Solaris Rising (2 page)

So, I’m back, and are you glad to see me? Are you? You know, a boy’s got expectations. You come home after six months working up on the sun plants with those Algerians who think they’re better than you a dozen different ways, no beer and less fun, and you expect, well, maybe not a parade, maybe not the whole street turning out with goats and chickens and kids on bikes and the soundsystem and all that, but some kind of welcome. Six months, every Saturday transferring money back here; I like the plasma screen, those are very smart smartphones, and how could I begrudge my own brother that funky little Chinese moped but, people, I am not a sorcerer. This is Azumah, come home from working away, so why do you think he’s some kind of evil necromancer?

So, Dad has started speaking. I can see how that might cause alarm. In all the years he sat in that corner in his chair, smoking like a chimney, I only ever heard him speak three words and that was when FC Maamobi was relegated and those were not pretty words. In fact, on word count alone, he’s said more dead than alive. But it’s not me putting words in his mouth. It’s not me making the dead speak. But it
is
me getting the looks on the street and down at the Maxmart, and the people leaning close to each other and whispering.

I may have been up on construction in Algeria for six months but I know what’s going on here, I read the news, I keep in touch with family and friends, but you’re the ones closest to it, you’re the ones living it. You’re the ones see the money walking, the funds drying up, the hospitals going unbuilt and the oil people slopping money around like fish in a bucket. I tell you this, it may be big Western companies building those solar plants out in the desert, but sun is never dirty like oil. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m the least qualified to make Felix Cofie grumble about the state of the nation. And I’m disappointed that everyone thinks it’s me being disrespectful to the dead. After all I’ve done. No, no, I’ll get to the bottom of this. I’ll redeem my good name. I’m no sorcerer, Azumah Addy is no necromancer.

But d’you know? I’m glad the old man’s doing it.

I am Grace Ahulu and I too am dead. I also have a complaint. I have many complaints, a lot of which have no relevance here. Here’s how I died: my heart stopped on the way to church and down I went in the street with my Bible going up in the air. The cardiac ambulance came but they could do nothing except take me away. It’s a good way to go, it was quick and it only hurt for a moment and I was happy that I was on my way to church. I love it there very much, all my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Now, I can hear what you’re thinking. How can you, a respectable lady washed in the blood and a one-time choir member as well, be with the Lord in heaven and in some terrible pagan Satanic house of demons and unbelievers? Well, if Pastor Nathaniel’s Bible Study is true, we do not go straight to heaven, but only on the Day of Judgement when we are called from our graves and appear before Christ where we see our names written in the Book of Life. Then we are admitted to the realms of glory. Until then we sleep, and if we sleep, we dream – it is as obvious as day. And, if we dream, can we not dream usefully?

So: I am dead in the Lord, but I have a complaint, and it’s this. Since when is it more important that we feed Chinese mouths than our own? Since when do Shanghai children come before our own children? Yet the government is signing over hundreds – no, thousands – of hectares of land, selling off our land, – your land, my land – to Chinese agriculture companies. And they guard these plantations with armed guards, and security cameras, and robot drones. And who are these guards, and who flies the drones, but our own men and boys. They’re carrying guns against their own people! And who works this land, but the very people who were put off it by the big business! The very same land! Oh, I can’t understand that. They work the land, for wages, to buy expensive food they could have grown in their own fields, and sold it, and made money. Where is the logic in that? I suppose the logic is that some Minister gets a kickback, and the money goes all the way down, hand to hand to hand. Shameful! Sinful. I tell you this, it’s worth putting off the imminent hope of heaven to address such wrong on Earth!

(
Vision
magazine, Issue 27, May 2019)

The Ghost Machine

Obo Quartey is the Maamobi man who built

a heaven – and made a million cedis.

