My earliest memory of life is of escaping death. It is December 31, 1981. I am three years old. My older sister, Bozoma, is four, and my younger sister, Ahoba, is one. I hold my dad’s big hand as he rushes me down the back stairway of the government officials’ building where we live in Accra. Normally cool, velvety, steady, and dry, my father’s hand is hot and sweaty, gripping mine as though he fears I’ll slip away. My toddler legs can’t carry me fast enough down the seven flights, so eventually, my father carries me. From over his shoulder, I can see through the glass windows into the courtyard.
The government of Ghana is being overthrown in a military coup. When a plot to overthrow a government fails, the coup plotters are killed for treason. When the plot is successful, the existing government officials and anyone who stands in the opposition’s way are the ones who get killed. In both cases, hundreds of people senselessly lose their lives in the midst of riots, mayhem, and anarchy. I am too young to understand it, but the fear of death blankets Accra this morning.
When I close my eyes now, images from this fateful morning remain with me: car doors flung open, belongings hurriedly stuffed inside. Car horns honking, impatient. People rushing about, panicked. The mental pictures feel both vivid and unfamiliar, like stills from someone else’s family photo album. It would be years before I even realized where they came from.
Everything I know about that day, apart from these disconnected flashes, I learned secondhand from my parents through conversations about this terrifying moment in their lives. I was an adult by then. It was strange, hearing about our flight and trying to place myself in it. I was there, but I’ll never truly know all that I felt. Maybe I was just too young to understand what was happening around me, or maybe this blank spot is the protective cocoon of early childhood trauma. I’ll never know. More than anything, I recall the warmth of my father’s hand. In the midst of chaos caused by the fear of death, I know I felt calm and safe with him holding on to me.
Whatever its effects on me, the story of the coup belongs to my parents. They were the ones whose bodies bore the weight of that firsthand experience. What follows is their story, or as much of it as they’ve chosen to share with me, filtered through time, distance, and their own pain.
My father, Dr. Appianda Arthur, was a prominent government official under Ghanaian president Dr. Hilla Limann, who was suddenly no longer the president. If we stayed in our apartment, my father would die. And in all likelihood, so would we. So we rushed down the stairs to get to safety because the elevator was busy with other government officials and their families, also desperate to flee. At thirty-six years old, my dad was a rising star in Ghana’s political landscape. He’d earned Ph.D.’s in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University in America (which I would eventually attend) and enjoyed an illustrious career as a lecturer at the University of Ghana (which I also eventually attended—definitely a daddy’s girl).
Additionally, my father represented Nzema East in the Western Region of Ghana as a member of Parliament; he was on the committee overseeing the office of the President, and sometimes he traveled as part of President Hilla Limann’s entourage. The Limann administration had only been in power for a little over two years, and now the government was being overthrown by J. J. Rawlings, a notoriously violent figure in Ghana’s political history. It was a perilous time for our family.
My mother, a Fante woman named Aba Enim, who worked as a fashion model in London before marrying my father, hadn’t signed up for any of this. There is a picture of her tucked away in her things that I’ve only seen once from before she was a mom; close-cropped Afro, denim booty shorts, a crocheted bikini top, and platform shoes—as sexy and badass a woman as the 1970s ever made. There’s a cigarette dangling out of one hand and a dark beverage in a tumbler in the other, a record player behind her. But now, her life was different. She’d been sewing cushion covers for a furniture company because we needed the extra money. A career in politics isn’t particularly lucrative in Ghana.
The marriage was a smart move for my father. Just as my mother’s modeling and fashion design career had started to blossom, he had snagged her and taken her to the United States, where he finished his doctorate degrees. She never wanted to be a working mom to three girls under five. She certainly didn’t want to be frantically clutching them all and running for her life in her nightgown from a gang of armed insurrectionists.
After the 7 a.m. official announcement came over the radio that the government had been overthrown and all those who worked for the government should immediately surrender or risk arrest and execution, my parents rushed us to my uncle Paa Kwesi’s house. My mom forgot my little sister’s breakfast porridge. This seemed a small oversight, but turned into an unspeakable terror when she tried to retrieve it. In recounting this harrowing trip to me years later, the details proved too much for even my iron-willed mom to convey fully. She could only relay the story in slivers. My heart breaks for what she endured. The grace with which she wears this quiet pain looks, to me, like the epitome of strength.
A few days after the coup, my father decided to turn himself in rather than risk getting caught. Soberly, he and his government friends got into a van that drove them to the Nsawam prison on the outskirts of Accra. When my father described this moment to me over the phone recently, I was touched to hear his voice constricting. “Bozoma asked me if I’d be back for her birthday in three weeks’ time,” he told me. “She would be turning five. I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. I wept.” My father is not the type to tear up; his difficulty in relaying this moment to me, even forty years later, showed me just how deep the wounds were.
