Black Gold of the Sun (14 page)

A door stood open round the side of the house, forming a dark rectangle against the sun's glare. I knocked, stepped inside and found myself in a long, narrow hall, the floor patterned in a chequerboard of black-and-white tiles. Two easy chairs with faded green silk cushions stood together against the wall. The hall felt cool and noiseless, as I imagined a bank vault would, once you unwound its circular locks and swung open its steel door.

From a side door at the other end of the hall the owner of the house emerged. He had white hair and a face on which was written the same grace and exhaustion as his house. He crossed the chequerboard hallway and clasped my hands in his.

‘I've been expecting you,' he said, standing back to look me over.

When I knew I was visiting Cape Coast, I'd arranged to
see him through my mother. His name was Nana Banyin de Graft Johnson, son of the late Horace de Graft Johnson. He was my great-uncle.

‘Nana Banyin' was an honorific title. In Fante it means ‘grandfather', and this struck me as appropriate because, for many years, he had been compiling an account of the sprawling de Graft Johnson genealogy that drew together all the multiple wives and obscure relatives, all the children that careered through West de Graft Hall, all the dead sons and forgotten aunts.

Nana Banyin retreated to the back of the hall and returned with a carafe of water and two glasses. He placed it between the chairs and waved at me to sit down. Side by side in the hall, we talked for the whole afternoon. Through him I discovered who the founder of my mother's family line was. And from the legal documents Nana Banyin showed me I also found out what he did for a living.

Afterwards, when I'd said goodbye and returned to the afternoon sunlight, my head was ringing. I leaned against a wall overwhelmed by anger and astonishment. I wasn't sure where I was any more. The streets looked the same. But I knew now that another reality lay beneath them.

This fact struck me as both awful and funny. Beside the bust of Queen Victoria on London Bridge, I started laughing long and hard. But there was no mirth to the sound. People hurried past afraid to meet my eye for fear I was drunk or delusional. I wanted to call out and say, ‘Everything you know is wrong.' Just as quickly, though, it struck me that perhaps it was just me who was ignorant.

The past had caught up with me in Nana Banyin's mansion. It revealed itself as a joke hundreds of years in the telling. And here's what was funny: the punch line was on me.

When the Europeans first built their forts on the shoreline of Ghana they discovered the climate bore a variety of infections ranging from the fatal – malaria, dysentery, yellow fever – to the bizarre – such as the Guinea worm, the larvae of which were ingested through stagnant water, and grew to three feet inside the body before chewing their way through the skin to daylight. Even worse was the mysterious ‘48 Hour Disease'. It began with headaches and vomiting. The next day, convulsions. By thirty-six hours pustules sprouted on the sufferer's forehead and calves, after which a lethal fever set in. No one knew what caused it or how to cure it. The only certainty was that a healthy white man would be dead precisely two days after contracting it.

Such infections probably account for the low quality of recruits serving as soldiers at the forts. Drunkards, gamblers and former convicts enlisted from across Europe, they signed on for a three-year term, with more than half dying in the first twelve months. The rest found themselves serving out their time in overcrowded barracks that leaked in the rainy season and proved hot and airless during the
dry months. Fed on salt pork and hard biscuits, trapped behind a raised drawbridge at night, they fought and gambled and drank rum to battle the tedium.

The officers and company merchants of the forts had comparatively better food and conditions. As Capitein discovered at Elmina, many of them also took African concubines. Usually officially prohibited, it was nonetheless tacitly accepted by fort commanders. The most progressive marriage terms existed at the Danish fort of Christianborg in Accra, where Bishop Worm of Copenhagen had given officers a special tropical dispensation to wed African women. Danes were even required to sign over a percentage of their wages to their wives if they had children together.

Of necessity many such marriages were short-lived. Husbands either returned to Europe after their term or died on the coast. Marriages were, in any case, designed for the convenience of Europeans. An African wife could be dismissed at any time of a white man's choosing. Even so, local families were keen for their daughters to secure a white husband. Marriage was a business relationship. Through a white man, the family gained access to the forts, where they could barter goods such as gold and ivory for beads and rum. Children of mixed marriages took their father's name, and when husbands returned to Europe they would sometimes leave behind a sum of money for their African family.

