Midnight’s Family

When midnight at last arrived on March 6, 1957, church bells sounded across Accra. The crowds, who had filled the city streets with the hum of celebration and hope, pushed into the square outside Parliament and cheered as Britain’s Union Flag was lowered, and the green, gold and red colors of the new nation of Ghana were hoisted in a light breeze. In a nearby polo ground, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah broke into dance and then spoke of a dream finally realized. “Today, from now on, there is a new African in the world,” he declared. “At long last the battle has ended. Ghana, our beloved country, is free forever.”

In Fodome, a small village in the eastern Volta region of the new nation, 22-year-old Kwame Deh and his family and friends gathered around a radio and listened through crackling static. “I felt very happy,” remembers Deh. “The future was ours.”

All births are incredible moments, but some are more momentous than others. When the citizens of the British colony of the Gold Coast gathered to witness the founding of their new nation a half-century ago, they carried not only their personal hopes and fears but the aspirations of a continent. As the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break away from its foreign master in the post-1945 era of independence, Ghana became the symbol of a land throwing off its shackles, the first breeze in what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would later dub “the wind of change.” “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent,” said Nkrumah that night.

Fifty years on, Ghana remains an uncannily accurate measure of Africa’s successes and failures; its ambitions and broken dreams. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself in other African states, the optimism of independence gave way to unrest, militarism and economic decline. As elsewhere, though, Ghanaians have struggled back, rebuilding their country, renewing their democracy and securing fresh reason to hope. That rise and fall and rise again has given many Ghanaians — and many Africans — a more realistic understanding of what it will take to develop their continent’s fragile fortunes than they had in the first flush of freedom. And it has left them with a deep appreciation of basic principles that others take for granted: stability, democracy, jobs.

This is the story of one family — three generations of Ghanaians — who have experienced the struggles and triumphs that define Africa’s first 50 years. In many ways, the Dehs — Kwame, Suzzy and Delight — are unremarkable, average. But in their incredible ability to keep mining Africa’s most precious resource — optimism — they are extraordinary. Just like Africa itself.

HOPE AND FRUSTRATION
Linus Kwame Deh was born on the floor of a mud hut. His parents divorced before he reached school age, and it was his father — a bricklayer and farmer — who raised him. Kwame means Saturday, the day he was born; Linus is his Christian, or colonial name. At school, in the lush hills of the Volta region — an area that had originally been colonized by the Germans, but later came under British rule — the young Kwame sang God Save the King and saluted the British flag. “That’s the training for discipline,” remembers Kwame, now 72. Along with discipline, the British brought some measure of modernity to Ghana — schools, hospitals — but from a young age Kwame sensed that “they would not open up development how we wanted it. They were our colonial masters.”

Kwame is sprightly for his age. When I first met him in April last year, he was wearing loose-fitting gold-colored trousers, a gold shirt and a small gold skullcap all made from the same embroidered fabric. He welcomed me into his modest rented home on the eastern edge of Accra, pumping my hand with the energy and strength of a man 20 years younger. The inside walls of his living room were painted electric blue, and a gold vase of plastic flowers sat on the coffee table. There was a small television in the corner, and a telephone that mewed like a cat when someone rang. More than once on my visits in April, and again last August, Kwame repeated an adage that an old schoolteacher of his had used: there is no such thing as African time. “There is no store in the world that sells an African watch or an African clock. We all use the same clock,” he told me. “And yet Africans use African time as an excuse. We have to be serious.” Overhead, a fan chopped through the humidity. “According to my age,” said Kwame as I was leaving at the end of that first visit, “I have to speak the facts.”

After leaving school, Kwame trained as a sculptor. Working off a photo supplied by grieving relatives, he would mold the face of a mother or father or child for their gravestone, or craft statues of Mary, Jesus and the saints for the many churches that were springing up across the country. Traveling from village to village, Kwame discovered a curious thing: people in the Volta region were underwhelmed by the idea of independence. Fearing that Ghana’s bigger tribes would discriminate against them, many Voltans wanted independence to come in stages, or even the chance to secede altogether. Tribalism, which would later rear its ugly head in places such as Nigeria and Rwanda, was already shaping postcolonial Africa.

