Accra Noir
Table of Contents
___________________
Introduction
PART I: ONE DAY FOR MASTER
Chop Money
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Mallam Atta Market
Shape-Shifters
Adjoa Twum
Pig Farm
Moon Over Aburi
Kwame Dawes
Aburi
Fantasia in Fans and Flat Screens
Kofi Blankson Ocansey
Jamestown
PART II: HEAVEN GATE, NO BRIBE
The Labadi Sunshine Bar
Billie McTernan
Labadi
The Driver
Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo
Weija
The Situation
Patrick Smith
Labone
PART III: ALL DIE BE DIE
Intentional Consequences
Anne Sackey
Kanda
Tabilo Wuɔfɔ
Gbontwi Anyetei
Airport Hills
When a Man Loves a Woman
Nana-Ama Danquah
Cantonments
PART IV: SEA NEVER DRY
Kweku’s House
Ayesha Harruna Attah
Tesano
The Boy Who Wasn’t There
Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh
East Legon
Instant Justice
Anna Bossman
High Street
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
Bonus Materials
Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple
Also in Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
About Akashic Books
Copyrights & Credits
For my cousin Kwasi Twum—
thank you for always staying in stride with me.
For hiking mountains, going to raw-food retreats,
eating lots of sushi, and braving a colonic,
all so I would know that I am not alone.
I love you.
They broke the sheds and built a town
Which grew stronger as city or state.
The city advanced as Accra has shown,
And the infant town conquered its fate.
—Dr. J.B. Danquah,
from the poem “Buck Up, O Youth!” (1938)
Introduction
Cry Your Own Cry
Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction. The telling of such tales—ones involving or suggesting death, with a protagonist who is flawed or devious, driven by either a self-serving motive or one of the seven deadly sins—is woven into the fabric of the city’s everyday life. Allow me to explain.
Accra is a city that stands at the center of the world. Of course, this is technically untrue. The center of the world is at the meeting point of those two imaginary lines that divide the globe into hemispheres, separating north from south and east from west—the equator and the prime meridian. It’s the intersection of 0° latitude with 0° longitude. Accra’s geographic coordinates are latitude 5° 33' 21.6" north and longitude 0° 11' 48.8" west; not quite the center of the world, but remarkably close. Those few degrees of distance notwithstanding, Accra has long served as the meeting point of east and west, north and south, as a cultural crossroads.
Accra is one of the most well-known cities in Africa. It’s the capital of Ghana, which in 1957 became the first sub-Saharan (read: black) nation to gain independence from colonialism. But the city, in all its globalism, predates the nation. Prior to becoming a sovereign land, the area now known as Ghana was the Gold Coast, a British colony formed in 1867. Ten years later, Accra was installed as its capital. For nearly a century, in addition to being a political and financial center, the city was a major hub of trade. People came from Europe and other African nations to trade everything from gold and salt to guns and slaves.
Accra is more than just a capital city. It is a microcosm of Ghana. It is a virtual map of the nation’s soul, a complex geographical display of its indigenous presence, the colonial imposition, declarations of freedom, followed by coups d’état, decades of dictatorship, and then, finally, a steady march forward into a promising future.
There is a story in every name, be it of a building or neighborhood such as Christiansborg Castle, Jamestown, Cantonments, Flagstaff House. Many roads and landmarks are dedicated to the architects of independence, not just Kwame Nkrumah, J.B. Danquah, William Ofori Atta, Edward Akufo-Addo, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, and Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, the six men who are recognized as Ghana’s founding fathers, but other leaders as well, including those of the Non-Aligned Movement like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.
Given that Ghana’s Independence Day is March 6, one might wonder why there is a street named 28th February Road, situated by Black Star Square and Independence Arch. It commemorates the Accra riots, which began on that date in 1948, and continued for five days in response to the deaths of three protesters, ex-servicemen, at the hands of the colonial police. The riots were considered a clarion call for freedom. It makes sense then that 28th February Road leads directly to the monuments of liberty.
Inside Black Star Square, upon declaring Ghana a free nation, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president, issued another clarion call: “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”
This is not intended to be a history lesson, though history is perhaps the most straightforward way to explain how multifaceted the city is, how everything in and about it holds meaning and is sending a message. When in Accra, one learns quickly to look beyond the literal. It is not enough to consider a text; one must also consider the context, beware of a pretext, search for a subtext.
Earlier, I likened Accra to a map. As with most maps, there exists a legend through which one can decode any and all aspects of the place. Legends are merely definitions, commentaries.
Accra is a city of storytellers, people who speak and live and love in parables and aphorisms and proverbs. Sprawled on the back windows of taxis and trotros—the minivans that are used for unregulated public transportation—are sayings such as “cry your own cry,” “every day for thief, one day for master,” “jealousy will kill you,” “haste not in life,” and so on.
