Black Gold of the Sun (17 page)

A few days later I took a bus to Takoradi to change some money. It had been raining all morning. By the time I got to the bank the water was running freely off my clothes. I squelched across the floor to join the queue. As I did so, the manager rushed out of his office towards me.

‘You there! Yes, you there,' he said. ‘What do you think you're doing?'

He pointed at the trail of water behind me.

‘Is this how you treat your own home? Clean it up! Get on your knees and clean it up!'

Men and women in the queue turned to stare. Bank
clerks froze in the middle of stamping cheques. The whirr of a ceiling fan became violently audible.

I'd come face to face with a Big Man.

‘Are you deaf?' he asked. ‘I told you to clean it up! Why do you still stand there?'

No one had spoken to me that way since I was a child. According to Kobby I could retain my dignity by begging the manager for mercy. By the same logic, though, I'd win an even better victory by getting to my knees and cleaning the floor.

I couldn't bring myself to do it.

‘Clean your own floor,' I said. ‘I'm sorry if it's wet, but you may have noticed it's raining outside. If you want it dry do it yourself. Otherwise, leave me alone!'

For a moment, as the manager stood paralysed by his own fury, I found myself studying the line of sweat that ran from the crown of his balding head to the ridge of his eyebrows. I noticed the orange specks of palm nut soup on his white shirt and how the fifth button had popped loose under pressure from his stomach. Then he began to roar again.

‘Who are you?' he said. ‘How dare you speak to me like this?'

‘I told you I'm sorry, but I'm not going to clean it. I'm not here for a fight. All I want to do is cash some travellers cheques.'

His eyes narrowed.

I could see the calculations working behind them.

My accent wasn't Ghanaian.

I had travellers cheques.

The pieces fell together.

An unctuous smile glazed his face.

‘I can tell from your voice you're not from here,' he said. ‘Why didn't you say so to begin with. We have to be very careful with the people who come into this bank. Some of them are just here to waste our time. Please, come with me. I'll see you're not detained any longer.'

Taking me by the elbow he steered me past the other customers to the front of the queue.

‘If there's anything else I can do after you're finished here, please come and see me.'

Half bowing, the manager retreated to his office and shut himself in.

I passed my travellers cheques to the cashier without meeting her eyes. What had happened? My status as a westerner had superseded his position as a provincial bank manager. Once he realized he was outranked, he'd taken the Kobby option and backed down.

The entire argument left me disgusted. I hurried out of the bank with my cash and ordered a bottle of Coke at a bar across the road. I pictured the manager's face as it shifted from anger to obsequiousness. Then I imagined how haughty I must have looked in return. Westerners had been behaving with assumed superiority since they first came to Africa. It hurt to find myself acting the same way.

True, the manager deserved it. But Ghana already had enough Big Men without me joining them.

I drained my Coke and sat watching the traffic go by outside the bar.

It occurred to me that for every Big Man there must also be a Small Boy – the victim of authority who, unlike me, had no power of his own with which to retaliate. The following afternoon brought proof of his existence. At Takoradi passport office, I witnessed an argument between a clerk and a young man as I waited to renew my visa.

The young man said he'd picked up his passport yesterday, but when he'd got home he realized he'd been given the wrong one. The clerk snatched the passport from him and flicked through it with pursed lips.

‘Are you telling me you're not Kwaku Paulson, occupation carpenter?'

‘Yes, boss, that's me.'

‘Then why are you wasting our time? Can't you see we're busy?'

‘But the picture is wrong. It's my name. But you've put the wrong man's photo in my passport.'

The clerk glared at the young man.

‘We can't be held responsible if you don't check your documents before picking them up. You should have been more careful. Do you know how many Kwaku Paulsons we have to deal with in this office?'

He gestured vaguely behind him, suggesting the presence of a mountainous heap of passports all marked ‘Kwaku Paulson'.

‘We can't be expected to do our job with people like
you around. If you're so careless what do you want us to do?'

Kwaku Paulson's head sunk into his shoulders like a rain-soaked bird.

‘How can I travel with an incorrect passport? Please, master, I have to go to Germany next week.'

