The Masque of Africa (20 page)

He wished us to be impressed, and the palace and the wall did make an impression of size and style. But as soon as you began to look at the detail you saw that it was tawdry, in keeping with the area, and, though unfinished, already somewhat run down.

We followed Pa-boh through the iron gateway into the bare palace yard. From here I could see more clearly that there was an area of vegetation, a strip of trees, a narrow piece of woodland at the side of the yard, beyond the palace wall. This would have been where the shrine was; and though the green would have been welcome a little while before in the mess and crowd of the neighbourhood, now, thinking of it as a place that might be used for special rites, I saw it as menacing.

A side gate in the wall led to the grove. Women were not allowed to enter here.

The front door of the white palace was ajar. Various people were waiting for us inside. And since this was a palace, and in palaces in this part of the world there were usually big colour photographs of the ruler and his visitors, there were painted portraits here, such as sign-painters might have done, of three generations of the Gaa high priest. They were strong, heavy-featured men, bearded, in white gowns, and they all held the little brooms that marked them as religious cleansers. They were all barefooted; this was another sign of their religious importance.

The high priest was not in the palace. He had been called out, but he had sent a message on his mobile that he was coming, and bringing some people to see me.

There was a dignified old chief who had been waiting for some time. I don’t know what story Pa-boh had told him; but it was enough to keep him quiet. He had dressed with care, in a lilac or purple silk gown, and he had white bangles. Below the bangles there were tattoos or markings on his skin; and he also had flat earrings of thin gold. His hair was done with some style. He could certainly have been expecting some schnapps, and perhaps a gift of money.

I was irritated with myself for being where I was. Pa-boh in his conversation had given all that I needed. I didn’t need more. Twenty years before, in the Ivory Coast, in my dealings with magicians, I had understood that beyond a certain stage there was no place for simple inquirers; local magicians didn’t understand. And it wasn’t fair to them. Their faith mattered to them. They didn’t like to think it might be mocked.

Pa-boh looked irritated too. He was irked by the presence of Richmond, who understood everything. But neither my irritation with myself, nor Pa-boh’s with me, matched the irritation that the old chief in the lilac or purple gown (who understood that I was not a true believer) was exhibiting towards Pa-boh, who might have misled him about the visitor, might have appeared to promise some reward, and involved him in this waste of time, without even the likelihood of a bottle of schnapps at the end.

A curving wooden staircase led up from the ground floor. It led nowhere. There was no upper floor, only glimpses of rough brickwork and electric wires. I thought the staircase might have been inspired by something in a film and had been done to give an extra touch of grandeur to the palace, but Pa-boh said that that they were going to create a space up there for “archives.”

The men in the room began to look grumpy. They had good reason. They had expected me to come alone. The presence of Richmond
upset them. Richmond had already begun to tell me what they were talking about. I felt all of this was adding to my get-away bill.

Pa-boh sensed that the situation was deteriorating. He decided to hurry things up. His demeanour changed. He gave a bow of great depth to the people in the room and addressed them. He explained who we were and what we wanted.

At every courtesy I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper.

There now appeared a tall man with light eyes and a strange paunch, high and round and stiff-looking. This man was the oracle-priest, the deputy to the high priest. He said nothing when he came in. He only drew up his legs on to his chair—he too, to my alarm, was barefooted—and looked at me in an assessing way.

I felt undermined. I thought we should leave. Our bill here—our
hongo
, so to speak (to use the nineteenth-century Uganda word for a tax on travellers)—appeared to be going up and up. And Richmond, with all his cynicism, agreed.

When they tried to close the door of the palace, I said, “No.”

I went to the door. It hadn’t been locked. I made my way out; Richmond followed me. The iron gate at the front of the yard hadn’t been closed. That was a bit of luck. Once we were out on the squalling street next to Pa-boh’s car and the black water butts I felt free. We drove away, but not back to where we had come from. We followed the curve of the road in the other direction; and after a while we saw the other end of the green strip, the big shrine area, that had begun at the white palace.

