Black Gold of the Sun (20 page)

‘I need to go, Solomon. Will you help me?'

We stood in silence, my question hovering between us, then without replying he disappeared down a cinder track to the village. An hour later Solomon returned, looking grave.

‘None of the drivers wants to take you. They said the roads are too bad. They're right, you should wait till tomorrow. But anyway I carried on asking and…'

His words were drowned out by the whine of an engine as a tiny Korean Kia hatchback ground its way up the cinder path. Its orange-and-white livery shone with wax. Its hubcaps gleamed. A cloud of dust billowing behind it, the car pulled up at our feet.

‘That's Alhaji,' said Solomon, pointing to the grinning youth behind the wheel. ‘He was all I could get.'

Alhaji stuck his thumb up like a Spitfire pilot in his cockpit. I thought I saw Solomon shudder slightly.

‘He doesn't speak much English. You know you can still just take the bus tomorrow. It would be better than going with this boy.'

‘Thanks, Solomon, but I have to leave.'

He shook my hand, and I jumped into the passenger seat. Alhaji gunned the engine. An Arabic pop song wailed from the stereo. We skidded away down the cinder track. Solomon shrank from sight in the side-view mirror. Even
after he'd disappeared I could still see the disconsolate expression on his face. In a distant place within myself I realized the taxi fare was more than his monthly wage. It was too late for regrets, though. I had a border to reach.

Humming to his cassettes, Alhaji hunkered down behind the wheel pushing his car hard. Bushes and low trees flickered past the open windows.

‘I have friend in Bolga,' said Alhaji. ‘She is good friend, you know.' He laughed through yellow teeth. I guessed the car hadn't been polished for my benefit.

We'd been travelling for two hours when he turned the Kia off the tarmac road and took us down a dirt track scattered with stones and boulders.

‘Is this a shortcut?' I shouted above the engine.

A boulder loomed. Shoulder muscles bunching beneath his shirt, Alhaji swung us around it. He shot me a quick look.

‘This is road. To Bolga. Yes.'

‘Is it like this all the way to Bolgatanga?' I asked.

Alhaji did the thumbs-up again. In different circumstances – at dawn, say, with the silvery glow of the English Channel coming into view below at the end of a successful mission – it might have been reassuring. As it was I reached for the roof strap and held on as tightly as possible.

‘Slower. We go slow.'

‘Slow?' said Alhaji.

‘Yes, slow.'

‘OK. No problem.'

My head snapped back against the seat as the Kia accelerated along the dirt trail.

‘No, slow,' I said.

‘Yes, no slow,' cackled Alhaji, hunching low behind the wheel.

We burned along the track. Dust plumed behind us like the contrails of a jet engine. By my reckoning we'd already covered a third of the distance – I was starting to admire Alhaji's skill. We were leading the field in the inaugural Mole–Bolgatanga rally. The going was tough, but Team Eshun had been breaking records all morning. If we didn't get reckless we'd make it to Bolga by mid afternoon.

It was at that moment the Kia hit a hump in the road and launched itself into space. For a second we hung above the ground, the front wheels of the car spinning noiselessly and neither of us daring to breathe. Then we plunged back to earth with an ominous crunch. The car shuddered to a halt. We clambered out into a cloud of ochre dust. Its right front side had caved in on impact. Alhaji swung himself underneath the carriage.

‘Is axle broken. Car smash.'

He sat up and wiped the dust from his face. I felt a wave of anger at the sight of him.

Thanks to flying ace Alhaji we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. If he hadn't been in such a hurry to see his girlfriend we'd have made it to Bolgatanga easily. Why couldn't he have slowed down when I told him to? I kicked a stone and watched it bounce among
the dried-out bushes by the roadside and settle into the dust.

‘We can't stay out here for long,' I said. ‘The heat'll kill us if we don't get moving.'

Alhaji took the front, while I put my shoulder to the boot. We started pushing the Kia along the track. Its wheels sprayed us with dust. The sun beat on our heads. Dust bit into my eyes. I ducked my head and carried on shoving. Each step forward seemed to take hours. But the next time I looked up we were surrounded. A gang of boys had materialized out of the bush and were gathered round the car, chattering with Alhaji.

