Accra Noir. Группа авторов

      

       Table of Contents

      ___________________

       Introduction

       PART I: ONE DAY FOR MASTER

       Chop Money

      Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

      Mallam Atta Market

       Shape-Shifters

      Adjoa Twum

      Pig Farm

       Moon Over Aburi

      Kwame Dawes

      Aburi

       Fantasia in Fans and Flat Screens

      Kofi Blankson Ocansey

      Jamestown

       PART II: HEAVEN GATE, NO BRIBE

       The Labadi Sunshine Bar

      Billie McTernan

      Labadi

       The Driver

      Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo

      Weija

       The Situation

      Patrick Smith

      Labone

       PART III: ALL DIE BE DIE

       Intentional Consequences

      Anne Sackey

      Kanda

       Tabilo Wuɔfɔ

      Gbontwi Anyetei

      Airport Hills

       When a Man Loves a Woman

      Nana-Ama Danquah

      Cantonments

       PART IV: SEA NEVER DRY

       Kweku’s House

      Ayesha Harruna Attah

      Tesano

       The Boy Who Wasn’t There

      Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh

      East Legon

       Instant Justice

      Anna Bossman

      High Street

       Acknowledgments

       About the Contributors

       Bonus Materials

       Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

       Also in Akashic Noir Series

       Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

       About Akashic Books

       Copyrights & Credits

       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