Déjà Vu

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.