Free Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Page B

between the fourth and eleventh centuries. I had thought Dr. Nkrumah uniformly revered. Billy was the first person in Ghana I’d heard criticize him.
    “Africa has the oldest civilization on earth!” I sputtered. “Look at the ancient universities of Timbuktu! You had elaborate systems of government long before the British came and carved the place up. If people ran toward the forest when they saw white faces, they were smart to do it. Look what the whites did to this continent! Slavery! Colonization! Generations of exploitation!”
    “Yes, yes,” he said dismissively, “but it was all for the best.”

    “Sistah Korkor, I am not happy,” Santana told me. “I have not been happy for some six months.”
    The camp was over, and I was spending a week in Apam with Santana’s family before heading north to another camp. Apam was a fishing town on the coast. Before his death, Santana’s father had owned a small fleet of boats there. As a teenager, Santana often took the bus to Accra, carrying batches of smoked fish to sell at the market. Whenever possible, she used these trips to develop her English skills. She had attended six years of school— a lot for a small-town Ghanaian woman of her generation, but not enough to satisfy her curiosity about the world. Whenever she met white people, she spoke to them. She’d heard about the voluntary association from a German woman she met on the bus.
    Apam had a peculiar beauty all its own—a dreamy, unruly splendor. Looking down on the town’s flat expanse from Fort Patience, the seventeenth-century Dutch fort perched on a hill just outside of town, you saw a jumbled maze of houses built of gray cement or red mud, their sloping bamboo or corrugated tin roofs reaching outward to the slate blue sea. Shabby, brightly painted wooden sailboats and rowboats were jammed together on a sandbar, which stretched like a tawny arm between the shallows. A few of the small crafts boasted outboard motors.

    On the rocky coast outside of town, the ocean foamed and roiled. Pigs played in the surf, and palm trees tossed their tousled heads in the breeze like Rastas at a party. Pygmy goats not more than two feet high roamed the dusty streets, bleating. Walking through town, I was amazed by the range of the goats’ voices and by their human-sounding timbre. The kids, some with shriveled umbilical cords still hanging off their bodies, whimpered in plaintive sopranos. The nanny goats scolded in nasal altos, and the billies chimed in with gravelly bad-tempered baritones. Sometimes I’d see a mother goat toddling anxiously back and forth on her short legs, looking for her kid. The call and response between the searching mother and the lost child sounded like a musical game of Marco Polo.
    A short hop from the beach was a row of dilapidated colonial mansions, replete with columns, balconies, and balustrades. Santana’s extended family shared one of these with several other families. The house was in an advanced state of decay. The floorboards were loose and rotting—you had to be careful where you stepped. Parts of the ceiling were crumbling, and a gust of wind or a heavy stomp could release a small blizzard of plaster flakes.
    The outhouse in Santana’s yard was filled to the point of overflowing, and no one had gotten around to digging a new one. Every morning we trooped a few blocks to the public toilet, where we waited in line to go in. The women’s side consisted of a wooden bench with six holes in a row where women squatted, side by side, like silent crows on a line. The first time we went I lingered outside, planning to enter after everyone else had gone. But either it was rush hour or the place was the hottest ticket in town, because new people arrived as quickly as others left. I finally took a deep breath and plunged in, so to speak. As I arranged myself beside my sistahs, trying to ignore a little girl who gaped at me with unmasked fascination, I waxed philosophical. To squat next to