Black Gold of the Sun (6 page)

At the start of 1958, Adelaide discovered she was pregnant. It was the year after independence – a time of new beginnings for the country. Nkrumah had a saying to describe the infant strides of the new republic: ‘Ghana, two steps forward, one step back.' With similar trepidation, my parents found themselves with a daughter to care for. They named her Araba Foriwa.

Adelaide started training to be a teacher, and Joe went to work for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Accra. He mixed with the activists and politicians of the new independence era. All of them believed in the promise of a free Africa. At Nkrumah's All-African People's Conference, delegates arrived from across the continent: Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, the Kenyan trade union leader Tom Mboya, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe of Rhodesia – the young activists who'd become Africa's first generation of black leaders.

The TUC sent Joe on a nine-month scholarship to Germany, where he toured the factories and Bierkellers of Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Hanover. In the summer of 1961 he crossed Checkpoint Charlie and visited the blasted streets of East Berlin. He was still in the city when the East Germans start uncoiling barbed wire across the centre and began to erect the Wall.

From Germany, Nkrumah's party, the CPP, sent Joe to London to be its representative at the Ghana High Commission. He, Adelaide and Araba settled in Wembley and, if the work there was more prosaic than the building of a republic, there were occasional flashes of glamour. A photograph from 1964 shows Joe in a tailored three-piece suit at the Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle. Beside him stands the city's Lord Mayor, gold chain around his neck. Adelaide is in the foreground. A fur stole is draped over her shoulders, and there is a bottle of champagne in her right hand. She is about to smash the champagne against the steel hull of the SS
Benya River
, the latest addition to Ghana's merchant fleet. High up on the deck, sailors wave down to the crowd. Adelaide waves back. She lets go the silk cord. A camera bulb flashes. The bottle shatters. The
Benya River
slides out of the docks and begins its voyage to Accra. In the camera's glare my parents, the children of the young republic, appear to wear a halo of optimism.

Two years after the photograph was taken, however, on 24 February 1966, Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup. As a representative of the CPP, Joe lost his job. The family had to leave its house, which was rented for it by
the Ghana High Commission. To exacerbate their troubles, Adelaide was nine months pregnant with their second child.

Eleven days after the coup she gave birth to a boy, Kodwo. Joe, Adelaide and the two children moved to a new house on Ealing Road, in Wembley. Joe became the leader of the CPP abroad. Nkrumah was in exile in Guinea. Joe hoped that with enough pressure Nkrumah might still be returned to power. From a three-room office in Fleet Street, Joe set up a dissenting newsletter against the military government called
Ghana Defence
.

When J. W. K. Harlley, one of the instigators of the coup, arrived in London, it was Joe who leaped on his car, causing Harlley to dive to the floor in fear of an assassination attempt.

In 1967, Joe and Adelaide had their third child, Esi. Towards the end of the same year, he told Adelaide he needed to fly to Benin for a meeting.

‘I'll be back in a week,' he said.

On the day of his departure, he kissed her and each of the children, and hurried to Heathrow to catch his flight. The plane landed in Cotonou with Joe aboard. After that there was no sign of him. He'd vanished, leaving no sign of his whereabouts in Cotonou or in London.

‘He's dead,' Adelaide told herself, not wanting to believe it even as the days following his disappearance became months.

Every night, she dreamed of the same scene from
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. It was the last film they'd
seen together, but instead of Richard Burton's doomed scramble for the Berlin Wall it was Joe she saw shot down. She'd wake up to the clatter of gunfire, believing each time she'd seen him die for real.

To keep the family together, Adelaide found work at a sausage factory. When the stench of offal became more than she could bear, she moved to a night shift at the McVitie's biscuit factory in North Wembley and opened a children's day-care centre in her living room on Ealing Road. Eighteen-hour working days and, each time she shut her eyes, there was Joe still trying to scale the Wall.

From the beginning of his disappearance, Adelaide learned not to rely on her neighbours for help. The elderly white woman next door would ignore her even when they were both standing in their back gardens, with just a fence between them. There was the time the pipes burst, leaking through into the woman's house. The first Adelaide knew about it was when a constable arrived at her front door. Instead of calling round the woman had rung the police.

Strangers proved just as spiteful. At MacFisheries on Wembley high street, she waited her turn at the counter. Waited and waited while the white women behind her were served first. When she complained, the fishmonger affected to notice her for the first time.

‘In this country,' he said, ‘we prefer to queue.'

She left, trying and failing to hold back tears.

Six months after Joe vanished, a friend of his called at Ealing Road. He had a wheedling manner that made it
difficult to follow his conversation. Adelaide understood from him that Joe might be alive and in Ghana.

Another four months later, she received a letter signed by Joe himself. He'd been abducted by government agents as he landed at Cotonou. For the past year, they had held him in detention at Ussher Fort in Accra. He was a political prisoner. It was only much later that Adelaide discovered that the man who'd come simpering to Ealing Road was the one who'd betrayed Joe to the government. Even with the relief of Joe's letter, there was still no way to see him. Conditions were still too volatile for her to return to Ghana.

And by then there was a fourth child to consider. Unknown to either of them when Joe left for Benin, Adelaide had been pregnant with their second son. I was born nine months afterwards, in May 1968. She named me Ekow, after Joe's Fante name.

I saw my father for the first time two years later. By then the government had conceded they had no case against him. On his release we flew to Accra to meet him. Seated on the plane, Adelaide thought about all the things she wanted to say to him about the children, and her time in London. And she found herself wondering if he might apologize for her loneliness and turbid dreams.

In the event neither of them did much talking. When he saw her, Joe began to cry. She held him as he wept, and the two of them exchanged tears in place of words, while the children clutched at their parents' legs, excited and uncertain about the meaning of the adults' behaviour.

