Angel Boy (2 page)

T
he backpackers' names were Chris and Vicky, and they were from England. They were younger than his dad, but a bit older than Leonard's teacher at Blessed Wisdom. They were serious people, but they smiled a lot and agreed with each other in quiet voices – unlike the noisy people in the seats behind.

‘Are you going to see the fort at Elmina?' Chris asked Leonard.

‘Yes, I'm going to see the fort at Elmina,' Leonard told him – saying it loudly enough for everyone else in the tro-tro to hear.

‘You learn about it at school?'

Leonard nodded, his head dangerously near to coming off his shoulders.

‘Then would you come round with us? Tell us what you think…?'

‘I surely will,' Leonard said, sagely.

‘It would be good to get your impressions…'

In about the time the tro-tro mate had said, the bus arrived in Elmina. It dropped the gossipy women off in the town, near a knot of mean-looking street kids, their stares at Leonard through the glass making him turn his head in the other direction. It went on up to the fort with the three remaining passengers, where Leonard counted out his fare. It used up just about half of what he had.

‘What time, here?' he wanted to know from the mate, needing to be sure that he'd get back home in time.

‘You go around,' the mate said to Leonard and the backpackers, flicking his fingers at the fort. ‘We come back…' And he nodded his head
in the general direction of the small car park, as time to go was when things happened, not what numbers the hands of a clock pointed to. He banged on the roof for the driver to be off before they got embroiled in the commotion running up the track – a crowd of older kids chasing up from the car park and immediately surrounding the two backpackers.

‘What's your name, Boss?'

‘What's yours, Missus?'

‘Where you from?'

‘You got an e-mail address?'

Vicky walked on. ‘He's Chris and I'm Vicky, from London.'

‘London! England! We love England!' the boys called after them as Leonard hurried with his new friends up the slope to the fort entrance. ‘Give England our love!'

Leonard kept his shirt well tucked in. He'd looked at the boys. For school holiday kids they were far too neat in their clean shirts and jeans: they looked more like students on a Sunday
outing. By contrast, beyond the fort, down by the beach, men and boys were stripped off and sweating, hacking at big tree trunks to make dug-out fishing canoes. On a nearby stretch of land set up with goal posts other youths were playing football, everyone hot and scruffy. No one around Elmina looked as neatly turned out as these boys at the fort entrance – quite different from the raggedy boys Leonard had seen in the town, those kids with mean, hungry-looking faces. That scruffy lot had seemed threatening, but these tidy ones were puzzling. What was their game? Suddenly Leonard suddenly didn't feel so comfortable far away from home, and he hurried to keep up with the backpackers going into the fort.

But how was he going to go inside? His pocket money didn't take account of entrance fees. He just about had enough for the tro-tro back home. What should he do? Could he skulk just inside the entrance until Chris and Vicky came out? He didn't fancy being alone with either set of the
Elmina kids.

‘Will you be our guest?' Vicky suddenly asked him, turning from the pay box.

‘Sure, do us the honour of coming round with us?' Chris said.

To which Leonard was happy to say ‘thank you'.

They were in the company of a guide – a young woman who took them all over the fort, and didn't spare the horrors of the place. First, she stopped them at a plaque on the wall, and in a quiet voice read aloud the words on it.

IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OF
THE ANGUISH OF OUR ANCESTORS.
MAY THOSE WHO DIED REST IN PEACE.
MAY THOSE WHO RETURN FIND THEIR ROOTS.
MAY HUMANITY NEVER AGAIN PERPETRATE
SUCH INJUSTICE AGAINST HUMANITY.
WE, THE LIVING, VOW TO UPHOLD THIS
.

She then asked the three of them to join her in their own silent prayers, and after shutting his eyes – and a sudden feeling of the rightness of coming here, standing where he was and praying for his forebears who had been treated so cruelly – Leonard took his cue from the others, and followed the guide, who had walked discreetly on.

Leonard knew from his history lessons what had happened in this place – but that didn't stop a swirling anger from burning inside him as he saw for himself the scenes of those terrible things. He found himself in those same dark, arched dungeons where there was no light, no sanitation. His breath seemed to leave him as he pressed his hands against the unforgiving walls of the dungeon where the women had been kept, some of them taken out to be abused by the slave traders and thrown back again.

He went down more steep steps, the same steps where the men had been pushed, shackled at the ankles in spiteful chains. He stood beneath
the sculptured skull above a dark doorway and his stomach rolled with fear as he looked into the condemned cell where they had thrown men and women who disobeyed and locked the heavy door, until they died of thirst and hunger.

Leonard ran his hands down the walls, felt the rusted shackle-rings. And tears came to his eyes as he counted back in time the way his teacher had done in the history lesson. He was overcome by the feeling that he could almost touch his great-great-great-great Nana, who could almost have been sold as a slave. He pictured the anguish on such a sweet face, and he felt helplessness and horror and anger.

