Black Gold of the Sun (3 page)

I let Kobby and the girls disappear on to the dance floor without me, while I stood at the bar nursing a sour mood. Yet the truth, I realized when I was alone, was that Boomerang was as ‘authentic' as any other facet of the night-time city. Just because it didn't conform to my expectations of an African club didn't make it any less real. In actuality, what was disturbing to me wasn't the club so much as the gap between what was in front of me and what I held in my head.

For the past twenty-eight years I'd carried a mental picture of Ghana frozen in the early 1970s. When I thought
of the country, I saw passers-by in Afros, heard highlife music blaring from the radio and envisioned my uncle Abosom cruising the streets in his yellow-and-black Ford Capri. Somehow I'd imagined nothing would have changed. Instead I'd returned to a city of SUVs, mobile phones and hip-hop clubs. The transformation made my memories seem false. I felt like an interloper.

Ghana had tilted towards the Atlantic world in my absence. I'd seen the indications of it all evening. The momentum was irrevocable. And it struck me, too, that there were moments when it was futile to dwell on those changes too deeply – chiefly when everyone else seemed to be having a good time. I floated towards the dance floor, giving myself over to the music and the beat of the night.

As dawn approached, the hustlers and the night crawlers, the whisky-soaked and the drug-addled, dragged themselves to Adabraka in the hope of a last carousal before morning. The neighbourhood lay on top of a hill in central Accra, commanding a low but distinct view across the city. At the base of the hill, prostitutes huddled in the arc-lit forecourt of a Mobil petrol station. Cars drew up beside them. The women stuck their heads inside so that they were visible only from the waist down, skirts stretched tight over heavy thighs. They negotiated a fee and got into the front seat. The car accelerated, rear lights vanishing
into the gloom. From the unlit edges of the forecourt, the women's pimps watched the trade. Slouched against a row of cars, they wore gold chains and a uniform expression of severity. The red tip of a cigarette glowed in the darkness. A quarter bottle of brandy was passed from hand to hand.

Beneath the arc lights, the roof of a parked car stood open. A group of the women was dancing to the music uncoiling from its radio. As I rode by in Kobby's car I spied them for a frozen moment. With almost unbearable poignancy, their levity struck me as belonging to another, more benign place, quite distant from the forecourt and the gaze of the pimps who stood in the shadows, regarding them with contempt.

As we ascended the hill the street became darker and more still.

We passed a scattering of poorly lit bars. Fugitive shapes flitted beneath streetlights. Without warning a naked man stumbled into the beam of our headlights. His hair was matted into dreadlocks. A pair of tablespoons clattered on a string around his neck. Oblivious to our presence, he stood mumbling to himself, then disappeared down a side street in search of a way to feed his addictions.

The top of the hill was crowned with bars. Their tables lined the street. Music drifted into the warm night air. We found a seat and ordered a drink. Most of the customers at the bars looked as if they'd spent the night working: selling drugs or selling themselves, or in the case of a few spectral figures begging for change among the tables,
simply trying to distinguish reality from their own unruly imaginings.

Yet the tensions of the night were beginning to leaven. Even the most severe-looking pimps were smiling. Shortly the sun would rise. The daytime business of the city would begin again. From the tower of a mosque somewhere below came a call for the start of dawn prayers.

Barmen began collecting chairs from the pavement. Kobby left and, sitting alone, I sipped at a bottle of beer. As I did so my thoughts turned to Joseph Eshun, my grandfather, ninety-five years old, with a crown of white hair and the profile of a bird of prey.

Whenever he visits Britain, wearing a lambswool scarf round his neck in my parents' overheated living room, Joseph tells me about the parties and balls he used to attend in 1930s Cape Coast. Through his words I see him scraping his hair into a centre parting and rubbing Pond's Cold Cream into his cheeks. He puts on his stiff-collared white shirt and his evening suit with its silk lapels. The local children have gathered outside the gates of Cape Coast Town Hall. Joseph pushes through them. He enters the hall. The Sugar Babies, the great dance orchestra of their day, are playing a waltz. As he glides on to the floor with a partner, Joseph's patent shoes sparkle with the reflection of the chandelier that hangs above the ballroom.

