When I remember my childhood in Ghana, its powerful scents come rushing back to me first. The sea air and fried fish, which we’d eat with fermented corn dumplings called kenkey, and hot peppers. I remember the smell of bodies close by at the crowded markets, the air full of spices. Fish and meat would sit out on display in the muggy air, while fierce women strolled by carrying massive pots of soup on their heads, their babies strapped to their backs.
My grandmother’s specialty was fufu: pounded cassava and plantain dumplings, which she’d make with a massive, waist-sized mortar and pestle. When I was really little, my mother would take us to visit my grandmother in her tiny village of Brakwa, in a forest belt about 60 miles from the coast. She lived in a small squat house fashioned from mud and cement block, which had no electricity. The drive on dusty, red-clay roads was rough and bumpy. When we’d get there, I would have to say hello to all of my aunts and cousins and grandmother’s friends. There could be 50 of them, because my grandmother was like royalty in that town and everyone had to show respect. It was scary in those little houses, especially once the sun went down and left us in the dark. I kept my head down and wished it would be over soon so I could get back to our comfortable house and my books and drawings and records.
During those visits, I would hold my mother’s hand, as I was poked and prodded by curious hands. She was always my comforter and my champion, and a formative example for me of courage and the power of the imagination. In Brakwa, when she was just a teenager, one of 22 kids (as is typical in extended polygamous African families), she started making dresses for the local ladies. She had an amazing eye for colour and, as she honed her skill, a talent for fitted shapes. At 17, my mother assembled her best samples and travelled from her village to the capital of Accra to try to get a place at a technical college. At the interview, they told her not to bother – she already knew everything they could teach her anyway. And so she picked up and moved to the north of Ghana, still a teenager, to a Sahelian region that’s a lot more Muslim than the Christian coast, to set up a dressmaking business. That’s where she met my father.
I can’t imagine any other line of work for my father, Major Crosby Enninful, than the military, with its authoritarian rigour and devotion to order. By the time I was born, at the tail end of a dry African winter in 1972, the fifth of six children, the Ghanaian military was one of the most powerful in all of Africa and it made for a prestigious career. Officers had solid, middle-class lives, with houses on military bases – we lived first on a base in Takoradi, later in Tema – and enough pay to ensure education and upward mobility for their children.
My father’s military duties made him a sporadic presence around our house. As severe as the black suits he wore when he was out of uniform, he would appear, tyrannise us and leave. He’d rail against my eldest brother, Crosby, his namesake, a bad boy, a smoker. (Today, he’s an Anglican minister.) Mina was next in line, a radiantly beautiful junior version of my mother: loving, gentle and kind. Then came Luther, who was my absolute hero, so engaging and handsome, with that same infectious charisma that Crosby has. Kenneth was next, brainy and studious, but also kind of a jock – a picture of success from a very young age. My father’s favourite, Kenneth always wanted to be a doctor, though illness prevented him from completing his studies. He’s living in Ghana today, in a happy relationship with a devoutly religious woman. The truest apple of his eye was our sister Akua, whose stubborn tenacity rivals his. (Before I put aside all freelance work to become editor of Vogue, Akua was my agent. I picked her for a reason.)
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He was our biggest source of fear as kids, and the rejection I felt in particular, because I was shy and more artistic and sensitive than my brothers, would keep us from developing any kind of an affectionate connection until much later in life. It wasn’t just that I felt he didn’t understand me; I felt he actively disdained me. Even when I was young and didn’t have the language to explain it, there was always a tension between how I might want to act naturally and what my father considered appropriate behaviour. I learnt to check my every instinct when I was around him, though luckily I didn’t internalise his disapproval to such an extent that it entirely killed my spirit. I just learnt to hide.
I spent as much time as I could at my mother’s atelier, where she made dresses and suits for actresses, society ladies and wives of diplomats and heads of state. From 1972 to 1978, before he too was deposed in a coup, the president was Ignatius Acheampong and his wife was one of my mother’s favourite clients. I’d go with her for fittings to the presidential palace, with its high stone walls and air conditioner blasting. She liked my help, as I knew how to keep quiet and behave. And she liked that I took an interest in what she did. She had notebooks filled with sketches and she’d also often work on loose-leaf paper, dividing one sheet into nine squares, drawing a different look inside each. I’d imitate her all the time and still do today when I’m brainstorming an editorial of multiple pages, grabbing a sheet of paper and drawing those same nine squares.
Her workshop was where I discovered how fashion really works. My mother was discreet with her clients, quiet and shy. She’d show them fabrics and take their measurements and together they’d decide on an idea. When her clients came in for their fittings, or when she’d go to their homes, I’d be there, just as silent and serious, to help my mother zip them in. I learnt how to fasten a hook and eye without pawing someone and how clothing works technically on a woman’s body. I saw from my mother’s example how to talk to women about clothes and work with them to come to new ideas. I learnt to recognise the expression on a woman’s face when she turns to look at herself in a new dress and finds what she sees really beautiful. And also how she knows when it’s not quite right. You can imagine how this has come in handy as a stylist. These days, Rihanna or Taylor Swift need only move a millimetre of their faces for me to know if it’s love or hate.
