Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Sometimes, when I’m poring over a newly arrived set of photographs on the computer in my home office at 6 a.m., or I’m huddled with a photographer and a superstar model on set past midnight with three more looks left to shoot, I feel at my most content. Through bougie Western eyes, this probably looks out of balance: I’m overworking at the expense of my personal life; I need to create boundaries, or whatever. But I’ve never seen work and life as truly separate. It’s not how I was raised. My parents were both hard workers; their careers were at the centre of their lives. Even as they were surrounded by six kids and an endless extended family, nobody went hungry. And I’ve been my parents’ son since the day I was born, at the tail end of a dry African winter in 1972.
I can’t imagine any other line of work for my father, Major Crosby Enninful, than the military, with its authoritarian rigour and devotion to order. By the time I was born, the Ghanaian military was one of the most powerful in all of Africa, and it made for a prestigious career. Officers had solid, middle-class lives, with houses on military bases and enough pay to ensure education and upward mobility for their children. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, the first in Africa to sever his nation from the British Empire, had a pan- Africanist vision for the country that was once known as the Gold Coast. As Ghana was relatively socially and economically advanced among its neighbours, it meant that Ghanaian soldiers traditionally did frequent tours abroad, often aiding United Nations Peace keeping forces. So, for most of my childhood, whether he was in Liberia, or Egypt or the Middle East, my father was elsewhere.
That suited his children just fine.
I was born in Takoradi, one of the bigger port cities along the coastline, the fifth of what would become a family of six children. There was Crosby, the eldest, named after our father, my sister Mina, brothers Luther and Kenneth, and baby sister Akua. In Ghana, it’s common to take the name of the day on which you were born. As I was born near midnight on 22 February, the hospital had one date, and the post office another. So my mother Grace gave me two Ghanaian names: Kobina Kweku, or Tuesday Wednesday, as well as my Christian name, Edward. I was really only Edward in school. Most people called me Asiamah. In Akan, the country’s most dominant language after English, it means ‘Blessed Child’.
We lived on a military base in Takoradi, a cocoon of pristine order inside the more laid-back city. The base was dotted with neat little stucco bungalows on stilts that we used to run and hide underneath. When I was still quite little, we relocated from Takoradi to the capital city of Accra, where we lived on another base called Burma Camp, just across the road from the sea. It was a similar dynamic: our family living on an island of tidiness surrounded by a city unconcerned by order. Burma Camp looked so organised and perfect to me as a child, with its clipped lawns and freshly painted little houses.
That order hid a darker reality. Ghana suffered from political instability and frequent military coups. Whoever was in charge at the time was often settling scores with whoever came before. Our home was the last in a cluster of cottages, and we had a clear view of a hill that had a string of wooden posts erected on top. That was where they’d execute, by firing squad, whoever was considered an enemy of the state. Every few weeks or so we could see it happening from the window of our house: the soldiers would march condemned men with pomp and ceremony, cover their heads with hoods, take aim and fire. We’d hear the gunshots crack as their bodies would slump. ‘Oh, is it firing-squad day?’ we’d ask each other. Anything habitual becomes normal when you’re a kid.
We had a lot of space in Burma Camp, with five bedrooms to shelter my siblings and me, who ran in a pack together. I was the baby until 1977, when Akua was born, so most of the time, everyone took care of me. Much of it involved keeping away from our father, who was a believer in distributive justice – if one of us acted out of line, we all got yelled at. Or worse, we’d get the leather strap on our hands. As we were constantly making noise, we spent a lot of time at the beach, playing in the sand, and taking part in deadly serious track-and-field competitions. I was a shy kid but a good student and confident in my abilities – I’d end up skipping two grades before I got to secondary school – so I’d show other neighbourhood kids how to do maths on the beach with rocks. They would call me ‘teacher’.
