Fantasia in Fans and Flat Screens

by Kofi Blankson Ocansey

Jamestown

The joke about doors in Jamestown was that each carpenter measured differently. No two doors looked alike. Not only did the carpenters measure differently, they even built the doors wrong and would have to plane them down on-site to fit them in the frames. It was not uncommon to see doors whose lower edge slanted to accommodate the unevenness of the concrete floor.

On the other hand, it meant that the rooms always had a draft. You could sort of catch some sleep after midnight when the day’s heat had finally dissipated and the cooling breezes blew in from the ocean.

Naa stirred. Her dress had shifted in the night, bunched up around her thighs, and nestled within her considerable cleavage. The little beads of sweat that formed no matter what she did—turn the fan on or turn it off—had made a line that traced the seam of the garment. She breathed in the scent of her body, just awakened, before a shower and the daily application of powder and fragrances. It was a dark, heavy scent, particularly around her armpits. She felt the prick of stubble and sniffed at the coating of sweaty musk that had formed overnight.

Her home was part of a series of “chamber and hall” apartments—two-room apartments consisting of a bed and a hall—that were a step up from the communal rooms that most of the residents of Jamestown shared. Everyone who lived in a compound house, for that’s what these arrangements were called, entered their dwellings from a communal yard, and most cooked their meals right in front of the doors leading to their halls.

The chamber was the bedroom, the hall was the sitting room, where Naa received her guests. She could also have her meals there and basically afford to sit around with her blouse either undone or totally off, her bra cradling her breasts, her going-out clothes exchanged for something simpler and lighter. This casualness didn’t feel strange in the privacy of her home; once she stepped outside she could see many of her neighbors similarly partly uncovered. Men of all ages hung out bare-chested. Naa herself understood that this was not erotic. Not much could be read into accommodating oneself to the humid tropical climate.

Overall, her life suited her, given the liberal outlook on coupling she grew up in and the indulgences she allowed herself from time to time. Well, really, more like those she lived in all the time. She was a frequent presence in the culture of heavy partying in Accra; those in the know took it for granted that on most weekends, at funerals, ironically, the after-parties could turn into combinations of impromptu partnerships.

* * *

It was the still of the night. Naa heard the sound of a man’s voice; it came from just outside her window, from the alley that led to yet another alley that led to the water’s edge. It was a familiar voice. In fact, it belonged to Nii Teiko, a man she knew well. His voice, as she knew it, was level, relaxed with a deep timbre. She was accustomed to listening to it in steady conversation. The voice she was hearing now was rushed, out of rhythm, wavering.

The neighborhood’s streets and alleys were agnostic. The piety of children and matrons heading to church was cheerfully balanced by the evening traffic of the drunk, the pickpocket, the trick turner, the odd civil servant, or the errant lawyer persuaded to risk career and limb on some wild delight. The more fanciful of the people who thronged the streets this late in the day believed they were breathing some heady old scent from a time when white men, soaked in whiskey and gin, with their mottled skin and scurvy-blasted mouths, plied these grounds, avid participants in the trade of black humans destined for a damned existence in the land beyond the oceans.

Naa heard the blows, gut punches in rapid succession. They were the sounds made by hard fists banging against yielding skin stretched over bone. A moment of sympathetic feeling had her believe the blows were landing on her. It made her cringe. Her entire being had entered into a heightened sense of alertness. This suddenly allowed her to make out what he was saying.

“Kwɛ! Kwɛ!!” Look, look. “You are killing me,” the muffled groans came out. Nii Teiko was trying to draw out a measure of mercy.

“Feemɔ diŋŋ.” Shut up. The response was severe and merciless, imposing an eerie silence.

The second voice was also familiar to Naa. He was another man she knew, Nii Odoi. This made her even more chilled by its implacability. There was determination in the voice; its owner recognized that at this point the plan that was unfolding this evening had to be carried out. Not a scintilla of doubt could be entertained. He barked, “Kɛjeee nɔ ko kulɛ, wɔbaafo ogbɛi.” We’d cut your dick off if we could.

