Summary
Sissie is a bit concerned that going to London is a weakness, but tells herself it is the only way to get people at home to understand where she has been in her travels. Germany, the U.S., and France are also overseas, of course, but they’re different from England.
What first surprises Sissie about England is how many Black people are there. It surprises her that they all stay given how wretched their lives are. Most men and women claim they’re students, but they’d been students ever since they went there. There were scholarship students, yes, but they were basically “the recipients of the leftovers of imperial handouts” (86).
The narrator sneers that for a few pennies and then the receipt of a doctoral degree, the students would tell the imperialists about the people, their history, their mind (without internalizing any radical ideas, of course). It is a familiar tale of the “oppressed multitudes” from the colony rushing to the imperial seat because they think they’ll find salvation there, but instead all they find at the center is “worse slavery” (88).
Sissie notices how poorly they’re all dressed, especially the women. At least against the black skin the motley raiments and cheap shoes look better than they would against white, but it still makes her sad and she wants to cry. Then, however, she becomes angry and rages at whatever drives her people from their warm homes to these cold climes to suffer. She wonders why they do not tell the truth back home, these “ghosts of the humans that they used to be” (89), these “been-tos” (90).
Sissie is planning to meet a Ghanian friend who had asked her to his dingy hotel on the fringes of the West End. She muses on meeting Scottish and Irish people in London, and the narrator adds that these people often try to say they have a lot in common with her. Sissie is skeptical about this, and especially does not think this is true for her German-born American Professor in Humanities who claims hotly and extravagantly that it is oppression that binds the Germans, Irish, and Africans together. Sissie was astonished by this and could not even think to ask about Buchenwald and Dachau as he foamed at the mouth about how Germans had been oppressed since the First World War.
When Sissie meets up with her friend, she sees that he is already with another person, a relative of his named Kunle, who has lived in London for seven years. Instead of talking about the war in Nigeria, they discuss the Heart Transplant, a triumphant victory for science by the Christian Doctor. What happened was this: a white man in South Africa was dying and received the heart of a Black man. The Black man had collapsed on the beach and apparently did not respond to resuscitation, so his heart was taken out and given to the white man. Kunle thinks this is wonderful news but Sissie is not sure. She wants to ask why but knows she must tread lightly since “We are in the region of / SCIENCE” (96) and she knows people think she is just a little village girl who does not understand anything.
Sissie and her friend finally do ask Kunle why he is excited and he proclaims that it will solve the Colour Problem. They ask if he has thought about whose hearts were used in all the trials before this successful transplant, and he shrugs that it must have been dogs and cats. They are angry, and reply that this was not the case.
Sissie’s mind swirls through numerous thoughts, such as how in some places animals are treated like humans and humans like animals, how the Christian Doctor himself said the hearts of Black people are easy to come by because they just fight with each other all the time and kill each other.
Kunle sits serenely and sincerely convinced of his vision, which Sissie finds unconvincing: “that cleaning the Baas’s chest of its rotten heart and plugging in a brand-new, palpitatingly warm kaffirheart, is the surest way to user in the Kaffirmillenium” (101).
The narrator intones that the dying white man is now dead, having lived for a year with the Black man’s heart. The Christian Doctor was the only one who did well, making money and getting a new wife; the rest is just a “veritable catalogue of / Death and just plain / Heartbreak” (102). The Dying White Man’s Black neighbors carry passports, do backbreaking work, are tortured, decay, and die.
She continues that Kunle also dies, killed by the car that he had waited for. First, she gives haunting excerpts from African family members back home, writing to their loved ones abroad and telling them things are bad but that they are not complaining and are proud they have family overseas. Kunle’s mother writes to Kunle of the family’s troubles, but says she is not begging; she knows Kunle himself needs money. Kunle wishes he was cowardly enough to stay in England forever, but also knows that back home people would be thrilled to talk to him knowing he’d been abroad, and he would be part of the “elite.” So he returns home, where he decides he must have a car. He had driven cars for people in England and now thinks that since he is elite, he has to have someone drive him around in the car. His new chauffeur gets in a terrible accident though, and Kunle is burned to death in the wreckage. The narrator says wryly that this is a loss especially for the poor Christian Doctor, who would have loved to have Kunle’s heart (and Kunle would have loved to give it to him). She sighs that Black people die so uselessly.
