Then one day I happened to pick up Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, the subject of one of Carey Francis’s talks. It may not have been a thriller or a detective novel, but the story of Pastor Stephen Kumalo going into the city to look for his sister Gertrude and his own prodigal son, Absalom, could just as easily have unfolded in Kenya. The theme reminded me of the plot line in Kenneth’s unfinished book. I even wondered if Alan Paton was black: how else could he capture so well the tone and the imagery of African speech? Cry, the Beloved Country whetted my appetite for books that reflected my social reality, but the library did not meet my needs. On further search, I found several copies of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. It was my first autobiography. The similarities between the situation in the nineteenth-century American South and Kenya were eerily captured in Washington’s story.

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

The girls who picked on me were neither persuaded nor deterred by my recitation of this history. But my father was right on one count: their words no longer pierced my skin. When they approached me, I stuck my nose in the air imperiously and walked in the opposite direction. To their insults, I did not respond. I acted as though they did not exist.

My father continued to teach me about Ghanaian history after discovering that the entire continent of Africa was excluded from my world history textbook, except for Egypt. And the illustrations of ancient Egyptians in the book made them look decidedly European. “Nonsense,” my father said.

This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.