I was, above all, watchful, shy, spacey, and totally consumed by my imagination. Some days, as my brothers ran about kicking up sand, I would find a quiet spot and take those same rocks and turn them into a pretend class of my own. Each rock became a character. I’d dole out praise, correct their mistakes. I would sass them and make jokes at their expense. When I was in my comfort zone with my brothers and sisters at home, no adults to yell at me, I felt free. When I had my confidence up, I found joy in making people laugh, even the older kids.
When I remember my childhood, its powerful scents come rushing back to me first. The sea air and fried fish, which we’d eat with fermented corn dumplings called kenkey, and hot peppers. In Ghana, you buy groceries either from the central market if you’re in a larger city, or on the street from trailers, which were all over, loaded with vegetables and fruit and peanuts, colourful and abundant and waiting to be turned into something delicious. In stalls they’d sell grilled turkey tails, which are just the end of the bird, crispy and loaded with fat. I remember the smell of bodies close by at the crowded markets, the air full of spices. Fish and meat would sit out on display in the muggy air, while fierce women strolled by carrying massive pots of soup on their heads, their babies strapped to their backs.
Ghanaian cuisine is often starchy–my grandmother’s specialty was fufu: pounded cassava and plantain dumplings, which she’d make with a massive, waist-sized mortar and pestle. You’d dip the fufu into fragrant, peppery soups. Ghana’s climate is mostly tropical, with a summer monsoon, and anyone who comes from a tropical part of the world knows that spicy, high- temperature food is an important part of cooling the body down. I still eat hot pepper with every meal, no matter my location. There is a lot of depth of flavour in our cuisine, much of which we have in common with our West African neighbours. Stews are full of beef, fish, crab, chicken and shrimp, sometimes all together, and layered with dried shrimp powder, bitter herbs and peanut flour, spiked with tomatoes and chillies and onions and lime. My nose always knows if I’m visiting someone from Ghana from the smell of that cooking–there are a lot of us in London–and every time, it takes me back home.
The coastal cities in Ghana were well developed, but the countryside was another story. When I was really little, my mother would take us to visit my grandmother in her tiny village of Brakwa, in a forest belt about sixty miles from the coast. She lived in a small, squat house fashioned from mud and cement block, which had no electricity. The drive on dusty, red-clay roads was rough and bumpy. When we’d get there, I would have to say hello to all of my aunts and cousins and
grandmother’s friends. There could be fifty of them, because my grandmother was like royalty in that town, and everyone had to show respect. It was scary in those little houses, especially once the sun went down and left us in the dark. Even though I held my mother’s hand, as a visitor I felt poked and prodded by curious hands. I kept my head down and wished it would be over soon so I could get back to our comfortable house and my books and drawings and records.
I was coddled by my mother, brothers and sisters, and in their company I was happy, though sometimes I was in excruciating physical pain. I was born with the blood disorder sickle cell trait (and then later diagnosed with a related disorder, thalassaemia), which means my blood cells form a kind of hook that doesn’t flow well into the tiny vessels in my joints. When my condition flares up, as it does from stress, or poor diet, or, today, taking a lot of aeroplanes, it’s like having an especially piercing case of arthritis and only morphine can really take the pain away. Because of this, I bounced back and forth to hospitals to have my blood checked. My mother would always be there with me as the doctors did their work. Because I had more of these attacks when I was younger, I could never be too far from her. I have so many early memories of her arguing with doctors, pleading with them to do something to ease the pain. Much less was understood about the disorder than is known today, and even as a tiny boy, I could feel my mother’s worry and frustration that we had to keep coming back to the hospital over and over. Why did this pain keep coming back? She couldn’t understand what was wrong with her baby, much less make it stop.
My mother was my comforter and my champion, and a formative example for me of courage and the power of the imagination. In Brakwa, when she was just a teenager, one of twenty-two kids (as is typical in extended polygamous African families), she started making dresses for the local ladies. She had an amazing eye for colour and, as she honed her skill, a talent for fitted shapes. A few of her brothers became tailors, too, so perhaps awareness of clothes runs in our family. At seventeen, my mother assembled her best samples and travelled from her village to the capital of Accra to try to get a place at a technical college. At the interview, they told her not to bother – she already knew everything they could teach her, anyway. And so she picked up and moved to the north of Ghana, still a teenager, to a Sahelian region that’s a lot more Muslim than the Christian coast, to set up a dressmaking business. That’s where she met my father.
