Black Gold of the Sun (2 page)

All along the west coast of Africa, Europe discovered riches. They named the land as they went – the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast – and sailed home borne down with tusks and precious metals and the human cargo sometimes known as ‘black gold'.

Yet the African connection to the western world was never simply passive. Among the Portuguese crew that landed at Elmina was the ordinary seaman Cristoforo
Colombo, for instance, who led Europe's discovery of the Americas ten years later accompanied by his African pilot, Pedro Nino.

The plane banked towards Kotoka airport and Accra hove into view, lambent in the falling light. Through the window I imagined the paths of the sailing ships preserved in the sea, forming a lattice of wake lines joining Africa, Europe, America and the Caribbean. It was impossible to tell where the connections began or ended. The shape of the continents themselves seemed to blur, as a result of centuries of commerce and migration, both voluntary and forced.

Kotoka control tower rose into view. Wheel hatches creaked open. The past is not history, I thought, as the plane screamed on to the runway. It beats against the present like the tide.

It was the smell that I first noticed – like rare orchids or rotten fruit.

Car horns blared in the distance. The lights of the terminal glowed across the tarmac. From the doorway of the aeroplane I followed the other passengers down the steps into a steam-room heat. I ploughed through customs, immigration and the scrum of porters wrestling me for my luggage, until I stood with my back to the airport, facing Ghana.

And Ghana stared back.

Behind a wire perimeter fence, wives and fathers and children playing hide-and-seek between the legs of their
parents waited to greet the plane. There were smiles and waves as they spotted loved ones. None of them was there for me, but for a moment a wave of happiness engulfed me as I watched the crowd. Ghana wasn't home, but perhaps it would be possible for me to feel
at
home there.

Dragging my suitcase to the first car in a row of black-and-yellow taxis, I collapsed into the back seat. The cab shunted into traffic. Accra coalesced around me. The neon image of a grass-skirted dancer hovered above the roof of the hotel Shangri-La. Children materialized at traffic lights selling cigarettes and cellophane bags of iced water. Street hoardings advertised the virtues of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Richoco chocolate milk. Trucks rumbled by bearing ecclesiastical slogans above their windscreens such as ‘Forward with God' and ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine'. I smelled diesel fumes and sewage and, as the cab paused at a junction, the aroma of plantain and peanuts roasting on a brazier, the memory of which I'd savoured since my last taste twenty-eight years earlier.

From London, I'd arranged to borrow a house in a sub-urban neighbourhood called Upper Heights. It belonged to my mother's cousin who lived in Nottingham and spent only holidays there. Apart from Mrs Hagan, the housekeeper, I would be alone.

Upper Heights was a modern development of trim white houses built on a hill overlooking the city. Mrs Hagan, elderly, maternal, solicitious, had laid out a dinner of boiled yam and fish stew, with sliced mango and small hand-baked
sponge cakes to follow. But the journey had left me exhausted. All I could do was stab at the food, then drag myself upstairs, Mrs Hagan clucking after me like a mother hen in case, as she seemed to think likely, I couldn't make it to bed before collapsing. Tired as I was, I couldn't sleep. Accra flickered before my eyelids in a sequence of dazzling impressions, as if I were gazing up at it on a screen from the front row of the cinema.

Nothing matches your first sight of a new city. You approach it with trepidation and its streets embrace you. The scent of bitumen and hot street food tantalizes your senses. Vendors and car horns and radios blare an unfamiliar rhythm. Your heart beats a noisy reply. That first night I gave up on sleep altogether. I sat on the balcony outside my bedroom looking at the mystery of the buildings glimmering in the distance. By contrast to London's pallor, Accra seemed to sparkle.

If I knew then as much as I do now, it's possible Ghana might still have appeared to shine. But first impressions are exactly that. There is an order of fact beneath them that is inescapable. After the sparkle fades you have to deal with what's left – whether you like what you see or not.

Saturday night on Oxford Street. Bright-eyed girls clung to the arms of broad-shouldered young men. Thrilled by the promise of the hours ahead, their eagerness lit the dark.
Couples hailed each other across the street, coalescing into groups that promenaded arm in arm along the pavement like a Broadway chorus line.