As he told it, a parade of arrogant opposition soldiers greeted him with kicks, taunts, slaps, and the butts of their guns. For the next five months, he sat in a corner of the prison reserved for those whose fates were still undecided. During that time, he found a Gideon Bible and decided to dedicate his life to the service of God. His heart filled, and he was given over to a singular purpose. Whatever else was going on in my father’s heart in that jail cell—fear, anger, anxiety, boredom, confusion—I know that his conversion was total and sincere.
When it was time for my father to be tried before a military tribunal for his “offenses,” he told the judges about his newfound commitment to God and promised to spread God’s love if he was released. They laughed, having already sentenced his government friends to thirty or forty years for “corruption.”
While my father was in prison, my mom also found Jesus. Her conversion happened at a revival in Accra. If anything, hers was even more unlikely than his: her faith was usually only observed a couple of times a year during weddings or funerals. But I see how being a single mom of three with a husband in prison would drive anyone to seek out a higher power. Desperation is often fertile soil for faith.
One saving grace during this time was that my parents had grown close to Americans at the US embassy in Ghana after their time in the States. Those relationships made it easier for my mother to implore her embassy friends to keep a watchful eye on my father’s situation, as the United States had eyes on the political unrest in Ghana. For weeks and weeks, my mother toiled, unsure of whether she would ever be reunited with her husband again.
After six months, remarkably, the prison officials took my father seriously and they decided to release him in early May, just in time for my fourth birthday. My parents’ Christian faith and prayer had proved itself, and their reunion was so exultant that they conceived a fourth child. My sisters and I secretly wished for a brother.
After my father’s release, an old classmate of his, Chris Weaver, worked with the US embassy to help secure our travel to the United States. My dad stayed behind because his passport had been seized. Off my mother, sisters, and I went to Bethesda, Maryland, to live with “Uncle Chris,” while my father sorted out his escape from Ghana. Pregnant and with three very small children, my mother boarded the plane with us and settled in for the long flight. I was oblivious to the gravity of the situation, of course, and have always been unable to sit still for long. I remember walking up and down the aisles of our international flights, making friends with fellow passengers.
Upon arrival, my mom was alone in a country in which she’d only spent a few years. Falling apart would have been an easy option for her. But it just isn’t in her DNA. To hear her tell it, she carried the weight effortlessly: expat wife and suddenly single mother, a warrior in love. By the time she arrived in Bethesda, she was faithful to and well versed in Christianity and actively sought out community, as she waited patiently for my father’s return. She found it in the yellow pages: the First Baptist Church of Bethesda. One Sunday she enrolled us in the church preschool and got a job there. It was only after persistent prodding from me that she revealed she often cried in the bathroom by herself, usually with me or one of my sisters banging at the door.
After some serious serendipity and a laborious route out of Ghana, guided by farmers by day and fishermen by night, my father made it to the Ivory Coast and eventually into Liberia. There, he was classified as a political refugee and obtained an international passport, which allowed him to join us in Maryland. Six months after we left, he was safe and reconnected with us, but the road ahead remained uncertain.
In Maryland, we settled into our first full-time home in America. I have few memories of the years in Maryland, but all of them are of safety and family: A babysitter put mascara on me. I decided it made my eyelashes too long, so I cut them, to the horror of the babysitter, who had to explain why a young child took scissors to her eyes under her watch. I remember my fifth birthday, and the delicious chocolate cake that I reluctantly shared with Ahoba, who turned three at the beginning of my birthday month. For the occasion, my mother made us matching outfits out of Ghanaian fabric. We wore a lot of matching homemade clothes in childhood. I thought they were endlessly cool, but my classmates often disagreed. With the supreme confidence of a five-year-old, I shrugged it off. (Adolescence was another story.) We were outsiders, anyway. And my parents came home from the hospital with yet another girl—my baby sister, Aba. My sisters and I were sorely disappointed. I remember asking my mom to take her back, but today, I could not imagine anyone but her. She grounds me. Aba completed our family.
For years, we were missionaries and political refugees, bouncing around the planet while my dad took jobs preaching and spreading the gospel of Jesus. Wherever we went, the six of us got on the stage. My father as the visiting pastor, his beautiful wife, and his four girls in matching outfits. We’d smile for pictures, wave, and head off to the next church the following Sunday. For longer stints, we spent time in Pasadena, California, while my dad taught at Fuller Theological Seminary. We lived in Nairobi. We even traveled back to Ghana for a few years, as my father headed up the African regional office of Prison Fellowship International, sharing his story of redemption in prisons across the continent. After my dad served his initial prison term, his offenses were erased, and we were allowed in the country safely. My father’s work often sent him on international travel, which gave my mother a chance to see other parts of the world and spend time alone with him when my sisters and I stayed behind. Fellow missionaries and family friends watched my rowdy bunch of sisters and me in my parents’ absence, and when Mom and Dad came back, they returned bearing gifts.
From Manila, they brought multicolored jelly sandals. To this day, in my mind, the Philippines is the land full of glittery rubber shoes. When my dad returned from Australia, he brought back a metal trunk full of goodies, including a boomerang. I remember him throwing the boomerang in the house and my mom yelling at him, because she knew I would run after it inside the house. I did, slicing my right calf on the corner of the metal trunk. Today, the five-inch-long scar still reminds me of all that has been possible for my family, even in the face of chaos.
