Black Gold of the Sun (16 page)

Busua Beach Resort – Drinking at Zion – Big Men and Small Boys – Mr Prempeh returns to Kumasi – The sermon of Bishop Maxwell-Smith – The mysterious death of Richard Wright – Pursued by nightmares – The face of my killer

I was worn out. I needed a break. I caught a tro-tro from Cape Coast and rode west along the highway towards the
beach village of Busua, which according to my guide book was ‘a great place to chill out for a few days'.

Squeezed into the back I nodded off to sleep by the window and woke up a few hours later to find the bus had turned off the highway and was huffing its way up a dirt track, dodging the minor crevasses in its way. Each time it came to a stop at one of the villages by the roadside, local women clamoured round the windows selling boiled eggs and mugs of cocoa, and loaves of hot kenkey wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a plastic bag filled with iced water and watched fields of red earth undulate beyond the window until the tro-tro finally shuddered to a halt at Busua.

The village had one street and plenty of goats. Shop-keepers were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. It was five o'clock in the afternoon.

I followed the street round the corner and came to the entrance of the Busua Beach Resort hotel. A pair of security guards flipped their noses up at me as I passed through the gates. Inside, rows of chalets stood on tended lawns. Gardeners clipped at immaculate hedges. Waiters in white gloves pushed serving trolleys along the path-ways. I crossed an acreage of grass. The lobby doors whooshed apart. My footsteps echoed across the marble tiles.

‘I'd like your least expensive room, please.'

The receptionist was as well groomed as the lawn. As she looked up, I became conscious that somewhere between Cape Coast and Busua I'd acquired a fine layering
of dust over my face and clothes. Her tone was cooler than the lobby's glacial air conditioning.

‘Normally we are fully booked well in advance. But we do have a budget room available. You'll have to pay in dollars. In advance.'

‘No problem,' I said, trying to muster a jaunty air.

A bellboy led me out past the chalets.

‘Where are you from? he said.

‘London. Well, actually, my family's from Cape Coast.'

‘Wofra wo den?' he asked in Fante.

‘Ekow.'

‘Eh-
kor
, Akwaba. You are most welcome, my brother. I'm Kwame.'

He gave me a sidelong look and started laughing.

‘What's so funny?' I said.

‘When you walked into the lobby we thought you were from Ghana. We get guests who come here from Takoradi and Accra. They think they are big men. If they've been to Yankee they put on a new voice to go with their new clothes.
Wobo life papa
– they put on the style!

‘Eh, my brother, you should see them. They think they are too fine. So when we saw you, we said to ourselves, you must be one of them.'

Kwame led me towards the distant perimeter of the hotel, past the staff canteen, the hotel laundry and the enormous galvanized steel bins where vultures picked at the rubbish, until we came to a strip of breezeblock rooms with battered screen doors.

‘We only have a double left, but for you, my brother,
I'll see you're charged the price for one person,' he said, opening the door on to a spare, clean room with a view out over the beach.

‘This will do fine,' I said.

Kwame gave me a vigorous slap on the back and left shaking his head, apparently overcome with hilarity at my presence.

I stayed at Busua for a week. Joseph de Graft often floated into my thoughts. Each time I tried to figure out his life I felt the same sensation of horror, like the moment when the cars reach the highest point on a roller-coaster ride and sit teetering on the edge of oblivion.

I spent the week lying on the beach and swimming out into the high Atlantic waves. Even when the riptide took me and I was dragged round and round beneath the surface of the water Joseph was on my mind. I must have looked quite melancholy wandering the Beach Resort grounds on my own because, largely due to Kwame I suspect, the staff adopted me as the hotel mascot.

Over breakfast, Ralph and Ato, the waiters, would crouch by my table. ‘You have the cash and we have the connections, my brother. We can't fail!' they'd say, trying to convince me to back their putative bush-meat export business. At the gates, the security guards now gave a jaunty salute each time I passed. Even Madame, the fearsome matriarch in charge of housekeeping, looked kindly on me. Whenever I passed her small, neat office, she'd call me in and make me speak to her in Fante
so that, as she put it, I could learn to become a real Ghanaian.

