Black Gold of the Sun (5 page)

Nor did matters improve when I arrived at Christianborg. The castle had served time as a Dutch trading port, the British governor's residence, a constabulary mess and a lunatic asylum, before now becoming the official seat of the Ghanaian government.

As I approached, I saw that the gates and windows were occupied by soldiers carrying submachine guns. They looked disturbingly hostile. Even the castle's ornamental gardens were posted with fearsome warnings against loitering. I stood beneath a palm tree gazing up at the
castle walls, uncertain if I was banned from approaching any closer. There was no one else around, apart from a goat nibbling at the lawn beneath a ‘Keep off the Grass' sign. A sinister impression crept over me that I was being watched from one of the windows. The feeling was so acute that I hurried away without looking back, only to find further disappointment at Independence Square. An amphitheatre designed to hold 30,000 people, the square probably had an amazing atmosphere when it was full. Unfortunately, with the exception of a family of chickens pecking at the ground, it was deserted when I arrived. It was as if the real Accra had taken the day off, leaving me to wander around the empty city by myself.

I sat down in the empty bleachers, exhausted by the morning's defeats. A cyclist rode across the square, the squeaking of his bicycle's wheels hovering in the air as he shrank to nothingness on the other side. Watching him labour past, it came to me that I'd been here before. On that occasion it had been night, the square filled with thousands of people celebrating Independence Day. The scent of plantain cooking on a brazier drifted over the crowd. I clung to my father's hand while the grown-ups surged around me. A troupe of stilt walkers in pierrot costumes strode past. The last of them leaned towards me. His cheeks were greasy with rouge. I smelled spirits on his breath. Wriggling free of my father in fright I burrowed into the crowd. The smell of beer and sweat surrounded me. My father grabbed my hand. He held on to me while the crowd buffeted us. What was I scared of? Looking
back, it must have seemed that something malign lay behind the smeared cheeks of the pierrot. Maybe what I glimpsed in his face, and the musk of the crowd, was the sensuality of the adult world. Its normal appetites, such as alcohol and play, made grotesque by their novelty to me.

Urged on by a circle of spectators one of the pierrots was attempting a cossack dance. The crowd clapped in time, and he whirled faster and faster until he tumbled to the ground to wild cheers. My father tugged at my hand. We pushed our way out of the crowd hopping over puddles of beer. Fireworks burst overhead. I turned back and watched them dissolve into the night like exhausted stars.

From the square now, I drifted along a path running parallel to a scrappy strip of beach. A sprawling game of football was taking place. Every few minutes another passer-by kicked off his shoes and joined the match until the players resembled a shoal of fish turning through the water. Grains of sand hung in the air suspended by the sea's breeze. I watched the footballers chase the ball into the haze and transform into shadows, before cantering back into view glistening with sweat and ocean spray.

Accompanied by the murmuring of the sea I followed the path to the National Cultural Centre, a market filled with dealers selling embroidered cloths, painted face masks and ebony carvings. Among the stalls, I started searching for one of the hand-painted signs carried by itinerant barbers. The signs showed portraits of young men sporting
the latest haircuts. For dramatic effect, these were normally named after a 1980s action movie such as
Top Gun
or
Rambo
. The pictures themselves always featured young men with the kind of angular high-top hairstyles favoured by American rappers fifteen years ago, as if the barbers' aesthetic universe had achieved perfection in the year 1987. It was for this reason, and not despite it, that I liked the signs and wanted to buy one. But there was confusion among the dealers when I raised the subject.

‘You want haircut?' they said. ‘This is craft market. You like statue. Nice statue. Good price.'

After searching to the very back of the market in case I came across an overlooked cache of the signs, I accepted another failure for the day. I'd had enough of walking around in the heat anyway.

A row of trees stood near the entrance to the market, beneath which a flock of young men had gathered, taking advantage of the shade. Each time a tourist arrived they'd swoop upon them as if with a flurry of wings and offer to guide them through the market. Only one or two would be hired. The others would return to the trees and continue scanning the horizon for fresh pickings.