‘They say village ahead,' he called from their midst. Jostling for handholds, the boys started to run the car along the track. Unable to keep up with their pace, I stood in the road catching my breath as they disappeared over an incline. The afternoon fell abruptly still.

None of this was Alhaji's fault, I told myself, following the car tracks. What difference would it have made if I'd left for Bolgatanga tomorrow? Why was it so important to reach the border immediately anyway?

Before I found an explanation I arrived at a clearing set back from the road. The boys had pushed the car to its edge and were still swarming round it as Alhaji examined the damage.

A group of men sat beneath a tree drinking from a calabash which they passed between them. They waved me over. An old man stood up as I approached. He wore a purple tracksuit and a toothless grin.

‘Car no good,' he said.

I was forced to agree.

‘Do you have mechanic?' I asked.

The question seemed to amuse him. I got a good view of his gums. He said his name was Hassan and he had his own moped. For a small fee, he was prepared to ride to the next town and look for a mechanic. I gave him 10,000 cedis and watched him putter away from the clearing on his ancient motorcycle.

Help might be some time arriving, I concluded.

Team Eshun makes unscheduled stop on the Mole–Bolgatanga rally. Duration: unknown.

I returned to the car. Alhaji was slumped by its side. He looked as forlorn as the vehicle itself.

‘Mechanic?' he said.

‘No mechanic,' I said. ‘He come soon.'

An impression of Hassan carousing in the bars of the next town came to mind, but I dismissed it right away. There was a limit to how much fun an old man could have on 10,000 cedis – even one with a purple tracksuit and his own moped.

Alhaji would be here for a while. And because of me he'd wrecked the car that was his livelihood. I counted off 500,000 cedis and handed them to him. It was his fare for the whole trip to Bolgatanga. Now it might just cover the cost of repairs. Before he left Hassan had told me that if I waited by the roadside I'd be able to hitch a lift by truck the rest of the way to Bolgatanga.

I gave Alhaji a parting thumbs-up. He didn't look
up. I felt the last of my hunger to reach the border evaporate. I remembered Solomon's expression when I'd left Mole that morning. Through his eyes I must have looked like some pith-helmeted explorer riding into the jungle on a palanquin. He hadn't been sad to see me go. He was disgusted. Just as much as I'd been trying to figure out Ghana's contradictions, I had to accept my own. I'd spent almost all my life in a white country. How could I not have imbibed some of its prejudices along the way?

Europe looked down on Africa. Maybe I'd been doing the same thing? How else to explain shouting at bank managers and sneering at preachers while checking into a beach hotel with its own security guards? Does living in a white country make you, in some way, white, I asked myself, as I said goodbye to Alhaji.

An answer came to me while standing by the track waiting for a ride. We are not creations of our environment so much as its interpreters. In the three decades since I was a child, Britain had changed from a place where kids carved National Front logos into their desks at school, to somewhere more open and less fearful of change. Each person of colour living there had helped to create that shift. By doing nothing more nor less than being ourselves each of us had altered the nature of Britain. We'd made it over in our own image.

In the same way, it was impossible to arrive in Ghana without bearing some traits of the west. Nevertheless, the way I behaved was my responsibility, not the result
of culture or genetics, and that was surely a cause for optimism.

Maybe you can't undo the past, but the present is mutable. All I could do as I travelled was accept that at different times I'd be naive, excited, angry or behave like an idiot. None of those elements defined who I was any more than a self-important bank manager or Joseph de Graft represented the whole of Ghana.

There was no template to being African or English. You just had to make it up as you went along.

As penance for my foolishness, I checked into a room at the Catholic Mission centre once I reached Bolgatanga. The room smelled of mould and the bedsheets were marked with ominous stains. In the morning I was woken by the sound of pigs rooting through a rubbish heap outside my window. Above the communal washroom at the end of the passage, a notice read: ‘Please do not urinate in the bathroom.' I spent the whole of my shower on tiptoe. Just as I reached the breakfast table a bishop in his purple robes heaped the last of the scrambled eggs on to his plate with a contented smile.

I gave up on breakfast and crossed the road to order coffee in the whitewashed courtyard of the much grander Black Star Hotel. The waiter took my order and vanished into the interior of the bar. From its depths I heard a radio
playing ‘No Woman, No Cry', followed by ‘Redemption Song', then ‘Natural Mystic'.

