It's an odd journey, one that has to be ready to accommodate both the lovely, and the ugly. To seek to only glorify one's family's past would be to set off on a journey where decaying tree stumps are not regarded as part of the landscape, only newly blossoming flowers or lush vegetation. That is not an option for me, especially as I already know before I start that Akus had peculiar elitist notions and practices; that they were mocked for not being African enough, and obviously not English - yet putting on Western airs. So, regardless of their belief in education as a means of self-development, there's enough murkiness there which is disagreeable.
It's also the perfect year to begin to question this past - my personal history is entwined with that of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and I'm trying to only look back around 200 years, which seems but a wrinkle in my historical fabric. Due to recent publication of my book, I now meet many more people, at book signings and such, incidental people who I likely will never meet again, who ask me questions. Hard questions. Unanswerable questions. And I deliver fudged answers.
Why do you have a name like yours? I'd never have questionned it - everyone else who is Aku, in the Gambia, has a similar mix of names - its normal. In Kenya, people often change it round, because for most people here, the English sounding name is the first name, and the African name always comes second. Nigerians always want to know why the Yoruba name, and how come it exists in The Gambia. It begets the question - why do Akus exist at all?
I've been dredging up my ragged bits of information. Oh, we are a mix of liberated slaves who went back to Sierra Leone and were brought over to The Gambia by the British to be administrators during the colonial era. We mixed with Africans who were liberated before being sold into slavery, and of all the cultures, Yoruba was the nt one, and therefore that's how we have this mix - of English with a dash of Yoruba words and Yoruba cultural practices. Depending on who I'm talking to, I might also need to explain that we have words like egugu, omole, ashoibi, omo, yawo - and that we pour libations to the (or at least used to when I was young). I whip up odd bits of knowledge and season with snippets from long forgotten conversations or books. It has been argued that Krio is a language - because it has idiomatic expressions and a grammar.
But there are more questions than answers.
- I know that we are third generation Gambian on my mother's side, but what about my father's? When did the Forsters turn up?
- Who came on the boats, with immaculate records that can still be found in the Gambia's National Archives?
- What is the link to Nova Scotia that I've heard mentioned?
- Why are we called Akus in The Gambia, but describe ourselves and our language as Krio?
During one of our family holidays back home, I was chatting with a Gambian historian, Florence Mahoney, about us - the Akus, how we came to be - when we had our last family holiday. And she told me that:
- the Aku community was influential in pressing the case for independence
- during colonial rule, they routinely wrote to English newspapers to press their case
- they clubbed together money to pay for one of their own to go and learn English law
- apprentices sometimes took on the names of the merchants they were being trained under and that's how we got names like Mahoney, and Forster
- We are called Aku from a Yoruba greeting
- Akus have certainly been there longer than the 4 generations I had in mind
- In the 1830s, excess liberated africans from Freetown were resettled in The Gambia
- That these Africans came from all over - not just the Yoruba link I know, but also Igbo, Hausa, Moko (Cameroun), Popo (Dahomey) and Congo.
- Bathurst was founded after abolition, to enforce the new law
I find a book on the internet called A Political History of The Gambia, Hughes and Perfect, published in 2006, and the title of chapter 4 is Patrician politics in the era of the Forsters 1886-1941. That's a hell of a long time to be influential. So, which Forster? Having discovered from the oldest living Forster that my father's particular branch is illegitimate offspring, a son of an only slightly acknowledged , where does that leave me? Where does my history fit?
I find references to other books - the Krio of Sierra Leone by Akintola J G Wyse, that I will need to get a hold of. And it mentions 'Aku', but in Sierra Leone, so does that mean it wasn't just Gambian usage? Another chain of questions starts. I'd also need to get A History of the Gambia, which seems to include quite a bit about Aku history, by Gray.
Where will I get these from? At some point, I'll probably try to find the Nairobi University's African Studies department and see what's available. But for now, its me, sitting at my desk, on the internet, probing, searching. First stop, Amazon. Amazingly it has several of these available second hand. And Columbia University has them all, catalogued as appropriate - not checked out, kept off-site. I try the British Library and discover even more wonder - they have a system called Secure Electronic Delivery, which may be able to deliver a copy of my requested document to my inbox. At a fee of course. It all starts to seem doable.
And I can, at last, start a blog about something I care about.