The clerk held the picture up to the light.

‘All the details in here are correct, yes?'

Kwaku Paulson nodded.

‘It's only a matter of the picture?'

Kwaku Paulson agreed that was the case.

‘Then I don't see we have a problem after all,' said the clerk triumphantly. ‘When you look at it, the photo isn't very far off from you. It's really a very good match.'

His fellow clerks gathered round and scrutinized the picture. One of them gave it to an elderly woman standing at the counter. She passed it down the queue for further examination. Consensus among her fellow customers had it that the photo was a good likeness. The only dissenter was Kwaku Paulson.

‘Please, master, I have a young family. If I go to Germany with this passport they will deport me. I beg you.'

The clerk summoned an especially severe expression.

‘Look, just because this is a passport office you can't think you have the right to automatically receive your passport. We're not miracle workers. Just this once we'll issue a new passport. We won't even charge you. How's that?'

Overcome by his own magnanimity, the clerk held out his hand. Kwaku Paulson shook it limply.

‘Even the best of us makes mistakes sometimes,' said the clerk. ‘Let that be a lesson to you.'

On the bus back to Busua, I replayed what I'd seen in the past few days. If I could, I'd have gathered all the Big Men in Ghana, along with the Small Boys they preyed on, taken them to London, and shown them the relativity of power. We could have waited on a street corner trying to hail a taxi while the cab drivers rolled by with their lights on. I'd have pointed out the bags drawn closer to legs when we boarded the tube; the white women who crossed the road when we were walking down the street behind them; the receptionist's confusion when we arrived at an office and proved not to be a courier.

And then I'd have asked them why we were struggling to put distance between ourselves in Ghana when the whole of the west was ready to do it for us? Maybe it was a naive question that failed to take into account all the nuances of class, income and tradition in Ghanaian society. Even so, I'd have liked an answer.

The following evening I left Busua. At Takoradi station, I booked a berth on the sleeper to Kumasi. The train pulled out into the falling light. Past the windows the giant machines of bauxite mines were rendered infernal by the darkness, as if they were boring a way to the underworld. All through the night I rode away from the sea. Yet the further I left it behind the more clearly I heard its emanations: the bubblings of a submerged volcano; the soundings of whales calling over fantastic distance; a continental
shelf groaning at the centuries of civilization that rose from its back, unaware of their accumulated mass.

The ghost of Joseph de Graft walked next to me in Kumasi. The thought of him stripped away the pleasure of finding myself in a new place. I wandered the city aimlessly, beset by a gloominess it seemed impossible to shift. At the central market I watched a butcher drive his knife up the belly of a dead goat and strip the corpse clean out of its skin. At Lake Bosumtwi I lay on my back and tried to imitate the passivity of the jellyfish as it is borne across the surface of the ocean.

I visited the Manhyia Palace, home to the Asante king Prempeh I in the 1920s. It was a place of advanced melancholy. In the king's old office, with its bakelite phone and leather-covered desk top, moths fluttered irritably through shafts of afternoon sunlight before settling back among manila files to lay their eggs. A spider had spun a web over a waxwork of the Asante queen mother Yaa Asantewaa. It hovered before her face like a veil. Amid the relics and waxworks of the palace, my spirits dipped further.

In 1896, following the British overthrow of the Asante empire, Prempeh was stripped of his title and exiled to the Seychelles, aged twenty-six. Twenty-eight years later he was allowed to return to Kumasi as plain Mr Prempeh. Little is recorded of his time away, although a photograph
exists of the former king on the forward deck of a ship, as it departed Liverpool for the final leg of his return voyage to the Gold Coast. Prempeh is hunched inside his coat, and the foretaste of homecoming and bitterness of exile mingle in his gaze.

Wandering through Kumasi, I felt as lost as the deposed king. In the heat of the afternoon, the ground seemed to pitch like the deck of a ship.

