The Masque of Africa Page 14

  This downgrading of the high priest can create difficulties. Some chiefs nowadays are Christian; they don’t like offering libations to the shrines or oracles. And modern laws can affect traditional practices. Slavery, for instance, is now outlawed, and parents can no longer sell or give their children to a shrine, to pay off a debt.

  Chiefs get money from the government for administering government land. They fine people for breaking taboos, and that money belongs to them. They can also act as arbitrators, and then they are paid by both sides. So the function of the chief changes.

  Pa-boh said, “Traditional religion in Ghana is dying slowly. It started to die when the Europeans and Muslims came and saw us as pagans. Their superior technology killed us. We have witches who fly in the air. But when we saw aircraft we came to abhor what was our culture. I think the modern African is in a very difficult situation. He should look at it and modify it. He should not condemn it.”

  4

  IT WAS hard to believe that Pa-boh, who spoke with such passion about the traditional religion, was formally a Christian, with a Christian grandfather who ran a church in a village. Sixty years before, this grandfather had had his house and church burned down by the villagers whom he wished to serve (he wanted them to repent, to leave their African gods and lesser spirits and come to Christ), and he had been pushed with his family into the bush. His sister had been assaulted, her head split open.

  Strangely, Pa-boh spoke of this with passion too. Probably he was a man of passion; perhaps he needed to live at a certain pitch.

  He said, “I cried when I saw how my grandfather and my father had suffered.”

  And then, to complete the cycle of passion, he said, “But this cannot happen today even if people feel angry or outraged because there is a law, and they cannot go beyond a certain level.” Moving now with almost equal fervour from religion to something quite apart: the virtues of civil society.

  When he was a child Pa-boh lost his parents (he didn’t say how), and he had to shift for himself. He did odd jobs; and, in order to work in the school office, he learned to type. He also became an electrician, picking up the skill from older men who in the beginning saw their eager boy helper only as a joke. He joined a musical band and by the time he was sixteen he was a vocalist for them. He was rowdy and wild, a big fighter.

  On a day in May 1970 his life changed. He became possessed by the Holy Spirit. It happened like this. He was singing with his band that day, and at midnight they had a break. He went to the midnight service and his behaviour was strange. He became noisy and disruptive. When the minister asked the congregation to pray for the betterment of their lives, Pa-boh insulted him. After the service Pa-boh went to see the minister. He wasn’t at all sorry for what he had done, but he began to cry, and his crying didn’t stop. He went to his dormitory but he felt very guilty and he couldn’t sleep.

  He felt a hand on his wrist. The hand led him to the dining room. There he saw a flashing signboard in the air, lit up with episodes from his life. A voice told him to go outside to the school ground. He said he couldn’t do that because he was afraid of snakes. The voice then told him to go to the dormitory. He did so, and found some seniors who said he was late and wanted to punish him. They asked him to kneel to receive his punishment. Normally he would have knocked these boys down and given them a good thrashing, but now he fell on his knees and waited for his punishment. The boys were bewildered. They thought Pa-boh must have been affected by something the minister had said.

  A little while later a senior monitor came running with a bible to Pa-boh’s bunk. The monitor said a voice had told him to do that. Pa-boh opened the bible and then, he said, he saw the light, just like Saint Paul.

  After that day many things began to happen to him. By chance one day he met a paramount chief and for some reason began telling this chief the whole story of the Gaa people since the sixteenth century. At the end the paramount chief put his hand on Pa-boh’s shoulder and blessed him for a full fifteen minutes. He said to Pa-boh, “You carry the peace of your people in you.”

  After this Pa-boh was guided to do many wonderful things. For one chief he solved in days a dispute that had dragged on for seventeen years. At first this chief had no faith in Pa-boh as arbitrator, but Pa-boh pleaded with him, and the chief gave Pa-boh money for the arbitration (this money being the arbitrator’s fee), and Pa-both went to the main Ashanti town of Kumasi and spoke to the assembled chiefs, and won. In this way Pa-boh became a witness and spokesman for his Gaa people, and a lecturer on their cultural practices. In time he set up his own church, conducting a service there every Sunday.

