Black Gold of the Sun (18 page)

I decided I'd seen enough. Head reeling, I hurried outside and climbed on to the first bus I could find that would take me away from the proposed site of the finest car park in Ghana. I felt drained by what I'd seen. Between the Big Men and the preachers I didn't know what to make of the country any more. The longer I stayed, the less sure I was of why I had come.

Returning to the centre of Kumasi, I ordered lunch in a restaurant and read about Richard Wright.

Browsing through a second-hand bookstall the previous day I'd discovered a copy of
Black Power
, Wright's account of his journey round the Gold Coast in 1953. Almost fifty years later, Ghana remained entirely recognizable from his description of its noisy, jostling streets. My order of jollof and fried fish arrived. As I studied the book I was struck by the sense of foreboding that had come over Wright as he travelled. Kumasi central market, he wrote, was ‘a maelstrom of men and women and children and vultures and mud and stagnant water and flies and filth and foul odours'. Nothing appeared safe to him. After a dinner of fufu and palm nut soup left him sick he suspected poisoning. In the embrace of a chief he sensed malevolence. By the final stages of his journey he'd become obsessed by intimations of his own death. At a funeral, he was chased away by a group of mourners waving machetes and became so frightened for his life that he fled the city and, soon after, the country.

Given the confusions of my own trip I had nothing but sympathy for Wright. But I also suspected there was more to his anxiety than dealing with a strange country.

‘Some hovering mystery, some lurking and nameless danger lay amongst its trees,' he wrote of Kumasi. But Wright's fear ran deeper than he admitted. I was sure of
it. And the answer might mean something for me, similarly becalmed in Kumasi. Searching my memory I tried to piece together everything I knew about Wright.

The child of Mississippi sharecroppers, Wright was born in 1908 and saw his first novel,
Native Son
, published in 1940. It was an international sensation. Critics compared him to Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The most successful African-American author in history, he left New York for an opulent home in Paris, where he was fêted by Sartre and the writers of the Left Bank.

By the time of his trip to Ghana, however, Wright's fortunes had declined. Book sales were faltering. On returning from Africa, he suffered debilitating bouts of amoebic dysentery. Publishers rejected his manuscripts. His wife left him. Short of money he was forced to move to a smaller apartment.

Alone in Paris he fell to brooding. He became convinced he was the target of a plot involving the CIA, the FBI and the State Department. They were out to destroy his career in revenge for the criticisms he'd published of US foreign policy. At night he slept with a pistol beside his bed.

‘I don't want anything to happen to me, but if it does my friends will know exactly where it comes from,' he wrote to a friend in 1960. On 26 November of the same year he was admitted to the Eugene Gibez Clinic in Paris complaining of stomach pains. Two days later he died of a heart attack, aged fifty-two.

With no history of coronary illness, Wright's death was
mysterious. State Department documents released after his passing establish that he really was under surveillance by the secret services. Friends speculated that government agents may have assassinated him with
Rauwolfia serpentina
. A drug known to be favoured by the CIA during the Cold War, it mimics the effects of a heart attack with lethal consequences.

Yet sitting in the restaurant pondering his fate it came to me that the cause of Wright's death was probably more ordinary and terrible than murder.

In my mid twenties, I began suffering from severe nightmares. I'd keep the radio turned on and blinds open to ward off the night, but at some point I'd falter and the dreams would come.

In the gloaming of an underpass, a teenage gang kicked me to the ground. On a rooftop, an assassin hefted his rifle and aimed at my head. From the doorways of a rural town, a crowd coalesced. Wordlessly, they chased me across a square, waving clubs. Sometimes I woke before they caught me. When I didn't they raised their clubs and beat me till I stopped moving.

The dreams came with such force that they began to seem more real than the daytime. I was living in a flat overlooking Upper Street in Islington at the time. The music and laughter from the bars strung along the pavement would rise to my window every evening. There is a righteous anger that can descend on you when the rest of humanity appears oblivious to your distress. You want to
smash faces. You want to see blood. You want to spray the street with a machine gun. You want to make them hurt like you do.

After working freelance since leaving LSE, I'd taken a job as an editor on
The Face
magazine. It was only when I was at my desk scrutinizing copy that I was free of the shadow cast by the dreams.

