Black Gold of the Sun (11 page)

Unless you came from Africa – in which case you were still nobody.

At least that's how it felt to me. After all, what kind of heritage did I have compared to Dwayne?

‘Where you from?' he'd say. And all I could think of were the despots on the cover of my father's
West Africa
magazine, with their cold eyes and fly whisks. On television there were
Roots
and the African character created by Lenny Henry on
Tiswas
, with his leopard-skin fez and his catchphrase, ‘Katanga!' Among the piles of comics in my bedroom, there was a solitary African superhero, the Black Panther, who stalked the rooftops of Manhattan with ‘the strength and agility of a jungle cat'.

‘Where you from?' Dwayne would say.

I assumed the question was rhetorical. That Africa stood for something backward in his mind. That he beat me up at lunchtime out of contempt.

Yet seeing again the look of confusion on his face, it occurs to me now that maybe he was looking for a proper answer. Perhaps the reason he picked on me was because he really
did
want to know where I was from. This is the only reason I can think of to explain why the next time I saw Dwayne he'd become a born-again African.

It was 1989. The summer London turned red, black and green. The summer of apocalyptic prophecies. An African-American professor wrote a book about the coming war between ‘ice' people and ‘sun' people. In the closing minutes of Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing
the racial sparrings of a Brooklyn neighbourhood ignited into riot. The most haunting moment on Public Enemy's
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
belonged to a voice calling out above a clamour of sirens: ‘Freedom is a road seldom travelled by the multitude.'

It was the summer I turned twenty-one; the summer black people in Britain discovered Africa. At bookstores in Hackney you could buy stone busts of Nefertiti and leather pendants in the shape of Africa. Young men in suits and bow ties stood among the traffic on Coldharbour Lane, selling copies of the
Final Call
. Someone published a magazine called
The Sphinx
featuring a comic strip about the lives of the Pharaohs.

‘Here, my brother.'

On the Edgware Road, a young black man wearing an Africa pendant thrust a photocopied leaflet into my hand.

‘Read and learn,' he called after me.

Walking up the street, I turned it over. The leaflet
described a mythic time when the continent of Africa had been a single peaceful nation – Bilad as Sudan, the Land of the Blacks – where Africans had lived together in peace until the coming of the white man brought ruin and warfare. I skimmed through it hurriedly. There were many such leaflets being distributed that summer, most of them harking back to some supposedly golden period of black history. It was only after I'd shoved it into my pocket that I realized that the young man who'd handed it to me was Dwayne Hall. By then I'd lost sight of him in the crowd. I'd missed the chance to find out what had brought him to that street corner.

Had he come to ask himself the same question with which he used to interrogate me? Did the answer prove so elusive it had led him all the way back to an imaginary African past? If so, he wasn't alone. That summer, London seemed to be full of born-again Africans.

Their inspiration came from hip-hop acts such as Public Enemy and KRS One who'd resurrected the black nationalism of Malcolm X and Bobby Seale, and allied it to the infectiousness of their studio-produced beats. On the cover of
By All Means Necessary
, KRS One recreated an iconic photo of Malcolm X, the rapper staring through the curtains of a window as if under siege, an Uzi submachine gun clutched at his side.

Listening to the swarm of sirens, horns and slogans on a Public Enemy track felt like tuning into the broadcasts of a state at war with itself. Reproduced on pendants, T-shirts and photocopied handouts, Africa had become the
symbol of a renewed wave of black political consciousness.

I read through Dwayne's leaflet again. As black people we came from royal blood, it said. ‘Raise your heads, brothers and sisters. You are kings and queens joined by spiritual values. Children of the sun and descendants of the Pharaohs.' I threw it away with a sigh. Dwayne and his crew used to tell me I lived in a tree. Now he wanted to remind me about my regal past. The trouble was I felt no more noble than I ever had bestial.