Admonitions and affirmations are also conveyed in symbols. The Ga people, an ethnic group that has inhabited Accra for over five centuries, have a system of symbols called samai. An example is adowa fai, the name of a symbol that translates literally into English as “deer’s hat” or “crown.”
The message of this symbol is that the most admirable traits of the deer—such as its cunning, agility, wisdom, and swiftness—are also evident in a great ruler.
The tribes of the Akan clan also utilize a similar system of symbols called adinkra. An example is sesa wo suban, the symbol of transformation. The literal translation of the words is “change your character.” This symbol is actually made up of two other adinkra symbols, the morning star, which represents the dawn of a new day, and the wheel, which represents rotation or independent movement.
These symbols, from both the samai and adinkra, are ever present. They are used in the design of cloth, jewelry, and home decor. They are utilized in the creation of visual art and referenced in music and literature. They are an essential part of the culture that shapes life in Accra.
The use of proverbs is not limited to the windows of vehicles and a set of symbols belonging to a specific tribe. Far from it. When an individual dies, a special cloth is designed for mourners to wear at the funeral. Each cloth design has a name, and each name is an aphorism. Weddings and naming ceremonies are rife with parables. Everything in the culture revolv
es around story, and every story has a moral or theme, one that can be encapsulated in a pithy phrase. We are born into this tradition.
There is one name that every child in Accra who is able to walk and talk definitely knows—Kwaku Ananse. He is the closest thing we have to a mascot or superhero. Ananse is a trickster, capable of assuming any form, though his usual appearance is half man, half spider. The stories of his adventures and misdeeds are called Anansesem, or spider stories.
Before Kwaku Ananse won the right to have all stories bear his name, those stories belonged to Nyankopon, the sun god, and were called Nyankonsem. There are many different tales about how and why Nyankonsem became Anansesem; the one I will share with you happens to be my favorite.
Legend has it that Nyankopon issued a challenge. He wanted to teach Death, a taker, a lesson about loss. Anyone who could bring Nyankopon the golden broom, golden pipe, and golden sandals that belonged to Death would have all the stories renamed after them.
Everybody wanted the stories, but they feared Death. (Whenever my grandmother would tell me this story, she would pause after this observation and say, “That’s the way it is, Nana-Ama. Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there.”)
Only Kwaku Ananse, a slick and wily creature, was foolish enough to take Nyankopon up on the challenge. With the help of a few other creatures, whom he’d promised to feature in the stories once they became his, Ananse entered the Kingdom of Death, a place from which no one had ever managed to return. But Ananse did return—with the items he’d been challenged to retrieve. He also returned with Death hot on his heels. Ananse had planned for this turn of events. He and the creatures who’d helped him enter the kingdom had even laid out a trap. Once they successfully captured Death, they chopped it up into a thousand tiny pieces, which they then scattered all across the land. That is why Death now exists everywhere.
Nyankopon kept his word and turned the stories over to Ananse, making them Anansesem. The stories, particularly the ones that specifically feature Kwaku Ananse, attempt to prove the truth of a proverb by showing what happens when one does not heed its inherent wisdom.
* * *
One thing that people, too easily seduced by the city’s charm and history and beauty, forget about Accra is that it is a major metropolis. Accra is New York; it is Los Angeles; it is Shanghai, Mexico City, Santiago, Caracas, and Cape Town. It is an urban area, with poverty, desperation, and the inevitable result of a marriage between the two—crime.
In his book The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, Robert D. Kaplan, an expert on global affairs, writes: “Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century. The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate.”
The stories that you will read in this collection will highlight all things Accra, everything that the city was and is—the remaining vestiges of colonialism, the pride of independence, the nexus of indigenous tribes and other groups from all over the world, the tension between modernity and traditionalism, the symbolism and storytelling both obvious and coded, the moral high ground, the duplicity and deceit, the most basic human failings laid bare alongside fear and love and pain, and the corrupting desire to have the very things you are not meant to have.
Much like Accra, these stories are not always what they seem. The contributors who penned them know too well how to spin a story into a web, elaborate with a geometrical arrangement of lines and a beautiful network of fractals. Read them carefully; read between those lines. Consider the context, beware of a pretext, search for a subtext. Remember that in the culture that defines this city, everything holds meaning and is sending a message. Kwaku Ananse exists in each story, in different forms.
It is an honor and a pleasure to share these stories—classic Anansesem, spider stories, in the guise of noir fiction—and all they reveal about Accra, a city of allegories, one of the most dynamic and diverse places in the world.
Nana-Ama Danquah
Accra, Ghana
September 2020
PART I
One Day For Master
Chop Money
by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Mallam Atta Market
Limah abruptly lifted her head from the sticky valley of Charles’s chest, stretching to light the wick.
“My time up already?”
Limah ignored him, hurriedly reaching for her T-shirt and skirt. Self-consciously, she checked that her head tie was still in place before bending to hand him his uniform and boots. The flame made shadow ghouls of the rubber soles.