As a result I took to working past midnight.

I turned up at the office on my days off.

I came in over Christmas.

I'd do anything so that I wouldn't have to stay home by myself replaying the events of the previous night.

The dreams persisted. They formed into a recognizable sequence of events: a sniper would stalk me from the rooftops; his face remained hidden; his shots always missed. But I sensed he was getting closer.

Eventually I had a dream where he caught me. He stood over me with a pistol, and I lay on the ground looking up into the muzzle of his gun. We stared at each other in silence, the gun in his hand and the ground beneath me. He pulled the trigger.

I woke up screaming. He had killed me – but not before I'd seen his face.

I ordered a glass of iced water in the restaurant. The memory of those dreams had returned to me as I read through Wright's book. As I turned those scenes over in my mind, I started looking at his life through them.

The horrors I'd encountered took place only in my head.
By comparison Wright's nightmares were real. As a child he'd lived briefly in Arkansas. His family was forced to flee town after Wright's Uncle Hoskins went to work one morning and never returned. He'd been lynched by white farmers. The family escaped in the back of a covered wagon the same day, too frightened to even stage a funeral for Hoskins.

From Arkansas they settled on the south side of Chicago. Wright saw how the indignities of racism led his neighbours to drink and violence and self-loathing. Working in a hotel as a teenager, he met Shorty, the elevator boy. For a quarter Shorty would bend over and let the white guests kick him in the ass. ‘This monkey's got the peanuts,' Shorty would bellow as he scrabbled to pick up the coins they'd thrown on the floor.

For all his later success, Wright was never able to leave the brutality of those years behind. He failed to escape its memory by moving to New York, then to Paris. From reading
Black Power
it becomes clear that he hoped to find an Africa untainted by prejudice; a land, as he wrote, where humanity lived according to the laws of nature.

The Gold Coast was not the idyll he'd imagined, and perhaps on returning to Paris he abandoned any hope of paradise. As his fortunes faltered did he come to believe that racism had ensnared him with the finality it did his Uncle Hoskins in Arkansas?

Unallied to violence, racism can't kill directly. But it leads to a spiritual exhaustion. This seems to me a more likely reason for Wright's untimely death than murder.
Stripped of hope after returning from Ghana, did his heart give out having endured all it could bear?

Wright's passing led me to question the source of my dreams. At the time I took them as a sign of some ineffable unhappiness. Thinking back in the restaurant, though, I remembered the embarrassment of school in Queensbury after returning from Ghana. I'd say nothing when a kid called out ‘jungle bunny' or Kevin Dyer shoved his face into mine and hissed ‘black cunt'. The whole world seemed to be against me then. So maybe it was no surprise that I dreamed about shadowed snipers years later.

And perhaps this was why, when I finally saw the sniper, he turned out to have the same face as mine. He and I were the same person.

The shame of childhood was so severe I wanted to erase its memory. In my dreams I became the sniper, an emotionless killer determined to eradicate everything I secretly loathed about myself – my vulnerability, my pain, my childhood. I wanted to kill the past because it hurt too much.

That dream marked a climax – afterwards the nightmares faded away. Yet they seem more significant than ever now.

While I was in their grip, the boundaries between my internal reality and the outside world began to slip. My daytime fantasies of omnipotence – of machine-gunning passers-by on Upper Street – were fuelled by my terrors at night. This diagnosis would have struck me as melodramatic at the time, but albeit in a minor way I believe I was showing signs of psychosis.

I asked for the bill and stood up.

However brief my brush with mental illness my experience was far from unique. In Britain, black people are six times more likely than whites to be diagnosed as schizo-phrenic. There is no biological explanation for the difference – only, it seems to me, the experience of racism we share growing up in the west.

I left my table and opened the door on to the street.

The insistence with which prejudice insinuates itself into everyday life is enough to leave you doubting your own faculties. You wonder if you've made up the sly expression of a work colleague or the patronizing tone of the bank clerk. Or you succumb to paranoia as Wright did because the difference between fantasy – a government plot to ruin your career – and reality – the State Department tapping your phone – is no longer discernible.