Nii Teiko twisted and lunged against a wall, banging his head against a set of jalousies, slowing down the grimly resolute parade to the rocks. He knew he was in mortal danger. He had grown up in Jamestown. Death was no stranger here, it would leave a little memento mori in these alleyways from time to time. Once a year or so, some really stupid thief, perhaps too desperate to remember that one didn’t steal around here, would try his luck and end up stiff and glassy-eyed on a curb, waiting for the city authorities to cart him away to a mortuary. The police really didn’t bother to investigate these deaths.

Nii Teiko could guess that if he were to die in the next few minutes, it would happen painfully. And he was correct. He was stabbed in the side, his face bashed in against the outcrop and his body thrown into the waters he had swum in as a child.

Nii Teiko wasted his last lungfuls of air trying to summon help from the sleeping masses. He knew everyone behind each frame of paired windows, he was sure that they could hear his wails. Each cry for help was answered by a buffeting that turned his mouth into a bloody mess. Fifty yards past Naa’s window, Nii Teiko braced himself against the ground, uselessly trying to protect his head. Instincts die hard, it seemed. He lifted his head and said, rather incongruously, given the sort of man he had been, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.”

That prayer was punctuated with a heavy thwack, not unlike a bass drumbeat, a silencing blow and a determined, if nervous, rejoinder: “Onyɛ sɔɔ mli.” Your mother’s cunt.

Nii Teiko was weakening, using the last reserves of his strength to tie up some of the loose-end thoughts that flitted across his consciousness. He looked Nii Odoi in the face and uttered his last coherent words: “Mibi oo kaaha ohiɛ kpa amɛ nɔ, ni Nyɔŋmɔ aakwɛ onɔ.” My children, don’t forget them, and may God keep you.

“Fool, you are calling God. Even devils call God. Buuluu. Fool,” was Nii Odoi’s unshaken response.

Naa shrank back from the window. Had it really come to this? She heard Nii Odoi’s tirades about injustice so often that she had considered them part of their evenings together. It often felt that he thrived on this wellspring of energy, and that when it possessed him fully, he had the necessary focus to really be with her.

Naa’s mouth didn’t work. A gasp caught in her throat, she tried to push it out but couldn’t. Her lips were dry, instantly chapped. She had to brace herself against a wall; on it lay the lupine shadow of her arm, cast by the dim bulb hanging from her ceiling.

Naa was trying to come to terms with the fact that she knew both men. The reasons why flooded over her. She couldn’t tease apart the strands of memory that tied the three of them together in playful scrapes, in the occasional very bitter divisions, but mostly in the wobbly tug and push of their overlapping lives.

Nii Odoi had bought the fan. It came in a large white box that had the words Happy Life over the photograph of a smiling red-lipsticked Asian woman. Nii Odoi, after she’d let him in, had asked her to go into the chamber for a minute. She could hear him knocking about, requesting that something be placed just so and then politely ushering someone out. After a few seconds, the ceiling light went off. Sitting on her bed, Naa saw a peacock’s tail of multicolored lights pulse its way under the ill-fitting door that separated the chamber from the hall. The accompanying hum delivered with it a breeze that stirred up dust motes.

When Nii Odoi finally opened the door, she thought he looked a little flushed, but he motioned her out and pointed in the direction of the noise and lights. When she saw the gift, her hands flew upward to cup her face. It was a standing fan, with several speeds and an illuminated middle section—three bulbs that rotated in a vertical plane. There was a button that changed the steady beam into a strobe; the effect of combining that with the highest fan speed was in itself a conversation piece. Certainly, sex that night with Nii Odoi was disorienting, but in a pleasant and enticing way, one that led to an experience that was out of the ordinary.

