‘But where is the body?’
‘They took it, because they hate us.’
‘This is what they have been waiting for to bring us down.’
‘What of the ceremony, Uncle?’ I asked.
‘We will postpone it, until this unpleasant matter is settled.’
They began to speak of the arrangements for the postponement, and were still speaking that morning when the Odumonkomakyerema beat the gong-gong, calling for all the young men to form search parties for the missing man. There was a notice in the Gold Coast Press and the State Council offered a reward of £8.
They summoned the Amantoomiensa to meet them, but they refused, gathering instead in the courtyard. I was in the council chamber, seated between my two uncles. Our new King suggested the State Council join the Amantoomiensa.
When we arrived there, the Odikro of Tetteh was shouting, his voice high and strained. ‘Every house in Kaba must be searched. The palace must not be spared.’
The King’s spokesman, the Okyeame Abroso, spoke. ‘You must be calm and collected, and stop your abuses and insinuation. It is not likely that the missing Odikro is still in the capital for, even if he is dead, nobody could keep his corpse and breathe it.’
The Odikro of Tetteh’s spokesman answered for him. ‘It is true, we broached the question that the palace must be searched; however if you point your gun, you stain your shoulders. We do not propose to search the palace. After all, we are slaves to be sold in the interest of the Paramount Stool. We have no wish to cross words with Nana, but the Amantoomiensa, the Three Counties, are now reduced to Amantoomienu, the Two Counties.’
With this, they turned and walked away.
In the old days, there was not the thanatophobia, the fear that Europeans had of the unknown beyond the grave, the passionate clinging to life. Death was a transition, like birth, from one kind of life to another, and those left on earth had to see to it that the King entered the spirit world with a retinue befitting his high station. People were killed to resume their duties for their royal master after death. Prisoners of war, criminals sentenced to death, High Court officials, relatives, wives of the dead monarch who no longer had the will to live, all followed him.
But could this death really have been a sacrifice to pacify the elements? An act to re-establish order, to shout out our grief at the loss of this great presence? Would I not have heard of it? Was it being presented as a crime by our enemies? Were the colonial authorities making an example of the arrogance of our family, because we had attacked their prerogative?
There were only a few truths we could all agree on. That the missing man was an Odikro. That he was forty-eight years old. That his ears were small. And that he walked slowly and gently.
Certainties of his life that might have made up for the uncertainty of his death. If the old order had been standing on the edge of a cliff, it was his disappearance that pushed it over the edge and, in its course, changed the fate of a country.
Three months later both Kwamena and I received our acceptance letters to the University of London.
That day the priest Osei Tawiah visited Police Corporal Nuamah, telling him that one of the palace courtiers had confessed to the murder. ‘He asked me for medicine to lay the dead man’s ghost,’ he told the policeman and took him to a place close to the royal mausoleum in Kaba to uncover the remains.
The same night, with only a kerosene lamp, they sank spades in the earth, and unearthed nothing.
Days later, Kwamena received another letter, asking him to come for examinations and interview at the University of Cambridge. An anonymous note arrived with the supposed whereabouts of the Odikro’s remains.
The police dug up a skull, lower jawbone, seven limb bones and a tooth. The evidence was as shaky as our traditions would come to seem.
The priest Tawiah had been dismissed from being a servant of his shrine three years before and the skull and bones were said to be those of a woman who had died two years earlier.
And yet Uncle Kagya, three of my brothers, two cousins and Odumonkomakyerema Pipim were arrested and charged with the murder of the Odikro.
I was in the courtyard when the police came to search the stool house.
The King’s spokesman told them that no Asante, no circumcised man, and no one in shoes could enter, and the search party was reselected.
‘Where is the eighth stool?’ the Odikro of Tetteh asked.
‘It is on the King’s temporary grave in the mausoleum,’ the spokesman told him.
We made for the mausoleum, libation was poured and a sheep was slaughtered. There was a white stool resting on a mat on the grave mound.
‘This is the stool to be consecrated and blackened for our King,’ said the spokesman.
‘This is quite untraditional,’ the Odikro said, his larynx straining against the skin of his neck as the Amantoomiensa reminded him where he was.
There were those who said the Odikro had been killed to blacken my father’s stool.
Blackening the stool was the greatest honour one could give to a king or queen mother after their demise.
Those who harmed the stool through their vices or had been chosen for the lack of suitable heirs did not have stools blackened in their honour.