‘Why all the Bob Marley?' I asked as he returned with my drink.

‘You don't know? It's Bob Marley day. All over Ghana we celebrate his birthday today.'

‘I didn't realize he was so popular here.'

‘But of course. In the whole of Africa he is for the black man. His songs are for freedom.'

‘Aren't you already free?'

‘Yes, but I'm poor. Without money you don't have freedom. That's why we love Bob Marley so much in Africa. He speaks for people like us.'

The waiter returned to the bar. ‘Buffalo Soldier' drifted into the courtyard. I drank my coffee. It struck me that the freedom he heard wasn't so much to do with the absence of oppression as the embrace of possibility. Bob Marley sang for the waiters and market women and Small Boys who dreamed of achieving more than they were born to in Africa. If it was Bob Marley day in Bolgatanga they were probably celebrating his birth in Nairobi, Kinshasa and Bamako, too.

I experienced a renewed surge of shame at my taxi ride – as if I'd allied myself with all the forces holding back the ordinary people of Africa by taking that trip. Leaving the hotel I drifted down the street past a row of open-air workshops where craftsmen sat chiselling figurines of tribal warriors out of wood. In the shade beneath a tree a portrait painter had propped his pictures of prominent Ghanaians
such as Kwame Nkrumah and Kofi Annan. One of the paintings caught my eye. It was split into thirds, a triptych, with a different subject in each section – Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur and Osama Bin Laden. All three rendered as nobly as the neighbouring statesmen. Just looking at the picture made my head reel. I shut my eyes against the glare of multiple worlds colliding.

By coming to Ghana I'd hoped to find something of myself that was lost. How was I different from Capitein or Richard Wright or any of the other travellers who arrived seeking certainties only to discover more questions? Instead of a singular place I'd discovered a country making and remaking itself under the gaze of its elective gods. Bob Marley was the icon of contemporary Africa. In another way Osama played the same role. I remembered seeing T-shirts of him for sale on the roadside soon after I'd arrived in Accra. I was surprised, but had given it little thought until I flicked through a copy of the magazine
Africa Today
at a newsstand in Kumasi. On a page of readers' photos I'd found a picture of a Ghanaian student on his way to a fancy-dress party wearing Osama's white beard and combat fatigues. There were those in Ghana who'd never measured the moral weight of September 11th. In their minds Osama was simply a symbol of Third World resistance to the west.

His words or politics didn't interest them – only his image. It was no different than westerners wearing Che Guevara T-shirts while remaining ignorant of the principles of revolutionary socialism.

But what about Tupac? A conversation floated into my mind from my cousin Kobby's visit to London five years earlier. We'd been walking along Tottenham Court Road when a BMW drove past blasting Tupac's ‘Keep Ya Head Up'.

‘You know he's not dead,' said Kobby.

‘Who?'

‘Tupac. He's still alive.'

‘Of course he's not. He was shot in Las Vegas last year.'

Kobby pushed up his chin as if he was trying to balance the weight of his superior knowledge upon it.

‘They never found his body. Didn't you know? He's still out there.'

I started to tell him that Tupac had been cremated, his ashes had been scattered on his mother's farm in North Carolina, but I stopped myself, figuring that seventeen-year-olds needed their heroes. Instead I made him a cassette of Tupac's most recent album
Me against the World
and gave it to him as he was returning to Ghana.

‘I played that tape all through school,' he told me in Accra.

We were driving through town. As we paused at the traffic lights, he leaned over and tugged something free from the mess in the glove compartment.

‘Look, I played it until it broke,' he said, rattling the same cassette I'd given him five years before.

Why did Kobby love Tupac so much? Listening to him, I got the impression that Tupac said all the things that my cousin and his friends found difficult. Thug poet, street
intellectual, romantic gangsta, he was idolized by a generation of young Ghanaians. In his brusque lyricism, they saw their own yearnings. They believed in Tupac as much as their parents had believed in Nkrumah. It mattered no more that he was American than it did that Bob Marley was Jamaican-Scottish or Osama a Saudi. In Ghana all three became African: the idols to a portrait painter in Bolgatanga, a student in fancy dress and Kobby Mensah at the wheel of his Golf.