![]() ![]() “Be careful don’t let them see you staring.” ![]() “Take a good look at his face,” she quietly urged her friend. “Except for that one,” the first observed. ![]() “And look at them!” said her friend, “They look almost the same.” “Beats me,” one genuinely shocked female student remarked to another. The three Africans were the real thing, the raw ones - and who hadn’t heard of all those wild, weird stories about Africa? How did they make it to Germany anyway? Wasn’t Lauterbach too cold for them? The black Americans were second hand Africans. Blacks though both black Americans and Africans were, it seemed to her that there was something peculiar in the demeanor of the Africans. Ursula went on to encounter many more Black American soldiers after the war, but this was the first time she had seen Africans so, while she didn’t stare, she stole glances. Certain incidents in life entrenched themselves in one’s memory, no matter how young one was at the time. She was only four when it happened: the episode with the Black American soldier who stormed their doorsteps in Wiesbaden. Several of the German students, who had never set eyes on a black person before, stared at the three Africans in awe. They could have come from America or Britain or France, but everyone knew they were Africans because they were already aware that a group of African students, sponsored by their various governments, had enrolled in the school under a special program with the West German government to receive training in various aspects of the textiles industry. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest. Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. The students, old and new, were assembled in the auditorium, waiting for the School Director. All three are in Ania’s apartment in Hamburg. Ursula, (Mutti), and the older twin Nadia, refused to. The younger of the twins, Ania, is travelling to Ghana to grant Jofri this wish. An old, retired, sick and dying Jofri seeks to reconnect with his estranged ex-wife and twin daughters. Their twin girls live their first eleven years with their father in Ghana and thereafter join their mother in (West) Germany.Īfter the Prologue, the story moves to 1999. They marry after their studies, settle in Ghana and have twin girls. He and a fellow student, the pretty, young German woman Ursula, meet and fall in love. Jofri, a young man from Ghana is on scholarship to study at the (then) renowned Textiles Institute in the small (West) German town of Lauterbach. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |