Black Gold of the Sun (19 page)

I fell asleep again. When I opened my eyes it was near midnight. We weren't moving. The bus was pulled over on the edge of a field. The door stood open. Most of the passengers were outside. Some were sitting on the grass talking. Others had stretched out asleep on mats. Across the aisle from me a woman wearing a headscarf and a tired expression was cradling her sleeping baby.

‘What happened?' I asked.

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

‘It's too much, oh. The bus, it break down.'

‘Can't we fix it?'

‘We have to stay here tonight. The relief bus doesn't come till morning. This is what we've come to in Ghana. Even the bus cannot take us from one place to another without trouble.'

She was staying on the bus with her baby, said the woman. If I wanted I could borrow her mat.

‘This is all we can do in the country. Unless we help each other the devil might as well take us all now.'

I climbed down into the warm night and unrolled the mat near a group of men clustered round a radio. I lay on my back listening to the murmur of their conversation for a long time. Trucks rumbled along the highway, their headlights flaring our camp into temporary radiance. For all the inconvenience of the emergency stop, it was more pleasant sleeping outside than in the stuffiness of the bus.
Even the goats were slumbering peacefully. I was exhausted, and as I lay on my back it seemed to me that I was falling upward into the sky, into the embrace of a darkness without limits.

The elephants of Mole – Chris Ofili's vision of freedom – Flying ace Alhaji – Bob Marley day in Bolgatanga – Tupac and Osama – Hegel and racial science – The border of Ghana – Inside the slave camp – W. E. B. DuBois and The Souls of Black Folk – Kodwo and Black Atlantic Futurism – Sun Ra and the rings of Saturn – The City of London – Caribs' Leap

From a distance they hardly looked real. I worked the lenses of my binoculars until they sprang closer and I could make out the delicacy with which they wound their trunks through the branches and plucked at the leaves higher up the tree. As abruptly as they'd emerged a few minutes before, they retreated into the bush and I was left gazing at a deserted waterhole.

I'd arrived at Mole the previous evening and checked into the park hotel, which stood on a hilltop overlooking the 5,000-square-kilometre natural reserve. At the bottom of the hill lay the waterhole where I'd found the elephants gathered when I woke in the morning. A trekking group was leaving from the hotel in a few minutes to explore the area surrounding it. I hurried to join them and arrived as Solomon, the guide, was just finishing his introductory speech.

‘We must be silent, silent, when we get close to the elephants,' he said. ‘If one of them flares its ears get behind me. It's about to attack.'

He slapped the wooden butt of his rifle for emphasis and led the way down the hill into the bush, spiky leaves scratching at hands and a mosquito making experimental sorties around my head. We'd been trekking for an hour when he raised his hand. The waterhole was directly ahead. Six elephants stood at its far edge. One of the larger ones spread out its ears and waded into the pool. The others
followed, dissolving themselves into the muddy water. Solomon pointed to a cloud of white tickbirds approaching above the trees.

‘That means there are more elephants coming,' he whispered. ‘The elephants move quiet, quiet, but the birds can tell you where they are.'

The trees across the lake seemed to part by their own volition. A dozen elephants materialized at the waterside. Breaking free of their parents, two calves plunged into the lake, their trunks peeking above the surface like periscopes. The rest of the herd followed them into the water. Even close up I had the sensation of watching mythical beasts, like coming across a herd of grazing unicorns.

By the time Solomon led us back to the hotel I started to notice there were creatures all around us. Green monkeys rustled through the trees. I spotted a golden antelope dash across a clearing. Arranged in perfect descending order of size and seniority, a family of warthogs crossed the path in front of us, their tails waving briskly like antennae.

I returned to my room, but by noon the heat was suffocating. I pulled on a hat and followed a trail leading to the small village near the hotel. The path led past a rubbish dump of watermelon rinds, mango stones and other discarded food. As I approached a troop of baboons was rooting through the garbage. I held still, expecting them to bolt at my presence, but they were too busy foraging to look up. While I was walking past one of the big males, shoulders trimmed with fur, cuffed an adolescent on
the nose, triggering a chorus of shrieks among the troop audible all the way to the village.

The village itself looked deserted. The sun, I decided, must have driven everyone inside. Across from the main square, though, I made out Solomon crouched beside the wall of the school. A group of adults and children had gathered behind him. Solomon's rifle was drawn and, as I approached, he put his finger to his lips.

‘Be careful. Stay behind me. It's Action.'

‘What kind of action?'

‘No. Action.'

‘Action?'

‘Look.'

I pushed my head round the corner. An elephant stood in the middle of the schoolyard chewing leaves off a tree.

‘That's Action,' said Solomon. ‘He's a young male. It's always trouble when he comes. Last month he stepped on someone's bicycle and crushed it. Today, this. Always trouble.'

I peered back round the wall. Action was staring at us. I could see his dark brown eyes and the curl of his lashes. The elephant flared his ears. Solomon curled his finger round the trigger of his rifle. I felt the sweat trickle down the inside of my shirt. Action regarded us in silence. He cocked back his head, yawned, then ambled out of the yard.

Solomon lowered his rifle. The children ran out from behind the wall and started waving their arms around like trunks.

‘How often does an elephant come into town?' I asked.

Solomon took off his hat and wiped his forehead.

‘All the time. Only Action's a problem, though. The others never come very near.'

We walked past the rubbish tip. The baboons had retired and a pair of warthogs was truffling at the remains.

‘It seems as if there are just as many animals in the village as we saw down at the waterhole this morning,' I said.

‘They know they'll find food here. They've got used to the people. Why go foraging in the bush when you can just come here?'

‘So we didn't even need to go trekking? We could have just stayed here and let them come to us?'

Solomon shrugged.

‘The tourists expect to see animals in their natural habitat. So we take them on tours. But this village is part of the park. Just because they're feeding on rubbish doesn't mean they're not behaving naturally. The tourists don't like to think of this as nature. It's only if you come into the village that you see it's all part of the same thing.'

Solomon left me at the edge of the village. I returned to the hotel turning over our conversation in my head. Every time I thought I had Ghana figured out I discovered another contradiction. Now it turned out even the wildlife park wasn't that wild.

That evening I ate dinner alone on the terrace of the hotel restaurant. Out of the dark giant scarab beetles hove
towards the candle on my table and crashed on to the white tablecloth. They lay on their backs, legs kicking ineffectually, until I turned them over and helped them whirr away.

It seemed to me I had as much relationship to the reality of Ghana as the beetles did to the flame. Its outline flickered before me. But every time I stretched out to touch it I found myself on the floor with my legs waving in the air.

As I ate I recalled visiting the artist Chris Ofili at his house near Brick Lane. We'd spent the afternoon talking and drinking tea. The scent of cardamom percolated his living room from one of the many Bangladeshi restaurants nearby, and our conversation was periodically interrupted by the cassette tape of a chanting imam, borne through the open door of a Muslim grocery shop.

Ofili told me he was born in Manchester. Although his parents were Nigerian, he had been to Africa only once. That occasion was a student visit to Zimbabwe in 1992. Taken on a trip to a safari park, Ofili became captivated by the balls of elephant dung which lay half-hidden in the long grass, emerald-coloured beetles swarming over their surface so that they glittered like jewels.

Returning to Britain he made a visit to London Zoo and left with a bucket of dung. He fixed it to his paintings, decided he liked the effect and continued to use it on all his canvases. At the time Ofili was painting with a palette of brilliant colours – ceruleans, limes, fuchsias, sunset oranges – which he coated beneath thick layers of glaze.

Across the surface of the paintings he scattered the cut-out heads of African-American movie stars and rappers such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Dr Dre and the Notorious B.I.G. In ‘The Holy Virgin Mary', his depiction of the black Madonna came adorned with breasts, buttocks and vaginas clipped from porn magazines with titles such as
Black Tail
and
Black Magic
.

The works drew scandal, but Ofili maintained his aim was to create a transformative universe in which all of the calumny heaped upon black people as sexualized, out-law figures became the primal matter for a new order of beauty, just as elephant dung, seen through grass, might resemble emeralds. When he was eleven, Ofili told me, his parents split up and his father returned to Lagos. Ofili had not seen him since or ever travelled to Nigeria. Nevertheless, in 2002 he staged an exhibition of paintings inspired by his impressions of Africa. They showed an arcadia of palm trees, blissful lovers and red, black and green sunsets.

‘I find it interesting that I've not been there,' he said that afternoon. ‘How can I make the paintings I have without doing so? It's a contradiction. But you can ignore reality. Forget there's disease and conflict there. Forget it's a bit too hot and you can't understand the languages. Forget about all those things. It can still be the beautiful land of promise if you choose to imagine it that way.'

Recalling our conversation in Mole it seemed to me there was a divide between the idea and the reality of Africa. I'd spent my time in Ghana trying to resolve the distinction. By contrast Ofili painted Africa from
imagination. The result was still an evocation of the truth as he saw it.

Maybe I'd been looking too hard for the answer when it already lay in front of me. In the darkness beyond the candle on my table there were parallel worlds in which black lovers kissed beneath red, black and green skies. Beyond those lay yet further galaxies of black freedom and beauty. Infinite versions of Africa unfolded through the night. Instead of trying to resolve all the paradoxes I came across, what if I accepted that Ghana was made up of multiple histories? If the country was born out of contradiction, maybe there was room enough to find my own vision of Africa?

It came to me that the best way to make sense of my journey would be to get to the end of it. Mole was less than a day from the border. I decided to leave as soon as possible for Bolgatanga. I looked at my watch. Midnight. No way out. But the idea had seized hold of me. Looking back I see now that I imagined the border as a place of release. I could stop feeling guilty about Joseph de Graft. I could surrender the memory of the coup and my bedroom fights with Kodwo. With hindsight I can see that was asking a lot from a simple inland border post. At the time I couldn't wait to leave.

‘You can't leave,' said Solomon.

‘Why?'

‘It's impossible.'

‘This is ridiculous.' I unfolded a tourist map and traced my finger along the road that snaked from Mole to Bolgatanga through 200 miles of bush. ‘There's a bus that runs all the way from here. What's the problem?'

‘Today's Sunday. It's not running. You'll have to wait until tomorrow.'

‘Monday's no good,' I heard myself whine. ‘It's got to be today.'

‘What's the hurry?' said Solomon. ‘Come with me today. I'll take you into the bush. We'll go looking for leopard.'

‘It's no use. I have to go today. I can't explain.'

Solomon contemplated the mud on his boots.

‘The only way to do it would be by taxi. But that's madness.'

‘A taxi? That's brilliant.'

‘Are you crazy? It will cost a fortune.'

‘No, no, it's genius.'

I felt suddenly reckless. I was a needle tipping into the red zone. Lights flashed in my head. Clarions blared.

‘I don't care about the money. Let's sort it out.'

I'd woken up that morning seized by the same urge to reach the border as the previous night. It seemed to me that only by arriving at the end of my journey could I stop
to figure out what the trip had meant to me. However ordinary the border post itself might be, the prospect of reaching the end of the road was something I couldn't get out of my mind.