Roaming the streets of Accra, I was beset by the same feeling
of childlikeness that had overwhelmed me on my first day in Togo. This time however,
it was spiked with incredulity. Accra felt shockingly similar to the UK. For a
start, I was meandering down impeccably signposted
streets that meticulously matched my tourist map! The city bloomed with aesthetically
pleasing architecture. It had flyovers and amusement parks. Western brands
blithered polished propaganda from every available billboard.
Everything was overwhelming. How could Accra have a National
Theatre and a Symphony Orchestra, and a state of the art Health Service, when
Lomé’s roads were first paved three years ago? How could a strip of barbed wire
marking national perimeters sear such a void between these two universes?
I knew that the “positives of colonialism” do not exist. It
is impossible to absolve the enslavement and subjugation of another human life.
Yet there lies an undeniable disparity between these two French and British
ex-colonies. Likewise, Nigeria, bordering Benin, is now an economic powerhouse,
and a former British colony. I clung to these observations, in the hope that they
could be shreds of acquittal that I could use to dab at the bloodstains
saturating my nation’s history.
However, I knew that these flimsy excuses would be snatched from
my fingers the moment that I ventured to Cape Coast. My visit to its infamous
castle the following day would have innumerous horrors to disgorge about the colonial
amorality committed within those walls.
At the same time, I hoped that there would also be euphoria
drizzled into my emotional melting pot of horror and outrage and joy and sheer
adrenaline. I was alive: there were so many new things to discover. Each
morning, I awoke without the slightest idea of what was going to happen in the
next twenty-four hours. Each day was an adventure. Each day I grew and learnt
and flourished, as my view of the universe continually upended itself.
Waking up the next morning: excitedly preparing myself for
the day’s events, I blissfully stowed all my possessions into my rucksack, and
boarded a coach to Cape Coast. Had I have predicted the events that followed:
the decisions and mistakes that I would make, I would have left the bus
immediately, and caught the very next coach back to Lomé.
