Listen to Your Footsteps

Kojo Baffoe

Description

Kojo Baffoe embodies what it is to be a contemporary African man. Of Ghanaian and German heritage, he was raised in Lesotho and moved to South Africa at the age of 27. Forever curious, Kojo has the enviable ability to simultaneously experience moments intimately and engage people (and their views) sincerely, while remaining detached enough to think through his experiences critically. He has earned a reputation as a thinker, someone who lives outside the box and free of the labels that society seeks to place on us.

Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be ‘a man’.

Sujets

• Memoir
• Philosophie et théologie
• Essays

Informations

• Publié par: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770107816
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘Those who know Kojo would have known what to expect in Listen to Your Footsteps : a deeply personal, authentic and equally intellectual journey of a quintessential African. A storyteller for the ages, every word and anec dote is like being alone with him in a quiet place as he narrates what it takes to be a real man, doting father, loving son, devoted friend and committed partner. Equally at ease in front of and behind a camera and microphone, or reading or writing, I expected him to be able to weave a story. But this was more than a story. It was a tome of a real African life – of love, loss and lessons. His anecdotes of the loss and longing for his mother, the relationship with his father, of his struggles and triumphs as a son, father and husband, of being a man, draw you into a reflection of your own standing and stance in a world that has unresolved issues with what it means to be a man. More than anything, Listen to Your Footsteps is a love story and history lesson. His story. Our story. An elegant and authentic reminder of who we are as a people, Africans and humans, by one of our finest storytellers.’
– THEBE IKALAFENG, founder and principal at Africa Brand Leadership Academy
‘An insightful memoir of Kojo growing up, navigating family and figuring out his contribution to the world that reads as a beautiful ode to his father. With every word he writes there is a sense of responsibility to leave the world better than he found it. A true wordsmith; the landscape of his memories dances on the page.’
– TUMI MORAKE, comedian and author of And then Mama Said
‘“I have lived a thousand lives …” writes Kojo and Listen To Your Footsteps lets you, albeit almost too briefly, in to his youth in Maseru, his struggles with addiction and melancholy, the immense losses that have shaped him into the African man and father he is today, and his relationship with the world around him. The questions Kojo will almost never get answers to – trying to make sense of his identity; his mistakes and achievements; his parenting style; and being under the omnipresent guidance of his father – are laid candidly bare in this absorbing recollection of his life.’
– MELANIE BALA, broadcaster, Metro FM


To my mother and father, Elfi and Frank Baffoe
And to Estelle, Kweku and Ayanna,
All of whom make me want to be the best version of myself.


LISTEN TO YOUR FOOTSTEPS
Reflections & Essays
Kojo Baffoe
MACMILLAN


First published in 2021
by Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19
Northlands
2116
Johannesburg
South Africa
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-780-9
E-ISBN 978-1-77010-781-6
© Kojo Baffoe 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Editing by Sally Hines
Proofreading by Sean Fraser
Design and typesetting by Nyx Design
Cover design by K4
Front cover photograph by Victor Dlamini


‘I am not African because I was born in Africa but because
Africa was born in me.’
– Kwame Nkrumah
‘Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is
to decide forever to have your heart go walking around
outside your body.’
– Elizabeth Stone
‘The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the
same time; not to admonish them, but to be seen never doing
that of which you would admonish them.’
– Plato
‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how .’
– Friedrich Nietzsche
‘The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.’
– Marcus Aurelius



Contents
A story 1
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON 7
MOTHER 59
GROWING UP 75
IDENTITY AND BELONGING 113
CREATIVITY 147
BEING THERE 189
BEING IN THE WORLD 237
Acknowledgements 295