I found a space beside them and leaned against a tree. As I did so a minibus rumbled to a stop at the market entrance. The guides cawed with excitement.

‘What's going on?' I asked the young man next to me. Like the rest of them he was wearing a baseball cap and a basketball vest. His was yellow and purple. It said ‘LA Lakers' on the front and ‘Bryant' on the back.

‘It's a whole bus. There are enough tourists on board for us all to get work,' he said.

The bus door opened with a sigh of hydraulics. The first tourist stepped out. He was black, with a shaven head and a white beard. He wore a dashiki and loose trousers in Ghanaian Kente weave. In his right hand he held a carved wooden staff. He set his legs wide, planted the staff in the dusty earth and looked about him, a prophet taking in his first sight of the holy land. The other passengers joined him. They wore the same printed smocks and pious expression. The guides began muttering. One of them spat resentfully on the ground.

‘What's the matter?' I asked the one in the LA Lakers top.

‘These people are no good,' he said. ‘These are black Americans. Last year I got work as a guide with some people like this, through my uncle. He runs tours. We drove them all around Ghana for two weeks. At the start I thought they were fine people. They said to me, “We are Africans who live in America. You and us, we are the same people.” We took them to the slave fort at Elmina. They all cried when they saw the dungeons. They poured a libation for the souls of their ancestors. But after a while I saw it was all words to them. Each night they stayed in a good hotel. When the food did not come fast they complained. When there was no ice in the water they complained. When the air conditioning broke down they complained. After a while all they did was complain. And they acted so high and proud as if we were their servants and they were the real Africans.'

‘Not all African-Americans are like that,' I said. ‘Maybe it was just the ones you were with.'

He shrugged.

‘Everyone here has a similar experience. Even when we take them round the market they think they know Africa better than us.'

‘So what will you do?'

He shrugged again.

‘Do? We'll still guide them. Maybe we make friends with them. Maybe we get a visa to USA from them.'

I looked at the guides in their basketball vests and Nike sneakers. America for them meant Kobe and Shaq and Michael Jordan. Across from them stood the tourists. In their eyes Africa was a land of enduring wisdoms. They were its lost kings and its Nubian princesses. Both groups saw in the other a reflection of their own dreams. Africa and America converged in the car park, each searching the other's eyes for a glimpse of jungle or glittering skyscraper.

When I lived in Ghana as a child I had a tortoise called Ricky. He was a lugubrious creature. Hardly the life of the party. But I liked the way he'd push out his neck and, blinking slowly, snap at the spinach leaves that I fed him. Ricky had long legs that he'd hoist up his shell on, before scuttling into the high grass behind our house.

I found him on a trail back there one day. He must have
been sleeping when they attacked. Columns of ants were streaming from the sockets of his shell. Each insect carried a diamond of flesh in their jaws. They had killed him. Now they were dismembering him from the inside.

I dug a hole with my hands in the dry red earth beside our house. There were still ants clinging to Ricky as I laid him in the grave. They ran up the outside of his shell on to my hands. One of them bit me on the fingertip. I squeezed it in half at the thorax. Then I poured the soil over Ricky until it made a soft mound over him and he was safe for ever from the ants.

That's how it was in Ghana. You never knew what shape your enemies would take.

When I first arrived at the age of two, the country seemed like a land of giants. Men walked with their bellies thrust in front of them like bull seals. The women at the market, their enormous buttocks wrapped within yards of cloth, would sit behind tubers of yam, pyramids of aubergines and trays of giant snails, fleshy and dimpled as cow tongues. But I soon found out that the scariest creatures were the smallest.

From Block O my family moved to a bungalow in Legon, a suburb of Accra. The nearest neighbour was barely within sight above the scrubland grass. In the evening my mother, who'd been raised at a convent school, sat on the porch singing ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away', ‘Abide with Me' and the other melancholy hymns she associated with a happy childhood.

