Black Gold of the Sun (15 page)

Is it right to say, I wondered while walking along the highway, that Ghana was built on slavery? States such as Asante and Fante became rich through involvement with the Atlantic trade. Yet whatever short-term profits they made were outweighed by the eventual cost of collusion with Europe: a million Ghanaians shipped across the ocean in the eighteenth century, an enfeebled economy and Britain's colonial takeover in the nineteenth century.

Within the space of an afternoon I felt as if I'd become aged and brittle. I recognized the sensation. It was the same one I'd had when I was eleven years old and coming to realize the implications of the coup; when at seventeen a taxi drove past me with its light on for the first time; and on the first occasion, at the age of twenty, a policeman stopped me in the street and searched my pockets. Each time it seemed as if I'd stepped beyond a veil of idealism to find the realpolitik of a cold world.

Every time it happened I was certain I'd learned the true nature of things. I thought I'd never be gulled into believing in fairness or equality again. It's amazing how tempting it is to cling to those ideals, though. You tell yourself it's a one-off; that the taxi driver was in a hurry or the policeman was just doing his job. Only when different people do the same things over and over do you finally surrender your illusions. Even then, when you assume yourself wiser and
more bitter, with a shrunken capacity for hope, even then you will still find yourself horrified by the latest dispatch from the hard frontier.

Before going to Ghana, I was sure the story of the slave trade was one of white brutality and African victim-hood. It is true that black people were raped, kidnapped and sold by whites, but that does not mark the limits of the story. Some Africans, such as Joseph de Graft, were collaborators in that dehumanization. To insist otherwise would be to believe that Africans were too meek to resist the European forces landing on their shore. Or too simple-minded to see through the blandishments of white traders.

Coercion and seduction took place. But Africans also sold Africans by choice; because they stood to gain from it. For centuries they'd practised a trade between themselves that was similar to serfdom. Perhaps, when the Europeans arrived, they imagined that Atlantic slavery was just an extension of that system. If that was the case they couldn't have been more mistaken.

The advent of white people introduced the ideology of race to slavery. Europe justified its brutality on the basis of its ‘natural' superiority to black people. In doing so, they set in place a notion of genetic inequality that still remains central to white self-belief.

This is where my ancestor was most culpable. The mulatto Joseph de Graft exploited his white parentage to do business with the forts. The lightness of his skin and his Dutch surname enabled him to turn the European
belief in African savagery into an advantage over his local black rivals. In this he wasn't alone. By the close of the eighteenth century, some 800 mulattoes lived around the European trading posts. Many were employed as servants at the forts. Others were independently wealthy, such as Jan Neiser of Elmina, a rich and influential merchant contemporary of Joseph de Graft, with a declared contempt for ‘stupid blacks'.

You imagine that the events of history take place in some nebulous ‘other time' unrelated to your own life. Yet I feel the consequences of Joseph's actions every day in Britain. It was partly because of the pervasiveness of racism there that I'd come to Ghana – only to find my ancestor had collaborated in establishing its tenets.

At such moments you yearn to stand back and reflect on the ironies of history. In reality it's impossible to find the distance. The shock is physical. You feel winded. The sun is too bright. Your head aches. You find yourself walking along a sand-blown highway no longer sure who you are any more.

There were thirty gravestones, leaning away from each other at precarious angles in the grass. From the highway I'd turned off into Pedu and found my way to the small, overgrown cemetery. I'd scoured foliage from the head-stones of a dozen faithful husbands and dearly departed
mothers before I discovered the grave for which I was searching. I traced the inscription with my hand:

Joseph de Graft, Nobleman, Merchant, Warrior, Statesman, Patriot

And then, in Latin:

Acta Non Verba
(Action not words) 1756–1840

Deep down I'd wanted to dismiss Albert's story about Joseph as an old man's yarn. But he was here memorialized in stone. The fact of his existence stared back at me so baldly that, overcome with a sudden light-headedness, I had to sit down with my back to the gravestone to recover myself.

For Joseph, the slave trade brought rapid wealth. Near the British-owned Cape Coast castle he built a mansion, with a basement specially designed to pen his slaves before they were sold abroad.

Riches lent him the status of a chief. When Cape Coast came under attack from the Asante he donated 800 ounces of gold towards the maintenance of British troops at the castle. In 1824 he raised a private army of 300 men to join the British counterinvasion of Asante territory. The battle went badly. British forces were overrun at the river Pra. Their commander, Sir Charles McCarthy, was beheaded. Joseph managed to escape the rout and return to Cape Coast. After the battle he eschewed fighting for business.

He bought virgin land at Pedu and allowed the hardest-working
slaves to settle there in their own homes instead of being shipped away. Joseph's slaves came from all over Ghana. Captured at war or kidnapped from their homes, they arrived separated from their families, and speaking little Fante. In Pedu they became part of his household. Even after the British abolition of the international trade he continued to keep bonded labour. Two of his five wives were Pedu slaves. Their children were free-born, the distinction between slaves and extended family becoming increasingly indistinguishable as the household grew.

Shielding my face from the sun, I got to my feet and searched the rest of the headstones for Joseph's brother William. There was no sign of him, which seemed appro-priate. From the little I knew about him, I suspected they must have been quite different. William was an ordained Methodist minister, one of the founders of the Church in Ghana. He travelled the country preaching, and I imagine that what he saw along the way made him question the morality of Joseph's wealth.

