Free Black Gold of the Sun by Ekow Eshun Page A

radiation. You just had to stand in the corridor as the kids rushed between classes and your Geiger counter would start clicking like crazy. In school, on television, out in the street, they were completely commonplace.
    Every time I heard them they still hurt, though. I told myself they described me no better than the glistening face of a black-and-white minstrel. In doing so, I realized I faced a choice between fantasy and truth. Either I could play along with white people’s expectations of me as a minstrel or I could confound their prejudice and seek out the real, paradoxical nature of the world. That was the true fight. What did Kevin Dyer matter by comparison?
III
    On 4 June 1979 my childhood ended.
    I’d just turned eleven. Family photos show me poised with a spoon, about to rain destruction on a chocolate fudge sundae at Baskin Robbins during birthday celebrations. Benny Mitchell, Greg O’Rourke, Jamie Brown and I had just watched
Battlestar Galactica
at the Empire cinema, Leicester Square, in ‘Sensurround’. In our violently stimulated state, laser blasts seemed to caroom round the white-tiled walls of the ice-cream parlour. As I pictured it at that moment the future involved screaming guns and faster-than-light star cruisers.
    After my birthday, though, the green leather family photo albums that had recorded first days at school in awkward new uniforms, outings to Hampton Court and grumbling visits to obscure relatives go blank. The Eshuns turn away from the camera. Our attention is diverted by foreign affairs. On 4 June a coup takes place in Ghana. The photo albums are a void after this date because, for us, the promise of a vivid future has become a thing of the past.
    In the beginning the word meant nothing to me. I heard it repeated over and over behind the door of the living room as aunties and uncles huddled in conference with my parents. From their hushed tones it was obviously something fearful.
    â€˜Two steps forward, one step back,’ I heard my mother say, to murmured agreement.
    But how bad could a ‘coup’ be?
    As far as I could tell from eavesdropping, the grownups were debating whether to stay in London or return to Ghana. That would mean enrolment at Mfanstipim, Achimota or one of the country’s other boarding schools where the boys slept in dorm rooms, wore shorts till they were sixteen and saluted in the presence of teachers. It was not a prospect I looked forward to.
    In the
Observer
that Sunday I saw for the first time a picture of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He was tall and light-skinned, the child of a Ghanaian mother and a Scottish father. The coup had been staged by junior ranking officers like him from their base at Burma Camp. Rawlings called it a revolution. Politicians and senior army officers of the previous regime were being arrested en masse, said the report. Afrifa, Acheampong and Akuffo, the three former heads of state, were to stand trial on corruption charges under penalty of death. I read through the story a second time and put the newspaper down.
    Judging by the reaction of the grown-ups, the coup was a grave event. To me it sounded thrilling. I pictured crowds amok on the streets of Accra. The mighty being torn from their palaces. Buccaneers seizing the crown. It was like a real-life version of
The Count of Monte Cristo
or
The Prince and the Pauper
.
    No one had asked my opinion about returning to Ghana – I was against it for reasons of tight discipline and dormrooms – but a febrile atmosphere pervaded the house. There were late-night crisis meetings, phone calls from Accra at unfeasible hours, aunties in tears on the doorstep. If a coup meant the upending of the existing order, then it was already working its magic. One step forward, two steps back. There was no way to tell where we were heading any more.
    Perhaps it’s because of this, because I was dazzled by the realization that the adult world was no more ordered than