Ghana. There wasn’t much of it left. The people of Ghana had eaten much of it out. From this talk of wildlife we turned to the cats and dogs that people were now eating with a will. In the north they ate and loved dog; they called it “red goat.” In the south they ate cats and had almost eaten them out. Richmond knew someone who bred cats in order to eat them.
The trouble with cats was that they were tricky to kill. Cats knew when they were going to be killed and eaten; they fought for their lives and they could be dangerous for a few minutes. The best way of killing a cat, assuming you had invited someone to dinner and didn’t want to create a scene, was to stretch the animal’s neck, the way people in England killed a rabbit. But when you did that you could be badly scratched. The surest way—if you or your guests didn’t mind the racket—was to put a cat in a sack and beat it with a stick until it was dead. Another good way was to drown it. You used a sardine as bait to attract the cat to a container with water, and then you poured and poured water. The cat swallowed a lot of water and the virtue of this method was that it was much easier afterwards to tear the bloated cat’s skin off.
With this talk of local food—breaking off from time to time to look at unfinished concrete pieces in the bush—we beguiled many miles. And then, as if this talk of food had called them up, there appeared at the roadside local men holding up smoked animals, offering them for sale, the surrounding bush combed and combed for these survivors—the agouti, together with a big rat known here as the grass-cutter, baby armadillos, long-snouted baby ant-eaters, and a few other creatures that just weren’t fast enough to get away from these idle fellows.
The smoked creatures were usually split down the middle, to make for easier smoking, and they looked as though they had been run over by a motorcar. They were a strange shiny pale-brown colour—the colour looked as though it had been applied in a semi-liquid state with a brush—and were not at all like the thick black crusts of fish, monkey and crocodile that were being offered for sale on the Congo River thirty years before. Those black crusts had to be cracked open.
The bush was almost barren of wildlife, but these people were managing to squeeze out the last remnants, while their fertile land remained largely unused.
6
RICHMOND’S GRANDFATHER on his father’s side had been in the police, and high up. He was given a police funeral when he died, with a one-gun salute. Beyond that was a Danish ancestor, whose surname Richmond still carried.
It sounds strange. What were the Danes doing so far from home? But that is only a modern prejudice. In fact, the Danes, though their numbers were small, were active gold-buyers and slave-traders in their time, and were known to the chiefs of Ghana. The big fort near Accra was built by the Danes in the 1660s. (At the same time they also had territory in India, in Tranquebar, south of Pondicherry, half a world and many weeks’ sailing away.) The abolition of the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century more or less put an end to the Danish slave business, but it wasn’t until 1850 that they left Ghana, after selling out whatever they still had to the British.
Richmond knew the name of his Danish ancestor, but had done no research on him. I don’t think it was prejudice that kept him back; it was more likely that he didn’t have the time and wouldn’t have known how to go about researching the matter. “Just out of curiosity” he would have liked to know more.
He wasn’t too agitated about the slave-trading past of Ghana. But this might have been only bravado. It was said that visitors to Elmina Castle from the United States and the West Indies often broke down and wept when they saw, below the official quarters, the stone dungeons, smelling of damp (easy to imagine them crowded and airless), where slaves (already captive for many weeks) were kept before they were taken out in rowing boats to the slave ships for the Atlantic crossing. But Richmond would have seen the ocean rollers beating on those white slave forts and castles all his