Black Gold of the Sun (23 page)

‘For all the difference it made they might as
well
have been taken to another planet. The whole thing is pure science fiction.'

*

Rain continued hissing into the museum lawn. Beneath the roof of the summerhouse I remembered that DuBois had written a science-fiction story in 1920 called ‘The Comet'. I'd discovered it while reading through an anthology of black science fiction some years ago, and the plot returned to me in the garden by slow degrees, like a ship emerging from the fog.

In the story, the population of New York is wiped out by the poisonous gas trail of a comet. Oblivious to the disaster a black labourer works in the tunnels beneath the city. He surfaces to find the streets piled with corpses. The dead have fallen where they stood in their grey woollen suits and brown leather shoes. The labourer starts to walk through the city. For days he finds no sign of life. Then he discovers a young woman. She is the white daughter of a wealthy businessman. He has never addressed a white woman as his equal. The only black people she has ever known are maids and doormen. They stare at each other fearfully. Yet in the knowledge of their isolation the nature of their gaze changes. To survive, they have to see through the other's eyes. The hope of new life rests with them. They begin to recognize the humanity in the face staring back at them. And the beauty, too. They lean together with parted lips.

At that moment a group of survivors arrives from outside Manhattan, where they'd escaped the comet's path. They include the young woman's fiancé and the labourer's wife. Normality begins to reassert itself. But the kiss that never was suggests the possibility of a new order. A future based
on love and respect between the races not hostility. A world that, in 1920, seemed no more real than science fiction.

Only in the 1960s, centuries after their ancestors were first taken to the New World, did black people in America gain the same legal freedoms as whites. The struggle for civil rights reached its apogee on Wednesday, 28 August 1963, when a crowd of 250,000 gathered around the length of the Reflecting Pool in Washington to hear Martin Luther King proclaim their right to liberty.

At midnight of the preceding day DuBois had passed away in his bed in Accra, aged ninety-five. On the afternoon of 28 August his body was laid out in a bronze open casket beneath the roof of the octagonal summerhouse. Family friends including Maya Angelou and Betty Shabazz, the wife of Malcolm X, mixed on the lawn with government dignitaries. Nkrumah arrived in a black Zilli limousine. He hugged the widow, Shirley Graham DuBois, and stood for a while over the coffin with his head bowed. A state linguist poured a libation consigning DuBois's soul to the heavens. At that point, a shower of rain fell upon the garden, forcing the mourners to dash for cover. To the Ghanaians present, it was a sign that the passage to the afterworld had opened to receive DuBois's spirit.

The casket was draped in the red, gold and green colours of the Ghanaian flag. It was placed on a military gun carriage and drawn along 28th February Road. At Independence Square, several thousand spectators gathered to
watch it pass along the way to its final resting place at Christianborg Castle.

Flanked by an honour guard in ceremonial scarlet jackets, Nkrumah gave a speech describing DuBois as the greatest scholar ever produced by the Negro race. To the notes of the last post delivered by a bugler from the Central Army Band, the coffin was lowered into the ground beside the walls of the castle.

In Washington, Roy Wilkins, secretary of the NAACP, asked the crowd to lower their heads in memory of DuBois. Among the audience some wondered if his soul wasn't then passing over the masses at the Reflecting Pool. Per-haps, they said, it lent strength to Martin Luther King, who, at 3.40 that afternoon, began to speak of his dreams with a resonance that changed the course of the American republic.

What journey does the spirit make after it leaves the body?

As I left Ghana on board a British Airways plane that evening, I pictured the unfolding night of space.
More Brilliant than the Sun
was published in 1998. The cover shows a photograph of the rings of Saturn taken by the
Voyager II
space probe as it hurtles beyond the frontier of our solar system. Maybe this is how we can imagine the spirit's path: a solitary traveller exploring the stars, the only destination marked ‘Further'.

It was early morning when I arrived at Heathrow. Even after the plane screamed to a halt at Terminal 3 I had the impression that I was still in motion. The glass buildings across the tarmac looked out of focus. Inside the air-port, a tannoy squawked alien announcements. Passengers jostled for their suitcases at the luggage carousel. My head spun. I smelled fried fish and jollof rice. I saw a plain of red earth.