Major Crosby Enninful’s military duties made him a sporadic presence around our house. As severe as the black suits he wore when he was out of uniform, he would appear, terrorise us, and leave. When he was around, the party was over. ‘Don’t play, your father’s home!’ was the refrain. His children were supposed to be studying. He might have been a highly ranked soldier, but he was fighting a battle with his kids that he’d never ultimately win. He’d rail against my eldest brother Crosby, his namesake, a bad boy, a smoker. He was gorgeous in his cut-off jeans shorts and bright yellow shirts, and girls followed him around everywhere. According to my father, Crosby was going to ruin us. (Today, he’s an Anglican minister, and as serene as my sister Mina.) Crosby would play Luther Vandross and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King records around the house. ‘What you do to me is a shame! Ooh, gonna love you just the same…’ He was ten years older than me and so seemed like this force of coolness from another planet.
Mina was next in line, a radiantly beautiful junior version of my mother: loving, gentle and kind. Mina sees the good in everyone. Just thinking about her now makes me well up. Then came Luther, who was my absolute hero, so engaging and handsome, with that same infectious charisma that Crosby has. Luther loved sharp dressing even when we were kids, though he really came into his own when we got to London. Kenneth was next, brainy and studious, but also kind of a jock – a picture of success from a very young age. My father’s favourite, Kenneth always wanted to be a doctor, though illness prevented him from completing his studies. He’s living in Ghana today in a happy relationship with a devoutly religious woman. I loved my siblings, and they mostly took good care of me, though they couldn’t keep their hands off my food. In Ghana, it’s the grown-ups who get the biggest and best portions, and the littlest who have to fend for themselves. The minute I’d turn my back, someone would dive-bomb my plate and steal the one piece of meat I had on it. I had to hunch over my plate if I wanted to eat anything without scavengers. It wasn’t just at home, either. If we were at the beach, it was open season on my ice cream. Luther was the worst of them all.
There were exceptions to my father’s perpetual scowl. Sometimes he’d come home with a few friends for beer or palm wine – the fizzy, sweet homebrew served just about everywhere in West Africa. He’d be in a good mood, possibly induced by whatever was in his glass, and would send for Luther and Kenneth to come out and dance. They’d bop around to a few songs – everybody listened to American music back then, in our house mostly soul and R&B and jazz – till he’d excuse them and back to bed they’d go. At least he was laughing.
Crosby, Kenneth and Luther all loved to play football, which they’d do almost without fail every day when they were together. But then someone would get wind that our father was on his way home and they’d rush back in to clean the red-clay dirt off their feet and legs before he walked through the door and caught them out for the crime of kicking a ball around. He reserved his sweetness for Mina, of whom he was very protective. She was the only one of us kids who got a ride to and from school in his car when she was younger – she suspects because by picking her up as soon as class let out, she couldn’t get into trouble. And later on, the truest apple of his eye was our sister Akua, whose stubborn tenacity rivals his. (Before I put aside all freelance work to become editor of Vogue, Akua was my agent. I picked her for a reason.) But to us boys, he rarely had a nice word to say.
Some of my father’s rigour is simply cultural. African families are often a lot larger than typical Western nuclear families, and so being able to establish discipline and respect for authority can be a survival skill for parents. But he was our biggest source of fear as kids, and the rejection I felt in particular, because I was shy and more artistic and sensitive than my brothers, would keep us from developing any kind of an affectionate connection until much later in life. It wasn’t just that I felt he didn’t understand me; I felt he actively disdained me.
Some of my father’s rigour is simply cultural. African families are often a lot larger than typical Western nuclear families, and so being able to establish discipline and respect for authority can be a survival skill for parents. But he was our biggest source of fear as kids, and the rejection I felt in particular, because I was shy and more artistic and sensitive than my brothers, would keep us from developing any kind of an affectionate connection until much later in life. It wasn’t just that I felt he didn’t understand me; I felt he actively disdained me.
