It was early in the evening, and a crowd of people was gathered at Kotoka International Airport. Most of them were waiting to receive loved ones returning home, others were trying to make their way into the terminal. “Kotoka” is what my phone showed; to my surprise, because I had learned that the name of the airport was recently changed back to its original name: Accra International Airport.
Kotoka, whose full name was Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, was a Ghanaian lieutenant general and one of the principal leaders of the 1966 military coup d’état that overthrew Ghana’s first president. He was killed during a failed counter-coup a year later.
The government had announced the name change on the anniversary of the coup but rushed to emphasize that this choice of date was “purely coincidental and not deliberate.”
Politics, I told myself, was best left to politicians, and I made my way into the terminal. As I went through check-in, immigration, and security, the crowds became successively thinner, and the whole process took less than an hour.
The two ladies from the airline had already started scanning boarding passes at the gate, sending one passenger after the other onto the jet bridge toward the plane. I asked one of them how much time I had before I needed to board, as I was early and would have liked to explore the terminal.
Airports make many people feel stressed or anxious. They have always had a different effect on me. To me, airports are where the world briefly converges. Strangers from all parts of the world cross paths for a few fleeting moments before going on their separate journeys.
“Please give me your passport and boarding pass,” she said, ignoring my question entirely, and so I found myself in my window seat early. I was not the only passenger whom the airport’s efficiency took by surprise. Boarding was completed with more than an hour to spare. The captain requested an early departure and air traffic control approved.
Leaving the Gulf of Guinea behind, we were soon above the Sahel. Then the mighty Sahara – with its ergs, wadis, mountains, and the occasional oasis. Of course, the night denied me the experience of seeing any of this beauty and I was left merely imagining it, while slipping in and out of sleep.
As the sun rose, the desert gave way to the blue of the Mediterranean, with the flat coastal plain southwest of Rome in front of us. Touchdown at Aeroporto internazionale di Roma-Fiumicino “Leonardo da Vinci,” or simply FCO in the language of aviation. There was time for a quick breakfast.
The second flight was longer, but I did not mind. The older you get, the more time seems to lose its meaning. It had been seven years since I had last set foot on African soil, and yet it seemed like hardly any time had gone by. Memories were still vivid in my mind and the last few days felt like the seamless continuation of a chapter in my life that had never really closed, only to be interrupted once again.
“Is it really age or does it have something to do with the place?”
Before I could answer this question in my mind, I heard the wheels squeaking on the tarmac at JFK. Nineteen hours had passed since taking off in Accra, and I found myself in that state, peculiar to air travel, when one cannot quite tell anymore whether or not one is tired. I felt warmer than I would have felt in a rested state, and my skin seemed as if it was covered by an invisible film of wax. I made my way to Jamaica Station, hopped on an E train to Manhattan, got off on 50th Street, and started walking.
There really is no other place like it. No other city is so familiar to so many people who have never been there. Every other street, building, park, and plaza is embedded somewhere in our collective memory, by way of the books we have read and the films and TV series we have watched.
Strolling through Central Park, I wondered how Marco Stanley Fogg – from the Paul Auster novel our English teacher made us read in high school – might have spent his days and nights here, before being rescued by Kitty Wu and his friend Zimmer.
What would have become of him had he not been found? He would not have fallen in love with Kitty Wu. He would not have started working for Effing. He would not have uncovered his family history. More likely than not, he would have simply died.
As much as we like to think we are in control, it is chance that often shapes the course of our lives – and sometimes even history itself. What if you had never met that friend who made you see the world in a different way, never suffered that heartbreak, or never moved to that city?
What if that ambitious student from the then-British colony of the Gold Coast had not been admitted to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania? Would the man who would become Ghana’s first prime minister and president ever have found his path?
In 1935, when Kwame Nkrumah left the Gold Coast to study in America, there was little reason to believe that he would one day lead an independent African nation. He was simply a young man with a desire to learn and see the world beyond the limits imposed by colonial rule. Yet a chain of unlikely events would eventually bring him to the center of Ghana’s struggle for independence.
Nkrumah’s journey to America began from Takoradi, a coastal city some distance southwest of Amisano, where he was teaching at St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic Seminary at the time.
Takoradi was the Gold Coast’s only deepwater seaport for decades from when it opened in 1928. Nkrumah left from Takoradi in August and sailed to Liverpool in England, where he obtained his visa for the United States. He then crossed the Atlantic aboard an ocean liner and arrived in New York City toward the end of October.
More than ninety years later, the miracle machines born of the Wright brothers’ invention have reduced a journey that once took weeks to a single day. Now thousands of people depart daily from Accra International Airport, as it was first named by Nkrumah’s government. Some are traveling for holidays; others for business; a few because history has placed them on a path they cannot yet see.
Rainer Ebert is a German writer and a research fellow at the University of South Africa.
