The Masque of Africa (19 page)

With this talk of local food—breaking off from time to time to look at unfinished concrete pieces in the bush—we beguiled many miles. And then, as if this talk of food had called them up, there appeared at the roadside local men holding up smoked animals, offering them for sale, the surrounding bush combed and combed for these survivors—the agouti, together with a big rat known here as the grass-cutter, baby armadillos, long-snouted baby ant-eaters, and a few other creatures that just weren’t fast enough to get away from these idle fellows.

The smoked creatures were usually split down the middle, to make for easier smoking, and they looked as though they had been run over by a motorcar. They were a strange shiny pale-brown colour—the colour looked as though it had been applied in a semi-liquid state with a brush—and were not at all like the thick black crusts of fish, monkey and crocodile that were being offered for sale on the Congo River thirty years before. Those black crusts had to be cracked open.

The bush was almost barren of wildlife, but these people were managing to squeeze out the last remnants, while their fertile land remained largely unused.

R
ICHMOND’S GRANDFATHER
on his father’s side had been in the police, and high up. He was given a police funeral when he died, with a one-gun salute. Beyond that was a Danish ancestor, whose surname Richmond still carried.

It sounds strange. What were the Danes doing so far from home?
But that is only a modern prejudice. In fact, the Danes, though their numbers were small, were active gold-buyers and slave-traders in their time, and were known to the chiefs of Ghana. The big fort near Accra was built by the Danes in the 1660s. (At the same time they also had territory in India, in Tranquebar, south of Pondicherry, half a world and many weeks’ sailing away.) The abolition of the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century more or less put an end to the Danish slave business, but it wasn’t until 1850 that they left Ghana, after selling out whatever they still had to the British.

Richmond knew the name of his Danish ancestor, but had done no research on him. I don’t think it was prejudice that kept him back; it was more likely that he didn’t have the time and wouldn’t have known how to go about researching the matter. “Just out of curiosity” he would have liked to know more.

He wasn’t too agitated about the slave-trading past of Ghana. But this might have been only bravado. It was said that visitors to Elmina Castle from the United States and the West Indies often broke down and wept when they saw, below the official quarters, the stone dungeons, smelling of damp (easy to imagine them crowded and airless), where slaves (already captive for many weeks) were kept before they were taken out in rowing boats to the slave ships for the Atlantic crossing. But Richmond would have seen the ocean rollers beating on those white slave forts and castles all his life; they would have been stripped of emotion for him; and so when we went to Elmina he strode about like a guide, no more.

He said: “The colonial masters came here for business. Slave trade was a business. Maybe bad, but it was purely business. They took, but they gave us the church. That was a death knell to traditional religion. In the traditional religion, every king had his chief priest and elders to consult. It was a democratic system. It promoted sanity. People did not cross boundaries. The church came and overturned this. They brought in Jesus.”

There were so many clashing ideas there it was hard to disentangle them and to know what Richmond really felt. But perhaps the fault
was mine, looking for my own purposes for a clear reply to what, for Richmond, was a complicated and messy matter: a past dying, a new way coming.

Richmond said, “In my area in the Volta River [to the east of Accra] we all have a shrine. My father told me that in the old days we owned things, but we needed someone to own us, and so we had the gods. We were good herbalists. We had new herbs and drugs, and we used them to talk to the entity. You created the entity to rule over you, and you can misuse that entity too.”

Richmond had a story about the misuse of an “entity.”

“My mother told me this story. Her mother—that is my grandmother—was Nkrumah’s cook. Apart from Nkrumah’s house in the mountains, he had a bungalow at Half Asini in the western region. Whenever Nkrumah came to visit this bungalow my grandmother and her cousin Aunty Afua would look after him and cook for him.”

That was the first part of the story: the presentation and verification of the witness.

