a foreground, of traditional African belief. But Kojo said this was not so in his case. He loved the “Ashanti spirit,” but Christianity had made it mellower and less warlike. Paganism did not pervade Ashanti; Kojo was not exposed to it. The Ashanti have ancestral gods, but they are figures of healing. Certain cultural rites have to be performed at times of death, birth and puberty. Every family has an elder who can do the rites; the knowledge is passed from generation to generation.
2
THIS ASHANTI religion, if what Kojo said was true, was not too intrusive. The same couldn’t be said of the religion of the coastal Gaa people, at one time enemies of the Ashanti. This religion is so encompassing, so full of signs and portents that the true believer (rather like the devout ancient Roman) might live in a constant fever of anxiety about the messages of the gods. This Gaa religion is rooted in the spirits of the departed and is at the same time so much part and parcel of the living world that it surrounds us, this world of prophecy and divine messages, even when we are not aware of it.
If we are walking on a road and we stub our toe on a stone, that has meaning. If we sneeze, that has meaning. To sneeze on the right side is good; to sneeze on the left is bad. Nature itself has been programmed; we have to learn to read it. Even the velocity of the wind is a sign. The high priest will interpret it; so will the elders who guard the properties of the stool, which stands for the ruler, and women seers.
It was Pa-boh who took me into this understanding of his complex faith, where so much has to be explained. He never spelt his name out for me or wrote it down; so I write it according to my phonetic memory. It may be that I have written it wrongly.
The son of an important chief took me to see Pa-boh. I thought that the house we were going to was Pa-boh’s house. The house, when we came to it, was in a populous but uncluttered part of Accra, without garbage. I was told later that the garbage here, as elsewhere in Accra, was collected by a private garbage-collecting firm. There was also a system of drainage, and that made all the difference to the appearance of the place.
The houses were small but not hemmed in by garbage or fences; so there seemed to be a lot of openness. Children ran in and out of every free space and the street sounded like a schoolyard at recess.
At one end of the street there was a small white concrete structure, like a sentry-box; at the top of this strange box two crosses leaned away from each other. I thought it might have been a very small local chapel, with the leaning crosses showing how the imported religion of Christianity had been made to fit into the older African framework. I learned later that the sentry-box was, in fact, the oracle house, important to local belief, and open only to the religiously qualified.
We walked a little way down from the oracle house, past a few parked cars. We turned into a narrow passageway between two proper houses. The floor here was of concrete, broken in places. We were joined here by Pa-boh. He was wearing a local shirt-jacket, with a wide flare. I didn’t know who he was at this stage. I noticed the stylishness of his dress, and I thought he might only have been an idler, one of those who stare and push themselves forward when strangers come to their place.
At the end of the passageway between the two houses we came upon a little area of openness which enabled us to turn and start on a narrow staircase to the upper floor. So space was cramped again. The narrow staircase was made of roughly sawn timber, not planed or painted, showing diagonal saw-marks. The woodwork upstairs had a similar rough-and-ready quality. Our party edged its way into a small room that overlooked the street. The cries and shouts of the playing children came up to us.
The left side of the room was dominated by a big man who was sitting at a Hewlett-Packard laptop, completely given over to what he was doing. He was of polished appearance, and was sitting, big and chief-like, dressed in white, on a brown-and-white goatskin that