Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [1]
And for a time that’s what Europeans thought Africa was. Paradise.
The last time I thought about that story was a week after the letter came. By then I had left London — the city I now call home — to retrace the letter’s route to the place from where it had come and beyond. I was standing in a forest just like the one the sailors had stumbled into. And I remembered how in the early morning I used to watch my grandmothers, my grandfather’s wives, leave their houses and make their way, down the same path upon which I was standing, towards their gardens. One by one each woman parted from her companions and went to her own plot, whose boundaries were marked by an abandoned termite hill, a fallen tree, an upright boulder. There, among the giant irokos, the sapeles and the silkcotton trees of the forest, she tended the guavas, pawpaws and roseapples she had planted there. Then she weeded her yams and cassava where they grew in the soft, dark earth and watered the pineapple plant that marked the centre of her plot.
I thought of the sailors’ story. And for a long time, I thought it was just that. A story. About how Europeans discovered us and we stopped being a blank space on a map. But months later, after the letter arrived and I traced its arc and came to land with a soft thud in an enchanted forest, and after I had listened to all the stories contained in this book and written them down for you, that one story came back to me. And I realised the story was really about something else. It was about different ways of seeing. The sailors were blind to the signs, incapable of seeing the pattern or logic, just because it was different to their own. And the African way of seeing: arcane, invisible yet visible, apparent to those who belong.
The sailors saw what they took to be nature’s abundance and stole from the women’s gardens. They thought they had found Eden, and perhaps they had. But it was an Eden created not by the hand of God, but the hands of women.
The letter that brought me back to Africa came from my cousin Alpha. I didn’t recognise his hand on the envelope: he had never written to me before. Alpha had once been a teacher, but in those changed days he made his living composing letters for other people. People who took their place opposite him one by one, clutching a scrap of paper bearing the address of an overseas relative or else the business card of some European traveller, unwittingly exchanged in a moment of good humour for a lifetime of another person’s hopes. Alpha conveyed greetings, prayed for the recipient’s health, invoked the memory of the dead, and wrote hereby merely to inform them of the sender’s situation, the dislocations and hardships of the war. Sought their help in solving their many difficulties. By God’s grace. Thanking them in advance.
And then he swivelled the letter around to face his customer, for their perusal and signature. They nodded, feigning comprehension. And signed with a knitted brow and a wobbling hand the letters of their name learned by heart. Or else they pushed a thumb on to the opened ink pad, and left a purple thumbprint like a flower on the bottom of the page.
My own letter was written on a single side of paper taken from a school exercise book. No crossing out, no misspellings — suggesting it had been drafted beforehand and carefully copied out. Alpha’s signature was at the bottom of the page. Alpha Kholifa, plainly executed without flourishes, a simple statement. He used our grandfather’s name, the same as mine, so there could be no mistake. The other thing I noticed, only after I had read the letter through, was the absence of a post-office box address. Knowingly, he had denied me the opportunity to write back with ready excuses, to enclose a cheque bloated with guilty zeros.