The search for a place beyond discrimination led Wright to Ghana. I formed the same goal the morning I woke up and found I'd shot myself dead in a dream. Until then the idea of returning to Ghana had barely appealed. What would I find there apart from faded memories, I asked myself?

In its wake I began to wonder what the effects of spending the rest of my life in Britain would be. Supposing the dreams returned with greater force? Would I end up acting on them? I prevaricated for years before buying a ticket. I was afraid that once I got there nothing would change. But my decision was forged that night.

I stepped out of the restaurant on to the same streets as Wright fifty years earlier. Were the words that came to me now the same as those in his head then? This is what I thought: you can't escape the past. It stays with you however far you run.

I left Kumasi the next day. I was heading north to Bolgatanga, the last major town before the Ghanaian border with Burkina Faso. In a few more days I'd have crossed the country. My journey would be over.

When I arrived at the bus station I discovered that I could make a detour to Bolgatanga via Mole National Park. It was about 200 miles off my route, but there was a bus leaving from Kumasi that evening. It would arrive at the park the following morning. I could spend a couple of days watching elephants, baboons and gazelles, then take another bus to the border.

My entire relationship with wild animals had been conducted through Regent's Park Zoo and Hollywood movies. I told myself the detour would salve the affront of
Zulu, Congo, King Solomon's Mines
or any of the other films in which white adventurers hacked through the jungle while natives lobbed spears at them from the bush. The real reason was that I just like elephants. I like their scale, their density, the oblique delicacy of their trunks, and I wanted to see some close up without bars in the way. So I bought
a ticket to Mole. The bus left in two hours. I sat on a wooden bench in the station and watched a scrum of passengers do battle with the laws of physics as they tried to shove their bags and boxes into the hold.

The sun set. Departure time approached. Outside the station I heard the sound of bleating. A group of men walked into the loading bay followed by a flock of goats. The goats milled around the bus. They scattered the concrete with droppings. The scent of urine filled the station. Herding them together, the men hauled and pushed the animals on to the roof of the bus one after the other until they were all roped by the ankles. After prolonged exertion the goats were all fastened down and the men stood looking up at their handiwork, glistening with effort, as the goats chorused their discontent from the roof.

I climbed on board feeling agitated and miserable at the drama I'd just witnessed. My low mood wasn't improved in any way by the slogan of the bus company, which was written on the seat in front of me. It said, ‘We'll Get You There Alive.'

For a moment I thought of fleeing the station, and the country, altogether, just as Wright had when the omens mounted so intolerably against him. Up on the roof the goats started to scream. Blithely the driver turned up the volume on his radio and steered the bus out of the station into the night. It was too late for anything but to keep going.

I didn't know what to expect when I finally arrived at Bolgatanga. The north was an unknown proposition to
me. Until 1907 it had been a separate state from the rest of the Gold Coast. Even now it remained culturally and physically divided from the south. In comparison to the zealous Christianity of Kumasi, many of its people were Muslims, their land given over to vast dry plains punctuated by millet fields and baobab trees. I drifted to sleep as the bus left the city, only to be woken by a wailing that sounded like a crying baby. It was coming from outside the bus.

I peered into the blackness. I couldn't see anything. Then a white shape flashed by the window. The bus jerked to a stop. The blur materialized into the form of a goat, screaming horribly. It had slipped from the roof and come swinging past the window by the rope tied to its leg.

The driver got out. He stood scratching his head. Some of the other men from the bus came to stand beside him. The animal carried on yelling. A chorus of screams answered it from the roof. A lively discussion broke out among the men about how to refasten it. None of them seemed eager to tackle its thrashing legs or the screaming of its comrades on the roof. From the back of the bus an old man in a djellaba hobbled forward, his face as worn as bark and his hands tough as hide. He looked like someone who'd wrangled with a few recalcitrant animals in his time. Hitching up his djellaba, he clambered on to the roof amid the flock's furious bleating. I heard his footsteps above me and the sound of his voice, loud then gradually softening as he hauled the dangling goat back to the roof and calmed the flock down. The old man climbed back to the ground.
He took his place at the back of the bus without another word. The rest of the men returned to their seats in bashful silence. The driver started the bus back down the highway.