Some said it was custom that the Omanhene’s stool was placed on the grave for at least a year and that there was no link between the epun, the blackening of the stool, and the Wirempe ceremonies.
Others said that the Omanhene’s stool was to be left on the grave to rot and a different stool would be blackened.
Some that human blood had never been used to wash stools.
The ritual experts who had supervised the last funeral were long dead.
The question of what was traditional or not was to be constructed, forgotten and remade, as the case ran its course over the years.
*
I looked down at the Justice of the Gold Coast Supreme Court. I knew that his name was Mohammed Fuad, that he was a Cypriot, and that he was coming to the end of a long career. An unhappy man, my uncle had called him, long separated from his wife and family in Cyprus, complaining bitterly of the prejudice against his name and Muslim religion that stopped him becoming a colonial Chief Justice.
Uncle JB got up. ‘It is wrong to convict men on circumstantial evidence.
‘The facts are that the Odikro was having troubles with his subjects and that they had already tried to destool him.
‘Speculation is that he was ready to abdicate after the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies and that he had an epileptic fit in the courtyard during the funeral ceremony.
‘Now, it is well known that an Akan ruler is not permitted any physical weakness or deformation and to be so shamed in public is sufficient cause for the Odikro to take his own life.
‘We have had witnesses profess that they saw the Odikro at eight a.m. on the Kaba–Adadientem road, after he was supposed to have disappeared.
‘We have witnesses that question the credibility of the chief witness of the prosecution, a known thief and wife-beater, dismissed as a servant of the shrine three years ago.
‘We do not have conclusive evidence that the disinterred skull and bones are those of a man.
‘And last, but not least, all these men, apart from one – Kwadjo Amoako – are devout Christians, whose doctrine prohibits the very act that they are supposed to have committed.
‘They are Christian and servants of the court and as such are fully aware of the balance of rights and obligations, the unbroken chain of honour, which exists in a world in which one is never exempt from the eyes of the ancestors, in which any taint on the honour of a king is unpardonable. If there is a shadow of doubt in your minds, gentlemen of the jury, I beg you to consider it.’
The Assistant Attorney General, J. S. Mensah-Sarbah, the scion of a distinguished coastal family, an excellent cricketer, who had trained at Lincoln’s Inn and had been my uncle’s former mentor, got up to speak. ‘There has been a loss. We have hea
rd from two witnesses, two Okomfo priests, that two of the accused came for Sassaduro, medicine for laying ghosts.
‘Let us imagine that, as confessed to the Okomfo priests, on the afternoon the Wirempe ceremonies were to take place, the King’s son A. E. B. Danquah invited the Odikro to drink palm wine, and while he was drinking, another of the princes, Ebenezer Agyata, got up, stood behind the seated Odikro and hit and cudgelled him when he tried to rise, that the Odikro’s cheeks were pierced with a sepow, that his blood was collected in a bowl to be smeared on the King’s stool as part of the epun, the consecration of the stool – all while a memorial service was happening not a hundred yards away in the Presbyterian church.
‘We know that we are dealing with a group of people who assert their pride and unassailable belief in their privilege above others at every turn, who do not value the blood of a man unless, and I quote one of the family, it is made of gold.
‘They believe it is their divine right to rule.
‘It is this attitude that could make an act like this possible and will make it possible again, unless we put a stop to it, once and for all.’
The silence of the courtroom broke and the jury went outside.
My mother got up slowly and walked out. All three of us followed. We went to the car park and the driver opened the door for her to sit in the back. A crowd had gathered outside the white building and I could see the Odikro of Tetteh, in a green-and-blue kente, orating. He was holding a newspaper and I went and stood at the back of the crowd. Copies of the paper were being passed around and I leant over a young man’s shoulder and saw pictures of my brother A. E. B. Danquah in a three-piece suit, of Ebenezer in a top hat and black tie and of Uncle Kagya in a sumptuous cloth.
‘“Ofori Panin Fie, until recently the splendid palace of the Gold Coast’s most splendid monarch, is now alleged to have been the site of a foul murder,’” the Odikro read out aloud from the paper. ‘“Not just alleged, but indeed so.”’
The crowd made such a noise that it did not at first hear.
It slowly hushed as a female voice rose higher and louder than all the others. ‘Mo yɛ nkwaseafo,’ it was shouting. ‘You are all fools. Your heads are turned backwards so you do not know which way you walk.’
