The ghost train moves in during the blackest phase of night – on some battlement in Cyprus, in the days of Othello, a sentry would have called it the second watch. Black visages gaze at me, eyeless; a chain clanks somewhere in a lost corner of a dungeon dream. The night’s distemper which I have to face, night after night, started even as I wrote my thesis. A harmless piece it was: ‘The History of Cocoa in Ghana.’ Who would have thought it could land me in this soup? In this city of spires and shabby scholars in worn-out tweeds, squeaking away on worn-out bicycles, guys don’t know where it is! You’ve got to say ‘Gold Coast, now Ghana’. Friends suddenly become vocal, the slobs: ‘Should be ships making slave-runs between de lines here. Should be slave stations on dis brown cocoa-coloured page of yours, stations with names like Elmina and Ouidah, Komenda and Akwida. De word “slavery” doesn’t figure in your friggin paper!' I could’ve told them a thing or two about slavery – after all I was born in the bloody place! Gold Coast slaves were preferred, because the ones from Biafra was stubborn and prone to suicide. Slaves actually believed that at the other end of the Atlantic white savages would be waiting to eat them up! I could have passed on these nuggets, but all they were keen on was settling old scores, with black ram tupping white ewe once again. I shook my head, I wanted that doctorate from Oxford real bad. Now this: apparitions surfacing from nightscapes – black visages with bloodstains where the eyes should have been.
