Black Gold of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

British colony, and most people speak good English, so I hadn’t anticipated trouble making myself understood. Yet without the ability to address them in their own language, I found I’d been rendered dumb.
    Each evening as she laid the table for dinner, I saw a look of boundless compassion in Mrs Hagan’s eyes. Disregarding my insistence that I understood Fante, she’d ask me about my day in the deliberate tones of a parent spooning mush to their baby. Precious, her niece, lived nearby and often came to visit. At those times the women stood over the table, discussing in Fante my appetite and mood, and what I’d done that day, while I sat between them, mutely spooning a bowl of groundnut soup.
    On Upper Height’s main street the neighbourhood housewives, returning from the market carrying woven baskets of cassava and tilapia fish wrapped in greaseproof paper, would speculate about my identity as I walked by. I was an African-American tourist; Mrs Hagan’s retarded grandson; a Ghanaian who’d been to Abora Kyir (England) and come back with a swelled head and a phony accent. And who was I really? Even if I’d been able to answer to them in Fante, what would I have said?
    At the end of the street stood Maa Lizzy’s, the grocery store, where the local youth liked to gather after school.They’d fall ostentatiously silent when I was sighted approaching. But in the time it took for me to be served by the affectless teenage girl behind the counter, word would flash round the neighbourhood. On the first such occasion, what seemed like a herd of kids galloped to the store for a look at me. Smaller children hoisted themselves on to the shoulders of big brothers for a better view. An ice-cream boy riding past parked his bicycle and began hawking ice lollies and tubs of sweet frozen milk to the crowd. Scuffles broke out at the back among those denied a decent view. It was a carnival, and I was the main attraction.
    As I emerged into the light, someone shouted, ‘Burenyi.’
    Another voice called out the same word. Then they were all chanting it.
    â€˜Burenyi.’
    â€˜Burenyi.’
    They trailed me down the street shouting, until one of the youngest children, a girl with hair in bunches like Mickey Mouse ears, tripped over at the front of the procession.
    In the commotion that followed I slipped back home, where Precious was making soup in the kitchen.
    â€˜What does
burenyi
mean?’ I asked.
    She looked up from the stove.
    â€˜Where did you hear that?’ she said.
    â€˜Nowhere,’ I shrugged, trying to sound offhand. ‘Just out today.’
    Precious sprinkled pepper into the soup.
    â€˜It means “white man”,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask? I thought you said you understood Fante.’
II
    When I was twenty I met a girl called Hannah.
    We fell in love.
    It didn’t last.
    She was on my mind the morning after the kids called me a white man in Upper Heights.
    The children’s reaction brought home the fact that I was alone in a strange country. Hannah would have said that I courted loneliness. If that’s the case, it’s nothing of which I’m proud.
    We were together for eighteen months – hardly an eternity, but enough time to know each other well. That was when it got difficult between us. Hannah had told me all about her friends and her parents and her childhood. She expected me to do the same. Only I didn’t reveal anything to her about my past. The fate of our relationship came down to the reason why this was so. She said I didn’t want to. I said I couldn’t.
    The last time I saw her was in an over-lit pub in Finsbury Park.
    â€˜I’ve noticed something,’ said Hannah. ‘You never get angry. You never get upset. It’s as if you’re never really here. You’re so cut off from yourself it’s impossible to reach you.’
    â€˜I care about you.’
    â€˜I’m not sure