This was how it went when my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather arrived from Holland. His name was
Joseph de Graft. He was a white man who arrived in Cape Coast around the 1750s and soon after married a woman named Jyemsiwa. She was a chief's daughter from the neighbouring town of Wineba. Dutch ideas of the time compared Africans to animals, which makes me wonder if he would have felt anything like love for her. But maybe Joseph came to look at things differently once he settled on the Gold Coast? Perhaps the ordinary dignity of the Africans contrasted well with the boorishness of the white men he met there? Or maybe he was just grateful for human contact when faced with the omnipresence of disease? Joseph and Jyemsiwa had a son, whom they named Joseph. He was born in 1756. A few years later, a second boy, William, followed.

I doubt that Joseph showed the same affection for Africans in general that he did his wife and children. The slave trade has never been known as a refuge for the sentimental, after all. And it was trade that had drawn Joseph across the ocean to Africa. Every three months a ship arrived from Holland, bearing his silks and copperware and schnapps in the hold. In exchange for them, Joseph bartered the slaves he'd stored in the dungeons of Elmina castle, who were taken to the Dutch plantations of the East Indies and worked until their death.

With his children still young Joseph returned to Holland. We might speculate on the reasons why. A drying up of profits, maybe? Or a letter from home? Could there have been another Mrs de Graft waiting for his return? Whatever the reason, once he left the Gold Coast Joseph never
returned. To his children he bequeathed his name, de Graft. It was an entitlement that enabled Joseph, his elder son, to take up his father's occupation.

What's it like to discover your ancestor was a slave trader?

As you stand beside the bust of Queen Victoria you tell yourself the easy things: it was a long time ago; it has no bearing on my life. But these bring no comfort. The disgust is overpowering. You cannot stop thinking about the men and women he sold on to the ships. You wonder what kind of temperament it took to be a slave trader. And whether the responsibility for his actions runs through your blood. You walk through Kotokuraba market square, past the swirl of street traders and the scent of smoked mackerel. You are full of shame.

On the highway leading out of Cape Coast a sixteen-wheel juggernaut loaded with logs rumbled past me. I covered my face against the dust and carried on walking. According to Albert the town of Pedu lay twenty minutes down the highway. I was on my way to find a cemetery.

In my mind, I see the young Joseph growing up with caramel skin and loose curly hair that he slathers into a parting with coconut oil. He is driven by trade, and the lightness of his skin allied to the name de Graft allows him to move easily between Europeans and Africans. Before long, he has established himself as a Cape Coast slave trader like his father. As Joseph would have understood it, slavery fell into two types.

Down on the shore, with their ships and forts, the Europeans had created an international system of exchange and profit based on the exploitation of human labour. But there was a domestic slave trade that far preceded the international form. For centuries prior to the arrival of Europe, Africans had enslaved Africans. Warring tribes turned captured prisoners into serfs. Families repaid debts by pawning a son or daughter into servitude. With the arrival of the Europeans, the domestic trade became linked to the international system. Mulatto middlemen such as Joseph bought slaves from Africans and sold them to the ships, tightening the links of commerce and complicity until they stretched from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic.

As I walked along the highway, I imagined Joseph visiting Salaga, site of the great market in northern Ghana where merchants gathered from the neighbouring Asante empire, from Hausaland in the north, and from the eastern states of Yoruba and Dahomey. Past the traders squatting before trays of cowrie shells and kola nuts, Joseph would have come to the section of the market where dozens of men and women were roped together for sale. Walked to Salaga by northern traders, they stood naked, the welts of beatings dark on their skin, as merchants such as Joseph bartered over their worth.