“Do you think I will steal your shoes from your feet?” she half teased, noting his name crudely etched on their inner tongues. Charles thought everyone was out to take something from him. She handed him the boots now, needing him out so she could return the stall to her friend Asana. “I know you have to go back. And I have to clean this place.”
He wore his rifle like a handbag before retrieving a five-cedi bill. He held the flaccid note over her head. “You said she’s raised the price?”
“From thirty to fifty thousand.” The Bank of Ghana had moved the decimal point four places over ten years ago because carrying fistfuls of cash, sometimes sacks, in the tens of thousands for groceries or taxi fare had become unwieldy and dangerous. But for Limah, and everyone else who worked in the market, the currency redenomination might as well have never happened. It hadn’t changed the cedi’s value or stemmed inflation.
“Nothing free in Ghana,” Charles said, almost wistful as he handed her the limp legal tender.
“No. Nothing.” Limah loosened the padlock at the door, but still Charles lingered.
“I worry about you here, alone.” He adjusted his beret. The two chevron stripes on his navy shirt’s shoulder band, indicating he was a corporal, were urine yellow in the wick’s light.
“Didn’t you all catch the rapist?”
“Is there only one?” He shrugged. “You may see me tomorrow night. Munhwɛ is recording a program here with that comedian Ahmed Razak. The MP has requested extra police presence.”
She thought of whom she could leave Adama with so she could make more money with Charles. Asana usually watched her son, but tonight her friend wasn’t able to. Adama was with Limah’s fellow kayayei in the storage sheds outside the market, but Limah didn’t like this arrangement: the kayayei were watching the owners’ goods they would pile onto their heads and sell at the market during the day, and watching for armed robbers and rapists with the same eyes that monitored her son. But if she kept making an extra fifty thousand a week—forty after she paid Asana—she could start renting her own stall.
The thought softened the edges of her impatience. “The Munhwɛ people were here all day giving out flyers for a competition,” she said. “They say the prize is a car and a date with Ahmed Razak.”
Charles punched diagonal lines into the air and twisted the toe of his boot like he was extinguishing a cigarette, mimicking the azonto dance Razak opened his variety show with. His rifle swayed with the movement. “I hope you’re not entering the contest when you have your own Ahmed Razak right here.”
She laughed at his poor attempt at azonto, ushering him out. “They want only fat girls to enter. The show is called Am I Your Size?”
“Heavyweights make the best champions.” It was only Charles’s height that made his massive paunch describable as a boxer’s build. “Let me hear the lock.”
Limah closed the door and the padlock’s shackle, calculating how long it would take Charles to exit the market before she could return the stall key to Asana and get back to Adama.
Limah and Asana had an arrangement. On the nights she met Charles, Asana sublet Limah the stall for ten thousand, from ten p.m. to four a.m. But it was the eve of National Sani
tation Day and Auntie Muni, Asana’s landlord, would be in early to make a show of cleaning for the Accra Metropolitan Assembly inspectors. They had agreed Limah should be out no later than three a.m. this time.
Limah quickly folded Asana’s thin foam mattress and pushed it under Auntie Muni’s counter. Then she gathered her pan and the stiff disk of folded cloth she used when carrying it, loaded with customer purchases, on her head. Again, she touched her head tie, feeling through the yellow polyester for the thinning spot in the middle of her pate, remembering how thick her hair had been before she came to Accra last year to kaya.
Checking for the knife she carried in her handbag—the one she had started sleeping with when Joy FM reported that a rapist was targeting kayayei—she unlocked the stall again. Briskly, she stepped out, her senses sharpened to any presence or sound beyond the ambient snarling of dogs in combat and scampering rats.
Limah had walked the length of Mallam Atta Market so many times in the last year, she could do it in her sleep. Daily, she shadowed aging madams huffing in the heat, and spry young ones who seemed to stop short at every stall, almost capsizing her pan. Often, she carried for house help dispatched by their madams, some auditioning for a bigger role with insults they believed their bosses would hurl, most drifting too slowly through the rush, shove, and side step of the market, glad to be working remotely. Occasionally, tourists looking for places to stage their vacation selfies gave her a gratuity for carting their personal items on her head. Foreigners tipped the best. Once, one had pressed a ten-cedi note into her hand—one hundred thousand! She was lucky to get more than two thousand from anyone else. With about ten customers a day, she averaged seventy to one hundred thousand a week, most of it going to food, phone credit, and her family back home. Since she had been seeing Charles consistently these past four months, Limah had been able to count on an extra twenty thousand—now forty thousand.
As she turned the corner, the Adomi Street exit in sight, Limah remembered she had forgotten to blow out the wick. She sucked her teeth and turned back, doubling her pace. When she reached the corner stall, a hand snaked out.