In its own way, staying at the hotel was as disorienting as trying to negotiate through Accra had been when I first arrived. In the extremity of its orderliness – its cultivated lawns and sweet-scented flower bushes – the Beach Resort was the antithesis of the bustling streets I'd come to think of as authentically Ghanaian. Faced with the friendliness of Kwame, Madame and the rest of the staff, I felt some of my defensiveness begin to evaporate. I'd become used to thinking of myself as a stranger in Ghana, but it occurred to me now that finding a sense of belonging might involve no greater mystery than allowing yourself to accept a place in all its idiosyncrasy. Being Ghanaian was not just a matter of whose genes you had, I told myself at those moments. It could also be an act of voluntarism. If you made the effort you could even discover a home among strangers.

‘Everyone in the village is talking about you.'

I was having a drink outside the hotel, at a bar on the beach, when a young Ghanaian with shoulder-length dreadlocks sat down beside me.

‘You spend all day on your own and you stay in the Beach Resort where everything is so expensive,' he said. ‘They say you must be a black American with too much money.'

‘It costs me $10 a night for the budget room. I stay there because it's clean and quiet.'

‘Compared to the rest of us then, you
are
rich. When
the people see you coming down the street they call you Burenyi.'

He started to laugh, but stopped when he noticed the look of dismay on my face.

‘Don't worry. Everyone talks in this village. There's nothing else to do. It was the same when I first came here.'

He said his name was Daniel and that he'd grown up in the Volta region, in the east of Ghana.

‘If you grow locks in Ghana people think you are a bad person. The neighbours said I was a thief. It was a lie, but my parents threw me out. For the past few years I've just been travelling around Africa by myself.'

Daniel told me how he'd hitched a ride with a lorry driver across the Sahara the previous year.

‘There was me and two Arab guys on our way through the desert to Bamako, in Mali. Halfway across, the driver stops the truck. He makes us get out and stand in the sand.

‘“Give me all your money or I leave you here,” he says.

‘The Arab guys are scared. We hand over our money. Then he starts the truck and drives off. We chase after him, but the truck goes off fast.

‘Now we're alone. We start following the tyre tracks. The sand is shifting under our feet. It feels like we're not moving. We don't have much water, and the wind starts to whine like an aeroplane. It picks up the sand and sends it whirling around us. We're caught in a sandstorm.

‘We can't tell if we're going in the right direction. Our eyes are stinging. We're thirsty and frightened. One of the
Arab guys sits down. He's crying. His friend is pulling him up but he says he can't go on.'

‘What did you do?'

‘We have to leave him there, otherwise we'll all die. At least if we go ahead we can find help. We walk through the storm until we reach a small town. The police listen to our story. Then they try to arrest us. They say we must have tried to hold up the driver. The Arab guy is shouting about his friend. But they want to arrest us. We manage to slip away, and I grabbed another lift and got out of town, otherwise I'd probably still be there.'

Daniel traced a pattern in the sand with his toe.

‘After that, I don't worry so much about anything. Each time I arrive at a new place I remember the desert and that wind and I thank Jah for still keeping me on this earth. That's why, when I saw you on your own, I said I must talk to this person.'

We sat at the bar drinking and talking through the afternoon until, with sunset, Daniel took me to Zion, a reggae bar arranged under a canopy of palm trees at the far end of Busua beach.

‘That's Ocean,' he said, nodding at a young dread behind the bar. ‘He comes from Kumasi, but he had to leave home when he started growing locks, so he came down here, saved up some money and opened this place.'

‘It not be much, true,' said Ocean, joining us. ‘But this bar be righteous place for good people. Yes iya, so just relax and be cool.'

He rolled a joint and we smoked it without speaking. A
string of fairy lights hung from the palm fronds, and beyond them I could make out the glimmer of the stars. Over the speakers Horace Andy pleaded a love song into the warm night. The surf uncoiled itself on to the beach in silvery threads.

By the time the joint's effect had worn off, Zion was full of white backpackers, Ghanaian dreads and local kids attracted by the thump of the music and the buzz of conversation. A fire-eater juggled burning clubs, there was dancing beneath the palms and, every so often, a group of backpackers would run squealing with laughter into the sea, then trek back up to the bar, dripping wet, voices ringing with exhilaration.