The other man, Nii Teiko, destined in the by-and-by to be nothing but a liquefying mass of alcohol and putrefaction, had bought the medium-sized flat screen in Naa’s hall. Unlike Nii Odoi, Nii Teiko had sent his gift. There’d been a quick call to Naa to alert her that the present was on its way, but that was all. The little bit of propriety he allowed to guide his life suggested that a gentleman didn’t shame his family by being seen taking gifts to the homes of single women. That’s what he’d told himself, but in truth, there were probably too many single women in his life, and too little time.

When it all came into focus for Naa, the moment she realized that she represented a point of a triangle once jocular and teasing, the savage procession had already passed her window, the fan and blank-faced TV bearing witness. She felt pressed down by a weight and couldn’t move her limbs. In her all-too-quiet room, now that the sound from outside had subsided, her stomach rose and fell in difficult contractions, her breath released in gales. She managed the four steps it took to walk into her bedroom, and saw the backlit image of the woman she had just become reflected in the mirror on the dressing table. She almost didn’t recognize herself, worn, frightened, looking more like her mother’s sister than she cared to admit. She couldn’t control the images of warmth and death that flickered on her retinas. Her right hand, thickened and made strong by work, curled into her left palm. She brought both of them to her stomach as she sat on her bed. Sleep would come no more that night.

Naa spent the rest of the morning hours trapped in bed; her eyes were fixed on the wooden battens of the ceiling. In the middle of the panel directly above her head, a leak had produced a discolored map of a land that was often her secret refuge.

She felt a strong pressure in her bladder but couldn’t move. Eventually, unable to hold it any longer, she started to dribble, signaling that the fear of this area that she’d lived in for most of her life was now total. She just didn’t know what might happen if her legs carried her past the bolted door into the courtyard, toward the toilet she shared with the three other families in the compound. After tonight, she knew that anything was possible.

Naa had been in her fair share of fights over men. Wives here took it out on the other women, never on their men. Taking it out on a man would lead to questions about one’s mental stability. Philandering was what men did, after all. That was what it meant to be one. The fault lay with the ashao, the whore, who would spread her lagbaŋ for him. She was the one who had to be taught a lesson. And, sadly, Naa, who rather naively thought of herself as more of a courtesan than an ashao, got lumped in with the young girls, barely out of their teens, whose initiation into womanhood was to be the pliant, adoring booty call of any man who could drop fifty cedis on them.

Naa knew that it wouldn’t take too long for the dots to be connected. Everyone would be talking about how she had been the friend of both men. Actually, she was the friend of a lot of men like them. She was a free woman. She had a little import business that her main lover had set her up with many years before, so she was financially independent. She lived alone; her divorce had happened so long ago that it would often take her a minute to remember the actual year. In Jamestown, women didn’t really live alone. A woman stayed home. That is, her bags stayed home. Her personal effects were to remain in the communal house she grew up in until she married and moved out. No single women rented rooms before they got married. It’s doubtful that any landlord or landlady would have even given a twenty-year-old with the rent in her hand a room. It would have been like saying that the red-light district had arrived.

Naa was supposed to have gone back home after her husband had returned the drinks to her family, as dictated by custom and tradition, signifying the end of their marriage. The work of the lawyers, as dictated by government, always took a bit longer. Naa hadn’t gone back home because she knew how unforgiving the chatter would’ve been. “Akɛɛ, akɛɛ.” They say, they say. The famous opening lines of the rumor mill.

“They say the man found her with another woman in their bedroom.”

Eiiisshhh!

“They say when he walked in, she was with two men; she had one of them in her mouth, the other was gyrating behind her.”

Eissshhh, eissshhhh!

“They say she was doing styles!”

Eeeiiiiiiiiiisssssshhhhh—ooo eish!!!