Analysis
Sissie arrives in London, which she knows Africans consider to be a far different and more special place than others in Europe. Why that is is unclear to her though, as she immediately notices how the Black and Brown people in London “appeared to be so wretched” (85) that she could not fathom why they stayed. No matter how much she talked to people, she could not quite figure it out. They were “students,” but that word seemed loosely applied. They were “the recipients of the leftovers of colonial handouts” (86) who worked hard and gave too much of themselves away for too low a cost. They were deluded, for it was a tale as old as time that the “Oppressed multitudes from the provinces rush to the imperial seat because that is where they know all salvation comes from” (87).
Increasingly attuned to the experiences of women in particular, Sissie notices that they are the worst off. They are poorly clothed, their pitiful appearance contradicted by the fact that Sissie knew at home they’d be “dignified matrons” (88) or pretty young girls. Sissie’s sorrow at what she observes is soon turned into anger. She is more and more hostile to the “been-tos”, who pretended to like the food and culture of Europe, who if they went back home were “ghosts of the humans they used to be” (89). She is also angry at others who compare their situations to those of Africans, such as a professor who tells her Germans, Irish, and Africans were all the same. His ridiculous assertions made her realize “we are a joke. Us over here” (94).
It is this heightened anger and consciousness about the postcolonial state of things that Sissie brings to the conversation with Kunle, one of the most important episodes of the book. Kunle is a Ghanian who’s been living abroad for over seven years. He is besotted—or bamboozled–by the prestige and power of Europe, and dismisses his own people in favor of promulgating the Christian Doctor who carried out the Heart Transplant to save the Dying White Man by using the heart of a Black man. Sissie and her friend listen incredulously to Kunle, and Sissie actually feels a sense of relief that she can see Kunle for what he is (though she also rues that “Her half normal self regretted her inability to share Kunle’s vision even then” [101]).
It is Kunle’s fate that is telling how problematic the been-tos' mindset can be. Kunle was a chauffeur in London to make money and when he went home he decided he had to have a car of his own to show off. But he also refused to drive himself and hired a driver who was not very skilled, which led to an accident that killed Kunle. Megan Behrent observes that “In the end, Kunle, despite having achieved the ultimate symbol of success by studying abroad dies a pointless death and in no way contributes to the improvement of the material conditions in Ghana. The futility of Kunle's death points to the destructive effects that the desire for prestige and a privileged status can have while also shattering the aura of prestige which surrounds 'been-tos.'”
Critic Gay Wilentz suggests that this is an important encounter for Sissie, as for her, "Kunle not only represents the self-exile who values the colonizers' world more than his own, he also represents the 'been-to' who comes home with an exile's consciousness to complain and exploit rather than help build the nation. His identification with the culture of his exile makes him unable to confront the political realities at home. Although he returns to his native land, as Aime Cesaire calls it, he is not willing to sacrifice and utilize his skills to improve conditions…Kunle's death…illustrates the wastefulness of the African elite, both materially and spiritually. But Kunle's attitude also clarifies, for Sissie, the reasons why many others are ‘coward enough’ to remain in England.”
In an interview with the Massachusetts Review, Aidoo acknowledges that the whole situation with the been-tos, nationalism, and neocolonialism is complicated. She explains that “I think that that form of nationalism as evident in the posturings of Africans in the diaspora becomes an excuse, a kind of smokescreen behind which these people lead their lives uninterrupted and still manage to convince themselves that they are still very much in tune with what's going on at home. I consider it dangerous. On the other hand, we are caught in a kind of almost no-win situation. Although I don't believe one should believe in no-win situations; there is nearly always a way out. Against the loud, abrasive, and really empty postures of our people abroad, you can counter or you can sort of look at it against the neo-colonial situation at home which has compelled people to compromise in order to survive. So it's really very difficult. The contemporary situation in Africa is terrifyingly dangerous because we can't see our way through either the issue of living in economic exile, even political exile, and the compromises those who live at home have to make in order to survive, in order not to be considered a threat by those who operate the power machines. Because those of us who are forced to survive outside have to admit that despite exile, we live better at least in terms of the material trappings of life. It's all very confusing.”
