The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,61
was that I should have dinner at the hotel, while he and the driver prepared the house for me. When, after a good long time, they came for me, Richmond said that, apart from the bed mattress, which sank a little low, the bedroom they had got ready for me would have been of five-star quality.
There was some trouble about the lights—some bulbs had gone, and for some time after I had gone to bed, sinking low on my mattress, quite close to the floor, I could hear Richmond knocking against things in the corridor. But he was devoted to his master; he had done wonders in the uncommissioned house; and then in the morning he got up early and went with the driver to buy milk and coffee and bread.
Kojo didn’t want me to stay in a hotel. He wanted me to see his house, which was in an Ashanti royal enclave, and though it was only the guest pavilion, as he described it, it was indeed spacious and fine.
Next door to it the morning light showed the beginnings of a palace. It was Kojo’s; but the money had run out. All his instincts were princely.
At breakfast facing the garden (Kojo liked flowers wherever he lived) I saw a pretty little near-black hummingbird feeding off the red-and-yellow flowers of the flamboyant.
IN DAYLIGHT the lady we had disturbed during the night, a large lady in a splendid grey and white dress, was as firm as she had been in darkness. Kojo’s chief had got tired of waiting for us. So there would be no privileged viewing of the palace for us. We decided we had to live with that. It was, besides, a cleaning day at the palace; so there would be no visitors, and for us no burden of a palace visit.
The first impression of Kumasi, a royal town, was that of a British colonial settlement at the time of the conquest. The colours of official buildings were ochre and red, the architecture in the sturdy manner of the Public Works Department. The palace rails reminded me of the made-in-England rails of my own school in Trinidad (built in 1904); and the open green areas were like police grounds of the period. The treasures of the museum were small-scale, the little pieces of furniture unpolished. Ashanti was not a literate kingdom, in spite of its gold and glory. To see it as more it was necessary to be Ashanti oneself and (with the absence of spectacular remains) to consult the stirrings of one’s heart.
It was a hilly, up-and-down town, in the great heat fatiguing to explore, but with oddities that were all its own: a street of coffin-makers in the bazaar area, with the painted coffins—grey, white, lilac, silver and gold—pushed out on to the pavements and creating a festive effect (abolishing the idea of grief, introducing the idea of shopping, and suggesting at the same time one kind of plot possibility for a thriller writer). Begging women had their own area in the market, and that too was cheerful. Below bright parasols the women (packed a little too tightly) sat on little stools with their begging cups, avoiding eye-contact with the alms-givers, who moved among them in a matter-of-fact way; so the business of giving and receiving involved no strain.
Richmond said (though I couldn’t understand why he brought in Islam here) that Islam encouraged people to give alms, and so there had to be alms-receivers.
Away from the palace area the town had a repetitive smallness. Its crowded little streets never developed into something more interesting, an older section of the town, a fort, a famous temple. It hurried us away, and then, past the outskirts of Kumasi, yesterday’s country smallness began to tire us afresh on the way back: teak amid the plantains and bamboo in the trackless bush. Though there was something else in the bush this time, which for some reason we had missed on the way out: the grey and often frail-looking concrete of unfinished buildings. There were any number of them: so many that a couple of days later, when I was driving along the Atlantic Cape Coast, I thought that some of the ancient white castles and forts were repeating the unfinished motif of the interior.
Richmond said that what looked like unfinished buildings would soon be finished. If I came back in two or three years I would see what he meant. I didn’t believe him.