Kwame himself longed for freedom. “I knew independence was very important for this country,” he told me. “We needed jobs and employment to come to Ghanaians, to black people. The top administrative level was taken by the British.” It wasn’t just the colonial authorities Kwame chafed under. Around the time of independence, his father and stepmother chose a girl for him to marry. “But I didn’t like her. You know, we didn’t love each other,” he says. Kwame started wooing Theresa Afue, another girl in the village, instead. Within months they had married, eager to begin their lives together in a country that was finally free.

Ghana’s early years were full of energy and excitement; many parts of newly independent Africa were far richer and better developed than the countries that would later become Asia’s tigers. In the late 1950s, Ghana’s per capita gdp was equivalent to South Korea’s; today it is around $550 compared with South Korea’s $16,000. Nigerians still lament that they once had a massive palm oil industry but that Asian countries such as Malaysia, which were better run and less corrupt, have long overtaken them.

Nkrumah embarked on an ambitious program, building schools, houses, roads, a new port, factories. Ghana, its new leader argued, must be weaned off trade and investment from Britain and the other colonial powers. The construction industry boomed. Kwame got a job with the state housing corporation, building barracks for the army. “People were happy, more people were learning trades, schools were opening all over the place, we were feeling fine.” In 1961, he and Theresa had Suzzy, the first of four girls. Kwame began spending long periods away from home, working on houses for those displaced by the massive Volta dam hydroelectric project, another of Nkrumah’s grand schemes. “Life was still difficult,” he remembers. “But you were working and getting some money.”

But Nkrumah’s policies came at a high price. Industrialization cost millions and the government neglected cocoa, Ghana’s traditional export crop, which brought in most of the foreign exchange. As Ghana’s economy began to fall apart, Nkrumah seemed more interested in pan-Africanism than the minutiae of government. He became isolated, paranoid and dictatorial. In 1964, in a move that would be repeated by other African leaders in the decades to come, Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and himself leader for life. The early optimism was gone, replaced by a deep sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. “There were a lot of problems,” Kwame says. “People were getting hungry. Nkrumah was looking to the East for help. He kept paying everyone’s salaries, but things were not working how he planned.” In early 1966, with the President on a visit to China, soldiers seized power. “We all waited to see if the military could do a better job than the politicians,” says Kwame.

They could not. For the next two decades Ghana was wracked by instability and economic mismanagement. A revolving cast of military leaders left people with little faith in their government and no chance to change things. It was a cancer eating the entire continent: beginning with the first successful coup in sub-Saharan Africa in Togo in 1963, there were at least 200 attempts to seize power in Africa over the following four decades, 80 or so successful. Bitter civil wars erupted, some of them tribal struggles for natural resources, some of them fueled by foreign powers. In the 1967-70 civil war in Nigeria, Ghana’s regional neighbor, a million died. By the 1970s, Africa had become one of the hottest fronts in the cold war. Both superpowers propped up dictators and forced their economic policies onto their struggling clients, both stoked corruption and graft, and both fueled internal struggles such as the hellish wars that followed independence in Portugal’s colonies of Mozambique and Angola. “We had lots of fears. There was no freedom of speech,” says Kwame, about the time of troubles. “You go about and you see the army. The economy was getting worse.” By the late 1970s, Ghana was a mess: a drought had pushed up food prices, jobs had disappeared. “Bribery and corruption is all over the world, but where it is too glaring it kills the economy,” says Kwame, who moved his family to Accra and opened a small construction company. The hopes of independence had vanished.

DESPAIR AND HUMILIATION
Suzzy Afua Deh was 5 at the time of Ghana’s first coup. She remembers those early years with fondness. “Life then was easy because my father worked,” she told me as we sat outside her two-room breeze-block house in Lapaz, a poor neighborhood of dirt roads and street hustlers in northwestern Accra. “Everything was O.K.” Suzzy, who is now 46, stayed behind with her grandparents in Fodome when her parents moved to Accra. The extended African family has always been a welcome insurance policy when times get tough.

After school, Suzzy decided to study. She was 15 and wanted to be a secretary. But Ghana’s economy was collapsing and a crunch in the supply of building materials meant there was no work for her father and no money for fees. Some people’s lives are changed by poor grades or a bad decision. For Suzzy, it was a cement shortage. Unable to afford college, she drifted for a few years. At one point she tried to join the police force in Accra and passed the initial selection process easily. But after acing her exams, the senior officer refused to let her start training, apparently because she didn’t have the money for a bribe. “If I had been there in Accra, I could have contacted the big man,” says Kwame, who was traveling a lot at the time. “These days, when you pass the exam but don’t get in, you can challenge that. But in those days, you were afraid. Who are you to go and make noise? In those days when you go, the big men will boot you out. That is why democracy is better.”