My mother eventually tired of life at Burma Camp. She almost certainly tired of death at Burma Camp as well. The sound of executions happening like clockwork weigh heavily when you know what it means. There was another change of government soon in the offing, and perhaps the ongoing reminder of how fluid political favour could be finally wore her down. She wasn’t going to be like the other military families who packed up and moved all the time, either. The military might have been how her husband found his way in the world, but thanks to her talent and ingenuity, she could take more control over our family matters. With her business, she could give us a greater level of stability than would have been possible if my father had been the sole breadwinner. So when I was eight, the family moved off base into a pair of the largest seaport town in Ghana.
At Burma Camp we were spread out over five bedrooms, and still my father would complain about the noise. Now we would all be squeezed into two, in the first house there. Ceiling fans rotated endlessly to clear the crushing humidity in the simple, sparsely furnished living room. A television was what counted for décor. Despite what I do for a living, the apartment I share today with Ale bears a similar asceticism. I have the same aversion to excessive home décor as my parents. (Mina does too.) For all the truly unbelievable pictures I’ve been part of creating over the years, most of those that I’ve kept and framed are still leaning stacked up against the walls because I just don’t want that much visual distraction. (I will confess that my Time cover was framed and hung on the wall in record time. And I have a few other photos from collaborators like Steven Meisel, Juergen Teller, Emma Summerton and Craig McDean. And sure, when Beyoncé sent me a framed print of her British Vogue cover, there was a space over my dining table for that one.) As soon as I was able to move out of flatshares into my own place, I’ve opted for calm.
Where I’m from it’s normal for four kids to share abedroom, and everyone sleeps on straw mats on the floor, as we did in one of the two bedrooms in our family house in Tema. I loved that way of sleeping, and felt so safe. Our grandmother, whom my mother had by then convinced to leave Brakwa to come help take care of us, had the other bedroom. One of its walls was stacked high with suitcases that held all of our stuff. I adored my grandmother, who would cook us anything we asked for on demand. We weren’t overflowing with toys, though our mother’s older sister, Aunt Bertha, would sometimes refresh our supply. She was strict and demanding and scary, with a temperament a little more like my father’s than my mother’s, but she worked in the customs office where she was the frequent recipient of favours (small bribes, one imagines). Sometimes she’d pass them along to us.
I was more interested in books. If Crosby, and later Luther, turned us all on to music, already by that age, I was the family librarian. Having already read everything in the house, I’d borrow whatever I could from friends at school, read it as fast as I could and then circulate to the rest of my siblings so they could do the same. In Ghana, there was no TV until six o’clock at night, at which point we were supposed to be doing homework, so reading was a much bigger part of our entertainment than I’d imagine it was for middle-class kids in the West. I could get into almost anything, from Snow White to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to Ian Fleming and, later, the thriller writer James Hadley Chase. I was a precocious student and always found the time.
But as much as I loved books, I loved clothes even more. When Luther would come home from boarding school for holidays, and his smart school uniform of white shirts and shorts would be washed and made crisp again, I’d be the first person to get at them. I had to look sharp, as I was my mother’s chief assistant.
The other house in Tema was my mother’s atelier. By then she had a serious dressmaking business, with thirty to forty seamstresses working under her at any given time. While my father never wore a colour or pattern in his life, the clothes my mother made were fabulous, combining Western fabrics and traditional West African wax cotton prints in riotous colours with an enormous variety of styles. She had a flair for drama and volume, with peplums and bell sleeves. Her tailoring was precise. West African women’s clothing is typically quite structured, built to hug and flatter curves, and my mother mastered it.
