Black Gold of the Sun (21 page)

What we see of our heroes is only what we choose to observe, it struck me while looking at the painting. They are figures of myth rather than reality. But then, of course, myths can be real, too. In the hundreds of years since building the first settlement at Elmina, Europe has been spinning its tales of African inferiority. Writing in 1758, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus divided humanity into three subspecies, describing
Homo africanus
, the least developed, as: ‘crafty, slothful, careless', with ‘silken skin, apelike nose and swollen lips'.

His words were later echoed by the plantation owner Edward Long, whose bestselling book
The History of Jamaica
extended Linnaeus's argument to suggest that Africans were a separate species of humanity altogether – one closer in kind to apes than Europeans. ‘Ludicrous as it may seem,' he concluded, ‘I do not think that an orang-outang husband would be any dishonour to an Hottentot female.'

During the nineteenth century, the notion of the biological
inferiority of Africans gathered pace. It was supported by philosophers such as Kant, Herder and Hegel, who noted in 1824 that: ‘the Negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.' His nature could be understood by a European ‘no more than…that of a dog'. Fuelled by such sentiments the discovery of objective proof of Europe's racial superiority became one of the great scientific obsessions of the nineteenth century.

Whole new schools of thought rose up in its pursuit, from osteometry, craniology, craniometry and pelvimetry to phrenology, physiology, physiognomy and philology. In 1850, the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox wrote: ‘Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization depends on it.'

From the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the science of race became grimmer in theory and more furious in application. Racial thinking gave way to racial policy: eugenics programmes, forced sterilizations, yellow stars, train tracks into the Polish woods.

And all of it for nothing. Because race itself is no more than myth. Beneath skin colour there is no intrinsic difference between the peoples of Africa or Asia or Europe. Far from being everything, ‘race' is nothing. It is a fiction. A lie contradicted by a drop of blood beneath the lens of a microscope. Yet its shadow does not fade.

So as I stood by the kerb in Bolgatanga, the veneration of Marley and Tupac and even Osama came to make sense to me. If race is indelible and, with it, the accumulated weight of western prejudice, what else is there to do but
create our own heroes, and with them build new myths of freedom and resistance?

Squirming for comfort I peered out of the windscreen at the parched fields stretching away from the highway. The pregnant woman snapped off another bite of her chalk. She shifted position, nudging me closer to the edge of the seat. I clung to the dashboard and tried to lose myself again in the blank view outside. I'd imagined the final leg of my journey in more glorious terms.

At the artisans' row in Bolgatanga I'd hailed a taxi for the twenty-mile trip to the border. En route, the driver had picked up four passengers for the back and, just as I'd been congratulating myself on capturing the front seat, had stopped to pick up a heavily pregnant woman, who'd spent the journey so far nibbling on a stick of chalk. I'd been teetering between her and the gear stick since leaving Bolgatanga thirty minutes ago.

Without warning the driver pulled over to the edge of the highway. Before I could get my bearings the taxi was already bobbing as the pregnant woman pulled herself out. By the time I'd followed her the other passengers had vanished across the fields. Reversing his car the taxi driver skidded back up the road. Through the dust stirred by his tyres I saw a checkpoint ahead. I'd reached the border.

In the absence of a river or a mountain range, there can
often be an arbitrariness to inland frontiers. This is probably especially true in Africa, where the logic of colonial geographers becomes increasingly obscure with time. It was certainly the case with the Ghana–Burkina Faso customs post. Above the road ran a wooden arch with an uneven hand-painted sign that read ‘Bye Bye Safe Journey'. Below it, customs officers in blue uniforms checked the passports of truck drivers crossing the twenty metres to Burkina Faso where staff in green uniforms waited to examine the same documents. Beyond them the parched fields gave way to crouching green mountains swathed at their summit in cloud.

A truck rumbled past coating me with dust. Millet seeds whorled in the air. Now that I'd reached it I saw that the frontier had nothing to offer me.