* * *

The first light had yet to fully establish itself; the improvident had made their way to the beach to relieve themselves of the night’s production of excreta. You went early enough that the dawn afforded you a measure of privacy, and you were less likely to find the beach dotted with your neighbors’ leavings. These quiet ruminative mediations between man—and woman, let’s not forget our sisters—and nature that morning were overthrown by the strong, persistent buzzing of a horde of flying insects as they hovered above the rocks in a cruciform over the body of the dead man.

Jamestown police were summoned from their barracks close to the white man’s cemetery. At a certain time, the Europeans who succumbed to malaria, and weren’t important enough to be pickled and potted for the return trip to Shropshire, were interred in this field, a cozy spot dotted with tombstones, crosses, angels on pedestals, and a monument commemorating the valiant British lost in some campaign. It sat at a long diagonal from the famed lighthouse; it was on the outskirts of Jamestown, close to the Korle—the big lagoon . . . Eventually, though, as the town had grown toward the graveyard, some of these dead had been disinterred and reburied elsewhere; the rest were conveniently tarred over, awaiting, their discovery, perhaps, in some future archaeological dig.

Nii Teiko’s corpse was still in the early stages of death, but as grotesque as it looked, with its swollen and split lips, the bruises around its throat, and the blood-encrusted slit on the left side of its rib cage, it still looked somewhat like the fixer he had been. The last time any of the early birds had seen him, he was most likely parading between the neighborhood where his All People’s Congress plywood offices had been, on the edge of the busy market, and Maŋtsɛ agbo naa (a Ga phrase rendered loosely, and incomprehensibly, in English, as “the outside of the King”), the huge park in front of the traditional ruler’s palace. It was between these two locations that the future of Jamestown, and maybe even Accra, had been decided for a long time, and it was where Nii Teiko plied his trade.

The following week, the neighborhood continued to vibrate with the news of Nii Teiko’s death. He really had been a “big man” around there, and it unnerved many to think that such a person could be taken down.

* * *

Now that I am effectively in the ground, let me tell you what it was like to be on the ground, how it worked and why you needed me. This is where I was born. I knew every inch of the area. I knew everyone who lives in these buildings. I even knew their grandparents. I had to: they were my money. I was the person who got the politicians into office—I was never shy about saying that in life, and I’m certainly not shy about saying it now. I was the one who made sure that a grandmother could go to her final rest in a good coffin when her family couldn’t afford one. Between these two things, the town moves ahead.

You might walk along these Jamestown streets and see nothing but poverty, but I saw progress. I still see progress. Progress is peace, I would tell my boys. Over and over again I would tell them that if we have peace you can achieve your dreams; we all can. I would say it so often it felt like I’d become possessed by “the voice” of the politicians. To get peace, you need the right member of Parliament to be elected. The right MP knows how to tap into the consolidated fund, how to get the right contractors on board. He knows how to make the right inspectors see double: all of a sudden that two-inch subsurface is a four-inch subsurface, a mile of that is half a million dollars that the right MP can do good with. Scholarships for children of loyal voters, a car for the Maŋtsɛ, a sickly child saved, a woman set up in trade. So what if some of it goes to the boys, or if some of it ends up in the right MP’s overseas account. So what? Here, we say everyone eats around their job.

Ours is a historic town in Accra, a town of native stock. Jamestown politics has always been a bare-knuckle affair. Even today, we command the newspeople like Daily Graphic, Radio Ghana, and Ghana Broadcasting: each big party starts its national campaign off at Maŋtsɛ agbo naa. That is because Jamestown can make or break presidents. The right MP for us can mollify the president or squeeze his balls small when necessary, at the right time.

And the right time is always election year—but our work is year-round every year. In an election year, we squeeze the balls of the MP extra hard. The situation on the ground is dire, we would tell him. The more money we needed, the more dire the situation on the ground became: the boys who broke the heads of the other party’s boys; the girls we sent to spoil the other party’s gatherings with loud, vulgar chanting and insults.

