Chapter 1
My newly married parents had moved here so that Dad could take up a teaching job, and they managed perfectly well on their own without me for a couple of years until they yearned for the patter of tiny feet. They soon acquired a boisterous puppy and then later, when they realised it would be less trouble all round, me. I left Ghana when I was just under a year old – not on my own, you understand, got the folks to carry me – and for years never thought a whole lot about the land of my birth. There were some exotic baby pictures, it’s true, and I used to get hauled out of the bus on school trips to France by over-zealous French border police who were highly suspicious of the phrase “Place of Birth: Takoradi,” which featured nowhere on their map of England. Consternation all round, when their high-profile capture turned out to be a nerdy-looking, white English kid with a letter explaining that his father had once been a teacher in Ghana. Let’s hear it for Dad, by the way, who never let mere detail get in the way of an adventure. Mum should have known that life was about to get interesting after the whole honeymoon business. She was twenty-one, came from Derby and had never been abroad before. All her friends’ honeymoons had involved a train to Skegness and a few days in a seaside boarding-house. Dad, however, had a clapped-out car and unfulfilled dreams of travel beyond the East Midlands. He thought it entirely sensible to spend the first week of their married life driving overland to Barcelona – in the 1950s, no seatbelts, no motorways, no service stations – where Mum promptly got food poisoning and spent the second week in bed. I recount this simply to point out that my father, coming home one day a couple of years later and saying “Darling, guess what, I’ve got a new job! Not in Derby, no. Not in England, no. Not in Europe, no. Go on, have a guess,” was entirely in keeping. Accordingly, I grew up with a strange and distant birthplace marked in my passport, and as I got older I began to wonder what Takoradi was like. I adopted Ghana as my second national football team – just as hopeless as England, but more entertaining – and hung out in the bar at the Africa Centre in London (long gone, sadly). And chatting to the barman at the Africa Centre is where I discovered I had a middle name that no one had told me about. Turns out that in Ghana you get called after the day of the week on which you were born. Kofi Annan – former Secretary General of the United Nations – was born on a Friday (Kofi) and I’d like to bet that dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson came into this world on a Sunday (Kwesi). Me, I was born on a Thursday. So my name is Yaw (pronounced “Yow”). No one had ever actually called me that, but I was starting to think that maybe they should. And for that, I was going to have to go back to Ghana. Forty-odd years after my birth, we planned a trip, my folks and I. (No Dad, we are not driving.) My parents had never been back, not since the heady days of Ghanaian independence and the slow entrenchment of democracy. They were nervous about what it might have become, but curious about how Ghana had changed. It might be pretty poor by European standards, but Ghana is one of West Africa’s success stories – a largely stable country, with an educated population and resources of its own. I was just excited to visit the place written in my passport. It was time to go and see where I had been born. ◆◆◆ Patrick, our driver, hired for the duration, isn’t entirely convinced. “You want to go here, here, here and here?”, he says doubtfully, pointing at the map. Now Takoradi is an industrial city, and isn’t exactly on the Ghana tourist circuit, but it does its best with what it’s got. There’s a market. There’s a museum. There are nearby beaches. So to be fair to Patrick, he is a bit non-plussed why anyone would want to visit 1. the Elder Dempster shipping line offices, 2. Government Technical Secondary School, 3. Takoradi Polytechnic, 4. Maxmart supermarket, 5. Takoradi Sports Club, and 6. Takoradi General Hospital. The first five on the list are a trip down memory lane for Mum and Dad. The shipping firm that brought them here from the UK; the two schools where my father taught metalwork and technical drawing; the supermarket they sometimes shopped in; the sports and social club where 1960s’ expats gathered to swim and drink beer – the bar still open but the palm-fringed pool long since abandoned and derelict. We encounter nothing but kindness, mixed with occasional incomprehension (“You want to come in and look round the school? This school? Now? Are you sure?”), but whenever things look to be at an impasse I play my trump card. I whip out my passport, point to the birthplace line and announce “See, I’m Ghanaian! My name is Yaw!” It works every time. By now, even Patrick is getting into the spirit of things, and questions locals fiercely as we search for the house that my parents once lived in. He seems personally affronted that assorted builders, schoolchildren, shopworkers and market-traders can’t recall a bungalow by a banana tree on a hill near a church, or whatever random fact it is that Mum has just decided must mean it’s ‘our’ house. Eventually, Patrick’s forensic questioning prevails. We stand in the dripping heat outside 13 Dixcove Hill Road, a simple but substantial colonial-era bungalow. I sit on the corner terrace of a plantain-lined garden where my baby basket was once placed. Mum and Dad pose for photographs in front of their old house. The decades fall away, like blossom from the garden flowers, and a young married couple, with their lives before them, take Baby to the market and learn to sail in the warm harbour waters. There are two tarnished silver trophies on my parents’ mantelpiece at home in Huddersfield, recording them as race winners during regatta week in 1961. Along with the African masks and crude wooden statues dotted around the house they formed the backdrop to my childhood, but as we drive around the harbour later – an industrial place of sheds and warehouses – it’s clear that Takoradi Sailing Club is long gone. We stop anyway at the water’s edge, amid the tankers and containers, long enough to marvel at how a boy from Cambridge and a girl from Derby had once cut a wake through African waters. The market though – according to the folks – is exactly as it ever was. I read this later, in Mum’s travel diary, which she says she could have written four decades earlier, so little had things changed: Dried fish, palm nuts, pyramids of tomatoes, chillis, pawpaw – and heaps of dried refuse, broken wood and straw, and chickens with their legs tethered. And a mother, scrubbing diligently at her one-year-old, naked astride a gutter, a calabash of clean water emptied over him. We are curiosities everywhere we go, including the market where strangers cause a bit of a stir. Especially when – in reply to the question, “Hey, where you from?” – I can say, quite truthfully, “Takoradi. This is where I was born.” That gets warm approval, but when they ask my name and I say “My name is Yaw,” there’s almost a riot. The stallholders like that I was born in Takoradi. They love that I also have a Ghanaian name. ◆◆◆ There’s one more stop on this journey into my Ghanaian past. We arrive at Takoradi General Hospital and follow Mum as she strides confidently through narrow corridors, dredging up decades-old memories. Sick people turn their heads at this strange little party, but Mum is undeterred. “This is it,” she says, as we find the original entrance to the building. We walk down the wide, window-lit corridor and climb the stairs to the maternity ward. One of the many extraordinary things about my extraordinary parents is that it didn’t occur to them that Mum might go back to England to give birth – as every other expat mother did, in 1960s’ Ghana, while the fathers worked on, waiting months to see their child. She wasn’t going to leave Dad and go back on her own, when this is where