We left Pa-boh to pick up the pieces. It wasn’t fair, but it was something he could do, and do well. He thought of himself as a man possessed; important spiritual forces guided him.

Twice in the next week he left messages for me at the hotel.

A
T THE
end of the year there was going to be a presidential election. Kojo took me to meet Nana, the man most likely to win. He was intelligent, full of charm and urbanity. His colour posters were everywhere in Accra.

There was another man, though, who couldn’t be a candidate, because he had been president twice before and constitutionally couldn’t run again. This man was Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He had led two coups in two and a half years, nearly thirty years before, and had twice in that time returned the country to civilian rule. Later he had ruled Ghana for eighteen years. As revolutionary and ruler he would be a ghost-like presence at whatever new presidential feast was coming up.

There wasn’t much about him in the newspapers, but he was there. Richmond’s friends, when they spoke of this man, attributed extraordinary qualities to him; they said he was what the country needed; if he hadn’t done all that he might have done during his eighteen years in power it was because “bad” people surrounded him.

In this way Jerry Rawlings, even while he lived, with a pleasant house in Accra and another house in the country, was becoming mythical in Ghana, more mythical and more mysterious than Nkrumah could ever be; just as in Bengal in India in the late 1940s the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose became mythical after his death: with many sightings reported, the man who could solve all the problems of Bengal and India, if only by some trick, some great act of faith, or prayer, or national penance, he could truly be returned to the living. It happens like this in some religions too: a great leader dies, and the grief generated by his loss turns to a widespread conviction that the great leader is not dead but only in “occlusion,” still watching from his new position on high, his vision greater than before.

The Rawlings story lent itself to myth. He was born in 1947, his mother Ghanaian, his father Scottish. He was a big and handsome
man, and was the first man of mixed origin to become a political leader in Ghana. He had gone to good schools. Later he had joined the Ghana air force. He loved flying; he became a flight lieutenant. He came to power in a way that was full of romance and drama. As an air force officer he, greatly daring, had thrown in his luck with an anti-government coup. The coup had failed, and he was charged with treason. During his trial he made a remarkable speech about the corruption of the government. It was a brave thing to do; anything might have happened to him; institutions in Ghana, especially after Nkrumah, were still shaky. But in his speech he had spoken for much of the country; and his bravery on that day in court was his making as a politician. He was jailed on the treason charge, but he didn’t stay long in jail. In the very next month some junior officers successfully brought about a coup. They freed Rawlings, and he declared himself head of state.

For four months after that he sought to cleanse the country of its bad elements among officials, army people, business people. He then returned the country to civilian rule. It was his romantic idea: if you cleaned a country up, it looked after itself. But people and countries were more complicated than he thought; and a year later he led another coup against the people he had placed in power. This time he stayed in charge. Nine years later he gave Ghana a new constitution. He served for two terms as a constitutional president, and then was voted out.

He had been out of office for eight years, but his myth still held. He was the man who had risked his career and perhaps life to serve the people. He had handed back power twice. If he had failed it was only because he had been surrounded by bad people.

I
BEGAN
to think I should try to see him. I asked Kojo, who appeared to be able to do everything. But Kojo said he couldn’t help in this matter; and I remembered that politically Kojo was on the other side. Other people were unwilling as well, and my time was getting short. I
asked John Mitchell, the Trinidad consul; he said he could help, but he had to go away for a few days. I mentioned my difficulty to Richmond, the man with the unlikely Danish ancestor; and he (of course) at once said, “My father and Rawlings are cousins. His mother is my father’s auntie. This is why my father has dreams of being a politician.”

I think both requests—from John Mitchell and Richmond—got to Rawlings’s office; but it was John Mitchell who, the day before I left, drove me to the Rawlings house for lunch.