Finally he stood at the Door of No Return, that terrible, gate-like aperture, a sort of long, barred window in the thick wall. Through here the slaves were taken out and down to the canoes on the beach: this was the door through which no one who left was ever to come back to their homeland. It would be generations, Leonard knew, before their descendants would see this
dreadful place.

He stood looking at the bright light coming in through the door, so bright against the dark inside that it was hard to see his backpacker friends in the shadows. And he heard the sound of quiet crying, at first imagining it was the ghost of one of those slaves. But it was Chris, and the guide, too – who came to this door many times a day, and was still so upset at times that she couldn't keep back the tears.

The beginning of wisdom is knowing who you are. Draw near and listen.

She quoted the Swahili proverb to Leonard, and put a hand on his shoulder. And she told quietly of those who had gone through this door: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children – stripped, branded and separated from each other for all time. She unlocked the door for them, to let them see down the steps to the canoes below.

Vicky took a photograph, and apologised for
doing so. And they left, passing one of the churches within the fort where the slave traffickers had worshipped, thinking there was nothing un-Christian about doing what they did.

So affected was Leonard by what he'd seen that he no longer felt that he was in the real-life world of today: it was like leaving a cinema wearing some other, imaginary, skin.

As soon as they came out of the fort, Chris and Vicky were surrounded by the smart boys who had met them going in, but now they had conch shells in their hands, painted with the names of their new English friends, the names that they'd eased out of them.

Chris was being given one. It was painted with the words:

TO OUR BRITISH BROTHER MR CHRIS.
FROM YOUR BROTHERS ISAAC,
TIM AND FREDERICK.
HAVE A NICE TRIP.
[email protected]
AT ELMINA CASTLE.

And Vicky had the same, except that she was an honorary sister.

Suddenly Leonard realised what these boys were up to: now they were hounding the backpackers all the way down the slope, demanding American dollars for their conch shell gifts. It was what Leonard's father called ‘a scam'.

It was while the backpackers were busy finding dollars as they hurried back to the tro-tro, arguing and shaking their heads when whatever they offered was not enough, that their attention went off their young friend from Accra.

As the group moved on, Leonard was suddenly surrounded by three of the scruffy street kids from the town. They grabbed him, mean and menacing.

‘You come with us!' their leader said – a kid with a tribal-cut face and a twisted mouth.
‘We got you!'

And all at once Leonard was off his feet and being carried, squirming and shouting, down to the teeming town, unheard by anyone who mattered.

What sort of a terrible adventure was this?

T
he back ends of most poor towns are tips. People live in shacks, if they're lucky, or else they sleep wherever their hungry bodies fall down. The have-nots are left to scavenge in the town's rubbish amid the sickly smell of burning in empty oil drums, where fires blacken the food cans and beer tins that might be sold for scrap. Here, under rusted corrugated sheeting, was where the street kids lived – the place to which they frog-marched Leonard. The three who had captured him were joined by others as he was taken struggling over the harbour bridge and
past the huts and fishing boats. No one paid this group of homeless kids much attention. Homeless kids and beggars were everywhere around towns like Elmina.

Desperately, Leonard tried to catch someone's eyes or ears. But the tro-tro had driven off without waiting and there were no more cars in the fort car park, although the streets of Elmina were bustling with business. A smelly hand quickly clamped over Leonard's mouth, the other kids closed in around him, and he was held as tightly as a pig for slaughter. His feet didn't touch the ground as he was hustled past the boats and canoes to the rubbish grounds.

The kids kept him surrounded when they got there. Between two walls of nailed-together crate sides, under a holey corrugated roof, they let Leonard go, and pushed him about.

‘Not on the ground! Don' mess his clothes!'

The raggedy band stood in a tight ring. Their mouths fouled him with their insults. Their eyes pierced him like rusty nails. Their hands clawed
the air with violent threats. He was at their mercy, crying, shaking, his legs as weak as wheat.

‘Let me go! I've got no money!
Please!
You can have my stuff !' He tugged at his school shirt, pointed to his trainers. ‘I want my dad…!'

‘Listen!' The main boy came over to him. Up close, Leonard could smell the breath that comes from an empty stomach. ‘You ain't not got this dad person! Not no more. You ain't not got no one 'cepting this boy –' he thumped his own hollow chest – ‘an' this boy, an' this boy, an' this boy' an' this boy!' He went round the circle as each of them sullenly closed his eyes or thrust his crutch out or spat on the ground for the roll call. ‘This place is where you live –'

‘I live in Accra!' Leonard cried.

‘You live
here
, you're always livin' here, you're growin' old an' dyin' here! You get that in your skull, an' you trust it for God's truth! I'm your daddy, he's your mammy, this lot's your uncles an' aunties, we's all your fam'ly. An' we's your bosses!'