Maybe I should have known all along. Unlike, say, the white cliffs of Dover, there was nothing symbolic about the border's presence. It was a purely functional entity that existed on maps and in the minds of bureaucrats. I was furious with myself. The whole of yesterday's frenzied race had been for nothing. When I was in Mole the idea of reaching the border had seemed like a way to resolve the anxieties I'd accumulated during my trip. I didn't want to go back to London like Richard Wright, weighted down with sorrow. I'd told myself that an answer lay at the border. Now that I'd arrived, I saw how ridiculous that idea had been. There was nothing here to ease the memory of the coup or of Kevin Dyer's face. I'd crossed the whole of Ghana and I still couldn't say where I was from.

Now there was nowhere left to go. Tears sparked by roadside grit and disappointment blurred my sight.

I wiped my eyes and started to walk away from the customs post. Riding by in the taxi I'd noticed a small town a couple of miles back along the highway. I headed towards it feeling as dried out and flat as the surrounding fields.

The town turned out to be a scattering of houses with domed roofs and dark windows hidden behind high walls. None of them showed any sign of life apart from the last one. Outside it hung a sign reading ‘Salman: Antiques for sale. Bicycles for hire'. I banged on the metal gates. At least I could go cycling for a couple of hours before I returned to the grubby Catholic Mission.

No answer. I banged again. I'd already begun walking away when a man's voice called after me.

He had a light-skinned, Arab complexion and quick, precise gestures that reminded me of a sparrow. ‘Come, come,' he said, leading me through the courtyard of his house into a circular, windowless room with a rough clay floor. He gestured for me to sit down.

‘I am Salman,' he said with a little bow. ‘You have come for antiques, yes?'

Without waiting for an answer Salman started rooting through the leather bags and wooden chests scattered round the edges of the room. From their depths came herds of rearing elephants, snarling lions and tribal warriors. Their uniformly worn nature led me to suspect they'd originated with the craftsmen in Bolgatanga, then
been kicked about in the dust for a while until they acquired an appropriately aged veneer.

The day wasn't getting any better.

I tried waving them away, but a small army of warriors and wildlife had built up on the clay floor before he finally accepted that all I wanted was to rent a bike.

‘OK, my friend, I'll take you on a tour through the fields. We will go to see the slave camps.'

‘I thought all the forts were in the south.'

‘Not forts,' said Salman. ‘Camps. From stone. Come with me. I'll show you.'

We wheeled two heavy upright bicycles out of the courtyard and pedalled into the fields. Salman led the way without any apparent effort while I laboured behind him, struggling to keep my bike from sinking into the sandy trail.

The idea of slave camps so far from the coast seemed bizarre. Yet the slave routes that terminated in Cape Coast and Elmina had begun in the north. Perhaps some evidence of them still remained.

We cycled for an hour, past 300-year-old farmhouses made of clay bricks, and cotton trees the pods of which had split open along the trail, exposing the cloudy fibres inside. Past guinea fowl picking at the soil and the trunks of giant baobab trees. I was sweating freely by the time Salman stopped.

The plains had given way to low, flat boulders. Before I could join him he'd already thrown down his bike and was scrambling across them. When I caught up with him
I saw that the rocks stretched for miles, growing in size to enormous boulders that lay scattered in the distance like the scree of a mountain range. Salman stood on the lip of a clearing formed by the rocks into a natural bowl. He stretched out his arms.

‘This is the slave camp.'

All I could see was more boulders.

‘It's just rocks,' I said. ‘Where's the camp?'

‘All around you,' said Salman, spreading his arms wide. ‘The Arab slave raiders used to ride down from Niger and Mali. They'd capture slaves from the villages around here and make camp in these stones.'

He pointed into the bowl.

‘If you look they form a natural defence from attack. The slaves would be held down there, and there'd be guards would stand up here to stop them from escaping or to keep the villagers from rescuing them.'

He began climbing down into the bowl.