She made dresses and suits for actresses, society ladies and wives of diplomats and heads of state. From 1972 to 1978, before he too was deposed in a coup, the president was Ignatius Acheampong, and his wife was one of my mother’s favourite clients. I’d go with her for fittings to the presidential palace, with its high stone walls and air conditioner blasting. She liked my help, as I knew how to keep quiet and behave. And she liked that I took an interest in what she did. She had notebooks filled with sketches, and she’d also often work on loose-leaf paper, dividing one sheet into nine squares, drawing a different look inside each. I’d imitate her all the time, and still do today when I’m brainstorming an editorial of multiple pages, grabbing a sheet of paper and drawing those same nine squares.
I clung to my mother’s skirts as a child, and as I got older, I still spent as much time as I could in her workshop. That’s one place I discovered how fashion really works. My mother was
discreet with her clients, quiet and shy. She’d show them fabrics and take their measurements and together they’d decide on an idea. She was incredibly focused on running her business, but she was also dreamy, and often somewhe e else in spirit. (I’ll never forget one time when, tagging along with her in London in our old neighbourhood of Lad roke Grove, she just started walking
out into traffic. I had to pull her back from getting hit by a car.) When her clients came in for their fittings, or when she’d go to their homes, I’d be there, just as silent and serious, to help my mother zip them in. I learned how to fasten a hook and eye without pawing someone, and how clothing works technically on a woman’s body. I saw from my mother’s example how to talk to women about clothes and work with them to come to new ideas. I learned to recognise the expression on a woman’s face when she turns to look at herself in a new dress and finds what she sees really beautiful. And also how she knows when it’s not quite right. You can imagine how this has come in handy as a stylist. These days, Rihanna or Taylor Swift need only move a millimetre of their faces for me to know if it’s love or hate.
I was transported by the whole experience of the workshop: the colours, the fabrics, the loving attention of my mother and her staff. It lit up my imagination. I’d sit under my mother’s cutting table, surrounded by scraps of wax fabric, and fill my own notebooks with ladies in elaborate dresses like she did. I’d show them to the seamstresses and they would pat my head and compliment me, ‘This one is so good, Asiamah! Look at that sleeve!’ Then someone would warn me that my father was coming, and I’d have to hide everything. He hated my drawings and hated that I wanted to draw. The same notebooks I filled with flights of fancy, so full of enthusiasm, I’d then burn so he wouldn’t ever find them. It was unfair. I loved glamour and women and their style and was drawn to them instinctively. I never imagined then that I’d make a career out of fashion – it never occurred to me until I was much older that it was even a possibility. But what was wrong with being inspired, especially by something that brought my mother so much success? What’s good for the goose was not good for the gander, as far as my father was concerned. Creative careers were for women, apparently. The Enninful boys would be doctors and lawyers: respectable, distinguished, cerebral, credentialled, dull.
In Tema, one of my aunts had a hair salon called Dolly Dots. It was in the Meridian Hotel, which was brand new at the time, in a neighbourhood called Community One. The Communities of Tema are kind of like tiny boroughs. We lived in Community Two, which wasn’t remarkable one way or another: rows of little square houses, kids playing in the street, stray dogs and cats here and there, just to keep things interesting. Community Six was where the rich people lived, in big mansions with tropical gardens. Community One was just being constructed then, and I would trek through fields of tall grass to find the hotel. Today it’s squalid, but when it was new, the Meridian was incredibly posh to my young eyes. Dolly Dots was a tiny slice of a space in the lobby, painted black, with mirrors and colour photographs of chic Black hair looks and standalone hair dryers and ladies just waiting to be transformed. If I wasn’t in my mother’s atelier after school, much of the time I was here. I’d show up all by myself in the lobby and head straight in.
I loved my aunt, and I felt totally at home in that very female space, but I wasn’t there for the hair. I was there for the magazines. Every month she would have Ebony, Jet and Time
delivered. It was a big deal in Ghana to get American magazines. I’d devour the photos of Diana Ross and Jayne Kennedy and Donna Summer and the Somali model Iman. All these fabulous Black goddesses in fantasy settings, or in career looks, or on the beach, their eyes fixed on the camera. I felt their eyes connect with mine, like they were looking right at me. I would sketch them in asymmetrical off-the-shoulder dresses, teased hair and a block heel.
