chief gave Pa-boh money for the arbitration (this money being the arbitrator’s fee), and Pa-both went to the main Ashanti town of Kumasi and spoke to the assembled chiefs, and won. In this way Pa-boh became a witness and spokesman for his Gaa people, and a lecturer on their cultural practices. In time he set up his own church, conducting a service there every Sunday.
He was bringing up his five children as Christians. He kept them away from traditional religion because traditional religion had no book and was not codified or written, and this could lead to trouble.
5
KOJO THOUGHT I should go to Kumasi, the Ashanti “citadel,” which was his birthplace. He had a house there and he offered it for the night. Accra was on the coast. Kumasi was in the interior, to the northwest. When Kojo went to Kumasi, on business, he took the aeroplane. I thought a car would be better for me, for the sake of the long drive and for the landscape. Richmond, Kojo’s assistant, came along as a guide.
We went through the hills of the eastern region, and past the botanical gardens of Abrui, small but beautiful, wonderfully mature now. Some of the trees had very thick trunks, with buttresses that were like mighty tendons. The British had laid these gardens out a hundred years before. Here in Ghana, as in other places of the empire, these British botanical gardens, their founders often unknown, had become a gift for later generations.
The villages seemed to lie just outside forested areas. The land was always choked with vegetation; when you put your head out of the air-conditioned car you felt yourself driving through waves of humid heat that caused things to grow. This suggested that the forest ruled. But Richmond, Kojo’s assistant, who had a nice line in cynicism, said that the impenetrable forest was an illusion. One or two chain saws could in a short time open up big clearings.
And the landscape, for all its luxuriance, was a disappointment: endlessly small and jumbled, like a tropical cottage garden, no attempt at a plantation, never anything ordered or big: small patches of banana or plantain growing absolutely between stands of teak, big-leaved and apparently always in flower. There were no paths or tracks in the bush, or there appeared to be none; so it would have been hard to cultivate these small patches commercially.
The idea of smallness continued when at dusk we reached the outskirts of Kumasi. Weak electric lights showed outside the small houses—it might have been a municipal requirement: to prevent the big trucks smashing into them—and sometimes only oil lamps flickered, bright yellow, a real flame, a real colour, more pleasing than the dim, eye-straining fluorescent tubes in the little shops. It went on like that, for mile after mile, Kumasi delaying and delaying its promise.
And there was trouble when we arrived at the town. Neither Richmond nor the car-driver could work out where Kojo’s house was. That was not too surprising to me. Kojo gave instructions in a strange way; he could telescope distances. When he first sent me to the Abrui botanical gardens his directions abolished many miles. It seemed that now something like that had happened again. But it was important for us to know where the house was, because Kojo had arranged for an Ashanti chief to be there, to help us with the visit to the palace in the morning. Richmond telephoned Kojo. Kojo appeared to repeat his instructions. There was a big hotel on a main road not far away. When Richmond said it would save a lot of trouble if we all put up at the hotel, Kojo lost his temper. He said it was nonsense to talk about a hotel when we were almost at the gate of the house.
There were quite a few houses nearby. We knocked at the gate of one. The house was asleep. A ragged watchman came and spoke very softly to Richmond. He was speaking softly because he didn’t want to disturb the woman who was his employer and was sleeping. Richmond, without being too loud, knocked at the door. The woman whose house it was, not showing herself, merely told Richmond that the chief who had been waiting for us had got tired and gone away. And that was that. So we at least had this tender of Kojo’s good faith.
Many minutes later, and a longish distance away, down a curving road, we found the house. Richmond’s idea then