I knew Yaa’s voice before I saw her, alone amongst the crowd of men. She opened her mouth to say more. I saw all the men turn to look at her in her blue shift dress, her hair in a long braid at her back. They were silenced now, but soon her insults would raise their ire. I went towards her, just as the man next to her was trying to calm her by putting his hand on her arm. She pushed him with all her might.
‘Mo yɛ mmoa. You are animals,’ she was shouting.
Tears streamed down her face as she beat at the man. I put my arms around her and tried to carry her off, but she was intent on fighting and hit out at another man on her left. I picked her up and lifted her out of the crowd. She was crying so hard she could not breathe through her tears.
‘Yaa,’ I shouted with all my might, not caring who would hear, ‘you never do that. You never fight with men, Yaa. I do not care how angry you are or what they have done. If a man shouts at you, you do not fight him.’ I was shouting so hard now that my throat hurt. ‘You walk away. Do you hear me? There was a crowd of men. Men who hate you and your family and everything you stand for. They could have hurt you or worse. They could have killed you. Do you understand me?’
Amba came to Yaa and held her in her arms. My mother was getting out of the car. She had the faraway look in her eyes, but when she saw how Yaa was crying, she ran to her, almost falling over her lace kaba.
‘Me ba,’ she said in a strange shout-whisper, waving her hands in front of her. ‘Me ba. My child.’
Yaa ran to her. The driver led them to the car. He came towards me holding something. It was the Gold Coast Observer.
‘Not everyone is against your family, sir,’ he said. ‘I am taking them home. Let us pray for the right verdict.’
I nodded and looked down at the front of the paper. It read: ‘Sacco-Vanzetti case of West Africa. King’s sons on framed-up charges.’
I folded it until it was a very small square in my hands and walked back into the courtroom and sat down next to the three empty chairs. My skin felt cold and I was shivering despite the oppressive heat. I rubbed my bare shoulders just as the back doors opened and the members of the jury entered. The bustle of the crowd rose to a new pitch and the judge rapped his hammer repeatedly.
He took off his wig and wiped his brow.
A clerk brought him the verdict from the jury.
The judge looked down and slowly put on his wig the square of black cloth, and sentenced them all to death.
*
I kept my head bowed as I walked past the throngs and photographers and newspapermen and across the dusty street towards the sea.
There were naked boys jumping into the waves, and fishermen pulling their boats in from the reefs.
I dropped to my knees and put my hands into the hot sand. I thought of taking my kente off, walking into the sea, not coming out.
Perhaps the gods would take me as a sacrifice for whatever wrong had been done; whether it was our pride or some cruel onslaught of history that could not be stalled, I did not know, but the outcome was the same.
Over the next months, the press would make much of our wealth, status, our privileged personal ties.
They praised the police and Governor Burns, and poured blame, not just on the accused men, but on all the structures of the palace.
The Amantoomiensa drew up charges against my cousin and forced their way into the palace, with the aim of marking him so badly that it would warrant destoolment on the grounds of his physical deformity.
It took forty members of the Native Authority Police to beat them back.
But all this was before us.
I watched the boys jump and run into the waves.
The sun sank into the crystal drops of water on their skin.
I closed my eyes and tasted the salt of tears on my face, and wished there would be nothing but these boys and their laughter crashing off the waves.
Hands in hot sand, sun relentless on my head, the cool blueness of sea as far as sight, the sharp taste of salt dissolving, forever dissolving, and nothing before or after.
The pain is too much now and I must stop. I am nearing the end of my story, Kojo.
Do not think I have forgotten you.
I think of it, the river. Of its secrets and many voices.
I think of the bell of the clock tower. Of my father. Of the four of us walking the streets of Kaba, buying chocolate and shelling peanuts amongst the goats and chickens and stray dogs.
And I think of how I knew, but did not know, what light and happiness was.
A Note on the Author
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Ghanaian writer, art historian and filmmaker. She is founder of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia. Recently appointed a TORCH Global South Visiting Fellow to Oxford University, she is also the recipient of the 2015 Art & Technology Award from LACMA; of the 2016 AIR Award; and of the inaugural 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship. She is a contributor to the 2019 New Daughters of Africa anthology and in February 2019 delivered a TED Talk. Ayim will curate the Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. The God Child is her first novel. She lives in Ghana.
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