Black Gold of the Sun (4 page)

On Upper Height's main street the neighbourhood housewives, returning from the market carrying woven baskets of cassava and tilapia fish wrapped in greaseproof paper, would speculate about my identity as I walked by. I was an African-American tourist; Mrs Hagan's retarded grandson; a Ghanaian who'd been to Abora Kyir (England) and come back with a swelled head and a phony accent. And who was I really? Even if I'd been able to answer to them in Fante, what would I have said?

At the end of the street stood Maa Lizzy's, the grocery store, where the local youth liked to gather after school.
They'd fall ostentatiously silent when I was sighted approaching. But in the time it took for me to be served by the affectless teenage girl behind the counter, word would flash round the neighbourhood. On the first such occasion, what seemed like a herd of kids galloped to the store for a look at me. Smaller children hoisted themselves on to the shoulders of big brothers for a better view. An ice-cream boy riding past parked his bicycle and began hawking ice lollies and tubs of sweet frozen milk to the crowd. Scuffles broke out at the back among those denied a decent view. It was a carnival, and I was the main attraction.

As I emerged into the light, someone shouted, ‘Burenyi.'

Another voice called out the same word. Then they were all chanting it.

‘Burenyi.'

‘Burenyi.'

They trailed me down the street shouting, until one of the youngest children, a girl with hair in bunches like Mickey Mouse ears, tripped over at the front of the procession.

In the commotion that followed I slipped back home, where Precious was making soup in the kitchen.

‘What does
burenyi
mean?' I asked.

She looked up from the stove.

‘Where did you hear that?' she said.

‘Nowhere,' I shrugged, trying to sound offhand. ‘Just out today.'

Precious sprinkled pepper into the soup.

‘It means “white man”,' she said. ‘Why do you ask? I thought you said you understood Fante.'

When I was twenty I met a girl called Hannah.

We fell in love.

It didn't last.

She was on my mind the morning after the kids called me a white man in Upper Heights.

The children's reaction brought home the fact that I was alone in a strange country. Hannah would have said that I courted loneliness. If that's the case, it's nothing of which I'm proud.

We were together for eighteen months – hardly an eternity, but enough time to know each other well. That was when it got difficult between us. Hannah had told me all about her friends and her parents and her childhood. She expected me to do the same. Only I didn't reveal anything to her about my past. The fate of our relationship came down to the reason why this was so. She said I didn't want to. I said I couldn't.

The last time I saw her was in an over-lit pub in Finsbury Park.

‘I've noticed something,' said Hannah. ‘You never get angry. You never get upset. It's as if you're never really here. You're so cut off from yourself it's impossible to reach you.'

‘I care about you.'

‘I'm not sure that's enough for me any more.'

‘You don't want me?'

‘I just want to know what you want.'

A cloud of cigarette smoke from across the room drifted past me. I noticed the ceiling was the colour of spoiled milk and the table was embedded with the ancient rings of beer glasses.

We'd had the same conversation several times before. In response to her questions, I used to tell Hannah I couldn't recall much about my childhood. The truth was different, though: I just couldn't remember anything I wanted to talk about. When I looked up at Hannah, her face seemed indistinguishable from childhood enemies such as Kevin Dyer and Dwayne Hall – the kids who'd conspired to humiliate me when I was at school; she was doing the same now.

‘What do you know?' I said. ‘You sit there like you've got all the answers, but you don't know a thing about my life.'

I said a lot more, most of it made incoherent by anger and shame. Hannah simply let me speak. When I finally exhausted myself, she sat for a while, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers.

‘That's exactly my point. If I don't understand, why don't you try talking to me? I won't laugh at you or whatever it is you're scared of. I just want you to be yourself. Help me understand.'

The choice couldn't have been plainer: trust Hannah
enough to take her into my past or turn away into solitude. At the time it felt as if there was only one possible decision. Even years afterwards, when I'd recall the curve of her hips in bed beside me or the depth of her brown eyes, even then it didn't occur to me I might have done anything other than leave the pub that night by myself.