A tube carried me into central London. At Euston, where I changed trains, a mouse scuttled along the platform, unnoticed by the commuters. I emerged at Moorgate station and fought through the tide of office workers heading for the City. As I approached my flat, which lies in a maze of streets behind Finsbury Square, office blocks gave way to disused print works and parking lots constructed from the craters of Luftwaffe bombing missions.

In their sudden emptiness, the streets made me think of the slave camp in Bolgatanga. What did it take to survive in a place like that? Maybe nothing more than ordinary will. The same spirit that enabled the descendants of slaves to build a future for themselves in the New World. In both cases the refusal to believe you were anything less than human.

Soon after the last of the nightmares that ran through my late twenties, I realized I needed a break from London. That was when I went to Grenada. I spent a week there
swimming and reading novels and learning to sleep with-out having the blinds open to ward off the darkness.

Reading a tourist guide to Grenada I discovered the story of the Caribs. I found I couldn't get it out of my mind. Their fate moved me so deeply that I hired a car and drove to the far end of the island to find the cliff face from which they'd jumped. I stood at the edge of Caribs' Leap picturing how they must have been herded across their land by the French; how they'd gathered above the cliffs knowing that to return meant capture while only the waves lay ahead. And it struck me at that moment that nothing ever truly dies. Long after we pass away, we are remembered by molecules in the air that recycle our hair and skin. Even the echoes of the Big Bang are still being heard across the universe.

Thinking that way made the idea of returning to Ghana much easier to contemplate. I'd spent my adult life trying to run from my childhood. It had caught up with me in my dreams. The nightmares had stopped. But I was still afraid that going back would mean reliving the past in all its detail. I wanted to be free. Yet perhaps freedom meant acknowledging what had happened, then understanding it didn't have to determine my life. For all that assassins had pursued me through my dreams, I was still alive.

I could still look into the future and find it unwritten, just as I stared over the cliffs that afternoon, watching the sky meet the waves. What must the Caribs have thought, as they prepared to jump from the same spot? Perhaps that the remainder of their existence would not be momentary,
but an infinite thing measured in half-seconds and heart-beats stretching before them further than they could count.

So they leaped. In tears and silence, pride and fear. Fathers, sisters, howling babies. Each of them glimpsing again the verdure of the forest, the outline of a lover's face at night, the thrumming of rain on rooftops and how, just before dawn, in the moment between the end of night and the new day, the island and its creatures would seem to catch their breath collectively, in silence, even the wind drawing still.

So they leaped. The span of their lives running before them in unbound specificity. And it appeared to the Caribs that they might remain poised above the waves for ever. Falling without landing they turned through the sky. Turned through the sky like black gold of the sun.

For their advice and friendship I owe thanks to David Godwin, Simon Prosser, Richard Benson, Juliette Mitchell, Chris Ofili, Julia Harrington, Kobby Mensah, Norbert Schoerner and Stephen Tateishi.

Especial thanks to Professor Dan Afedzi Akyeampong, Charlotte Akyeampong and family for their support in Ghana; to Jenny Berglund, with love; and to Chrysoula Worrall, for helping me find the words to say what I felt.

For the sections in this book on Ghana's past, I am indebted to the following sources: Paul E. Lovejoy,
Transformations in Slavery
(Cambridge University Press, 1983); K. Y. Daaku,
Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720
(Oxford University Press, 1970); David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race 1868–1919
(Henry Holt, 1993); A. van Dantzig,
The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674–1742
(GAAS, 1978); Akosua Perbi, ‘Merchants, Middle-men and Monarchs', and Henri van der Zee, ‘Jacobus Capitein: A Tragic Life', both from
Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants
, edited by I. van Kessel, (KIT, 2002). I am also grateful to Professor Richard Rathbone at SOAS for advice
on research and to the staff at the Africana section of the University of Ghana library.

Some of the names in this book have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.