Table of Contents
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Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Mallam Atta Market
Adjoa Twum
Pig Farm
Kwame Dawes
Aburi
Fantasia in Fans and Flat Screens
Kofi Blankson Ocansey
Jamestown
PART II: HEAVEN GATE, NO BRIBE
Billie McTernan
Labadi
Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo
Weija
Patrick Smith
Labone
Anne Sackey
Kanda
Gbontwi Anyetei
Airport Hills
Nana-Ama Danquah
Cantonments
Ayesha Harruna Attah
Tesano
Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh
East Legon
Anna Bossman
High Street
Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
For my cousin Kwasi Twum—
thank you for always staying in stride with me.
For hiking mountains, going to raw-food retreats,
eating lots of sushi, and braving a colonic,
all so I would know that I am not alone.
I love you.
They broke the sheds and built a town
Which grew stronger as city or state.
The city advanced as Accra has shown,
And the infant town conquered its fate.
—Dr. J.B. Danquah,
from the poem “Buck Up, O Youth!” (1938)
Introduction
Cry Your Own Cry
Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction. The telling of such tales—ones involving or suggesting death, with a protagonist who is flawed or devious, driven by either a self-serving motive or one of the seven deadly sins—is woven into the fabric of the city’s everyday life. Allow me to explain.
Accra is a city that stands at the center of the world. Of course, this is technically untrue. The center of the world is at the meeting point of those two imaginary lines that divide the globe into hemispheres, separating north from south and east from west—the equator and the prime meridian. It’s the intersection of 0° latitude with 0° longitude. Accra’s geographic coordinates are latitude 5° 33' 21.6" north and longitude 0° 11' 48.8" west; not quite the center of the world, but remarkably close. Those few degrees of distance notwithstanding, Accra has long served as the meeting point of east and west, north and south, as a cultural crossroads.
Accra is one of the most well-known cities in Africa. It’s the capital of Ghana, which in 1957 became the first sub-Saharan (read: black) nation to gain independence from colonialism. But the city, in all its globalism, predates the nation. Prior to becoming a sovereign land, the area now known as Ghana was the Gold Coast, a British colony formed in 1867. Ten years later, Accra was installed as its capital. For nearly a century, in addition to being a political and financial center, the city was a major hub of trade. People came from Europe and other African nations to trade everything from gold and salt to guns and slaves.
Accra is more than just a capital city. It is a microcosm of Ghana. It is a virtual map of the nation’s soul, a complex geographical display of its indigenous presence, the colonial imposition, declarations of freedom, followed by coups d’état, decades of dictatorship, and then, finally, a steady march forward into a promising future.
There