Welcome to the afterlife. Here the deceased live in personalised spirit-houses, each one built to their tastes and characters. They sit on stools, around their heads are photographs of the things they did in life, their work, their friends, their children and grandchildren, their cousins and loved ones, thousands of them. At their feet are the things they loved in life: clothes, bottles of beer, cars, make-up, pictures of footballers or fishing lines or books, guitars or dancing shoes. But most of all, there is money, spirit-money, billions in ghostly afterlife cash. It’s not exactly how we think of heaven. But then it’s not quite hell either. Teshie, the online afterlife where hundreds of thousands – soon to be millions, hopes Obo Quartey, the online afterlife’s director – of memories of the dead are stored – is more like a noisy, overcrowded Unplanned Neighbourhood of a bustling city.

Obo Quartey is terrifyingly young and competent; dressed in the relaxed yet smart style of the modern digital entrepreneur – an open neck shirt, top label jeans, well-shined hand-made shoes. It’s a very long way from Maamobi, the neighbourhood where he was born (he claims, with pride) in a thunderstorm on the first Friday of the 21st century. But, he insists, not so long. Teshie is still headquartered in the district, in the same area as the computer cafe where local people formed the computer co-operative that gave fourteen year-old Obo his first data-work. Maamobi’s red dirt streets are the soil from which his online empire grew.

“Everyone goes on and on about Moore’s Law.” (This is a so-called ‘law’ of computing that every six months processor power doubles and the cost halves.) “What no one’s thinking about is that the real revolution is in memory. You can get a flash drive the size of your thumb that’s big enough to hold the entire University Library, for the price of a bag of rice. So, here’s this kid tagging these photographs for this white woman in Ohio, but what he’s really thinking is, I’m using one gig on this computer and a tiny corner of my brilliant brain, but down there at my feet is a terabyte of memory, just sitting there, doing nothing. Empty. Well, you know what this country’s like, leave anything empty and someone will move into it.”

Quartey’s first micro-business was Lawbase, a data storage facility for digitising and archiving thirty years of court cases and legal documents. So how did he move from dry-as-dust legal archiving to an online afterlife?

“I got commissioned to design a simple website for Fantasy Coffins,” Quartey says. “You know the sort of thing; Mercedes for businessmen, aeroplanes for travellers, hawks and eagles if you’re a big man, computers if you’re a geek. Beautiful things. They build them right sweet. Westerners put them in museums. It’s a way of keeping the memory alive, by surrounding the dead with the things they loved in life; the things that defined them. And that got me to thinking, maybe there are other ways of keeping memories alive? More alive? What if there was a place, online, where you could put all the photographs, and all the videos you shot on your phone, and the press clippings and the phone messages and the recordings and all the things your family did, so that when they die, they don’t fade away? They’re all there in one place, and you can go and look at them, and remember them, and even add to them?”

It’s become much more than that, with Quartey’s company adding new features, like the ability to buy online gifts and offerings to the departed, and donations of Teshie-dollars – virtual cash, and most recently, the feature that allows subscribers to design fantasy houses for the deceased.

“What can I say? I’m a businessman. I’m led by the market. The market is eight hundred and fifty thousand Teshie subscribers and growing every day. Those subscribers are buying the spirit-houses, the Teshie-dollars. I tell you this, every day we get comments and emails and phone calls and, yes, sometimes even old fashioned letters, with new ideas.”

In a rare display of inter-religious unity, both Christian pastors and Islamic imams have denounced Teshie as pagan and ungodly. Quartey is unimpressed.

“It’s no different from keeping photographs on the shelf, or a box of newspaper cuttings under the bed,” he says. “It’s not an afterlife. It’s a virtual environment. It’s Facebook for the dead. All I’ve done is recognise something about us as people that the established religions haven’t. We’re a country that honours our ancestors. I’ve just given them a way to do it.” He laughs. “But if that gets the clerics phoning each other, wait until they see what I want to do next.” He waits a moment for effect. “What if I give them voices?”