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I was transported by the whole experience of the workshop: the colours, the fabrics, the loving attention of my mother and her staff. It lit up my imagination. I’d sit under my mother’s cutting table, surrounded by scraps of wax fabric, and fill my own notebooks with ladies in elaborate dresses like she did.
I never imagined, then, that I’d make a career out of fashion – it never occurred to me until I was much older that it was even a possibility. In Tema, one of my aunts had a hair salon called Dolly Dots. I loved my aunt, and I felt totally at home in that very female space, but I wasn’t there for the hair. I was there for the magazines. Every month, she would have Ebony, Jet and Time delivered. It was a big deal in Ghana to get American magazines. I’d devour the photos of Diana Ross and Jayne Kennedy and Donna Summer and the Somali model Iman. All these fabulous Black goddesses in fantasy settings, or in career looks, or on the beach, their eyes fixed on the camera. I felt their eyes connect with mine, like they were looking right at me. I would sketch them in asymmetrical off-the-shoulder dresses, teased hair and a block heel.
When I could, I’d bring the magazines home like precious jewels to share with my siblings. Later on in life, after I started working for i-D, more of my siblings ended up working in fashion: Mina was scouted by a model agent when she was away at university in Calgary, Luther went to Cordwainers school and worked with me a bit in my earliest days as a stylist, and Akua went on to become not just my agent, but one for other prominent stylists and photographers too. Although Akua and I were the only ones to really stick with it, I like to think of us as a small tribe, our sensitivity to clothes and style moulded by our mother. I never really felt myself as a family leader, though I suppose I was.
In 1978, President Acheampong, who himself came to power in a coup, was overthrown in another coup by Frederick Akuffo, the head of his armed forces. Less than a year later, Jerry Rawlings, an Air Force lieutenant with a reformer’s streak, overthrew Akuffo, who was promptly executed. Corruption has been an issue in the country since before the Gold Coast became Ghana and banging on about it was an easy way for populist leaders such as Rawlings to gain support. For two years, a politically moderate civilian government was in charge and then Rawlings made another move and took over as head of the country in 1981.
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It started to become clear, little by little, that it wasn’t safe for us. With so many coups, people naturally belonged to different political families and our family was not part of Rawlings’s. That was enough. A cousin of my father’s, Colonel Joseph Enninful, had presided over the military trial in 1979 that convicted Rawlings of mutiny. Rawlings escaped justice and a few months later some of his supporters came to Joseph Enninful’s house and shot him and his wife dead at the breakfast table. Someone called our house when it happened. At first we thought they were talking about our father and we were terrified until we heard from him. Around the same time, the fathers of two of Mina’s friends at school were executed. Suddenly, we weren’t allowed to play outside as much and had to be home a lot more often. I was petrified to leave the house anyway and entertained myself in my little world in the atelier. Trips to Dolly Dots were now out of the question. It was hell on the older kids too. Anyone who was seen to be living too well was suddenly under suspicion. There was tension in the air that turned into something scarier. Nobody knew any more who was friendly and who wasn’t when you passed them in the street.
The situation simmered until it exploded and my father suddenly said goodbye and left for England. At first I thought he had simply abandoned us, because I didn’t understand the bigger picture and no one talked to kids about that kind of stuff. Then, maybe two months after that, Kenneth and I came home from school and all the other kids were jumping around, excited. “We’re going to London!” London? Where all the pop stars I had read about came from? Amazing!
In the time between when my father left Ghana and we met him in London, he was put up in a little residence in Lancaster Gate, not far from where Alec, my husband, and I live now, and worked to ensure us safe passage. Despite what I do for a living, the apartment I share today with Alec bears a similar asceticism to the sparsely furnished home we lived in in Tema, where a television was what counted for decor. Sometimes, when I’m poring over a newly arrived set of photographs on the computer in my home office at 6am, or I’m huddled with a photographer and a superstar model on set past midnight with three more looks left to shoot, I feel at my most content. Through bougie Western eyes, this probably looks out of balance: I’m overworking at the expense of my personal life; I need to create boundaries, or whatever. But I’ve never seen work and life as truly separate. It’s not how I was raised. My parents were both hard workers; their careers were at the centre of their lives. Even as they were surrounded by six kids and an endless extended family, nobody went hungry. And I’ve been my parents’ son since the day I was born.
A Visible Man by Edward Enninful (Bloomsbury, £25) is published on 6 September
Edward Enninful is in discussion with Michaela Coel about his memoir A Visible Man at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 4 September. Tickets cost from £35.
