Somewhere there exists a picture of me the summer I turned 11 in front of a herd of longhorn. I was being run around, through and almost over by a stampede. Unlike Mufasa from the lion king, I survived to tell the tale by standing perfectly still. Also they were moving slowly, while my mother (or her boyfriend Oscar) took the snapshot. I’ve seen the old picture somewhere in their massive, though stuffed, house in Boston many years later. I looked scared. But at the time, my parents saw a great photo op.
The photo shows a tall skinny girl with long frizzy blond hair that was braided down my back. My terrified blue eyes topped off the American outfit of T-shirt and shorts which showed my skinny legs, but not my budding woman’s figure. I was just starting my adolescent growth spurt, so it shamed me greatly that people often took me for a boy since I didn’t have pierced ears. Girls always had pierced ears!
The day of the photo was a brutally hot day in Accra, Ghana under the fierce sun of 1972, but every day was brutally hot then, so that detail doesn’t narrow it down any. In fact, it was the sun that injured me that day not the longhorns. We often went for a walk around our colonial style Lagos university housing, along Crescent Avenue, with its royal palm trees bigger waving and bowing to the sun. In about 15 minutes I would go from being a “brooney”- meaning whitey – this term was shouted after me constantly as a term of endearment, abuse, and just random interest – to being a “brooney coco” – meaning “burnt whitey”. My mom’s boyfriend, being a black American, didn’t think of sunblock (if it even existed at that time). And my mom, being in love, didn’t care. Soon, I learned, we all did, to only go out the first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon, when the sun was less lethal.
Come to think of it; I bet we were actually in Cape Coast the day of the stampede …. Why would a herd of longhorn steer pass by our little Accra cul-de-sac? Our street was called ‘the folly’ for some colonial reason, maybe because it didn’t go anywhere, so it would have been folly indeed to herd cattle there. Instead, the cattle would have been being taken to market through the suburban university housing we stayed at for a month at the University of Cape Coast with our students from Buffalo, NY that summer. Or maybe the herdsmen, were just taking advantage of our green lawns in Cape Coast to fatten ‘the doggies’ up.
When the man at the back of the herd saw me, after the herd of steer – 50 strong – had passed, he had the same moment of panic that my mom had caught on my face in this picture. Being in trouble with broonies would not necessarily be a good idea in his mind. So soon after colonialism Africans were still scared of Europeans. Maybe they still are.
We all laughed to ease the tension and I never let myself cry. I was way too grown up for that after all. My little sister was really laughing hard – that remains her go to stress response to this day. And she was probably calling me stupid for getting caught out. She was turning 7 so she was too stupid to be afraid. I felt smart for having known to stand perfectly still – maybe my mom (who had done rodeos in her youth) told me to. Oscar said they had got a good picture. The longhorns and their cowboy just kept on going.
The View from a Broad 