In 1980, aged just 19, Suzzy married Gershon Aka, a bank clerk 12 years her senior. The first few years of married life were a strange combination of personal joys and national disaster. Suzzy and her husband had two children — son Jubilant, now 25, and daughter Nutifafe (Peace), 23 — but the drought and hunger were tightening their grip. Ghana never experienced anything as bad as the famines that choked Ethiopia in the early 1970s or the mid-1980s, but the nation hurt all the same. As they would elsewhere, aid groups poured millions of dollars into plans for development. Some of the money worked; much of it did not. The crisis was exacerbated by Nigeria’s decision to expel thousands of Ghanaian guest workers who arrived home hungry and jobless. “You would go to the forest and search for cassava,” remembers Suzzy. “Whatever you could find.”

The country remained under military rule. In 1979, Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings had deposed another military government in another bloody coup. But Rawlings was different from earlier leaders. Though guilty of human-rights abuses in those early years, his government instituted a series of free-market reforms that slowly got the economy moving again. Suzzy, who today lies awake at night worrying whether her children will make it home safely, also liked Rawling’s emphasis on security. “There was not much armed robbery, you could move about at night,” she says. Her husband Gershon shakes his head. “Suzzy hadn’t seen anything different before, so she couldn’t compare,” he says of Rawlings’ time. “I felt we needed something new. You could not speak freely. There was no freedom.”

Today, Ghana is democratic and its economy growing. But Suzzy and Gershon still struggle. After being forced to retire from the bank, Gershon has opened a small office offering secretarial services. But his computer broke last year and he rarely gets any business. To make ends meet, Suzzy buys food at Accra’s central market and then resells it around her neighborhood. The family is perpetually behind on their $16-a-month rent, and, when I visited last August, the power in their house had been switched off after a meter reader said it had been installed illegally. The couple, who now have four children, including 2-year-old Wisdom — Suzzy calls him “our surprise” — often wonder how they will eat.

Suzzy’s two hours of joy a week come on Sunday at the Global Evangelical Church, a large building filled with simple wooden benches a 10-minute bus ride away. Gershon goes to a more traditional Presbyterian church — a “Certificate of Honor” on the wall of the family’s tiny living room commends him for being “a reliable choirmaster” — but Suzzy and the kids prefer the excitement and entertainment of evangelical preachers. “We produce our own electricity,” says Suzzy. “We are hoping for better things.” It is a sentiment that a growing number of people across the continent share. Christianity, especially evangelicalism, is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else on the planet. Promising riches, not just in death but here on earth, the churches often provide Africa’s urban poor their one chance to hope. For Suzzy’s third-born child, that’s especially true.

DETERMINATION AND OPTIMISM
Delight Kofi Aka was born in 1988, just as things in Ghana began to improve. Now 18, Delight is tall and lean, with the naive swagger of someone who has not yet known failure. He is in his final year at a Catholic boys’ boarding school in the Volta region and one of the best in Ghana. The family cannot afford to pay the school fees — some $600 a year — but, two years ago, Suzzy convinced her pastors at the Global Evangelical Church that her son was gifted and deserved a scholarship. Grandfather Kwame paid the $150 entrance fee and Delight was handed the best chance of securing the family’s prosperity in years.

It’s commonplace in Africa for one child to be invested with such massive expectation. “You have to force out the one that is intelligent,” says Kwame. “So he can be the breadwinner for the family.” That’s tough for those left behind — Delight’s older brother and sister both left school at 16 and now struggle with whatever work they can find. It can be tough on the chosen one, too. Delight was singled out from a young age and sent off at 13 to live with his grandfather so he could attend a good junior high. “I feel responsibility,” he says. “It’s a priority to study hard and become something, and if I fail any of my exams it will be a disgrace to my church and my family. Everybody’s eyes are on you.”

You wouldn’t know it to talk to him, though. Delight is warm and personable and has the relaxed confidence of youth. He loves school, especially science classes, and understands the importance of education. He is in many ways like his grandfather, with whom he is close. “I like studying, you know,” he told me. “There’s constant discipline. If you feel lazy or not, you have to study.”