I went to church that Sunday. Curiosity took me there rather than faith. Ghana, along with most of West Africa, was in the midst of a boom in charismatic Christian churches – the kind that boasted spectacular acts of miracle working and faith healing. Most of them seemed to be in Kumasi. Next door to my hotel, the Higher Ground Faith Ministries held all-night prayer sessions that shook me awake in the early hours as the congregation's singing and speaking in tongues reached their fervid pitch. On television preachers hollered like showmen, lifting their arms to heaven and slamming their Bibles on the lectern until their flock began to shake and howl and fall to the floor. Itinerant pastors stood on street corners haranguing passers-by through megaphones with gothic descriptions of hell. Shops bore names such as God is Able Plumbing Works; Shine, Jesus, Shine Fashion Centre; Omnipotent God Spare Parts; and – my personal favourite – Humble Yourself Bicycle Repairing. The churches ranged from shopfront chapels to stadium-sized arenas. Outside them you might find a list of services offered, including prophesying,
deliverance from demonic possession, faith healing through prayers, laying on of hands, telepathy, visions and ‘remote control'.

I decided to visit one of the largest churches in Ghana. The Holy Power Faith Chapel was founded by Bishop David Maxwell-Smith, the flashiest of the showmen preachers. He owned a fleet of American cars, a mansion in Accra and a family home in Washington DC from where he flew first class every weekend to deliver a sermon at one of the 150 branches of his church in Ghana.

His largest chapel in Accra held 3,000 people. The Kumasi outpost, at the edge of the city, looked as if it might do the same when it was completed. Although it was open the building work hadn't finished, and when I arrived I took a seat at the back near the scaffolding that covered the rear wall. Despite this, the rows of folding chairs leading down to the stage were full. A warm-up preacher was addressing the congregation accompanied by a backing band. Each time he made a point, a chorus of ‘Hallelujah's and ‘Praise God's rose from the crowd.

Seated on a red velvet throne at the side of the stage, Maxwell-Smith wore a purple three-piece suit and a goatee beard. When he stood, the band fell silent and the audience seemed to hold its collective breath.

The bishop pointed to the bare walls. By the time the church was complete, he said, it would hold a crèche, a computer room, a swimming pool for baptisms and ‘the finest car park in Ghana'.

Beneath the beam of a spotlight, Maxwell-Smith bowed
his head. To finish construction he was asking that morning for a sacrifice.

‘I need you to give some special oils today,' he said.

The bishop raised his eyes.

He looked at the faces of the crowd.

He held out his arms towards them.

‘Dearly beloved, this is God speaking through me,' he said. ‘To complete this church, I'm asking for a hundred people to step forward and pledge a thousand dollars right now.'

I couldn't believe what I'd heard. The average Ghanaian monthly wage was around 300,000 cedis, or roughly $50. He wanted twenty times that sum in a single cheque. But a few men and women were already heading to the front, the audience applauding as they walked down the aisle.

Surrounded by his aides, Maxwell-Smith descended from the stage and began to walk among the congregation with a radio mike.

‘If you can't give $1,000, give $500,' he said.

He passed close enough for me to see his manicured fingernails and the jewelled cross hanging outside his waistcoat.

‘It could be the money you've saved to travel: release it!' he said. ‘We all have some reserves for a rainy day. It could be your car. Take the keys and sell it! If not $500, then $250.'

He continued halving the amount as he shook hands with members of the congregation. At each drop in price more people rushed down the aisle, waving tithing envelopes.
Pushing back through them Maxwell-Smith returned to the stage.

‘Dearly beloved. Something wonderful is about to happen.'

Everyone seemed to know what to expect. His voice was barely audible above the cheers.

‘The lady who is facing an operation next week – it shall no longer take place. You are better. We are here to witness the working of miracles. The gentleman with the court case – the judgement will go in your favour. The woman who's waiting to hear from her husband – I just got a message from God. It's time for you to join him in America.'

As he scattered his favours, Maxwell-Smith continued calling for more donations. Waving envelopes and cash in the air, men and women ran down the aisle. A scrum formed in front of the stage. I saw women weeping. Others fell to the floor, convulsing. A smartly dressed man in his forties began to babble uncontrollably. More of the throng started speaking in tongues.