, the eyelids of morning open, still heavy with sleep. Morning raises her arms as she wakes like a child, to the sound of her mother’s voice calling. Another day, time for the fuzzy remnants of our dreams to take flight. The hemlines of night’s gown rise and are quietly folded away for another time.
We live in a squat, sprawling house, in Kampala, 17 Acacia Avenue. It nestles in the shade of thorn trees and a vanilla and raspberry ripple swirl of a magnolia tree dominates the front lawn. In the morning, when I wake up, the grass is carpeted with waxy, smile-shaped petals and I can hear Alex, the gardener sweep them aside with a broom made of twigs.
It scrapes the footpaths which meander between his manicured flowerbeds. That sound, the crackle of dry branches, the swift whisk of his wrist as he flicks, is the sound that percolates through my half-sleeping state. I am four and barefoot by choice. I don’t wear shoes or socks. It takes much wrangling and cajoling by Teresa, my ayah to get me to wear more than the orange, cotton-lawn print dress which reaches above my knees and a straw boater with a trailing, cream ribbon, which my father has brought me back from his travels somewhere west. This is the uniform of my childhood.
Ours is a stuttering, cluttering house, filled with noise and newly whitewashed. It’s stuffed with the latest gadgets such as Hoovers and record players. This is the late 60sand my parents lie at the heart of beautiful, bright, brown things who inhabit this play-play paradise.
My grandparents made Uganda their home; they had been brought here by the British in India to supervise the network of railways that was required to connect the far-flung corners of this dark-hearted continent. But Africa never loved us or reached out to take us in; we were unwanted guests who overstayed our welcome, sucking out all that was good and rich and leaving resentment and dry bones in our wake. We claimed it, anyway, we staked out our homesteads with tall fences and razor wire and pretended everything was just fine.
“This is now mine,” we asserted. My ancestors glare angrily from fading sepia toned photographs at the mess we have made, they look stern, in their military uniforms with their MBEs shining; they look so British with their stiff, swarthy Asian upper lips. They were more British than the boys from home.