During a holiday break back at home in Accra, Delight sits outside his family’s tiny house talking with a neighbor who recently returned to Ghana after a failed attempt to get to Europe. Jerry Senanu Nyonator is 28, and like millions of struggling Africans, dreams of working in Europe or the U.S. Three years ago, following the well-worn path of thousands before him, he set out for Europe, catching a bus to Lagos and then to Chad, where he eventually ran out of money and found his papers weren’t good enough. “Maybe when I get a passport I will try it again,” he says. “That is my ambition. I know when I get there my life will be meaningful.” “Is it cool?” Delight asks about Europe. “I think it’s cool.”

Later, inside the house, Delight picks up a book he is reading for school, The Gods Are Not to Blame by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, which transplants Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to Africa. He talks about his school and having to go to mass every day. He pronounces Catholic Cad-lick in his wonderful, treacle-thick Ghanaian English. There is a small table in the corner with a stove sitting on it. Pots and pans stack up under chairs that line the walls and on the shelves of a bureau that also holds a tiny color television. There is a small refrigerator, the padding in its door showing through the rust. Clothes lines crisscross beneath the plasterboard ceiling. “I’d like a new house,” he says. “That’s my dream. That my family can live in a better home.”

Such are the scaled-back hopes of Africa these days. Call it realistic optimism. Delight is neither as optimistic as his grandfather was at independence nor as pessimistic as his mother. His generation has lived through the time of the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu militias killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus; the brutality of Sierra Leone, with its arm-chopping gangs of child soldiers; the elemental fighting in Congo, beginning in the mid-’90s, known as Africa’s First World War, a series of conflicts that killed 4 million people. But he and the millions of young Africans like him also have the incredible leadership of Nelson Mandela and the redemptive tale of South Africa to inspire them, and in places like Ghana and Mozambique and Tanzania, the sense that the future will be brighter than the past.

When he finishes school soon after Ghana’s 50th anniversary, Delight hopes to study chemical engineering or agriculture at university. “The future of this country is bright if only there is no ‘hand go, hand come’,” he says, using the local slang for corruption. “And we need development. Do you know 70% of us are farmers, but we still import food from outside? Being an agricultural economist or scientist will help a lot. Something practical.” That attitude captures the mood of many young Africans who, having seen the failures of the continent’s first decades of freedom, want change. Professional, sometimes Western-educated, always ambitious and hungry for work, they are more pragmatic and less ideological than previous generations. “Ghana could be a rich country,” Delight tells me. “But it will take time. We have to work hard. We are improving, but not yet improved.”

A FAMILY, A COUNTRY, A CONTINENT
At a family gathering at Kwame’s house one day, Delight mentions that he doesn’t want a girlfriend because she will only distract him. His older brother Jubilant is engaged, but the couple are waiting to get married until Jubilant finds regular work. “I’m thinking about getting my own room,” says Jubilant, playing with his cell phone, a battered old model held together with an elastic band. “But work is tough. You can’t ever move forward.”

Delight says, “I’m not going to marry until I’m 30.”

That is precisely good,” says Kwame. “Then you will be a man.”

Girls are a problem,” says Delight. “And you don’t know what you will catch. You could die.”

“If you don’t abstain you should get protected,” says Jubilant.

Delight nods. Most African schoolkids know the basics on AIDS these days, though the disease will wreak havoc on the continent for years to come; in some parts of southern Africa, every third adult is hiv positive.

The conversation moves on to work. The problem, says Jubilant, is that it’s “who you know before what you know. If the system was good, if everything was moving forward, I would not be living with my parents.” Jubilant sometimes works for Kwame’s small construction company. But both men feel that a change of government six years ago hurt their chances of winning contracts, in part because many government decision makers are now from a different tribe and prefer their own. In Africa, success is personal — but also profoundly political. “At least Ghana has never had a war,” says Kwame, whose gray eyelashes ring his brown eyes like small halos.

They sit and eat a rare meal of meat and talk, Kwame wondering if he will ever see Europe or America before he dies, Suzzy worrying about her rent and how she will buy food for the rest of the week, Nutifafe dreaming of opening her own restaurant, Jubilant anxious that he has a fiancé but no work, and Delight, smart and confident but with the burden of a family’s dreams upon his young shoulders. One family, one story, in a continent just getting started.