A small aside on the risks inherent in meeting your heroines: years later I would go on to work with one of the great Black divas, whom I had been dreaming about in some way or other my whole life, for an advertising job for a big cosmetics company, in New York. I had used all my resources and favours to pull pieces from all over the world so that she might be impressed by the professionalism of me, the Black stylist from London. I wanted it to be perfect for her. Preparation is the key to styling, and I thought I had turned it out. This superstar arrived at the studio, I introduced myself and walked her over to a room with twelve racks of dresses and tables of accessories ready to be loved Through her sunglasses, she scanned the room from the doorway, declared, ‘I hate everything,’ and walked off. (I know you’re dying for me to say who this woman is, but I believe stylists should have confidentiality codes as rigid as doctors do. And in general, I don’t believe in trashing people in public forums.) Counterpoint: At around the same time, I also got to work with Iman for the first time, on an advertising job for Tommy Hilfiger, with her husband David Bowie. They were both huge influences on me, and were radiant and generous and a joy to work with. To see how they made each other laugh will stay with me for ever.
When I could, I’d bring the magazines home like precious jewels to share with my siblings. Later on in life, after I started working for i-D, more of my siblings ended up working in fashion – Mina was scouted by a model agent when she was away at university in Calgary, Luther went to cordwainers’ school and worked with me a bit in my earliest days as a stylist, and Akua went on to become not just my agent, but one for other prominent stylists and photographers too. Though Akua and I were the only ones to really stick with it, I like to think of us as a small tribe, our sensitivity to clothes and style moulded by our mother. I never really felt myself as a family leader, though I suppose I was.
In 1978, President Acheampong, who himself came to power in a coup, was overthrown in another coup by Frederick Akuffo, the head of his armed forces. Less than a year later, Jerry Rawlings, an Air Force lieutenant with a reformer’s streak, overthrew Akuffo, who was promptly executed. Corruption has been an issue in the country since before the Gold Coast became Ghana, and banging on about it was an easy way for populist leaders like Rawlings to gain support. For two years, a politically moderate civilian government was in charge, and then Rawlings made another move and took over as head of the country in 1981.
It started to become clear, little by little, that it wasn’t safe for us. With so many coups, people naturally belonged to different political families, and our family was not part of Rawlings’s. That was enough. A cousin of my father’s, Colonel Joseph Enninful, had presided over the military trial in 1979 that convicted Rawlings of mutiny. Rawlings escaped justice, and a few months later, some of his supporters came to Joseph Enninful’s house and shot him and his wife dead at the breakfast table. Someone called our house when it happened. At first we thought they were taking about our father, and we were terrified until we heard from him. Around the same time, the fathers of two of Mina’s friends at school were executed. Suddenly, we weren’t allowed to play outside as much and had to be home a lot more often. I was petrified to leave the house anyway, and entertained myself in my little world in the atelier. Trips to Dolly Dots were now out of the question. It was hell on the older kids too. Anyone who was seen to be living too well was suddenly under suspicion. There was tension in the air that turned into something scarier. Nobody knew any more who was friendly and who wasn’t when you passed them in the street. Images of my father getting marched up the hill at Burma Camp plagued me.