The slave business would have offered no struggle of conscience to him. How could it when it was so common-place? Each year 15,000 men and women were sold at Salaga. Most became domestic servants and joined the
household of a chief. Owning slaves was a symbol of power. Rich noblemen kept them by the hundred to farm their land, defend their homes and bear their children. In Asante during the eighteenth century, a third of the population was made up of slaves. They provided the army. They worked the fields and the gold mines the state depended on for its wealth. Slaves could be found in the royal household, as stool carriers, drummers, horn blowers, bathroom attendants, hammock carriers, elephant-tail switchers, minstrels and eunuchs.

Under Asante law, a female slave could marry her master or her master's son, and a favoured male slave could wed his master's daughter. Their children would be born free, and it was forbidden for any citizen to disclose the family background of another. Within a few generations, the descendants of slaves could find themselves fully integrated into Asante society.

Slaves could even became part of the nobility. Under the Asante king Osei Bonsu, the palace slave Opuku Frere rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1800 – an ascension he celebrated by establishing his own house-hold of slaves. The vagaries of the domestic trade threw up other notable figures, not least of whom was John Konny, the ‘Negro Prince of Prussia'.

In 1711, Konny, a fifty-year-old African merchant, controlled Cape Three Points, a lucrative trading site on the coast. Its position gave him a local monopoly over commerce. All slaves bought by Europeans, all guns and schnapps and cowrie shells sold to Africans – all business
went through Konny. To the chagrin of the Dutch and British castles nearby, Konny preferred to trade with the fort of Great Fredericksburg, which was maintained by the Prussian state of Brandenburg, a minor force in Africa compared to its more powerful European neighours on the coast.

Over the years, Dutch officers in the next-door fort of Axim had watched with alarm as Konny's influence grew. A report to the West India Company dated 16 August 1711 noted that Konny was ‘more and more chasing away our subject peoples, robbing some of them, killing others; he has furthermore dared to declare war upon us, threatening to commit similar acts of violence under our fort.' Another report, in 1715, complained of his reluctance to honour an outstanding debt. Konny had offered instead ‘flimsy excuses, such as the continuous rainfall, and later, an accident to his arm'.

Konny's power was such, wrote the Governor of Axim castle, that the local people ‘admit that they have to bow for him, nay, that they have to give their wives and children to him, if he desires them to do so'.

In December 1716, the Governor of Great Fredericksburg returned to Brandenburg. Konny seized the opportunity to consolidate his strength. Announcing himself its custodian, he took command of the fort, jettisoning the Prussian soldiers and stationing 900 of his own troops in their place. When slave ships from Europe were sighted at Cape Three Points they were greeted with a six-gun salute from the fort's battlements.

Attended by an honour guard of thirty troops and a servant clutching a gold-headed cane engraved with his master's initials, Konny would receive his visitors at the shore and lead them to the fort where a dinner of kenkey and palm wine would be waiting for them in the main hall. Adorned with bracelets and necklaces of pure gold weighing several pounds, Konny would sit at the head of the table and regale his guests in imperfect English richly peppered with expletives.

Determined to drive him from the coast, the West India Company sent a trio of frigates to Cape Three Points in 1718. Under a covering bombardment of fireballs and cannon, 120 soldiers stormed the fort. The attack was a disaster for the Dutch – Konny had been expecting them. His men returned fire from the battlements, killing most of the Dutch as they scrambled up the beach, and forcing the rest into retreat. Afterwards he lined the path to the fort with their skulls. Konny held court at Great Fred-ericksburg for another seven years until Dutch forces armed with heavy mortars finally destroyed his defences. Even then, they failed to capture him. Eluding his enemies, the Negro Prince of Prussia disappeared into the Asante kingdom, where he remained a free man until his death several years later.

As a consequence of men such as Konny, the practice of slavery was embedded in Ghanaian society. When the British abolished the international trade in 1807, King Osei Bonsu of Asante protested vociferously. ‘The white men do not understand my country,' said the king. ‘Otherwise
they would not say the slave trade was bad.' In light of his protests, domestic slavery was allowed to remain legal in the Gold Coast until 1874.