‘Slaves would be kept here for up to six months. They'd start with maybe twenty and only leave when there were around 200. Then they'd march to Salaga or Kumasi to sell them.'

‘How could you live out here for that long?'

I followed him down to the floor of the bowl. The rocks curved around us in a high wall, cutting off a view of the plains. In the sudden coolness even the equatorial sun felt remote.

‘See how this boulder is worn flat on top?' said Salman. ‘This is what the slaves used for grinding millet.'

He pointed to another rock with shallow indentations on its surface.

‘That's what they used as plates. They put the ground meal in there, mixed it with water and scooped it out with their hands.'

I followed him round the bowl.

You could see where slaves had scratched out a rudimentary board on the surface of some of the stones to play a game with pebbles similar to draughts. Knock hard on the larger boulders and they rang deep and hollow. At night, the slaves would play them like drums as they sang in memory of their homes. One stone stood in full sight of the sun. Salman knelt down beside it.

‘This groove that runs round the base here – it comes from a chain. This was a punishment stone. If a slave tried to escape he was shackled here and left to die in the sun.'

A shiver ran along my arms. Slavery meant the denial of individuality. It tried to strip humans of their will as effectively as it stole them from their homes. Like the dungeons of Elmina castle, this camp was a factory for the breaking of the soul. Yet the evidence of resistance was scratched into its rocks. Each time they sang the slaves asserted their freedom. Every time they shared food they held on to their humanity.

We climbed out of the bowl. Salman cycled back to his house. I stayed behind among the boulders. Evening beckoned. In the waning light the rocks glowed pink and became warm to the touch.

A few years ago, travelling round the Caribbean island of Grenada, I'd come across the story of the island's indigenous people, the Caribs. Faced with the threat of enslavement by French forces in 1651 they went to war. They lost. But instead of surrendering the last forty Caribs leaped to their deaths into the sea. This seemed to me a story of victory rather than doom. Instead of chains the Caribs chose to die free. In doing so they ensured their memory lived on beyond them. More than three hundred years after their deaths, the cliff face they jumped from was still known as Carib's Leap.

Looking round the rocks it came to me that journeys never truly end. Lives are remembered by rocks. The past is renewed in our genes. In that respect, you never truly leave home. It stays with you even in the worst of times. Like the slave camp here or Carib's Leap, the desire for intimacy among humans never goes away. Where was I from? Maybe the answer was here, among the rocks. The same would be true for any black person born in the west. Wherever we'd settled we carried with us the collective memory of slavery. Like the generations who'd passed through the camp I'd found here, we faced the denial of our humanity every day in the west. Our answer was the inalienable fact of our aliveness. We sang among the rocks. We chose a leap into freedom rather than a life in chains.

Night had fallen by the time I returned to my bike. As I cycled along the track, farmers were lighting fires to burn out the roots of old plants. Very faintly, the chorus of ‘So
Much Trouble in the World' floated towards me from someone's Bob-Marley-day celebration. My legs churned the pedals. A plume of dust rose behind me and settled back into the earth. I'd reached the end of my journey. There was nowhere left to go but back to London.

From Bolgatanga I caught a string of buses south to Accra and prepared to catch my return flight. On the morning of my last day I visited the former home of W. E. B. DuBois. The founding father of the civil rights movement in America, William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in 1868 and launched the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1909. In 1961, having exiled himself from what he considered a reactionary and racist United States, he settled in Accra at the age of ninety-three.

His house, a gift from the Ghanaian government, stood in a discreetly affluent neighbourhood not far from the airport. Following his death in 1963, it was converted into a museum. Unfortunately this turned out to be a lifeless place, full of faded exhibits and gloomy corridors. On the morning I arrived to look round there were no other visitors.

I'd made my trip with a specific goal in mind, and it was only after I'd left the main display room and explored the rest of the house that I discovered what I was looking for.
Down the end of a corridor around the back of the building, I discovered DuBois's study. Shelves of NAACP papers and hardback volumes of his writing lined the room. I started searching along their spines to find the book I wanted.