To Mother, I am an angry child who carries burdens that aren’t his to bear. A child who roams the earth with grievances on his shoulders, grievances that will one day hold sabres over him.
‘Aa’dze paa na ɛrehwehwɛ, awo dem abɔfra yi? You do not have to fight all the fights. You do not have to be the one who presses for answers or sets every record straight. Tena fam!’
She implores me to find rest, to give up on being a fighter for courses that probably never made it out of drinking spots in the late 70’s. As if I would listen.
The market at Saltpond still sells imported soap. The ones with slippery blue wrappers and English names. The ones that make exaggerated promises of softness. They sit beside the locally made bars, wrung from palm nuts and potash, uneven, sharp-edged, with surfaces chalky with lye. The prices are written in marker on cardboard, taped crookedly to wooden tables. But the imported soaps remain on the shelves because they cost insanely way more than they should. Once a week, or even a month, the occasional visiting Western tourist passes through the market and grabs one bar of soap. Maybe because it looks like home. Or maybe because a brownish thing with dark spots, coated with lye, doesn’t exactly scream ‘hygiene agent’, our Alata Samina is never what they pick.
The house where my grandmother lived stands in Abeadzi Kyiakor, a small village near Saltpond. It leans toward the sea, and when the wind blows, the salt clings to the air. Dust motes drift through sunlight, stirred by creaking floorboards. The creaks walk you to the back room, where the cupboard leans against the wall, holding years of whispered arguments, my grandfather’s slow steps, and the laughter of children now grown. The walls once wore a green coat, but time peeled it away, leaving patches of faded paint that cling to memory. From the front room, the ocean stretches out, silver in the morning light, darkened by evening. From the top of the hill, left to my house, you see Fort Amsterdam in all of its glory. Mornings bring the briny tang of the sea through open windows, and the scent clings to our clothes and hair when we run barefoot along the sand. Beyond the house, the village moves at its own pace. Men haul fishing nets along the shore. Women balance bowls of cassava on their heads. Children shout and chase crabs across the sand. Time seems paused here. Here, where I was brought up.
2.
The market women call me Nii.
3.
It was January 1948, when my namesake took matters into his own hands—as I would do decades later—single-handedly revolutionising the markets in Osu, successfully causing a nationwide protest and a subsequent boycott against European-made goods.
Nii Kwabena Bonney III was an Osu Mantse who would not be an idle spectator as the Gold Coast’s economy dwindled to nonexistence. A little after World War II, conditions worsened in the Gold Coast. The prices of imported goods were simply absurd; wages for African workers had remained stagnant for years; and European firms like UAC, Swanzy, and GBO had totally dominated the import-export trade. Racial discrimination, of course, would not allow Africans to climb up the corporate ladder where the real decisions were made. It seemed, despite the Gold Coast’s soldiers fighting side by side with the British, Colonial authorities were not even minutely interested in improving the living conditions of the people.
When you stifle a man’s tongue, he harnesses another means of communicating his hunger. He nurtures rage in the acids of his tummy till he finds a voice in whatever ability volunteers to be an echo. And when a mute man finally finds his voice; heavens will fall, earth will sink, before he stops fighting to make the ability permanent.
Nii convened the people of Osu, charged them with his charisma and deep desire for a better standard of living, and declared a boycott of all European goods. The premise was simple and clear. This was our response to unjust prices, monopolies, and the disregard shown to African traders and consumers.
He had the support of the traders and the market women, the transport workers, ordinary wage earners, and even the urban residents. Everyone wanted better. The boycott had undeniable radical implications. By refusing to buy imported goods, locals were not only challenging high prices but the entire economic structure that sustained colonial authority. It was a direct slap in the faces of the ‘owners of the land’, our ‘discoverers’. The resistance was fierce. But it takes tough skin for people to dedicate their lifetime to conquering lands already existing with full-blooded people and calling it a discovery. It takes even tougher skin to take over a people’s land and resources, have them fight in your war, and decide they are a grade lower in your classification of humans. So in their typical fashion, the colonial government responded with hostility and indifference. Rather than address the grievances being tabled, they defended European commercial interests. So though the boycott carried on for some time, the people with the voice refused us the courtesy of a calming comment.
4.
There are very few reasons why you will hear someone scream ‘thief’ in the market. First, they are English or literate. Second, they witnessed a pilfering at work. There are two reasons why I screamed ‘kromfo’ that Saturday afternoon. First, I am Fante. Second, tin sardines should not cost an amount that puts a hole in my pocket. Auntie Efua was sniggering at my outburst, but even in her amusement She could tell my reaction was not baseless dramatisation. Where did we start from, and how did we get here? One can’t even go to the market and return home with a bag of groceries anymore.
‘This cannot continue, oh. Something has to be done about this. Haaba!’
They nod and ask what exactly can be done to salvage this overpricing problem. Especially by lowly traders. How could they possibly do anything capable of leaving even a measly dent in the situation at hand? When I realised they were not being rhetorical or performative, and actually expected me to come up with a plan, I sat three market women down and gave them a history lesson on the man, Nii Kwabena Bonney III, who would later become my namesake.
5.
There is something called the degenerative spiral or the concept of a vicious cycle. To put it simply, it captures how one problem leads to another, creating a self-reinforcing downward progression. So, poverty breeds poor education, which limits opportunity, which in turn, perpetuates poverty. So, social unrest triggers repression, which causes fear, which leads to more unrest. Each stage magnifies the previous one, and the cycle continues until intervention interrupts it.
