When We Were We
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Kwame utters un-Ghanaian things like “sweet as a chocha” and “my plates are killing me.” They are from a mixed bag of international slang he uses to pepper his conversations. No one is able to place him with ease. Whenever I confront him about his language, he says, “I’m a Ghanaian so everything I say is fucking Ghanaian,” and I say, “See what I mean? You can’t say the f-word casually like that. My mother would slap you. Your own mother would slap you.”
“Well, we are not going to see them, are we?” He holds my gaze.
Last week, I told him I’ve been thinking of going home. I’m tired of cold London mornings; of sweeping streets from 5am, having to negotiate with tramps who call me f-ing immigrant or nigger as I collect empty beer cans around them; then the lifting and shifting job—where Harry compliments me on my English and says, “I’m not being funny, yeah, but do you have a big dick?”—until 2pm; four hours sleep, then cooking, eating, and studying for a degree I already have under a different name; and a short nap before the shelf-stacking gig from 1-4am.
“Really?” he said, and went back to playing that FIFA football game on his Playstation.
Kwame, unlike me, has decided not to study. He met a girl who worked at a market research call center while clubbing in Essex. Three days later, he left our shelf-stacking job at Iceland to go and work at the call center. He is a shift manager now. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays—days when I don’t do lifting and shifting—I come in at 7:30am to change for uni and find him still sleeping beneath the large map of Zimbabwe that graces the wall of his day bedroom. He seems content with life.
We are not the kind of Africans who cross the Sahara and traverse an ocean in some tricky vessel to get to Europe. We are too well educated for that, but we know several Sahara-crossing Africans. One of our friends, Manu, from Benin, came to the United Kingdom from Italy, complete with Sicilian gestures, fleeing—he claims—a family whose daughter he impregnated. He met her in a club where he worked at the bar and did security on weekends. We met him at our local pub, The Duke of Wellington. When we ask if the family is a Mafia family he says he doesn’t think so. He insists he is a responsible Muslim man so he sends money for the child by Western Union; the money is collected on the Piazza Vittorio Veneto on the fifth day of every month, without fail. “The boy is also called Vittorio,” he informs us with a smile. Manu is in London with no problems because he has an Italian passport, but we still have problems.
Kwame and I knew exactly where we wanted to go when we decided to leave Ghana. From what we had been told, what we had read in the brochures at the British Council, from what we could glean from films, London was occasionally rough (Lock, Stock and [End Page 1107] Two Smoking Barrels), but nevertheless a place of unbelievable opportunity (My Fair Lady, Love Actually). We spoke the language, we worked hard, we had good degrees, so that’s where we were going.
When we were refused visas the first time and the British High Commission kept our money, we were bitter for weeks, months, until our friend Hakeem said, “Why are you worried? Just get new passports and apply again. Learn from your mistakes. A birth certificate costs about nothing to get.”
He was right. Any details changed on a birth certificate make you a new person.
Kwame applied for a one-year visa although he only had an interview for a Masters in Psychology. Naive. I didn’t have enough money in my account to prove that I could fend for myself over my proposed six-week holiday. I calculated my costs based on Naked. It...