Even the “big people,” some would call them the “pillars of our society,” must eat some. The priests are also inside—discreetly, though; they would look aside, mumble thanks on behalf of widows and orphans, as the envelopes went into the voluminous pockets of their vestments. So, too, are the heads of this or that family association . . . and I haven’t forgotten the market women, the fishermen, and the women who buy the day’s catch. We just had to make sure that the ground was much better where we were standing than where the other side stood. In fact, we had to make sure that we buried them in quicksand.

I was the spigot, the tap the politicians pissed through. This work was too dirty for my MP to handle directly, and the little schoolboys and schoolgirls who trailed after him, with their foolish university accents, these people were too stupid to be told the truth. Especially today when the newspapers and TV stations are stirring themselves, today when some of them are becoming overzealous, today it takes a dirty man like me, like I was, to handle dirty money that is meant to keep the peace precisely where it should be.

I was expendable, obviously, but I was also wily and I rolled along with it. I made sure the ground was good, I also made sure it was cool, gbᴐjᴐ—done and with no fuss, as my people like to say. How I did it, I didn’t really share with many. The MP certainly didn’t care to know, and perhaps he shouldn’t. It was all a game of lies and bluffing, this peacemaking campaign of ours. The wife turned her nose up at it, but she liked the estate house on Spintex that we paid for in cash, in the name of a company that our fancy lawyer claimed couldn’t be traced to me. I believed him. The kids go to international school. I have a small insurance policy—a fifty-acre fruit farm near Somanya, an old Dangbe town twenty or so miles to the northeast of Jamestown, and three trucks—enough, if looked after well, to last the children through university. This can be a dirty and unforgiving business. You could be up today, and still end up being the dirty piece of shit who didn’t bring the votes in. The one they counted on who failed them.

I might have seemed like a big man to the people I passed when I trekked to Maŋtsɛ agbo naa. People see what they want to see. They saw the showy gold ropes around my neck, the Pajero with the shiny wheels, my Friday-night parties where the boys drank free Club beer and local gin and feasted on kebabs. They also feasted on the ladies who showed up. But I knew two things the people didn’t. First: the stress I got from their fantasies of unlimited money in my reach, and the strain of kissing ass upward and downward, and the knowledge that I would stand alone if some of my crimes ever saw the light of day. I would stand alone, and I would fall alone.

The second thing I knew was the distance between me and Peduase, where the leaders—the president and his coterie—a truly sybaritic lot, live a life that wouldn’t be believed if I had tried to describe it to the average Jamestown citizen. In my mind, and I’d been abroad once, Jamestown was Ghana, Peduase was the ablotsiri, the land beyond the ocean, of my imagination. With its frosty cold rooms, heavy tapestry, silver trays, and deep hush, the distance between my Jamestown and this transplant was almost an unbridgeable chasm. There, my beer becomes Moët; my kebabs, tough and chewy, become fine small chops; my women give way to women for whom the maintenance of their lustrous skin and hair costs a year’s wages in Jamestown.

So, it’s not easy, it’s not easy at all. I stayed on top by the skin of my teeth. There are always people who want what you have. They see beer, easy sex, violence with impunity, the escape from Jamestown and yet an even deeper immersion into its affairs. Some people saw the ease with which I kept the peace, and they wanted it. Undiluted.

They start to undermine you. They whisper into the ears of your MP.

“See your boy, Honorable?” their sibilance exactly like that of the biblical serpent.

“He’s not doing the groundwork, he will make the ground harder.”

“See your boy, boss? He spends all his time in rooms with other people’s wives, everyone hates him, if you don’t get rid of him it might not go well for you, I’m telling you as a friend.”

In Jamestown, we call this “chooking.” Some call it backstabbing.

And that was all within your own camp.