What? What are you saying? This I cannot believe – and I will not accept. Who do you think you are, storming round here this time of night? Can’t you see I’ve got work to do? Work that involves beer tins, and television? That’s you; that always was you, you always think that because I’m a student I never do a stroke of work. We just sit around in the sun drinking beer and staring at television and watching the country go to hell in a handcart. Well, just you look over here. Tell me, what you see? Yeah. That’s right. You don’t get to be an economist drinking beer and staring at television, and as for the watching the country go to hell in a handcart, it’s economists like me who’re going to bring it back to the way it used to be, when everyone looked up to us. You’re my brother but you make assumptions, Azumah, you make assumptions. I am not a parent abuser.

Moderate your tone. Calm down. Come out with me for coffee. There is a new place. It’s good. There are lots of good looking women. Yes, they’re students.

See, told you it was good. Now, let us be rational men here, brothers together. Listen to me. I am not putting words in our grandfather’s mouth. Let me say that again so there can be no doubt. It is not me making Felix Cofie sound off on the Teshie-net. I’m glad he’s doing it. I tell you this, things are bad if even the dead are complaining about them. You see, you don’t know the half of it, up there in the Maghrib. You see those people down in Independence Square on the news and the police throwing tear gas and going in with the sticks and the shields and the helmets and you think, what’s that about? I’ll tell you what it’s about. Corruption. That oil is ours, not Raymond Kufuor’s. And he and his cronies are using that oil, that money – our money – to build a big shiny tower to take them right out of reach. A whole generation is being shut out of power.

Oh they’re not so stupid as to close the whole internet down like those Arabs – the economy needs all those e-workers too much and it starts the Americans and the Europeans squawking like chickens – no, they’re subtle. You let through a little grumble here, a little gossip there, a little complain and a little gripe, but you hide all the big stuff. That’s the clever way to do it. I’ve been out, Azumah. I’ve been down to Independence Square. I’ve seen what it’s like. I’ve been chased. The cops charged us, the bastards. They didn’t beat me, thank the Lord, but they had this stuff they sprayed – no, it wasn’t tear gas, it was like a powder, but it didn’t burn like pepper spray. It got everywhere. We all looked like big white ghosts. I heard it’s some new thing they got from China – millions of tiny electronic chips each the size of a dust grain. They can track you, they can identify you. No, they don’t do anything like sling you in the back of the van. They’re clever; they just shut down your credit, they blacklist your name so you never get a good job, you never get access to money, you never get a loan to start a business, you never get your head out of Maamobi. Azumah, that’s much scarier. I’ve been showering. Twice a day, every day. I am the cleanest economist at Legon University.

And Dad’s protesting? He’s getting up on his stool and sounding off all these lamentations and lampoons? Hey hey. I wish it was me – that’s the way to do it. They may try and silence us, but you can’t threaten the dead. No, it’s not me. But I think I have an idea who it might be, someone a little physically closer, you know what I mean?

Yes yes yes. Again Felix Cofie finds it necessary to sit up and shake his stick. The impertinent dead? Is that what Justice Minister Kwame Charles Damoah called us? Mischief makers and anti-social elements? I will tell you who are the mischief-makers: Kwame Charles Damoah, Kofi Mensah, Raymond Kufuor, the men who each personally made a million cedis from the West Ga land sale. Our land, sold to the AMC-Shanghai Corporation. Food taken from the mouths of our own people so that the Chinese will have stable food prices. What about our own food prices? There. I have named you. I do not fear you. What will you do, take a dead man to court? And while I am at it, the holes of Kanda Highway must be fixed before the rains. These matters have not been attended to. Sort it out.

Yes, it’s me, Grace Ahulu again. How can a woman’s heart ache still, after she is dead? It aches because it sees rich men growing richer by selling all the things we have placed in their trust: our oil, our land – what will it be next, our people? Our future? Our children? I’ve seen how you treat our children, with your sticks and your dogs and your gas, like they are animals, or slaves. Hah! So that is what it is to be. Sell our young people! That’s an ache, that is. My aching heart killed me once, do not let it kill me again! Do you want to find out if ghosts have ghosts?