This was his world on a Saturday night. But Joseph the ballroom dancer was also by day headmaster, storekeeper, barman, optician and football club chairman. A photograph
from the 1930s shows him in a two-piece suit and spats. A jewelled pin glints on his tie and his aquiline nose is tilted towards the sky. From the picture, it's easy to imagine him walking through town nodding to calls of ‘Master Eshun', the title conferred on him as head teacher of Cape Coast's Zion School.

In 1877 Britain had moved the capital of the Gold Coast from Cape Coast to Accra, but the signs of colonial presence are found still in street names such as Beulah Lane, Victoria Park, Coronation Street and London Bridge, with its bust of a grim-faced Queen Victoria. Joseph's home stood in the market district of Kotokuraba. It was built around a central courtyard with individual apartments for family members and their children. At the front of the house, facing the busy street, he opened a store that sold tinned food and dry goods. In the back, he put a bar where he served Club, Star and the other Ghanaian beers, along with Scotch whisky and London gin.

During the late 1930s, a German named Herr Oppenheim set up business in Cape Coast. Joseph, perennially curious about life beyond Ghana, struck up a friendship with him. He invited the German to stay in his apartments on the second floor of the compound, where the two men talked late into the night about the state of the world. When war broke out Herr Oppenheim returned reluctantly to Germany. In parting he left his friend the machines of his trade – which was how, in addition to being headmaster and barman, Joseph became Cape Coast's sole optician. Patients came to him as they had to Herr Oppenheim.
They sat on a wooden chair in his living room, and he shone an ophthalmoscope into their eyes to check the condition of their retinas and optic nerves. Foot-long tubular packages would arrive from the British-American Optical Company of London. He'd unwrap rows of lenses waiting to be ground into shape on his lathe, once he'd stripped their brown-paper packaging.

On Sundays, Joseph chaired team meetings of the Sparts football club. Downstairs in the courtyard the young men of the team would warm up, as they prepared for another match against their arch rivals, the Venomous Vipers. There was always commotion in Joseph's house and in that way it resembled the restless turning of its owner's spirit.

It was from my grandfather that I first heard mention of William Essuman-Gwira Sekyi. The two men had moved in the same social circle of balls and masonic lodge meetings. But Sekyi was older and grander than Joseph, a lawyer who became one of the first Ghanaians to question the link between civilization and colonialism until then taken for granted by Cape Coast's upper classes. Born in 1892, the son of a wealthy merchant, Sekyi went to a small Church school run by an English head teacher, where he was called by the Anglicized name of William Sackey. He wore a high collar and frock coat, and received lessons in English history, Latin, etiquette and elocution. At nineteen he was sent by his parents to England, to study law at University College, London.

From the deck of the steamer Sekyi waved to his family, excitement churning his stomach as the ship drew away
from Cape Coast towards the grey Atlantic. At Plymouth, he boarded a train for the first time. Villages and ancient woods flashed past the windows. He imagined his journey as a royal progress, the land itself bowing in his presence.

As he wrote later of his travels, it seemed to Sekyi that he ascended to a higher order of existence by arriving in Britain. During his first days in the capital, he walked the streets in wonderment, gazing up at the sight of Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the dome of St Paul's rising before him against a pellucid sky. But as the months progressed his excitement began to dim.

With winter, the sky grew dismal. Trash whorled in the streets and mud clung to his trousers. He dreaded the bland meats served at his boarding house. The English themselves he regarded with distaste, as pallid, slump-shouldered and stinking of carbolic soap.

Yet with rising horror Sekyi was also realizing how England saw him. At college balls, girls exchanged sardonic glances when he requested a dance. In the dosshouses where he did volunteer work, the down-and-outs sniggered at his tailored suits.