All the same, spurred by hip-hop, black people really did raise their heads that summer. The mood of empowerment within rap found an echo in music and film on both sides of the Atlantic. The multicultural collective Soul II Soul emerged from its studios in Camden Town with a million-selling album and a utopian belief in the unifying powers of music, clubs and high fashion. At art-house cinemas you could catch screenings of black British independent films such as
Handsworth Songs
and
The Passion of Remembrance
. In New York, De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest crafted a rhapsodic take on hip-hop built on the premise of racial tolerance and creative promiscuity. I went to the Notting Hill Carnival that year wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a red, black and green image of Africa. Dancing with the crowd at Norman Jay's Good Times sound system a feeling seized me that all of us there, in that assemblage of skin colours and histories, represented something good and hopeful about London and Britain itself.

Carnival takes place on the last weekend of August, and
it traditionally represents the end of summer. For a long while afterwards the optimism of those months stayed with me. Every time I collected another leaflet like Dwayne's, I pictured myself dancing beside Norman Jay's speaker stacks and how the crowd there had seemed to articulate a belief in a multicultural future instead of the prejudices of the Britain I'd known growing up.

Forget about the future – the trouble with those leaflets was they couldn't even deal with the contradictions of the present. Reading yet another call for black people to ‘know their past' made me think of Ghana, where seventy-five different languages were spoken by a collection of ethnic groups who'd spent most of their history at war with each other. Then I tried to multiply those divisions across the fifty-four countries and 800 million inhabitants of this huge continent.

When I was done I couldn't look at an Africa pendant without getting angry. What was the point of a black consciousness based on mystification? We were not royal by birth. We were not bound by spiritual values. We had come from a place as fierce and strange and ordinary as any other part of the world. That was the truth. Why couldn't it be enough?

‘Where you from?'

The question had never gone away. Was I any closer to resolving it now that I'd finally returned to Africa?

The bus arrived in Elmina at sundown. Shouldering my rucksack, I walked through lanterned streets, past shopkeepers in their doorways and fishermen hawking the remains of their catch – spiny tilapia, rose-hued mullet, the formless grey flesh of some giant mollusc splayed on oilcloth like an afterbirth. By the time I found a hotel, night had fallen. My room overlooked a harbour. Through the darkness I could hear the sound of water slapping against the hull of fishing canoes.

Although I was worn out from the journey I couldn't sleep. I dug out my guide book. It told me that during the eighteenth century, the Ghanaian shore was the site of the densest accumulation of European forts in African history. The largest of these was São Jorge castle, built by the Portuguese here at Elmina in 1482; however, there had been more than fifty others stretched along the 300-mile coastline. Most of them belonged to Holland and England, with the remainder built by Portugal, Denmark and Sweden, as well as three others erected in a spirit of adventurism by the state of Brandenburg. What drew all these nations to Africa was trade. In the late sixteenth century, the value of gold shipped annually from West Africa was £100,000, or 10 per cent of the world supply.

There is so much gold in Elmina, wrote the Dutch merchant Pieter De Marees in 1602, that villagers dive to the bottom of the river and scoop it up with their bare
hands. For European merchants the opening up of Africa sparked a frenzy similar in kind to later dashes for profit such as the South Sea Bubble and the dotcom boom.

From Holland alone twenty vessels a year were weighing anchor at Elmina by the 1590s. Between them, they carried 200,000 yards of linen, 100,000 pounds of beads and 40,000 pounds of copper basins, as well as earthenware pots, brass cauldrons, barbers' basins, looking glasses, stuffed horsetails for use as fly swatters, iron bars to forge into machetes, and the vibrantly coloured Venetian glass beads prized on the coast as jewellery.

Trade with Africans did not always prove straightforward, though. The earliest Europeans on the coast came from Portugal. For decades they gulled the local people with rusty basins, mouldy cloth and other poor-quality goods, before being finally driven out by their enraged hosts. Faced with renewed waves of white men, the Africans came to pride themselves on their perspicacity as customers. Bolts of linens were rolled out on the ground to check for mildew; cauldrons kicked to test against buckling; knives examined for rust. Unembarrassed about introducing their own sharp practices, the Africans sprinkled copper into gold dust, coated lumps of tin with gold veneer and melted the Europeans own coins into bracelets which they sold back to them as solid gold.