It was my cousin Kobby who suggested meeting on Oxford Street. I'd spent four days exploring Accra's markets and museums. Now I wanted to see it after dark.

‘I know the perfect place,' said Kobby over the phone that afternoon. ‘It's the most fashionable street in Accra.' But as I strolled along the pavement past the brightly lit bars and the gilded couples, my mind turned to what I'd read about the fashions of eighteenth-century Accra. How men of that era liked to tie little gold ingots into their beards and shave designs for ships or castles into their hair. And the care with which a woman would prepare herself each day: rubbing her body with perfumed oil, then mixing a fine white clay with water for make-up, which she'd press on to her face and bust with wood blocks shaped like circles or scimitars. As jewellery, she'd have worn bead necklaces made from coloured glass and gold bracelets hung with European coins such as the French louis d'or, gold rings and an anklet in silver, weighing a pound, on each foot.

She'd have worn a skirt of imported silk, secured with a belt decorated with keys and coins so that she jangled as she walked. Attached to her hair might have been a small gold bell or the red tail feathers of a grey parrot. In her house she would have kept a pet civet, and once a week she would use a small spoon to tap the secretions of its anal gland, which she would mix with water and dab on her neck as perfume.

During the same period, the secretions of the civet, a catlike mammal, were also being used by perfumers in France and England. History is full of unobserved parallels.

It was like that with Kobby and me. He'd come to London for the first time five years ago in 1997.

‘This is your cousin,' said my mother. We'd shaken hands warily. Given he was a dozen years younger than me and had grown up a continent away, I wondered what we'd have in common. But Kobby turned out to be as hungry for music and movies as any child of the west. At seventeen, he was devoted to Tupac Shakur and WWF. I introduced him to Biggie Smalls and to Christopher Walken in
King of New York
. In return he offered stories about the trolls that were said to lurk in Ghana's woods and the spirits living in the lakes. At the end of his fortnight in London we shook hands again, this time more effusively. I hadn't seen him since.

Now I spotted him approaching along the neon-splashed street. Narrow-shouldered and light-framed as I remembered, but forcing his way through the crowds with his arms bowed as if he thought of himself as a heavyweight. We slapped each other on the back and Kobby led the way down the street.

‘I don't live anywhere at the moment,' he said with an airy wave of his hand. ‘I'm really too busy to think about a home.' He was a student now at the University of Ghana, but could rarely be found there.

At twenty-two he was also a senior copywriter at Ghana's leading advertising agency. Shuttling to meetings
across the city in his black Volkswagen Golf, he would arrive at the agency offices only in the afternoon. From then he worked into the night scripting commericals and slept on the sofa beside his desk. Come morning he woke up and went to lectures. Kobby talked about launching his own small ads magazine. He said he'd been raising money to build a luxury car-wash site in East Legon. But he was cautious about revealing too many of his plans to me.

‘No one knows the full scale of my affairs,' he said, drawing secrecy around him like an ermine.

What drove him to work eighteen hours every day? He already earned more than his parents combined, but listening to him it seemed the full scale of his affairs was bolder and less explicable than merely the accumulation of wealth. Kobby was waging a secret war, I realized, and the enemy was Ghana.

‘When my parents retire I'll have to look after them,' he said. ‘So I have to keep moving. I can't afford to stand still.'

His parents were teachers who lived in a bungalow in Cape Coast. As state employees their income had never recovered from the vicissitudes of the 1970s and 1980s, when inflation reached an annual rate of 100 per cent. Kobby and many of his friends had seen their parents cowed during those years. The memory had turned them into seditionaries plotting their own takeover of the state.

We turned off Oxford Street and entered a bar called @ The Office which was modelled on a real workplace. Mushroom-grey desks were arranged by the walls. The chairs were made of red moulded plastic. A shelf of yellow
box files ran above the bar. The drabness of the environment didn't seem to deter the crowd. Dressed in African-print shirts and army camouflage, they perched on the edge of the desks, drinking and flirting while a DJ played R Kelly, Jay-Z and Destiny's Child. The DJ's selection was the same as in any hip-hop or R & B club in London. Yet the crowd greeted each track with a familiarity that said it belonged to each and every one of them. For a moment I couldn't tell where I was.