“My grandmother told my mother that the Ivory Coast president and king, Houphouët-Boigny, went to the high priest and asked for eternal power.” Ivory Coast was next door to Ghana, and similar in many ways. “You should know that the Ivoirians believe that leaders are subject all the time to psychic attacks and have constantly to be purified and strengthened spiritually. So Houphouët was not behaving unusually. The high priest said to Houphouët, ‘All right, you want eternal power. You will have eternal power.’ He gave certain instructions. So in the shrine they chopped Houphouët into small pieces and placed him in a pot of herbs and potions and boiled it. The condition of that chopping and boiling was that Houphouët’s sister had to stand guard by the pot, until the pieces of Houphouët in the pot turned to a snake. Houphouët’s sister did as she was asked, and stayed by the fire until a big snake emerged from the pot. She grabbed the snake with both hands and they struggled so hard, snake and woman, they both fell to the ground, and Houphouët became a man again.”

This was Richmond’s comment on the story: “The strange thing is
that it worked. No one ever challenged him. He owned the whole country. So you see how he misused the power. Now with civilisation catching up with us we are not keen to pay homage to the gods.”

The comment was puzzling to me because Richmond appeared to be saying two or three different things at the same time: misusing the power, civilisation, paying homage to the gods.

I wanted to know whether he had relatives who had grown up in a time without education. He gave me much more than I had asked for, and what he said now was not mysterious at all.

He said, “I have such relatives still. They are myopic in their thoughts. Reasoning and delivery is limited. They are guided only by their own experiences. Their line of reasoning is always guided by what others say or do. Everything is laid out for them, what they see or have been told, or what is traditionally done. Knowing to read and write is not enough. It is only a tool to get out there. If in our setting we are limited we can never be smart. When I was in the USA I saw how limited the average small-town American was. He was as ‘smart’ as his Ghanaian counterpart. Reasoning is limited by your setting. I am sure of that.”

In a few words he appeared to define the dead-end of the instinctive life. So he had, after all, a gift of analytical thought; and though it might not have been fair to say so, this had perhaps come down to him from the Danish ancestor, who might have been an engineer or a military man or an administrator, a man living by logic, full of internal resources, creating a life for himself in a hard setting far from home.

Richmond explained why the Christian church had caught on. “It was new. It had a policy of assimilation, like the French in the Ivory Coast, but the English did it in an indirect way. They offered a faith that also brought education. It weakened the traditional religion; in that way it was like Islam. The only thing that has remained intact is the chieftaincy.”

A day or two after coming back from Kumasi he had been sent by Kojo to look for a hotel site on the east-west Cape Coast, where all the ancient forts and castles were.

Richmond said, “I went to the office of the traditional chief and saw the homage the people were giving him by bowing. I only offered my hand because I am not from his clan and I am educated. But indigenous people will bow low to him. The land of the ancestors is held by the chiefs as custodians. You have to give gifts of schnapps to tell them that you recognise their authority. If we buy the land the paramount chief will give the money to the clan chiefs and they will distribute to the families that make up the clan.”

I said, “The other day you told me your brother said it was a curse to be born in Africa.”

“It is a passionate statement. Being born in Africa is like being born in ignorance. We are indolent. Yesterday I encountered a very embarrassing situation. The chief I went to see lives in a finished building, but it faces a public toilet. The chief saw nothing wrong. I did not want to offend him by telling him that he was living by the cesspit. If I had sat there two more hours I would have gone to hospital, but he was comfortable. That is why I say the white man, bad as he was, brought enlightenment. We have a proverb that the man who has gone nowhere thinks his mother’s soup is the best.”

I
HAD TOLD
Pa-boh that I wanted to see his Gaa high priest. Later I had thought that I didn’t really need to, but it was too late to withdraw. And then Pa-boh said he was coming to see me on Sunday at midday to take me to see the high priest. He couldn’t do it earlier on Sunday because in the morning he would be conducting a service at his church.

He came as he said. I was in the hotel dining room. His appearance there was startling. He wore a white gown with wide strips of purple. (White, as he had told me, was what the high priests of his traditional religion wore. The purple, which he didn’t tell me about, was more
complicated. It went back to classical days in the Mediterranean, when purple, an expensive colour, indicated high rank for both Romans and Carthaginians, and then was taken over by the church. It had a history, Pa-boh’s purple.) He had a silver necklace which was engraved with something about Jesus.