What can Africa have made of the Europeans who arrived on its shores? For all that they communicated through trade, the white men would have remained as freakish a spectacle as Martians landing in Leicester
Square. In 1742 – some 200 years after a trade route was established – the sight of Europeans was still enough to cause consternation among local people.

The Ghanaian historian C. C. Reindorff records the meeting that year between King Frempung of the Akim people and a Danish merchant, Nicolas Kamp. Received by courtiers at the Akim palace, Kamp made a low bow before the king, who sat surrounded by his wives. With a cry, Frempung hurled himself to the ground. Guards held back the visitor. The king's wives formed a circle around his prone form. Until then, he had never seen a white man. As Kamp bowed, Frempung had caught sight of the merchant's pigtail. It had looked to him like an actual tail sprouting from his neck. Raised on stories that white men lived at sea and survived on raw flesh he had taken fright.

Tentatively, Frempung's head emerged from behind the women. Across the palace floor, the Dane explained that he was no animal. Frempung demanded he strip naked to prove it. Kamp took off his shirt. Tentatively, Frempung approached. He ran a hand across the merchant's chest and prodded a finger in his belly. Then he stood back and looked him up and down.

‘You really are a human,' said the king. ‘But as white as the devil.'

In the year 1749 a male slave bought at Elmina castle was worth six ounces of gold payable in equivalent goods. These were listed in the ledgers of the Dutch West India Company as the following:

2 muskets

40 pounds gunpowder

1 anker brandy

1 piece cotton cloth

1 piece patterned Indian cloth

1 piece plain Indian cloth

2 pieces gingham

2 iron rods

1 copper rod

4 pieces fine linen

1,000 beads

1 pewter basin

20 pounds cowrie shells

The castle was built by 600 Portuguese soldiers, sailors, carpenters and masons who landed at Elmina on the morning of Wednesday, 19 January 1482. It was a clear, warm day and contemporary accounts record that, after negotiations between Diego d'Azambuja, the Portuguese commander, and Kwamina Ansa, the king of Elmina, construction work began the following day. Like the other coastal forts that
followed Elmina, its initial function was trade – copper pots, beads and brandy for ivory, pepper and gold. But by 1700 the nature of that commerce had shifted.

A report from the Dutch West India Company in 1730 noted that ‘the part of Africa which as of old is known as the “Gold Coast”…has now virtually changed into a pure Slave Coast.'

At Elmina, control of the castle had fallen to the Dutch. Holland required manpower to work the new plantations it was establishing in the Caribbean. The same demands for labour were repeated at the British forts along the coast. In answer, almost a million slaves were exported from Ghana to the New World – over a fifth of the 4.5 million people shipped in total from West Africa during the eighteenth century, when the slave trade was at its peak.

As the oldest and largest of the European forts, Elmina marked the epicentre of the slave trade in Ghana. The castle was the reason I'd travelled to Elmina. I wanted to see the site of slavery for myself.

Early the next morning I wandered through Elmina's narrow streets. The town smelled of wood smoke and old age. Nineteenth-century colonial buildings stood next to wooden huts with corrugated steel roofs. A herd of goats ambled down an empty lane. I turned a corner near the harbour and found the castle. Its walls were freshly white-washed and they rose, futuristic-looking amid the huts, like the remnants of an alien intelligence.

I crossed the drawbridge and entered a courtyard the scale of which seemed to exist only to remind you of your insignificance. Battlements stretched into the sky. Beyond them I could hear waves dash against the shore. The sound was remote, as if the castle's presence had cowed the sea. Across the flagstones, I saw an arched doorway marked with a painted skull and crossbones. A sign above read ‘Male Slave Dungeon'.

I ducked beneath the arch and descended along a sloping passage. The light receded behind me. The air became heavy and damp. I ran my hand along the wall. It came away coated in green algae. At the end of the passage I emerged into the dungeon. The light from a small window high up on the wall percolated the gloom. The cell was the size of a school classroom. It used to hold 300 slaves at a time, the dying locked in with the living. All the prisoners breathing the same feculent air. All of them defecating on the flagstones that, over time, became coated with a solid layer of sand and human waste.