No One Dies Yet
By Kobby Ben Ben
On certain days, Accra decides it’s going to burn with such fury that it hopes its inhabitants get a taste of what Hell feels like, and repent as the roadside pastors instruct. It’s as if the city is angry about some slight committed against it. Burning, into rooftops of cars in traffic, through the shielding umbrellas mothers wield to hide the babies wrapped against their backs. Fires erupting on pavements into the shoes of pedestrians and peddlers who yelp, Awurade edeen na y’aye na wo teetee yen sa ara!
Still, nothing, not even the coconut oil bleeding down my hairline and stinging my eyes, deters me from my Saturday routine. To be born in Accra is to have the thick skin needed to survive her tempestuous moods. Even if the city batters and slaps you around, you have no other bosom to turn to. So you lean into the heat like you endure a mother’s tough love, convinced she’ll have a change of heart. Then at some grown age, you wonder why maternal hate isn’t as touted as maternal love. God knows having such language would free a lot of children. From expecting love to materialise where hate is festering. From expecting Accra to love us, when she’s only capable of hate, of heat scorching our sensitive napes, our hyper-pigmentations and our ageing skin, our cracked lips chorusing Black don’t crack when Accra cracks her whip over our backs.
Accra hates us, hates us all.
Even with all this hate, being such an enterprising people, we inhabitants of Accra create love. We sell love. Out in the open, on the labyrinthine streets of Jamestown. Hawkers yell, Come, come, come buy my love. There’s no love greater than the love you find on Accra’s streets, a love that makes life a lot more liveable on a low-income salary. All Ghanaians know if you want to purchase love without having to chip in on the rent of some exorbitant store, get love on the streets. Mothers and fathers can take their children all through primary school to university with the earnings they make on the street because Ghanaians do support local, even if local is a supply chain that begins in a Chinese warehouse. All things imported from China are love, it don’t cost a thing.
I find shelter in the shade of the old Kingsway store which used to be Ghana’s premiere shopping centre in the twentieth century, the former prime shoplifting grounds for British and Irish expat wives whom it became store policy to hound owing to the increasing cases of pilfered sugar and flour holstered into the waistbands of their panties. The building—dilapidated the only way time and terrible maintenance assaults walls, erodes hues, summons mildew—sits with a prestige not dissimilar to a run-down Grecian arena. Once a year, it is repurposed into a mural gallery to attract thousands of art enthusiasts around the world for Ghana’s largest street art festival, Chale Wote.
On Saturdays, it’s these streets of Accra I spend my afternoons browsing, looking for love, buying love from independent bookstores on table tops. At Kingsway, there are rows and rows of books mounted on sloping slabs of wood, on mats, on the arms of men who wave their wares—their love, in the faces of pedestrians. I’m the Richest Man in Babylon, hey! Buy my Richest Man in Babylon, hey!
Accra’s streets are the best places to stumble on some prehistoric Harlequin romances, Silhouette bodice-rippers, and bestsellers from old white writers—the stuff that always made it to The Sunday Times bestseller list two decades ago. Anyone fooled into walking into a shop labelled “bookstore” would be surprised to find only outdated diaries and stationery. True bibliophiles know that to find their next read they’ve got to approach these streets as though it were their oyster farm, searching for undiscovered gems among pirated copies of Becoming.
One seller accosts me the moment he figures I’m someone who might read a book, who might need a little love. He lures me to his religious stall, recommending Benny Hinn, who would “speak to my spirit.” I am tempted to ask if he’s got anything that’ll keep me from masturbating when night comes and my past creeps in with its metallic taste on my tongue. What about those times when masturbation alone isn’t enough, and I have to resort to other invented rituals, perhaps AESMA, Auto-erotic Sadomasochist Asphyxiation? Would you happen to know of any writers who have written extensively on this strange exercise that cinches my throat and fucks with my air-supply? Am I the only one who finds pleasure from imagining, in gory detail, the many ways I might be murdered?
“Those,” I say, pointing at old, in-surprisingly-good-condition paperbacks beneath the religious books.
“John Grisham?” he asks in rapid-fire speech. “You like John Grisham?” He begins speaking in pellets. “Dean Koontz? You like Dean Koontz? Sandra Brown? I get plenty-plenty crime.”
We share a brief look, a smile stretches his wind-chapped lips, happy he’s figured what this customer loves.
I pick up a sunburned James Patterson hardback and press it to my nose. Interesting thing about old hardcovers: if you rip off the book jacket and sniff at specific spots on the cloth-bound cover you might catch a whiff of its old home or owner. That some of these books are acquired from dead readers delights me. Used books delight me. I imagine that once they were treasures of a dying man, given away to some charity organisation determined to ship them to Africa for underprivileged kids. Unfortunately, these ones found themselves in the wrong hands and now here they are, sold at rather affordable prices. The library information in a few of them—Our Nig, The Autobiography of Malcolm X—makes me wonder what their stories are, how they escaped the libraries of the West to find freedom in the streets of Africa.
“Oga, you go buy?”
“How much for all?” I ask him. I do not bargain.
He hands me my plastic bag of new acquisitions.
Excerpt from “No One Dies Yet” copyright © 2023 by Kobby Ben Ben. Published by Europa Editions.
About the book: 2019. The Year of Return.
It has been 400 years since the first slave ships left Ghana for America. Ghana has now opened its doors to Black diasporans, encouraging them to return and get to know the land of their ancestors. Elton, Vincent, and Scott arrive from America to visit the sites of the transatlantic slave route, and to explore the country's underground queer scene. Their activities are narrated by their two combative guides: Kobby, their way into Accra’s privileged circles; and Nana, the voice of tradition and religious principle. The pair's tense relationship sets the tone for what becomes a shocking and unsettling tale of murder that is at times funny, at times erotic, yet always outspoken and iconoclastic.
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Kobby Ben Ben was born and bred in Ghana. No One Dies Yet is his first novel.
