map you have to look hard for Accra, the modern capital of Ghana, among the many sea “castles and forts” set down since the fifteenth century—by Portuguese, Danes, Swedes, Prussians from Brandenburg, Dutch and English, all dreaming of gold and slaves—on this long east-west stretch of African coast.
Kojo was an Ashanti, and his wife was the daughter of the previous King of the Ashanti. The king, Kojo said, had asked him to marry his daughter. It is one of the more straightforward things about Kojo. But when he tells it in his own words it acquires a strange tone: “My wife’s father was the previous king. He very tactfully suggested that I marry his daughter. She was studying medicine in school and I was a dentist. She was Ashanti, and I agreed.”
I saw a lot of Kojo when I was in Ghana. At one time we had dinner together every day. He was always ready to answer questions, always helpful and civil. Yet at the end he remained mysterious, almost as mysterious as he had been when he talked in his deadpan way of his marriage to the king’s daughter. At first it seemed to me that in spite of his readiness to talk, there was a reticence about him, an aristocratic African reticence that made him underplay everything. And then I thought that his life had been too varied, full of unconnected or disparate parts, and he hadn’t worked out a way to present himself. I suppose that meant he hadn’t been able to make a whole of his experience.
Here are pieces of the jigsaw as they came to me. Kojo’s father went to Achimota, the famous secondary school set up by the British to train the children of chiefs and local dignitaries for “public duty” (Kojo’s words). The Achimota student became a schoolmaster and served in different parts of Ghana. The schoolmaster’s father (Kojo’s grandfather) was a palace chief, a senior adviser to the king on cultural matters. Kojo said he received a “special” African education.
Kojo (in his reticent style) did not say what this African education was. He only said, “It taught him to fulfil his inherited designation. He was not a top chief or a very powerful one. His fiefdom was limited. He had less land. Land here means status and power. He did not have that kind of power although he was a wealthy man. He was wealthy because he had cocoa farms outside Kumasi. His tenants grew the crops, harvested them and dried them, and then bagged them in sisal bags and sold them to the agency. He had to spend time in Kumasi because of his court duties.”
Kojo said, “My clan produces the kings of Ashanti. There are five other prominent chiefs who can also produce chiefs. But we, of the Oyoko clan, give the leadership on my maternal side.”
The famous Ashanti wars that gave Gold Coast and then Ghana its final shape took place in the 1880s. This would have provided Kojo’s grandfather with enough drama. But the big disturbance in Kojo’s life came with independence and especially with the dictatorship of Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana. Nkrumah wished to redraw the Ashanti borders. He wished to make the Ashanti people less dominant. He brought in mining acts that took away the mining rights of the Ashanti. The Ashanti lands were famous for the gold they produced; in colonial times Ghana was known as the Gold Coast. Nkrumah’s mining acts decreed that below a certain depth in the ground all the mines belonged to the government.
Kojo said: “I could see myself in trouble. I was used to living in a country where there was the rule of law and where there were human rights and everything was regulated.”
From this period come his London stories, where his addresses are in Belgravia; this is when his three sons (“three of my boys”) go to Eton.
I met one of the boys at the very end of my time in Ghana, the evening of my last day, at the airport. He was charming and resourceful, full of manners, a great help in the airport mess and crowd; and I felt that it might be possible for this boy (though lacking his father’s experience) to have a steady way of looking and acting that his father (whose memories went back too far) wouldn’t begin to have.
Kojo was brought up as a Christian. In this part of West Africa this usually means a background, or indeed