The house was in an area of Accra known as the Ridge. It was well away from the centre. It had a big iron gate, and the shady compound had two big neem trees. There were a few other parked cars. A black poodle considered John Mitchell and me, but it didn’t bark. Away from us, near the stairs to the raised house, a tall and powerfully built man in a loose white shirt was talking to a little group. He had his back to us. This, of course, was Rawlings, fitting every description of him that I had read.

I had a moment’s hesitation, not knowing whether we should advance or wait. It was a brief moment, because almost at once a slender woman detached herself from the group and came towards us, waving and smiling. She would have been Mrs. Rawlings: dark, fine-featured, striking in black slacks and a floral blouse. The earlier group began to leave, making for one of the cars parked below the neem trees. Rawlings came towards us. He was built like a boxer and he had reading glasses on the edge of his nose. We began to go up the steps to the raised house. Remarkably, at the side of the steps, among the plant pots, was a grey and white kitten, self-possessed, of great beauty. It was the first happy kitten I had seen in Ghana. Mrs. Rawlings said it was a pet; they also had many dogs. I began to be prejudiced in favour of the house.

The sitting room was spacious and cool and comfortable. There was an empty aquarium with plastic flowers on it, and there were family photographs on a wall: in one of them I recognised Rawlings as a young man. We sat down on leather sofas. He sat on the sofa next to mine, but within reach of me. He called me “chief.” I thought it was
his style; and it might have done away with the need to remember names.

He said—and it was like a puzzle, like a continuation of some of the things he had been talking about with the people before—“Eight generals are executed just to prevent the country from sliding into chaos, but you do not take a man’s life to do the same. I tried to rejuvenate this nation. This nation was ready to fly. Ghana was ready to fly. All we did was to empower the people. I say: give the people the right leadership, and they will deliver.”

He stood up and began walking up and down the room. He came back to me and tapped me on the knee and said, “Chief, I want to tell you about language, how important it is. There is a spiritual quality to language, to words. If you use language as a tool to suppress the people it will lose all its spirituality. There is a special quality to the language of our ancestors, and we have lost that by having another language imposed on us. Our mother tongue has historical elements, and words were important.”

He was in an excited state and, like some intellectuals seeking to make an impression, he was laying down the subjects he wanted to talk about.

I said, to keep things going, “But some people can have two languages.”

He said, “Yes. But we are not going anywhere by having two or more languages. If we speak English we must learn to use it with its words. Once the language is spoken correctly it comes with its own spirituality. Language always evolves, but African is under threat. You attack their culture and tradition.”

He took off his glasses and looked hard at me. He said, “Chief, let me tell you. In 1979, when I came to power, there were cases that had been in the courts for five to ten years. They were robed in the Latin language. I solved them in five to six days. Justice was given to the people.” He had begun to talk loudly. He stopped, as though he had lost his way among the many memories he had released.

(I was reminded of Pa-boh. He too had been taken up from obscurity
and quite suddenly then had discovered his gifts of arbitration: in a few days he had solved for an important chief a dispute that had dragged on for seventeen years.)

Rawlings asked his wife, “Where was I?”

She said, “You were talking about justice.”

He slapped his knees. “Ah. I remember. On one occasion, in the earlier part of the PNDC, angry people emerged as leaders. But as things calmed down respectable people found a place in it, and it became the NDC, the National Democratic Congress.” He was talking about old political wars. “One of our areas was health and hygiene. I used to lead the people in cleaning campaigns. I went to a big open gutter in one village. It was full of filth and disease. I and my party wanted to give a social sense of responsibility by cleaning the gutter. It became clean and modern.”

He had begun again to talk loudly, booming across the room. And again he stopped. When he started up again he began to jump from topic to topic, as though looking for the right one. His wife looked at him (aware as she did so that we were looking at her), and so did two of his old political colleagues, a former minister and a lawyer, who had also been invited to the lunch and had come to the house before us. Rawlings stood up and told one of these men to tell us about language and its spiritual element. He then left the room, and his wife followed him.