I've had relationships with several women since Hannah, but solitude remains more familiar to me than intimacy. I live by myself in a flat near the City of London. After the office workers have left for the night, a stillness takes hold of the streets, one that's punctuated occasionally by the sight of a vixen, two cubs yowling behind her, as they make their way to Bunhill Fields burial ground on City Road, to lie together near the grave of William Blake.

Nearby on Brick Lane, immigrants have been coming to make their home in London for hundreds of years. French Huguenots, Jews, Somalis, Bangladeshis – all in turn have built a community there and left an indelible mark on the neighbourhood. That's not my way. I prefer the in-between places – a flat above a row of shops; a cul-de-sac; the anonymous expanse of a council estate. Some place without an identity of its own where no one asks where you're from.

Yet I still woke up the morning after the incident at the store weighed down with the sense of my aloneness. I rang my sister Esi from the balcony outside my bedroom. When I first decided to return to Ghana, she talked about coming
with me. But the more we discussed it the less enthusiastic she became. Esi is a year older than me. Her memories of the place were more vivid. She said she wasn't ready to go back to them.

‘I never felt at home there,' said Esi, down the phone line. ‘Do you remember that set of flats where we lived in Accra? Community One housing estate, Block O. With a big O painted on the side. These two boys would chase me around the courtyard there. I guess one of them liked me. But they called me “Guinness”. I didn't understand what that was supposed to mean but there was obviously some racial undertow to it – I didn't have the right accent or I didn't fit in. And they used that against me.'

A mosquito buzzed around my head. I smacked it away and set off a ringing in my ear. Static surged along the phone line. For a moment Esi was submerged beneath its waves. Then her voice bobbed back to the surface.

‘There was a funeral for an auntie of ours. She'd died of septicaemia after giving birth to her sixth child. But everyone said she was killed by a curse. On the day of the funeral the yard behind her house was filled with drumming and women ululating. The sound started to send me into a trance. I can't explain it exactly. Even at six I knew that certain types of drumbeats would make me drift away from myself. You start to dissolve. Your spirit gets drawn out of you until there's nothing left. I could feel it happening. It was terrifying. I ran as far from the sound as I could because I knew that if I didn't I would lose myself and disappear.'

I was listening to Esi speak, but for a moment all I could think of was how I used to creep into her room at night in London when we were kids. A pile of books lay on the floor beside her bed. Enid Blyton's
Mallory Towers
,
The Hobbit
and, at the bottom, the
Encyclopaedia of Epic Films
, a giant volume that claimed to ‘capture in glorious detail all of Hollywood's greatest historical movies'. Esi was the book's oracle. She'd imbibed every scene of every movie. When I couldn't sleep I'd wake her up and we'd leaf through pictures of the chariot race in
Ben Hur
, the flaming ship taking Tony Curtis to Valhalla at the end of
The Vikings
and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, borne into Rome on a golden sphinx.

As it rose from her bed, Esi's voice was grave. She talked about the pictures as if she'd lived through ancient times and was recalling now those former years. As if she'd already seen too much at ten years old.

‘When we first went back to Ghana Mum and Dad took us to see a fortune-teller,' said Esi. ‘He was an old man with red robes and red eyes. He made us throw cowrie shells so he could read our future. He pointed to you and said, “Fine.” Then he looked at me. He shook his head. “Her? No.”

‘I was going to have a terrible life. I was five years old. How could he say something so cruel? Mum and Dad took me back to see him, and he changed his prediction – I suppose on their insistence. But it was already too late. After that it felt like I couldn't touch anything without it turning to ash.

‘In Block O we had a Labrador puppy called Husky. He was very cute, but completely unruly. When I played with him I forgot how strange it felt being in Ghana. But Husky's barking used to really irritate the neighbours. They complained to Dad and he decided Husky had to be put down. Some men from the north were hired to come and deal with the dog. Everyone said the reason they hired themselves as dog killers was because they liked to eat them afterwards.