  He was bringing up his five children as Christians. He kept them away from traditional religion because traditional religion had no book and was not codified or written, and this could lead to trouble.

  5

  KOJO THOUGHT I should go to Kumasi, the Ashanti “citadel,” which was his birthplace. He had a house there and he offered it for the night. Accra was on the coast. Kumasi was in the interior, to the northwest. When Kojo went to Kumasi, on business, he took the aeroplane. I thought a car would be better for me, for the sake of the long drive and for the landscape. Richmond, Kojo’s assistant, came along as a guide.

  We went through the hills of the eastern region, and past the botanical gardens of Abrui, small but beautiful, wonderfully mature now. Some of the trees had very thick trunks, with buttresses that were like mighty tendons. The British had laid these gardens out a hundred years before. Here in Ghana, as in other places of the empire, these British botanical gardens, their founders often unknown, had become a gift for later generations.

  The villages seemed to lie just outside forested areas. The land was always choked with vegetation; when you put your head out of the air-conditioned car you felt yourself driving through waves of humid heat that caused things to grow. This suggested that the forest ruled. But Richmond, Kojo’s assistant, who had a nice line in cynicism, said that the impenetrable forest was an illusion. One or two chain saws could in a short time open up big clearings.

  And the landscape, for all its luxuriance, was a disappointment: endlessly small and jumbled, like a tropical cottage garden, no attempt at a plantation, never anything ordered or big: small patches of banana or plantain growing absolutely between stands of teak, big-leaved and apparently always in flower. There were no paths or tracks in the bush, or there appeared to be none; so it would have been hard to cultivate these small patches commercially.

  The idea of smallness continued when at dusk we reached the outskirts of Kumasi. Weak electric lights showed outside the small houses—it might have been a municipal requirement: to prevent the big trucks smashing into them—and sometimes only oil lamps flickered, bright yellow, a real flame, a real colour, more pleasing than the dim, eye-straining fluorescent tubes in the little shops. It went on like that, for mile after mile, Kumasi delaying and delaying its promise.

  And there was trouble when we arrived at the town. Neither Richmond nor the car-driver could work out where Kojo’s house was. That was not too surprising to me. Kojo gave instructions in a strange way; he could telescope distances. When he first sent me to the Abrui botanical gardens his directions abolished many miles. It seemed that now something like that had happened again. But it was important for us to know where the house was, because Kojo had arranged for an Ashanti chief to be there, to help us with the visit to the palace in the morning. Richmond telephoned Kojo. Kojo appeared to repeat his instructions. There was a big hotel on a main road not far away. When Richmond said it would save a lot of trouble if we all put up at the hotel, Kojo lost his temper. He said it was nonsense to talk about a hotel when we were almost at the gate of the house.

  There were quite a few houses nearby. We knocked at the gate of one. The house was asleep. A ragged watchman came and spoke very softly to Richmond. He was speaking softly because he didn’t want to disturb the woman who was his employer and was sleeping. Richmond, without being too loud, knocked at
the door. The woman whose house it was, not showing herself, merely told Richmond that the chief who had been waiting for us had got tired and gone away. And that was that. So we at least had this tender of Kojo’s good faith.

  Many minutes later, and a longish distance away, down a curving road, we found the house. Richmond’s idea then was that I should have dinner at the hotel, while he and the driver prepared the house for me. When, after a good long time, they came for me, Richmond said that, apart from the bed mattress, which sank a little low, the bedroom they had got ready for me would have been of five-star quality.

  There was some trouble about the lights—some bulbs had gone, and for some time after I had gone to bed, sinking low on my mattress, quite close to the floor, I could hear Richmond knocking against things in the corridor. But he was devoted to his master; he had done wonders in the uncommissioned house; and then in the morning he got up early and went with the driver to buy milk and coffee and bread.