A story
Thes e are stories. My stories. Well, most of them. Some of them may be memories of stories that do not belong to me. A friend once said to me that I have a story for everything. I wanted to tell him, ‘No, I don’t’, but then a story came to mind. And I told him that story. I can’t remember that story, but perhaps it will rear its confusing head somewhere in these pages.
I have been writing words for most of my life. Some of them have been good, usually at the time of writing. Many haven’t, at least when I read over them. The one guarantee is that when enough time has passed between the writing and the reading, I find my writing cringeworthy. I try not to reread my own writing once it has been put out into the world.
My father – you’ll hear me say that a lot – said that when you want to make sense of things, take them out of your head and put them on the page, so I have tried to do this, often. Sometimes, when I am lucky, they have made sense on the page, as they shifted and morphed, or is it as I shifted and morphed?
In the early days, I would sit at the old Amstrad computer – young ones, Google it – in his offices of Baffoe & Associates (Pty) Ltd, while waiting to be dropped off at home after school, and let the words flow, out of my head and onto the blank page on the screen. When it was time to go, I would simply switch off the computer, without saving the file – floppy disks weren’t cheap. My words would float out into whatever ether there was, never to be seen again, until the next time I sat and typed thought without thought.
Eventually, I went old school when it wasn’t old school and wrote on the pages of actual notebooks. I went from long, drawn-out sentences – which I seemed to have returned to in recent years – to shorter sentences, and somewhere along the line they became poems. I reckon every writer has quirks that irritate them about themselves and their writing. Mine is being long-winded with my sentences.
My foray into writing poetry and the role that poetry played in my later life has always been painfully ironic because my relationship with poetry in high school was often rocky. Trying to remember what the teacher said the poet meant by each line, each metaphor, each image, never quite gelled with me, or maybe it was because I never seemed to get out of the poems what was intended. I would be told that the poem was about heartbreak and yet I found it comedic, or satiric, or romantic.
School does have a way of taking the joy out of most things. I studied Shakespeare’s Macbeth for four years in a row and dabbled in some of his other plays, reluctantly. Once out of school, I read the complete works of Shakespeare while fulfilling my duties as a Rotary Exchange Student in Oldenburg, Germany. I still have the collection on my bookshelf. One day I will read them again. Although, getting into the language is another journey in itself. Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but not as cumbersome.
Anyway, I have been writing my whole life. Sometimes I have even been paid for it. Sometimes I have been praised for it. But I have never written a book. I have written poems, articles, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts and long captions on Instagram, but I have never written an actual book.
Yes, I did publish two collections of poetry – in 2004 and 2005 – but, even with those, it has never felt like I have written a proper – whatever that means – book.
When I was heavily involved in Johannesburg’s poetry scene, including running shows, my father asked me why I hadn’t published a poetry collection. The primary obstacle was funds, as there were no publishers interested in publishing poetry, especially my poetry. He offered to pay for the publishing of what was released as Voices in My Head .
Everything was bootstrapped. I typed, edited and laid out the basics. Quick confession. It’s probably better to have someone else edit your writing; there are errors in Voices . A friend shot the cover in the bathroom of the apartment Estelle and I were living in. It is a picture of our faces with fabric stretched over them. We invited some friends and family over to feature on the cover, their payment being supper and wine.
I found a printer, who was happy to print as long as I gave him cash. I found details for the National Library of South Africa and secured an ISBN number for the book. I printed 500 copies, which I sold primarily at open-mic nights. I was consulting at the South African Post Office around the time the book came out, so I published a second, smaller collection called And They Say: Black Men Don’t Write Love Poetry . The intention was to put out a single-themed collection every quarter under the Backpocket Poetry Series umbrella. Short, small enough to fit in your back pocket and filled with poems on love, I paid for the printing myself. Another 500 copies. I was also able to self-fund the book launch, at which my father was the guest of honour.
Poetry has never been a best-selling genre. Most poets have other jobs, particularly in my lifetime, and I realised that, unless they knew me, people wouldn’t walk into a bookshop, see my collection and part with their hard-earned cash. I gave away as many copies as I sold and sold more coming off a poetry stage than at any other time.
I have written lots of words. I have worked for magazines where I wrote five to ten thousand words regularly, usually on a monthly basis. I had a column, which ran for two to three years, called ‘From the Mind’s Eye’ in my family’s newspaper, Southern Star , where I ranted, raved