I was angry for a long time. For most of my adolescence and early adulthood, I believed that J. J. Rawlings and his soldiers stole Ghana from me that New Year’s Eve. Had he and his forces never overthrown the government, I might have grown up in a country with people who looked like me, ate my food, spoke my language. I could’ve dated people with whom I didn’t have to navigate cultural differences. I might have gone every year to Kundum, a festival in my dad’s region, or might have learned to bargain in Accra’s markets. I might have grown up eating my favorite snack of deep-fried ripe plantain rolled in pepper, ginger, and salt—also known as kelewele.
The coup meant that I was forced into life as an outsider wherever I went. I was never Ghanaian enough by virtue of not being raised there, and never American enough due to my Ghanaian heritage. I never know how to answer the question “Where are you from?” Is the answer where I was born? Where my parents are from? Where I was raised? Or where I live? Or where I lay my head? “Home” has always been a fleeting concept for me, and I’ve had to learn to cultivate it in my body.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if the coup, and all the consequences that unfolded from it, molded me in ways I may never fully understand. My earliest memory is of thrilling, death-defying flight. Does this help explain the perpetual unrest living in my spirit, my never-ending yearning for adventure? Maybe that fateful flight down the back steps in Ghana rewired my little brain, and I was forever afterward drawn to peak experiences.
It would certainly track. I’ve struggled all my life with a near-pathological fear of boredom. I don’t think of myself as a thrill seeker, but I’m certainly an experience junkie. Falling in love. Music festivals. Psychedelics. Heartbreak. Adventure, dopamine, oxytocin. Flood my body with chemicals that make me feel alive, please.
As a child, I complained constantly of being bored. “Go read a book,” my parents would say, exasperated, to which I’d say, “I read them all.” (I had.) I took everything apart—I unraveled blankets, disassembled remote controls. I was driven by an insatiable need to figure out why things were the way they were. School was torture, as were the rote recitals of the lessons, the complete lack of questioning. Soon I experienced the same frustration in the lack of questioning of Christianity. Sitting still was a punishment that I chafed against by constantly talking to the people next to me, by constantly moving. Boredom was a force pinning me down; I wouldn’t let it get me.
Even more than the scariest feelings—trauma, loss, terror, grief—I’ve always feared monotony. Maybe the flight path our family took across the globe has something to do with that. Or maybe I was destined to be a nosy, bright, curious, awkward, fidgety, and sensitive kid, no matter where I was born.
Whatever the case, the coup arrived in our lives unexpectedly. When the unexpected comes in to rob us of something we treasure, it can also bring about incredible opportunity. Just like death itself.
The truth is that the coup, and all the death it brought, created opportunity for my family. We are extremely close. No matter where I go or have ever been, my sisters remain my best friends, but we’re not without our challenges. We grew up packed in like sardines—four kids in six years—so naturally we wanted to kill each other occasionally, but we also would want to kill anyone who so much as looked at one of us wrong. I belong with them. As adults, our deep sister-bond feeds and nurtures me in a way that would not have been possible without the constantly changing backdrop of our childhoods. And since we’re all tall with big feet and varied senses of style, I’ve got three additional wardrobes and shoe closets to peruse. If we had stayed in Ghana, we would have never grown to be the women we are today. Who else but my sisters can understand the implications of our childhoods, the all-night Christian revivals, constant travel, Ghanaian food school lunches, and our secret adolescent rebellion against Christianity?
So yes, death can be a thief. But death is also what brings life. Dead leaves fall from the trees and nurture the soil. People die and make space for new ones to be born and populate Earth. Our aging cells continually die off so that the new ones can thrive. When I look back at the life I’ve lived, I can appreciate the synchronicity of it all.
In those capricious times, my sisters and I did not know of the struggles my parents faced to provide for us while holding on to their mission work. Despite what they were going through, my parents decided that girls becoming women need stability. So in 1989, we moved for the last time as a family, settling in Colorado Springs. It is the world’s center of the Evangelical Christian movement—white, military, and highly conservative. Eventually, in 2006, my parents divorced, selling the house they built with a finished basement just for my sisters and our friends. We were scattered to the winds but somehow also still one, bonds forged by blood, death, and experience.
Little deaths abounded each time we said goodbye to a house (the addresses of which I will always remember), friends (names of which I’ve mostly forgotten), customs, rituals, and familiarity. We were changed by each experience but quickly learned new places, new people, new foods, new ways. Today, we are a mosaic of every place we’ve ever been, a reflection of those we’ve ever met, and a tapestry of who has touched us.
We are a tight-knit crew: my thoughtful, resilient, worldly, charismatic parents, and four bright and bold daughters—same shine, different sparkle. We survived. We move about the world as one unit where nothing—nothing—could infiltrate our circle. That is, until Bozoma met Peter, and he became our family too.