  Kojo didn’t want me to stay in a hotel. He wanted me to see his house, which was in an Ashanti royal enclave, and though it was only the guest pavilion, as he described it, it was indeed spacious and fine.

  Next door to it the morning light showed the beginnings of a palace. It was Kojo’s; but the money had run out. All his instincts were princely.

  At breakfast facing the garden (Kojo liked flowers wherever he lived) I saw a pretty little near-black hummingbird feeding off the red-and-yellow flowers of the flamboyant.

  IN DAYLIGHT the lady we had disturbed during the night, a large lady in a splendid grey and white dress, was as firm as she had been in darkness. Kojo’s chief had got tired of waiting for us. So there would be no privileged viewing of the palace for us. We decided we had to live with that. It was, besides, a cleaning day at the palace; so there would be no visitors, and for us no burden of a palace visit.

  The first impression of Kumasi, a royal town, was that of a British colonial settlement at the time of the conquest. The colours of official buildings were ochre and red, the architecture in the sturdy manner of the Public Works Department. The palace rails reminded me of the made-in-England rails of my own school in Trinidad (built in 1904); and the open green areas were like police grounds of the period. The treasures of the museum were small-scale, the little pieces of furniture unpolished. Ashanti was not a literate kingdom, in spite of its gold and glory. To see it as more it was necessary to be Ashanti oneself and (with the absence of spectacular remains) to consult the stirrings of one’s heart.

  It was a hilly, up-and-down town, in the great heat fatiguing to explore, but with oddities that were all its own: a street of coffin-makers in the bazaar area, with the painted coffins—grey, white, lilac, silver and gold—pushed out on to the pavements and creating a festive effect (abolishing the idea of grief, introducing the idea of shopping, and suggesting at the same time one kind of plot possibility for a thriller writer). Begging women had their own area in the market, and that too was cheerful. Below bright parasols the women (packed a little too tightly) sat on little stools with their begging cups, avoiding eye-contact with the alms-givers, who moved among them in a matter-of-fact way; so the business of giving and receiving involved no strain.

  Richmond said (though I couldn’t understand why he brought in Islam here) that Islam encouraged people to give alms, and so there had to be alms-receivers.

  Away from the palace area the town had a repetitive smallness. Its crowded little streets never developed into something more interesting, an older section of the town, a fort, a famous temple. It hurried us away, and then, past the outskirts of Kumasi, yesterday’s country smallness began to tire us afresh on the way back: teak amid the plantains and bamboo in the trackless bush. Though there was something else in the bush this time, which for some reason we had missed on the way out: the grey and often frail-looking concrete of unfinished buildings. There were any number of them: so many that a couple of days later, when I was driving along the Atlantic Cape Coast, I thought that some of the ancient white castles and forts were repeating the unfinished motif of the interior.

  Richmond said that what looked like unfinished buildings would soon be finished. If I came back in two or three years I would see what he meant. I didn’t believe him.

  We talked after this of the wildlife of Ghana. There wasn’t much of it left. The people of Ghana had eaten much of it out. From this talk of wildlife we turned to the cats and dogs that people were now eating with a will. In the north they ate and loved dog; they called it “red goat.” In the south they ate cats and had almost eaten them out. Richmond knew someone who bred cats in order to eat them.

  The trouble with cats was that they were tricky to kill. Cats knew when they were going to be killed and eaten; they fought for their lives and they could be dangerous for a few minutes. The best way of killing a cat, assuming you had invited someone to dinner and didn’t want to create a scene, was to stretch the animal’s neck, the way people in England killed a rabbit. But when you did that you could be badly scratched. The surest way—if you or your guests didn’t mind the racket—was to put a cat in a sack and beat it with a stick until it was dead. Another good way was to drown it. You used a sardine as bait to attract the cat to a container with water, and then you poured and poured water. The cat swallowed a lot of water and the virtue of this method was that it was much easier afterwards to tear the bloated cat’s skin off.

  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.

  6

  RICHMOND’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.”