Black Gold of the Sun by Ekow Eshun

Author:Ekow Eshun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-03-14T05:00:00+00:00

IV

Thinking about Capitein led me to remember the day my family moved out of Kingsbury. I’d already left home for university by then. With Esi and Kodwo gone before me, my parents decided to clear the debts they’d built up after the coup by moving to Northampton.

I went back that Christmas in 1987 to box up the records and comics still piled in the bedroom Kodwo and I had shared. When we’d finished and the removal van had rumbled off towards the M1, we squeezed into the back of the second-hand Beetle my father had bought as a replacement for the Volvo.

‘Better take a last look,’ he said. ‘Because we won’t be coming back.’ Then he pulled into the traffic and away from the house for good.

At the time I thought him cruel, but his brusqueness makes sense now as a desire to leave the memory of the coup years behind. He was right, too. We didn’t return. Not, at least, until years later when I took myself on a sentimental journey back to Kingsbury. Somehow I expected to spot old school friends hanging outside the kebab shop or sneaking fags under the bus shelter as they’d been doing the last time I saw them. But there was no one I recognized and, gazing up at the net-curtained windows of the old house, I felt nothing beyond the shallow wash of nostalgia.

It seems to me now that the act of departure affects the nature of the place you leave behind. Between leaving and coming back, you change. And because you don’t stay the same, neither does the place to which you return.

When Capitein was baptized in Holland, he renounced Africa. What drew him back? Did he accept he’d always be a stranger in Holland, or was he searching for his lost childhood? Perhaps both were true, even if Capitein himself viewed matters differently.

His actions in the first weeks suggest a man little given to introspection. In the space of a fortnight he set up a school for African children at the castle, recruited his first twenty pupils and began translating the Lord’s Prayer into Fante. His mission, as he saw it, was not to get closer to the Africans, but to bring them nearer to Europe. To further prove that he ‘did not despise them’, Capitein also decided to marry a young woman from Elmina.

As he would have discovered on his arrival, West India Company rules forbidding relationships with African women were commonly flouted at the castle. Most of the Dutch officers kept an African mistress at the fort. Their light-skinned children were a common sight in the streets of Elmina. All the same, his request was turned down by Jacob de Petersen, Director-General of the castle. In protest Capitein appealed to the company in Holland, arguing that a wife would help secure him against ‘the seductions of Satan’.

It took two years for him to receive a reply. In 1745 a young red-haired woman named Antonia Ginderos arrived on a ship from The Hague.

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