“Nurses and doctors run away from Ghana of their own free will,” Nii pointed out. “They want a better life, so why not? Me too, if I can go to aburokyire, I’ll go. And so will you!”

Isaac sucked on his teeth and shook his head. “So, they can use me like a slave? I don’t think so.”

“But there are good people there too,” Nii Kwei argued. “Who knows, maybe you are robbing some poor old white lady who contributes to aid organizations working in Africa.”

“You say what? Poor old white lady.” Isaac doubled over with mirth. “You’re funny, Nii. An American poor person is rich compared to us. It doesn’t cost them anything. They don’t even feel it.”

Nii Kwei suspired and looked out his window for a moment. This wasn’t an argument he could win, and besides, Isaac was not wildly off the mark regarding foreign exploitation. Still, for Nii, the leap to duping individuals of their money was a problem. And yet, despite Nii’s reservations, he felt himself being sucked in. Just look at this Lexus, he kept thinking. My God.

“Do you think I can do it?” he asked Isaac. “The sakawa, I mean. I’m not saying I want to—just wondering.”

“But of course!” Isaac exclaimed. “Nii, you are smart. You’re wasting your life right now. Look, just try it for some few months and then you can decide whether you want to continue or not.”

Notwithstanding guidance from Isaac, those first few months of becoming a sakawa boy were not easy for Nii Kwei. Isaac showed Nii Kwei the ropes and introduced him to someone called Kweku Ponsu. He was the traditional priest who was to become Nii Kwei’s default spiritualist. Ponsu put Nii Kwei through initiation rites that were a trial by fire. More than once, Nii was on the verge of quitting, but he endured.

Now, three years on, Isaac (ironically) had found his way to Germany and Nii had his own shiny black Range Rover and was training his own mentee, Bruno. He was rough and unpolished, like a piece of wood gouged off a baobab tree. Nii had to get Bruno to understand the mentality of white people. Nii had learned all about that at the University of Ghana, where he had hung out with a fair number of white students and had had an affair with an American professor, Susan Hadley. At the time, Hadley was visiting on a guest professorship from Boston. Nii Kwei often went to see her at her campus bungalow several times a week to fuck until they both collapsed. Now that Susan had returned to the States, Nii often missed her.

FOUR

January 4, Atimpoku, Ghana

Bobbing his head to the rhythm of hiplife blasting from the Rover’s eight-speaker music system, Nii drove north to Atimpoku. He arrived at the frenetic tro-tro junction just past two in the afternoon and stopped to buy abolo, crisp one-man-thousand, and fiery shito. While he ate, he watched the noisy chaos—travelers coming and going, tro-tros pulling out in a cloud of dust and smoke, and traders swarming the incoming ones in the hope of selling something. The irony was they were all selling the same items.