My earliest memories belong to that day. Thinking back, I cannot recall anything of how my parents looked – only the sensation of being caught between them. The bristles of Joe's beard, the scent of Adelaide's perfume and the force of my own tears as their reunion finally came to bear.

That was how I ended up living in Ghana as a child. We arrived in 1971 and stayed for three years. Araba went to boarding school in Cape Coast. When we came to school age, Esi, Kodwo and I were enrolled at Burma Camp in Accra. Burma Camp was not very different from being drafted. The red-brick bungalows of the school were set within the grounds of Accra's main military barracks. From my classroom window I could hear a drill sergeant bawl orders to his men away across the playing fields. Burma Camp wasn't an army school; it just shared the same grounds as the barracks. But discipline was martial. Mr Frankson, my class teacher, kept a cane above the blackboard. I never saw him use it, but he was still generous in slaps applied to the backs of young heads. He was a pastor in an evangelical church and seemed to believe our class existed in a state of permanent moral emergency.

‘Indiscipline is a sin,' said Mr Frankson. ‘You must work to purge it from your souls.'

I'd made the mistake of giggling during one of his extemporary sermons once. He'd covered the ground quickly for a small man. Before I could compose myself, he was at the back of the room clapping me over the ear. I had to spend lunch composing an essay on the theme of
‘Honour Your Elders' with a ringing head and teary eyes.

Once a week the boys in the school did drill, stamping dust beneath bare feet as we marched round the playing field. The point of this escaped me. For all the marching we always ended up where we had started. But in the physical repetition of actions – turn, march, turn, halt, march, turn, eyes right, halt, attention – my mind was at least free to follow its own course. I thought about chocolate biscuits and ice cream – luxuries almost impossible to come by in Ghana. They meant Britain to me. I knew there was something else, too, called, ‘chips'. I wasn't sure whether it was hot or sweet or sharp to taste, but like chocolate biscuits and ice cream it held the promise of unqualified delight.

‘Isaac Dunkor. Elizabeth Foster…' said Mr Frankson. He looked around the class with narrowed eyes. Then he read out the last name on his list.

‘Ekow Eshun.'

Mr Frankson led the three of us out of the classroom and along the silent corridors, until we reached a storeroom normally used for buckets and mops. He opened the door. It was the size of a closet. There were five children already in there. By the light of the corridor I made out Esi and Kodwo. Mr Frankson stood over us in the doorway. ‘Wo ye nyimpa bon,' he said. ‘You are bad children. You must stay in here the rest of the afternoon. We will call your parents and they can come and get you. Until then I don't want to see you.'

He shut the door and left us in the dark.

Elizabeth Foster started to cry. I felt like crying, too. What had we done that was so criminal apart from turn up for school that morning?

‘We haven't done anything wrong,' said Esi, reading my mind. ‘I heard some of the teachers talking yesterday about parents who hadn't paid their fees yet. They said that if the school didn't get its fees, then they wouldn't get their wages. So something had to be done about it. I think this is what they decided to do.'

We started discussing whether it was true or not. Then the talking subsided. Whatever the reason, we were shut in a dark room smelling of ammonia for the afternoon. We tried to get comfortable, but there wasn't enough space for us all to sit on the floor. I stood between two mops and shut my eyes. If I tried to blank out the room and the school and the whole of Ghana then, when I opened my eyes, I might be back in Britain, and there'd be all the chips and ice cream I could eat. I squeezed my eyes shut until I could see the red behind my eyelids. I took a gulp of air and held my breath. Blood thrummed in my ears. My fingers gripped my shoulders. Nails dug into skin. I couldn't hold on any longer. My eyes were opening. I was breathing again. And I was still in the same room. Elizabeth Foster was still crying. It still stank of ammonia. I started crying, too.

Some time later the door opened. It was Mr Frankson. And behind him my mother. She looked angry. He looked embarrassed. I wondered what she'd said to him. But the
lump in my throat was too big to say anything. I took her hand. She smothered my head at her waist. Esi and Kodwo and I followed her out of school, walking quickly. It was still light outside. She was very quiet and so were we. That evening after dinner, without a word of explanation, she served us each a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

The idea was to return home.

In 1974, General Ignatius Acheampong stared from the television screen announcing that he'd led the army in an overthrow of the government. My family made plans to leave the country. My father had secured another posting to the Ghana High Commission in London. The idea was that by spending his four-year term abroad we could sidestep the worst of the turmoil before returning to Ghana. Despite the upheavals they'd already faced, it didn't occur to my parents that something might disrupt their plan.

For years afterwards in Britain they pored over blueprints of house designs, drawn out on crackly translucent paper, trying to decide which style of house to build once we went back to Accra. In the garage my mum kept two metal shipping trunks that each month grew more full with Moulinex food blenders, Marks & Spencer towels and all the other essentials of modern family living.

A temporary stopover, then. But what does five-year-old Ekow think of the plan in Accra? Concupiscent fantasies fill his head. His belly swells in anticipation of the chips and ice cream and chocolate biscuits about to come its
way. Those are
his
plans. That's what home means to him. Not Block O or the dimly remembered greyness of London, but the satiation of desire.

So, eagerly, we board the Ghana Airways plane. Knowing we'll be back soon, Joe and Adelaide leave Araba at boarding school in Cape Coast. Kodwo, Esi and I are shepherded up the stairs. All of us, as we turn for a last look at the control tower and the city beyond it, believe in the beneficence of the future. We believe it will deliver us home. All of us suspect nothing of what lies ahead.

Two steps forward, one step back.

The future, it turns out, isn't all ice cream.