Setting Sail for ‘Home’

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Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A New Chapter for African Artefacts?. Buy the issue here.

As the day of departure approached, the excitement and tension in our house had been building to unbearable heights as arrangements were made, suitcases packed and checked for the return home. My father, Alpha Kanji, had been called to the Bar and my mother, Eugenia Ayodele, had qualified as a nurse. They regaled us with their stories of home and their dreams of returning to take part in the building of their nation. We felt like pioneers, explorers even, as we set out on that momentous journey.

My parents, in their wisdom, had given me the names Adeyemi, Olusegun and Abioseh, all Yoruba names, pointing to theirs and our connection to roots in Abeokuta, Nigeria. This was so on the side of both my maternal grandparent and my paternal grandmother. My paternal grandfather was Mandinka, a story in itself. Later in life, I came to believe choosing these names was part of my parents’ plan to make sure I connected to home, my roots, and could fit in. The return was always planned.

On the day we left, I could already imagine encountering pirates on the high seas and being called upon to thwart those rogues’ plans and rescue the entire ship through my cunning. I said goodbye to my neighbours, the other children I’d played in the park with and wondered whether I’d find friends as exciting when we arrived in Sierra Leone. For as long as I could remember, I had always immersed myself in books, magazines and comics. In fact, there was not a boys’ comic worthy of the name that I did not read. They were full of tales of adventure and derring-do. It was a major disappointment to me that we completed the journey without once running into modern-day pirates. I never got the chance to outwit those bandits of the high seas and save everybody, to properly exercise my learnings and realize my whimsy. I managed to keep my disappointment to myself...