The Deh family at home: from left, Suzzy Afua Deh, her 2-year-old son Wisdom, her father Linus Kwame Deh, 72, and her son Delight Kofi Aka, in Accra, Ghana.
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It's common in Africa for massive expectation to be invested in a single child. "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 struggle to find work. It can be tough on the chosen one too. Delight was singled out at 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."
For school, Delight is reading The Gods Are Not to Blame by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, which transplants Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Africa. Delight talks about his hope to study chemical engineering or agriculture at university. He pronounces Catholic "Cad-lick" in his lilting Ghanaian English. In the family house 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 insulation in its door showing through the rust. Clotheslines 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 tempered hopes of Africa these days. 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 Tutsi and moderate Hutu; the brutality of Sierra Leone, with its arm-chopping gangs of child soldiers; the elemental fighting in the Democratic Republic of 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. The Dehs are one family, one story, in a continent that is just getting started.