‘Where does a monkey get such nice clothes?' they said, laughing out loud so he could see their scarlet gums.

When he was invited to dinner, Sekyi came to expect the same questions: Did you wear clothes before coming to England, Mr Sackey? Is the climate safe for civilized people? Do they
eat
people in your part of Africa, Mr Sackey?

His degree finally completed at the end of three years, Sekyi returned to Cape Coast. Radicalized by his experiences
in London he refused to be known by his Anglicized name any longer. Instead of English, he now spoke Fante in public. He wrote a succession of essays and a satirical play mocking the colonial fixation of the town's upper classes. Sitting at his desk in the evenings, his thoughts turned often to the events of his journey home from London.

It was 1915. As his ship steamed across the Atlantic it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. The vessel started to list, and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Panic broke out among the passengers. In the mêlée Sekyi managed to clamber into a lifeboat. Others simply dived into the sea. Screams twisted up from the water. Behind him in the boat an Englishman with mutton chops and a red face was shouting. In the commotion, it took some time for Sekyi to realize he was the one being addressed.

‘How dare you stay in this boat when English lives are in danger,' called the red-faced man. ‘Get out at once and make room for a gentleman.'

Sekyi's head rang. He tried to reply, but the words caught in his throat. Water slapped at the sides of the boat. He stayed where he was. Passengers clambered into the lifeboat. Sekyi helped them in. They huddled together, staring at the ship as it started to sink. With it, the last of Sekyi's love for England descended to the ocean floor.

What would William Sekyi make of the modern Ghana I had seen that night. The Ghana of Jay-Z records, Mercedes coupés and Louis Vuitton handbags?

For all that he came to loathe London, his true anger was reserved for the Cape Coast elite and its mimicry of the English. His beliefs helped to galvanize the self-rule movement that led, in 1957, to Ghana's independence.

Yet embracing Africa didn't necessarily mean rejecting the west. At home Sekyi could be found with a cigar and a glass of wine listening to Wagner on his phonograph. His critics were perplexed by this apparent dichotomy. He was considered, wrote his son Henry Van Hein Sekyi, to be an ‘outstanding example of a tragic and unresolved conflict, desiring at once to be pagan and Christian, aboriginal and European…traditionalist and western progressive'.

Sekyi himself, however, perceived no contradiction in his character. Identity, he believed, was fluid not fixed, and I can see his shadow on men such as my grandfather and my cousin Kobby, both of whom understand Ghana to be a place of shifting possibilities. From his home in Cape Coast Sekyi walked down to Ghana's Atlantic shore. Finding himself between the land and the sea he chose to face both ways.

I drained the last of my beer and placed the bottle on the table. The bar was shutting. The street had emptied.

I walked down the hill into the wakening city.

Burenyi in Accra – Esi, Elizabeth Taylor and Block O – Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali in Accra – The pierrots of Independence Square – Ants – Joe and Adelaide at the Happy Bar – Joe vanishes – Adelaide alone – The Eshuns depart for London

Soon after moving into Upper Heights I discovered that my standing in the neighbourhood hovered somewhere between prize pig and village idiot. When I lived in Ghana
as a child I spoke fluent Fante. It is the language of my parents and one of the most prominent of Ghana's seventy-five different tongues. I still understood Fante, but growing up in London left me no longer able to form the words needed to express myself. Ghana is a former British colony, and most people speak good English, so I hadn't anticipated trouble making myself understood. Yet without the ability to address them in their own language, I found I'd been rendered dumb.

Each evening as she laid the table for dinner, I saw a look of boundless compassion in Mrs Hagan's eyes. Disregarding my insistence that I understood Fante, she'd ask me about my day in the deliberate tones of a parent spooning mush to their baby. Precious, her niece, lived nearby and often came to visit. At those times the women stood over the table, discussing in Fante my appetite and mood, and what I'd done that day, while I sat between them, mutely spooning a bowl of groundnut soup.