In the westerly Akwamu region William would have heard tales of the ‘Sicca Dingers', kidnap gangs who raided villages at night and sold their captives as slaves. He would have crossed through neighbouring states spurred into conflict by the high price that prisoners of war fetched on the coast. He'd have seen villages in the north stripped bare by slave raiders, and fertile land lying fallow because there was no one left to cultivate it. In Asante, he'd have come across innocent people facing fraudulent claims of
theft or adultery because the penalty of guilt was enslavement to the accuser. He would have realized that the whole country was devouring itself for the sake of the Atlantic trade. And he would probably have agreed with the findings of a Dutch West India Company report from 1730:

The part of Africa which as of old is known as the ‘Gold Coast'…has now virtually changed into a pure Slave Coast; the great quantity of guns and powder which the Europeans have brought there has given cause to terrible wars among the Kings, Princes and Caboceers of those lands, who made their prisoners of war slaves; these slaves were immediately bought up by the Europeans at steadily increasing prices, which in turn animated again and again those people to renew their hostilities, and their hope for big and easy profits made them forget all labour, using all sorts of pretexts to attack each other, or reviving old disputes. Consequently, there is now very little trade among the coast Negroes except in slaves.

Yet William would have been a brave man to reveal any such misgivings to his brother. In Asante, Swiss Methodist missionaries had been executed for calling for an end to slavery. William would probably have kept his own counsel. When Joseph died at eighty-four and William delivered the funeral oration, he no doubt spoke of his brother's courage and generosity. I wonder, though, if in solitude William believed that nothing good could come of Joseph's wealth?

*

‘When Joseph bought the land at Pedu it was just forest, it was his slaves that cleared it,' Nana Banyin had said earlier that afternoon. ‘After his death they carried on living there. In the years since then Pedu has grown from a settlement into a proper town with homes and offices and government buildings. The descendants of Joseph's original slaves are still living there. They claim Pedu belongs to them. They've been selling off the land in their name. We, the de Graft Johnson family, are fighting them in court. Joseph bought the land. It belongs to us. Unfortunately the original deeds have been lost over the years. It's hard for us to prove ownership. If we win then Joseph's legacy comes to us. We'll be rich.'

Nana Banyin pushed himself out of his chair. He shuffled down the corridor and returned with a tan leather satchel. From the satchel he pulled out the minutes of court proceedings, appeals, adjournments and other legal documents, all of them embossed with official seals in blood-red wax. Leafing through them I realized the case between the de Graft Johnson family and the descendants of the Pedu slaves had been going on in court for the past three decades and still showed no sign of resolution. All of the family members who'd started the legal battle were now dead – the last in the previous year.

‘He died alone in his room,' said Nana Banyin. ‘Everyone thought he'd gone to Accra and locked his room behind him. It was only after a week we noticed the smell. His body was so swollen it wouldn't fit through the door. We had to wrap it in a rug and lift it through the window.
Now there's only me left to chase the case and I'm not so young, as you see.'

He looked up from the papers. There was something in the slow unfurling of his neck and the heaviness of his gaze. Was Nana Banyin sizing me up to take over the case? A bead of sweat rolled down my back. I noticed that we were both holding the same court report from opposite ends. Outside a rook cawed.

Abruptly, Nana Banyin stuffed the papers back into the satchel and walked down the corridor without a word. At the end of the hall down which he'd disappeared, I pictured a back room with shelves piled with yellowed legal papers. This was how Joseph's legacy ended. Not in
acta
, but
verba
. Words rising in columns of paper, collapsing to dust even as they grew towards the ceiling.

What did Joseph's life tell me about mine? Only that there is no singularity to truth. He was a slave trader who sold Africans. He was a soldier who defended his town. A landowner and a patrician. None of these descriptions cancels the others out. They simply make for a disorderly whole.

The day after I learned about Joseph a lump about the size of a marble materialized under my right eyelid. It didn't hurt, but it forced my eye shut and gave me the look of a boxer who'd gone down in the third without
much of a struggle. Peering half-blind into my hotel-room mirror I looked for signs of an insect bite or an allergic rash. Nothing. The lump was tender to the touch, but otherwise painless. I concluded its cause was mental, not physical. It seemed significant that I'd lost vision in one eye. My body was staging a protest at the dualities I'd found in Ghana. Enough of ambiguity, it said. Give it to me straight.

For centuries Europeans had been coming to Africa imagining it as a place of primal honesty. Through their accounts of journeying along the Congo, the Nile and other rivers, Victorian explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley invented the notion of the Dark Continent with its savage tribes and impenetrable jungle. How many of those myths had I absorbed growing up in London? Blindness showed me what my mind refused to accept. That complexity scared me. This was my fear: if I was Joseph's descendant did that make me tainted by his actions?

I pressed at the lump. Yet it seemed to me that I'd spent my life paying the cost of Joseph's profits. Slavery is impossible to forget if you are born in Britain. It is present in galleries such as Tate Britain and in Bristol's Theatre Royal, both of which were built from Caribbean sugar money. It is remembered by the streets of Liverpool named after eighteenth-century plantation aristocrats, such as Earle Street, Cunliffe Street and Bold Street. And it lives in the collective memory of the black people who have arrived in Britain since the mass immigrations of the 1950s. What is it that keeps us going against the daily fact of
prejudice? Why don't we just go ‘home'? Perhaps because we see life through two eyes. We see possibility as well as prejudice. We see the miscegenation of things – black crossing over with white; wrong ameliorated by right.

Maybe over time all the world's crimes balance out. For each indolent Horace there is a hard-working Robert Newton. For every Joseph a William. Cape Coast itself, I thought, squinting into the mirror, is hardly a town of singular truths. It is the home of families with names such as de Graft Johnson, Hutton Brew and Casley Hayford. Of Cruickshanks, Van Heins, Brownwells, Mountfords, Butlers and Edmundsons. Names that originated in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and The Hague.

Even in Africa everyone comes from somewhere else.