The guys in the other camp were worse. They were out of power. Out of power meant that they couldn’t do jack for the contractors and the other people whose symbiotic relationship with the politicians fattened them both. They were lean and feral. True diehards. Wasn’t this the ultimate test? To be true when there was nothing left to feed on but hope? Even I admired the fervency with which they came after me. It ranged from outright insults hurled from the side of the street as I walked by, to nasty side-glances. I would hear, “Thief, thief, you and your thieving government, we will kill you one by one.”

I knew these guys. Some of the leaders of the opposition were members of my family. I grew up with them.

* * *

Nii Odoi was sitting on the second-floor balcony of the grand old house that overlooked High Street. It had been built by a great-grandfather who had grown rich trading with the English. Over the years, the family’s matriarch had become almost permanently ensconced in the living room that opened onto the balcony. She sat in a wide wooden armchair, on plumped-up red cotton cushions filled with kapok. She was usually dressed in a blue and yellow kaba, and her head was covered with a silk scarf, from underneath which poked the ends of her plaited gray hair.

He heard her visitor’s heavy footfalls on the wooden staircase. The visitor entered the living room and was received with good feeling and warmth. “O, Nii Teiko, oba?” You’ve come? the old lady asked. “Ta shi, ta shi.” Sit down, sit down. Nii Teiko acknowledged that he was indeed there in the flesh and took a seat at a right angle to his aunt.

“Ma,” he started, “you’re looking well, paa, have you found yourself some handsome young man?”

“Oh, stop it, you bad boy, since your uncle left us I’ve flown solo, the bed has been mine alone. If I’m looking well, it’s by grace and, of course, your kind gifts.”

“Ma,” Nii Teiko assured her, “the young guy is bringing this month’s provisions. You’re so precious to me, I have to take care of you like I would my own mother. In fact, after she died, you were more than a mother to me.” He placed a small flat envelope on the side table next to her.

“Oh, stop it.” The old lady pretended to be embarrassed by his flattery and gratitude. “You always say that, but your mother, Adjeley, was not just a cousin; she was my closest friend. I always thought that at some point the two of us would spend our remaining days sitting here in this room bossing stories.”

There was a short lull in the conversation, each one of them lost for a moment in a reverie about days past, about the woman—mother, cousin, confidant—they had both loved and lost way too soon.

“How are things on the street with your politics?”

“Ma, it’s not easy, election year matters. You’re my mother, I have to tell you the truth, I don’t sleep. The politicians have made our work difficult. The economy has become tough, the market women say no one is buying anything. Our little support we give them has dried up. The foreigners are not bringing in the loans, they say we haven’t used the old loans well. We are doing our best, we have to keep the peace, come what may, but it’s not easy.”

“Mibi.” My child. Her voice was as warm and sweet as the milo she used to make for him when he was a boy. “It shall be well. When you’re my age, when you’ve seen Nkrumah, Ankrah, Kotoka, Busia, Acheampong, J.J., and the rest, you know that there are ups and downs. Keep your head, you’re smart. Grace will lead you where you should go. Have faith in Him, and be faithful to the madam. Don’t let these small girls turn you against her.”

“Mmaa, small girls . . .”

“Oh stop, you think because I’m up here all the time I don’t know . . . Nyɛkwɛa nyɛhe nᴐ jogbaŋŋ.” Look after yourselves well.

He made as to leave, but hesitated and said, “Mmma, I’ve a small favor to ask . . .”

She looked up at him intently.

“Mmaa, minyɛmi nuu.” My brother. “Nii Odoi. He has to know that this is only politics, but he is taking it personal, too personal. I have many enemies, but my cousin . . . my own brother . . . shouldn’t be one of them.”

The old lady’s eyes darkened, she shook her head quickly. “No, you’re right,” she agreed. “I will see to it.”

He said his goodbyes and left the cool breezy room for the hurly-burly of High Street.

A few minutes after the old lady had opened the envelope, examined its contents, and tucked it safely away in her brassiere, her son clomped in from the veranda.

