Ghana times
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
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Eshun's story about growing up is also a frightening and shaming one of casual brutalities in Ghana and of childhood racism in London. ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
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Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa, Ekow Eshun, Hamish Hamilton, p.226, £14.99. 0 241 14192 3
THE subtitle of Black Gold of the Sun indicates that this will be a "personal" book, an account anguished by division and ambivalence. Early on, Ekow Eshun describes the crisis that was the impulse to his return to Ghana. He had begun to feel an intense sense of strangeness and rejection in London: the bigotries of the city weighed down on me". His trauma was evidenced in fantasies of violence against people in the streets, and he concluded that this state was a result of a profound loss he could not understand but which had something to do with his family's "toing and froing" between Ghana and London. Returning to Africa, he hoped, would enable him to comprehend it, to make him whole again.
Ekow Eshun was born in London. His father, Joe Eshun, was an official at the Ghana High Commission, but when Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, he lost his job. Instead he became the leader of the Convention People's Party (CPP) abroad. In 1967 he went to Guinea for a meeting, and disappeared. It turned out that he had been tricked by Ghanaian government agents and captured. Ekow Eshun did not see his father until he was two, when the family returned to Ghana on Joe's release from prison. Three years later, Lieutenant Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong overthrew the short-lived civilian government, and the family was sent back to London. Joe once again found work in the Ghana High Commission, but in 1979 Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings seized power in Ghana and sacked former officials. Many were tried and hanged, so the Eshun family remained in London in straitened circumstances. This is the "toing and froing" that Ekow Eshun thought lay behind his sense of loss. But it is also significant to the kind of narrative that this is, that the political history of Ghana is juxtaposed with tender domestic details and family crises. The child's perception of Acheampong's face on a black-and-white television screen as he announces his military coup is as much as he features. His presence in the book is to explain simply and only the Eshun family's departure from Ghana.
Ekow Eshun has many good stories to tell, and this narrative is of a search for a lost self, so perhaps the focus on the "personal" and on family is understandable. Grandfather Joseph Eshun was, in his time, a ballroom dancer, but he was also concurrently a "headmaster, storekeeper, barman, optician and football club chairman". It was he who told Ekow the story of William Essuman-Gwira Sekyi, who came from an eminent Cape Coast Anglophile elite family. Sekyi was groomed for an English education, was duly sent to England to study Law at University College London and just as duly became disillusioned with many of his Anglophile fantasies. On his way home in 1915, his ship was torpedoed. Sekyi managed to get into a lifeboat, only to hear someone shout behind him: "How dare you stay in this boat when English lives are in danger. Get out at once and make room for a gentleman". The incident contributed to Sekyi's forceful role in the decolonisation movement, but it did not estrange him from "Western values". People like Sekyi and his grandfather Joseph, Ekow Eshun argues, did not feel the anxiety that he himself feels about belonging. They seemed able to face both ways.
Eshun's story about growing up is also a frightening and shaming one of casual brutalities in Ghana and of childhood racism in London circa 1976. The memory of the brutal behaviour in Ghana alienates Ekow Eshun (and especially his sister Esi) from returning there, and the memory of the racism that followed him through school in England haunts him in adulthood. These recollections accrete and fill in the psychological context behind the impulse to return to Ghana, behind the need to engage with the troubling sense of uncertainty in England.
But the centre of the book is the journey itself. Here Eshun finds it harder to resist the pressures of the travel-narrative form. He has to appear more ignorant than he could possibly be, so that he can arrive at his epiphanic moment. For example, it would be more than surprising if he knew nothing of African complicity in the Atlantic slave trade until he discovered his own family's deep involvement in slavery. Yet the discovery appears to shatter him, as if the possibility of an ancestor's complicity had never occurred to him. Perhaps he might not have expected the degree of involvement, but his crisis of knowing seems overdramatic.
African Americans pop in and out of Black Gold of the Sun and are gently mocked as egotistical pilgrims who want to moved by the return "home" but who complain about everything. Ekow Eshun reinforces this with an account of Richard Wright's visit to the Gold Coast in 1953. Wright wrote about this visit in Black Power (1954). He was disappointed with what he found in Africa, and Ekow Eshun writes of Wright's disappointment as something visceral, something like a breakdown from which Wright never recovered. He lost his gift, his friends, his wife, and died in 1960: "Stripped of hope returning from Ghana, did his heart give out having endured all it could bear?" Yet in the seven years following the trip to West Africa, Wright was involved in intrigues and battles that demonstrate anything but the malaise described here, his spirited contributions at the Présence Africaine conference in Paris in 1956 being a powerful case in point.
Eshun's narrative ends with a reckless dash for the border with Burkina Faso. He analyses his frenetic rush to the border as a wish to get to the end of his journey, to arrive at the answer about who he is. Once there, he finds nothing but a customs post.
Eshun uses a surprising image to explain his conclusions. In the 17th Century, on the island of Grenada in the West Indies, the last 40 Caribs left on the island were being hunted by French forces. They found themselves trapped on the edge of a cliff, at a place that came to be called Sauteurs after the French commander, and is now known as Caribs Leap. All of them leapt to their death rather than be captured. Ekow Eshun celebrates them because they have chosen to die free, just as "any black person born in the West" is "denied his humanity" by his circumstances but stays on. At the end of his journey he has found out where home is not: "There was nowhere left to go but back to London". He chooses a kind of freedom and Ghana remains a past he is not yet ready to relive.
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