The boycott by Nii Kwabena Bonney III did not give the people the relief they sought. Tensions stewed, then bubbled up, then eventually got to a breaking point on 28th February 1948. Ex-servicemen march peacefully to present a petition to the Governor at the Christianborg castle. If they will pretend to play blind and deaf to our protests, then maybe we should take our grievances to their doorsteps. That way, there will be no denial that indeed you have seen; indeed, you have heard. Right?
There’s this song by Osibisa. ‘We are going, heaven knows where we are going,’ and it is the song that comes to mind as I recount this gory memory.
When Nana Kwesi-Atta Yorke Snr, my Grandpa to whom I owe much of what I know about past events, narrates this particular incident, my mind does the travelling thing again. Though my body is sprawled on a worn couch in our living area, my mind refuses to be in the room. It travels. It borrows air from another February afternoon decades before I was born, close enough to share breath with Sir Gerald Creasy. The whitewashed walls of the castle enter into my imagination, I transform, of sorts, to 1948, when the commotion starts.
A crack in the air.
Another.
The first shot punches into a man's back and throws him forward, his face striking the ground hard enough to split skin. He does not get up. A second shot tears through the body by his right, the force spinning him sideways before he collapses, clutching at his chest as blood forces its way between his fingers. Men scream now. Someone runs and trips over a fallen leg, landing in blood that slicks the dust into mud. Smoke burns the eyes and throat, and the smell of gunpowder mixes with iron and waste as bodies empty themselves where they fall. One man crawls, dragging his useless lower half behind him, leaving a thick red smear across the stones. His mouth opens wide, but the sound that comes out is broken, wet, animal. Rifles keep firing. Flesh jerks. Limbs twist.
Splatter. Scream. Anguish.
When the shooting finally stops, the ground is littered with men who had been walking moments earlier, some groaning, some staring, some already gone. Three lie completely still, blood pooled beneath their heads, their uniforms soaked through, eyes fixed and glassy. The road to the castle is no longer a road. It is a spill.
These ex-servicemen, who only wanted to get their voices heard, were the targets of open fire at the Christianborg crossroads at the hands of colonial police. What should have been a peaceful march claimed the lives of Corporal Attipoe, Sergeant Adjetey, and Private Odartey.
Degenerative spiral or the vicious cycle; social unrest triggers repression, which causes fear, which leads to more unrest. Inflation and low salaries cause low standards of living, which causes silent protests, which lead to a push and pull that claims lives; loss of lives causes anger, which causes radical resistance, which causes violence, which causes a riot, which collapses the economy, which causes inflation. Each stage magnifies the previous one, and the cycle continues until intervention interrupts it.
News of the shootings spread rapidly and ignited riots in Accra and surrounding urban centres. European shops were looted, symbols of colonial authority, attacked, and long-suppressed anger burst into the open. The riots were neither sudden nor senseless; they were the violent release of pressures that Nii’s—not me—boycott had already brought to the surface, and the death of the three ex-servicemen had escalated. The boycott was the small budding flame, and the shootings provided the kerosene that reduced everything, everyone close-by into ashes. This forced the formerly silent oppressors to take action. They arrested Kwame Nkrumah, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, Edward Akuffo-Addo, Joseph Boakye Danquah, Emmanuel Obestebi Lamptey and William Ofori Atta, tagged ‘the big six’ by the press. They needed to send a message, and the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention fighting for independence were the perfect scapegoats.
6.
Auntie Efua, Auntie Esi and Mena Badua sat with me for minutes through an unscheduled time travel, only pausing the transit in between breaths to attend to customers that stopped by.
Who was it said? ‘A boy can dream!’
Maybe it was the veracity with which I narrated Nii’s story. Maybe it was the market women being fed up themselves by the absurd prices at which they had to get the goods that stock up their stalls. Or maybe it was just one of those times in a person’s destiny that they live for without a clue. Everything aligns, and what will be, becomes. But the evening after my history class with the market women, my phone rang and Auntie Efua was the person on the other end of the line. They had approached the market queen after I had left. The three women who, prior to today, knew nothing about Nii Kwabena Bonney, had somehow convinced their leader that adapting his boycott strategy was a foot forward that inclined towards change and victory.
So Mother would not forgive me. But I Nana, became Nii. Boycott-hene for Saltpond market, leading traders to fight back MANET, the American Company that supplied all the imported goods sold on the central coast.
7.
To Mother, I am the continuation of sentences She thought would end with her. The echo of a fight She survived and fervently hoped and prayed would not find her children. I could be the boy who nods when She says ‘Tena fam!’. But instead, I become the one who leads people’s mothers to police counterback. Nii/Nana, boycott-hene wannabe.
References
Nana Kwesi-Atta Yorke Snr., personal interview, Mankessim, Central Region, Ghana, January 2025.
Austin Dennis. Politics in Ghana: 1946 -1960. Oxford University Press,1964.
Note: This hybrid piece is based primarily on oral history as recounted by Nana Kwesi-Atta Yorke Snr., whose recollections of market life, the 1948 boycott of European goods, and the events surrounding the Christianborg shootings informed the narrative. Politics in Ghana, served as a secondary source to verify historical facts and ensure alignment with the broader political context.
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Evangel-Leo-Ken Jnr redefines art in the way that he makes room for it in his every step. He believes writing to be stability amid chaos, life to be an absolute cinema, and love, a value so divine he only paints or writes about (the holiness needed for sharing and wanting in the same breath is something our mortal heart can only taint). Leo pursues a dual path of health, and legal practice. His works have appeared in Isele magazine, Nenta literary journal and elsewhere.
IG: @sadpoet.tt