He was aware of the impression he was making in the busy hotel dining room. He had a little smile on his lips, like a star who wished to play down his fame. I asked him who designed his white gown. He was pleased to be asked. He said the gown had been designed by an elder of his church. So, as I suspected, it had been designed—especially the broad purple band on the left of his heart.

He didn’t want to eat anything, although he had been preaching for much of the morning; and I thought (since the traditional side of his religion was so full of taboos and portents) it might have been a religious prohibition against eating before a certain time of day.

What I couldn’t tell Pa-boh was that I had developed nerves about making this trip with him. My friend, Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad ambassador in Uganda, had told me that I should be careful of religious people in this part of the world. Patrick, the ambassador, had told me that it wasn’t only the poor who had to be careful. He had a story from Nigeria. A professional person had been abducted and couldn’t be found. The family of the abducted man had gone to no less a person than the Oni of Ife, and after some time they had heard from the Oni that the abducted person, now dead, was “lying” in a shrine somewhere.

This gave another idea of what a shrine was. It was one of those words I thought I knew and had not, as it were, researched. I remember, in the early days of preparing for this book, asking a university lecturer in Uganda to come with me to a shrine. She had given a little cry of horror and said no. Other memories had come to me: a shrine was, someone else had told me, a place where body parts might be found scattered about.

It was because of this anxiety I had asked Richmond to come with
me to Pa-boh’s base. I needed his company and his local knowledge. Richmond knew the language of the Gaa, and had some idea of the religion.

In the beginning this precaution had seemed excessive, especially when I thought of Pa-boh’s face. He was driving ahead of us in a yellowish old Mercedes to show the way. His ecclesiastical dress showed; his face, when I caught sight of it, seemed set in a smile, above the spin of his wheels. I was trying to memorise the journey, in case we had to come back on our own. Our drive, when we left the hotel and were on the highway, was in the full sunlight of midday. No worry there; and no worry a little later when we were passing the cheerful red roofs of a new development where Nigerians, richer than Ghanaians, had been buying property, to secure their wealth, in a country less hectic than their own, and with more municipal regulation.

But then we turned off the highway, entered a gated area, left it, and turned and turned again. The roads became narrow and crowded and began to twist. Ghanaians are people of municipal order; but now this order began to break down. The shops were little more than boxes, every owner painting his box in a strong flat colour. Memorising the route became impossible; I gave up.

The people on the streets made me think of something Pa-boh had said at our first meeting. I had asked whether Accra, the name of the capital, had a meaning. (For black people in Trinidad a word that sounded like it meant a kind of food.) Pa-boh said, “The real word is
nkrah
, or soldier ants. The Ashanti said they were going to push us into the sea, but they could never conquer us. They attacked us on 7 May 1826, but we just kept coming and coming. So the Ashanti called us
nkrah
, soldier ants.”

The people here did indeed create something of that impression. They were Gaa, Richmond said, Pa-boh’s people. You couldn’t do much with them. Whatever you did for them, they went back to their old ways. He said, “They are comfortable.” It was one of Richmond’s words: it meant that the people we were seeing needed little, and it was foolish to give them more. The chief on the Cape Coast Richmond
had talked to a few days before—the man who had built his house in front of a cesspit and had no idea what he had done—this man, as Richmond had said, was comfortable.

At a big, right-angled turn in the road or lane, in front of a whitewashed wall that was extraordinary in its pretensions after what we had been seeing, Pa-boh’s Mercedes stopped. It stopped in the shade of a tree and next to three or four big water butts in black plastic. The water was for sale, in small quantities; the buyers would have been local people, comfortable (to use Richmond’s word) with this arrangement. We parked next to Pa-boh’s Mercedes, and Pa-boh, in his designer Christian costume, and with the little smile on his lips, told us we had come to the “palace” of the high priest of the Gaa cult.