As my childhood freedom became locked down, it was my turn to go to boarding school. Even if the country was reeling, people clung to anything that felt normal. I hated the idea of leaving my mother and the atelier, but at least I’d catch a break from my father’s aggressive manner. In Ghana, kids from middle-class families are typically sent to boarding school at fourteen. As I had skipped a couple grades, I was only twelve when I enrolled in Adisadel College, where Kenneth was already attending. It was – still is – a prestigious boys’ school. Ghana has always had a strong, serious academic culture, and earning a place at Adisadel, one of the top ten boys’ schools in all of Africa, was proof you could be elite. It had a sprawling campus on Cape Coast, about four and a half hours away from Tema by car, with ten student houses around which social life was organised, like the British public schools after which it was modelled. Modelled, but with a Ghanaian touch: ivy doesn’t grow in Equatorial Africa. Our dormitories were whitewashed stucco blocks on stilts, unadorned and functional. While we wore white dress shirts, black shorts and black-and-white- striped ties during the week, or black-and-white-striped, short- sleeved dress shirts on Sundays and for ceremonial occasions, students would also don white collarless cotton shirts and drape themselves in togas made of vibrant Kente cloth. Adisadel’s original name was St Nicholas, and so we students were known as the Santaclausians. ‘Play up! Play up Santaclausians!’ went the cheer we were encouraged to sing during inter-house football matches, not that I went to many. I preferred track and field, and ran the 100-metre dash. It was tension back in the big city.
Ghanaian schools are rigorous and disciplinarian. It’s not uncommon for primary-school kids to get the strap. But throw a bunch of boys together and no matter what, you’re going to get hijinks. At Adisadel we slept on squeaky iron beds in big open rooms, so if someone was getting up at night to sneak around, everybody heard it. There was a lot of hazing. As I was younger and shy, I was a prime candidate for harassment. I only escaped it due to Kenneth, who was older, wiser, and most importantly, very, very popular. I’d eat my porridge in the morning with the rest of the kids, and do my schoolwork in peace.
Because I was away from home, I was even more removed from the danger that faced my family. The situation simmered until it exploded, and my father suddenly said goodbye and left for England. At first I thought he had simply abandoned us, because I didn’t understand the bigger picture and no one talked to kids about that kind of stuff. His departure seemed like a punk move, but I had such a low opinion of the man that I just rolled my eyes and found another reason to curse him. One day when I was home on a break a few weeks later, the road to the presidential palace was overrun. Then, maybe two months after that, Kenneth and I came home from school and all the other kids were jumping around, excited. ‘We’re going to London!’ London? Where all the pop stars I had read about came from? Amazing!
London was the place everyone wanted to be. There was a kind of reverence around it, to the point that one summer a few years before, when Kenneth and I went to stay with a family friend for a month, we were barred from sitting at the dinner table with some other guests who had just come from London. They were that special.
My mother needed to stay behind to wrap things up with her business, so it fell to my brother Crosby to get us organised for the trip. If she was worried for herself, or for us, she didn’t show it. She was busy but kept cool and calm, one imagines, for us. We got all dressed up for the journey, in traditional African dress clothes: tunics over long pants for the boys and a wax-print dress for Akua. (By this time, Mina was already attending university in Calgary.) We packed as much as we could as quickly as we could and headed for the airport, with my mother treating it like a big adventure for us.
In the time between when my father left Ghana and we met him in London, he was put up in a little residence in Lancaster Gate, not far from where Alec and I live now, and worked to ensure us safe passage. Applying for asylum in the United Kingdom takes a long time, but apparently it was bad enough in Ghana that we couldn’t wait, so my first trip on a plane was under conditions far more harrowing than I really knew. We took Ghana Airways, all seated together in a row, a bit forward from the smoking section. All I really remember was thinking the aeroplane was cool, and helping to keep Akua, who was just seven, entertained. When we finally arrived at Gatwick Airport, we were detained for hours, all together, as they checked our papers.
There was a big problem: we didn’t have any. As members of the British Commonwealth, Ghanaians didn’t need visas to travel to the United Kingdom until just before our journey, when Margaret Thatcher changed the rules. Because the rule change was recent, we were able to get out of the country without everything in order, but upon arriving in the UK, all together like the West African Jackson Five with baby Janet, we were stuck until our father could come out on the train to present what paperwork he had.
During all the waiting and the nervousness and the not knowing what was going to happen, they fed us dinner–for some reason it was turkey, and it wasn’t terrible, even if it wasn’t how we were used to eating it back home. As we ate this weird food, and gawked, and poked each other, and whispered, my brothers and I were struck over and over by how strange it was.
Oh my God, we said to each other. It’s all white people.
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