“I hate that fucker,” Nii Odoi said plainly. “He shouldn’t come here and talk about brother this and brother that. Take it personal? Take it personal? I shouldn’t? After all he’s done to destroy order around here?”

“Herrrrhhh, Nii Odoi! Watch your mouth! What kind of nonsense ranting is this?” She pointed her right index finger at him. “The man has done what he had to do. Let’s face it, he was an orphan who had nothing. Do you remember the scraps I fed him while you ate meat, the mat he slept on while you slept on a mattress? I am sure he has not forgotten, and yet you begrudge him what he has made of himself?”

“Mmaa, please.” Nii Odoi waved his hands in the air as if to erase his mother’s words. “Don’t let me say things that I shouldn’t because you’re also taking his dirty money. It was you who told me how his grandfather stole my grandfather’s property, and how they drank everything away. You are the one who has forgotten, but I have not. You know how we ran this area before J.J. came in and threw everything upside down, how your baking business collapsed, how you were reduced to selling even your gold trinkets so that we could survive. Yes, I ate meat, but that ass deserved the scraps he was given. How dare he think he has the right to throw his weight around? He is the only person standing in the way of the right people coming to power, but it won’t be forever, you know.”

“Herh, herh,” his mother snapped. “Stop it. Enough with these old stories. Are you sure it’s not about that stupid two-by-four girl, Naa, who you both seem to like? You . . . you . . . my son, consorting with that reject. Sometimes I think you’ve lost your mind.”

“I have said what I am going to say, it won’t be long, things will change with this election.” He banged his fist on the dining table. It made the glasses on the runner in the middle shake. He threw his mother an unapologetic and pitying look, then stormed out.

* * *

Everywhere Nii Odoi looked, these cadres, these revolutionaries turned politicians, had grown fat. Each day brought more shocking news: the lands they had taken, the state enterprises they had sold to themselves, their homes abroad, their children rubbing their shit in everyone’s faces. As far as Nii Odoi could tell, all their shitty boys, Nii Teiko included, were talking about peace while fucking the people in Jamestown over and over again. He had walked up and down those streets and could see that the warehouses, once belonging to them, were now shuttered; his uncle’s medical clinic was flyblown; the people who used to be productive were now idling in the doorways of their homes, their daughters’ communal property. Nii Odoi had spent the last of his mother’s money studying in London, and he had brought that degree back home to Ghana, to Jamestown, thinking that there would be room for him to rebuild, to pay homage to the past and make a difference for the future. But he was nothing there without money, nobody was. Not even the air of ancient entitlement that he wore held meaning. The one and only thing that held meaning anymore was money. And where was it? It was in just one place. Money was in politics.

Nii Teiko may have found his way into a position of power. He may indeed have been the key to change, but Nii Odoi was determined to be the hand to turn that key in the right direction, for all their sakes.

* * *

The political boss, deep in conversation with his close associates, one of whom was a carpenter, a true-to-goodness, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-trousers Jamestown carpenter, looked up. A small girl, no more than ten years old, had come into the bar to find him. She tugged at his sleeve, as children do, and he bent his head toward her.

“Please,” she whispered, her words barely audible. “Auntie Naa sent me. She said she hasn’t seen you in a long time, and would like to see you. She wants you to come tomorrow night at about eleven.”

Nii Teiko smiled. He handed the small girl a ten-cedi note and patted her on the head. He’d been so busy with this election business, he’d not paid Naa a visit in a while. He liked her independence. She was the sort of woman who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to go out and get it. But she was also mild-mannered and didn’t hesitate to let a man be a man. He thought of holding Naa, pulling her body tightly into his embrace, inhaling the scent of her, which was mildly intoxicating. He thought of them kissing, then making love, in front of her fan, set to its highest speed, the colored lights strobing through the darkness of the room. This made him release a loud, joyous laugh. He couldn’t wait for night to fall.

That is how it happened. That is how Nii Teiko walked into Nii Odoi’s ambush.