Later in the night, in an advanced state of deterioration, I discovered myself in conversation with a young dread who called himself Black Prophet.

‘Me, I never read no book apart from the Bible,' he was telling me. ‘White man say human being dem come from monkeys. But me know this is lie. The only truth be Jah. He build the heaven and the earth as it say in the Bible.'

There followed a lengthy critique of evolutionism during which Black Prophet produced a pocket-sized Bible and began to read from Genesis in a forthright tone. Somewhere around
chapter 6
, verse 5 (‘Then the Lord said the wickedness of man was great in the earth'), I made my escape and found Daniel.

‘Why do all the dreads here have Jamaican accents?' I asked.

‘They want to be true Rastafari, so they try to speak like
they were born in the Blue Mountains,' he said. ‘The senior guys like Ocean are cool, but some of the young ones like your friend Black Prophet – all they know is Jah, Jah, Jah. To find answers you have to ask questions, but all they want to do is tell you what to think.'

‘You know what's funny about this place?' I said, watching the lights in the palm trees wink red, gold and green. ‘Everyone here is looking for something. If you're Black Prophet, you put on a Jamaican accent even though you were born in Accra. If you're a white backpacker you braid your hair and take drumming lessons because you think that brings you closer to the real Africa. But most Ghanaians go home after work, watch
The Cosby Show
and dream about living in America. Everyone's searching for a reality that doesn't exist.'

Daniel rolled a bottle of beer between his palms.

‘What about you?' he said. ‘What are you looking for?'

‘I don't know. Nothing here is what I expected. It's like, you think you're going to find your roots, but all you end up with is this tangled mess.'

I wanted to tell him about Joseph de Graft. It could be that he'd have a similar story to tell, in return. Whose roots in Ghana
didn't
reach back into the slave trade, after all? But the thought of Joseph filled me with shame. I felt like an outsider – a Burenyi – and I wondered if the sensation would ever go away.

I waved goodbye to Daniel and walked down the beach towards the lights of the Beach Resort.

*

Saturday in Busua. The chalets fill up with businessmen on a weekend break from Takoradi, the nearest big city. They swagger round the hotel, bellies preceding them, and a mistress on their arm. Watching them I remember a night shortly after I arrived in Accra. I was out with Kobby, my cousin, when a policeman pulled over his car. We were speeding and one of our rear lights was out, he said, opening his book to write us a ticket.

‘Please, mepa wo kyeo, I will fix the light tomorrow,' said Kobby. ‘I know I did wrong. Master, I beg you.'

The policeman tried to frown. But his lips flickered upward in rebellion. He started on a lecture about traffic observance that gave way to a protracted homily on respecting your betters.

‘OK, you can go,' he said finally. ‘But remember I will know your car and if I stop it again I will not be so kind. Don't let me see you again.'

We drove off in silence. I stared out of the window, embarrassed by Kobby's fawning and confused by the policeman's reaction. Kobby seemed to be enjoying my discomfort.

‘So, you see how we handle things in Ghana?' he said. ‘All he wanted was to be treated like a “Big Man”. Doing that cost me nothing. In fact it saved me something because I didn't get a fine. This is the Ghanaian way. You have to realize that a lot of those guys – police officers, army men, bank managers – don't get paid very much. All they have is respect. That's what it means to be a Big Man. Everyone looks up to you. So if you make them feel important,
they'll be generous back to you. Think about it. He stopped me because I broke the law. But I was the one who made him do what I wanted.'

According to Kobby, it was the Big Men who ran Ghana. They were the politicians, doctors and lawyers, whose work gave them an elevated status in the community. To be a true Big Man had less to do with occupation than attitude, though. They carried themselves with a bluffness that reminded me of nineteenth-century mill owners. All afternoon, for instance, the Takoradi businessmen had been barking orders at Kwame and the other hotel staff. Over lunch, I'd seen one of them actually snap his fingers for service. Determined to announce their superiority to ordinary Ghanaians, everything about them spoke of superciliousness, from their stentorian voices to the expanse of their bellies.