I'd discovered hip-hop in the early 1980s, the era of Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. In those early formative years, the music marked the triumph of the unheard and overlooked. Black kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn banging their drums so loud the world stopped to listen. Hearing ‘Planet Rock' in London for the first time at thirteen was like finding an answer to the isolation of growing up in a white suburb. The force of the music, its conviction, its lyricism, spoke to me. It let me know I wasn't alone.

But what did hip-hop say to the crowd here in Accra? Kobby returned from the bar with two bottles of beer. I remembered giving him a cassette of Tupac's
Me against the World
five years ago in London. He'd played it over and over, flipping the tape from side to side in ceaseless absorption. Tupac meant as much to him as Bambaataa had to me. And both of us had drawn the music from its source in America. London and Accra were links in a chain. We were the heirs to a legacy of Atlantic exchange that preceded us by centuries.

Kobby swept his hand across the bar. In the early 1990s, he said, the government liberalized Ghana's media laws. Dozens of radio stations sprang up across the country. Satellite TV stations beamed into the country from Germany, South Africa and the United States. The main beneficiaries of the broadcasting boom were the kind of young people gathered at @ The Office. The ones who had travelled to Europe and America, and returned seeking cultural rather than political change. Attuned to the music and fashions of the west they established themselves as a new hierarchy in broadcasting.

‘A lot of the DJs on Joy, Vibe and the other radio stations are in their twenties,' said Kobby. He himself was the youngest advertising creative in the city. On Accra's radio stations you could hear US hip-hop and UK garage. On television, you'd find Brazilian tele novellas, Australian soap operas, African-American sitcoms, Manchester United matches, Japanese cartoons and Bollywood movies.

I bought another beer for each of us. We clinked our bottles and, as we did, it seemed to me that we were drinking to the polyglot Accra before us in the bar, within which all dreams were probable.

Some time later I found myself riding in Kobby's Golf towards a nightclub called Boomerang. In the back seat were two girls he'd met for the first time that evening in some unspecified way. I gazed out of the window, listening to them bat sarcastic remarks back and forth in pidgin English, the private slang of young Ghanaians. When
Kobby fell silent to negotiate the traffic, the girls sent text messages to their friends, who were apparently also riding towards the club in the backs of other cars. The messages, I imagined, were a running account of their sensations as they related to our car journey, their love affairs and hopes for the future, and the state, in abstract, of the turning world. Gathered together, these would have formed a telemetry registering the emotional state of Accra's young female population, a green flash on a hand-held screen signalling crisis or elation as the cars swept in loose formation through the night.

Kobby and I had bought another few bottles of beer before leaving the bar. I was halfway to drunk and it seemed to me there couldn't be a finer place than Accra at 1.37 in the morning, the road ahead clear and the city flowing in silence around the car. We arrived at Boomerang to find a swarm of cars descending on the club. In the flare of headlights I thought of aeroplanes morphing from distant stars to brute metal as they screamed to a landing. Around us sleek couples unfolded themselves from the cabins of Mercedes sports coupés. They emerged warily, shading their eyes as if they were gazing down on the scene from the top steps of their Learjet.

I followed them into the club and came to a dance floor overlooked at the far end by a neon-lit bar. An overhead monitor streamed videos of rappers waving $100 bottles of Cristal champagne. In imitation of the videos, the young men at the club were dressed in African-American labels such as Sean John and Fubu. The women wore outsize
Fendi sunglasses on their foreheads. From their shoulders swung handbags embossed with the monograms of Gucci and Louis Vuitton.

For all the vibrancy of the club, the booming sound system and the packed dance floor, I found it hard to enjoy myself. Where @ The Office, with its young people in African prints, braided hair and army camouflage, had seemed like a particularly Ghanaian response to the universality of hip-hop, Boomerang marked its wholesale embrace. In place of individuality there was a reliance on brands and labels that made my heart sink. You could walk into a club in London, New York, Kingston or anywhere else that black people gathered on a Saturday night and find a crowd dressed with the same kind of ostentation. It was as if we had taken our cues from music videos and magazines to learn how to dress, how to hold ourselves, how to articulate what it meant to be black. We had become consumers of our own image.