‘There were three of them who came, tall and silent, with scarification marks on their cheeks. They carried a machete each and an empty brown sack. They chased Husky round the courtyard. His feet were scrabbling on the concrete as he tried to escape. The men cornered him. Husky was wailing. They raised their machetes. I couldn't bear to watch any more. Just before I turned away I saw some fleas jump from his fur and splatter themselves red against the white wall.'

Esi's voice drowned in a fizz of static. The phone line died.

In the distance, sunlight beat off Accra's tall buildings. I stayed on the balcony till the evening. Underneath, the shadows of banana trees stretched gradually thinner until they vanished into the gloom of the evening. Nothing stirred. In the dark I felt like Laika the space dog, spinning above the earth while longing for a scratch between the ears.

The following day I rode into Accra on a tro-tro – one of the customized minibuses which serve in place of public transport throughout Ghana. When it became stuck in traffic I pulled out a guide book and discovered that Ghana had been a voguish destination for African-Americans in the 1960s. Having won independence from Britain in 1957, the former crown colony of the Gold Coast had become, after Sudan, only the second African country south of the Sahara with a black leader. For visiting Americans, the new nation was a powerful inspiration in their own prolonged struggle for civil rights. In 1962 Malcolm X spent a week in Accra engaged in meetings with the Ghanaian government, his trip coinciding by chance with a visit by Muhammad Ali. Their arrival was recorded for the
Ghanaian Times
by the writer Maya Angelou, one of a community of 200 black Americans living permanently in the city. The most distinguished of the expats was the veteran civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois, who'd renounced his US passport for Ghanaian citizenship at the age of ninety-three. All of these recent arrivals were preceded, however, by Louis Armstrong, who'd visited the Gold Coast in 1956, a year before the formal handover of power, and played to a crowd of 100,000 at the Accra racecourse.

It was a heady time in the country's history, much of it embodied by Kwame Nkrumah, the charismatic head of state, and his lavish schemes for the fledgling republic.
Modernist silhouettes, such as the triumphal arch over Independence Square and the Accra Conference Centre, with its echoes of Le Corbusier's famous design for Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, began to sprout on the capital's skyline. The prices of gold and cocoa, the country's main exports, soared on the world market.

Ghana's example would inspire peaceful revolution across Africa, according to Nkrumah. The colonial oppressors would be thrown off the continent. A union of independent nations would rise in their place. Yet for all his ambition, Nkrumah's plans didn't take long to unravel. The grand building projects drained the national coffers. Foreign aid dried up. The international price of cocoa fell by 60 per cent. Inflation mounted. Political unrest grew.

On 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to Hanoi, the army seized power and imposed martial rule over Ghana. For the next thirteen years, military and civilian governments chased each other in and out of power. In 1979, Jerry Rawlings, a 32-year-old air force flight lieutenant, mounted a decisive coup, holding autocratic power for thirteen years before serving as elected president for a further eight years. In 2000, he was defeated in democratic elections by John Kuffour, the current president. So far, Ghana had managed four military governments and four democratic republics in the course of forty years.

It was hardly a great record. All the same, the days of political unrest were over and, from the guide book, I realized that I could retrace the country's route to
independence in three stops, by walking from central Accra to Christianborg Castle on the coast, then to Independence Square.

My starting point was 28th February Road, the place where modern Ghana began. On that date in 1948, British soldiers opened fire on civil rights protesters marching along this road to the governor's residence at Christianborg Castle. Three protesters were shot dead. In the rioting that followed twelve others died. The bloodshed spurred the creation of a mass independence movement led by Nkrumah. After nine years of unrest, Britain was forced to surrender its most profitable colony in Africa to Africans themselves.

Unfortunately my walk failed to recapture those turbulent days. Twenty-Eighth February Road had become a long strip of government offices with titles such as the Office of the Public Service Commission and the Human Resources Development and Management Directorate.