The ants had their home in the scrubland. From the red
earth they built fortresses that reached ten feet into the air and were impervious to anything short of heavy armaments. Within days of our arrival columns of ants marched through the kitchen and colonized the house. First they confined themselves to the food in the bin. Then they grew bolder. At breakfast they'd pick over the table for crumbs and other leavings. The dinner guest who paused with raised fork to deliver some telling bon mot would look down to find them crawling through his jollof rice. They even prised a way into the fridge. I dreaded opening the door for fear that I'd find them paddling in the juice of a mango, mandibles viscid with syrup.

Ricky was just one of their conquests. On the trails through the scrubland I'd often come across a horde of them wrestling with a butterfly or a giant beetle. They'd be trying to find a way into its exoskeleton to bite it to death. Even before the battle was over, they'd already be dragging it back to their castle.

Despite what they'd done to Ricky I didn't hate the ants. Hate I reserved for the mosquitoes.

At sunset clouds of them rose into the orange sky. Everybody was bitten. We slapped at them on the porch when they crept up our legs. We pulled the sheets over our heads in bed when we heard the outboard motor of their wings. We locked the windows and slammed the screen doors behind us to keep them out. But everybody was still bitten. And everybody got sick. It happened to me when I was four.

Lying in bed one night I noticed the temperature in
the room rising. I felt my bones twist as if they were being wound by a ratchet. The pain made me gasp. But my throat was too parched from the heat to call my parents. They found me in the morning writhing in the sheets. My mother looked into my bloodshot eyes and diagnosed malaria. They took me to Legon General Hospital. I was put to bed in a ward full of groaning children. The nurse pushed a needle into my forearm and connected a glucose drip to it. Blood blossomed, dissolving to pink in the drip tube. I felt myself drift to the ceiling, as boneless and languid as a jellyfish. When I looked down I noticed my parents had come in to sit beside the bed. Something about the intimacy with which they sat holding hands in silence made me think of them for the first time as a man and woman in their own right, not just my father and mother.

Whenever I've thought of that moment since, I can't help imagining their lives as children, too. I see my father, Joe, at the same age that I was when I fell sick, four years old.

It was 1942.

He was living in Cape Coast.

It was the year his mother died of meningitis.

With her passing, Joe and Lily, his older sister, were raised by their great-grandmother, to whom he was devoted. He slept on the floor next to her bed, looking up at the evening light as it percolated pink and green and cobalt blue though the miniature bottles of perfume on the window ledge.

Lily was fourteen years old when she came home from
school complaining she felt sick. Joe watched his great-grandmother take her to hospital. He was there as the doctors scratched their heads and said they couldn't find anything wrong with her. The family took Lily to a traditional healer who dosed her with bitter herbs. She continued to weaken. More quickly than seemed feasible, Lily was dead.

Two months later, Joe's great-grandmother was gone, too. The family said her heart was broken after Lily's death. All Joe knew was the certainty of his loneliness. At her funeral, a grown-up held him back when the cortège left to bury the coffin.

‘Cemeteries are no place for young boys,' he said. Joe did as he was told. He returned to the deserted house and waited for the adults to return. He never found out where she was laid to rest.

After the funeral, Joe went to stay with his father, Joseph Eshun, the master of Zion School. He watched Joseph step out to the dances at Cape Coast Town Hall in his coat-tails and bow tie, his shoes glinting and the scent of pomade in his hair. He came to acquire some of his father's fastidiousness. At sixteen he'd have his suits hand-made by Kobena the tailor in Kotokuraba, and he spent his evenings lounging outside the Happy Bar by London Bridge, listening to Lord Kitchener's ‘Trouble in Arima' and the other Trinidadian calypso records shipped over that month from Port of Spain.

The same year, 1955, he left school to work as a clerk at the United Africa Company commercial house, its ground
floor piled with bolts of linen and silk, delivery boys running back and forth, and the market women cursing at the salesmen that they'd been robbed, and swearing never to return, only to come back the following week to repeat the same performance.

Now that he was a working man, Joe began courting Adelaide Newton, who lived round the corner from him on Coronation Street in a grand, four-storey house called West de Graft Hall. Adelaide would sneak out of the house to meet him. They'd watch musicals and Westerns at the Cape Coast cinema or just hang out at the Happy Bar with Joe's friends.