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that seemed in danger of imminent rupture; Auntie Christina from Cricklewood, a martyr to her teeth ever since an unscrupulous dentist had whipped out her entire upper set during a routine check-up; my mother’s sister Panyin, who had a twin called Kakra, their names in Fante meaning ‘Older’ and ‘Younger’. There were diplomats, pastors, the wife of a former vice president, the daughter of a popular highlife singer, the boss of a thriving goat-meat concern and innumerable others whose names have blurred now, but were revealed that night to be fabulous dancers, dazzling storytellers or evil drunks.
    Beneath the apple tree at the end of the garden, Esi, Kodwo and I were gathered with their sons and daughters. From Nottingham, our cousins Charles, Albert andBetsey, the boys in matching blue suits made by their mother; Penelope and Eurydice, the heavenly sisters from Twickenham upon whom I maintained a silent and wholly unrequited crush; Ezra and Ezekiel, who lived in Luton and wore about them a morbid air that surely came from bearing names hewn from the dark matter of the Old Testament. From Brooklyn came my teenage cousin Marcus, sent to London for the summer by my mother’s sister in New York, after he’d taken to running with a wild crowd in Flatbush. Marcus wore a gold chain round his neck and spoke in a confidential drawl that forced us all to cluster round him.
    â€˜Back home, I got a gun, yo. But I let one of my boys carry it so I don’t get caught with a piece.’
    â€˜Wowww,’ we all said.
    â€˜Shit is crazy hectic out there sometimes, yo. Dude gotta pack
something
,’ said Marcus. ‘Yo, y’all know how it is, right?’
    We nodded vigorously, although I doubt any of us had any idea about how ‘it’ was.
    However tenuously we were related, us kids formed a family for that night. From the end of the garden we watched as our parents danced to the Mighty Sparrow. Our mothers waved handkerchiefs above their heads and twirled in circles, their steps precise within tight skirts. Fathers did the shimmy and the side-to-side slide, summoning the dance steps of their youth with varying degrees of success. As we watched, my dad patted the air with his hands for quiet. The grown-ups formed a semicircle round him.
    He raised an open bottle of gin and recited a remembrance in Fante to family, forebears and Ghana. The adults bowed their heads. Gin splashed on the grass. At the back of the garden Kodwo rolled his eyes and gave a theatrical yawn. The pouring of a libation occurred at every family gathering. It was always greeted with derision by the younger generation.
    â€˜Why can’t they just let the music play?’ said Kodwo, trying to swing from the lowest branch of the apple tree.
    How much of that scorn was envy, I wonder now? Our parents had their rituals and dance steps. They knew where they were from. By contrast all that connected us was distance from Ghana. Born in Britain, it seemed to us that we were the adults. We bore the pressure of growing up in a strange country while our parents played on the grass like children.
II
    Some of my best friends were racists.
    At Queensbury Junior School there were no African children apart from the Eshuns. So far I’d failed to turn up with a bone through my nose, but collective wisdom among the members of Class 3B held Africa to be a place of mud huts and cannibals. This from the same kids who conducted earnest debates on the best way to light farts and flick bogeys.
    To Greg O’Rourke, the aggressively freckled JamieBrown, Benny Mitchell with his lazy eye and the rest of 3B, England was an amalgam of Arthurian lore and Dunkirk spirit, predicated on the dominance of the white race over wogs, Pakis and Yids. In the playground they spread their arms wide like Spitfires, ack-acking at the Hun while they chorused the theme tune to
The Dam Busters
. It was their innocence that appalled me most. These were