Missions Resources - Bibliography
Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond
Authors: Ekow Eshun
ISBN: 0375424180
Publisher: Pantheon
Number of pages: 240
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
Several years into his thirties, Ekow Eshun, a London-based journalist and culture critic, needed to know more. Something wasn’t sitting right. So he up and left for his native Ghana, to re-learn his family’s stories and secrets, and hopefully to figure out what it means to be African in England. The result is this gem of a memoir.
Eshun had come to England as a schoolboy. His father was a diplomat, but from one day to the next—after a violent coup ousted the Ghanaian government—became a refugee.
The next several years were spent waiting—waiting for Ghana to change; waiting for home to become possible once again. But while Eshun’s parents waited, their two sons were becoming English. It was an accidental immigration, an unplanned transformation.
Eshun never fit in at school, because the template for black people in north London was that of the West Indians, and informed by African-American pop-culture. There wasn’t much room for Africans. Where was Africa? Far away. The young Ekow found his way in his fantasies, becoming a hip-hop journalist (interviewing visiting American artists and the like) and generally burying Ghana, except for visits with family across town.
But after an ugly breakup with his white girlfriend—who told him the reason he was having trouble committing was because he couldn’t come to terms with his own past—he decided a lengthy trip to Ghana was long overdue.
He starts off in Accra, staying in a touristy beach hotel and laughing to himself at African-American tourists trying to be African. But the longer he stays, the more his smugness peels away. He begins to meet with members of the extended family, who reveal to him family secrets that throw everything he thought he knew on his head.
He heads into the interior. After cooking up some grandiose justification, he admits: he mainly wants to see some elephants. En route to the elephants, he lands at a very wealthy Pentecostal church, which shocks him for its opulence in a struggling country (the pastor flies to America every week to pastor his emigrant flock). This visit marks the only breath of spirituality in Black Gold of the Sun, and tragically so, because the questions Eshun asks are all spiritual in nature.
This is one of the best books out there on belonging. After he returns to England, hardly more at home than before, but with deeper sorrow in his heart, he has a stunning conversation with his brother about—of all things—science fiction.
What is the bigger jump, his brother asks: having one’s home ripped away, or migrating between the stars (as they do in sci-fi stories)?
Christians believe in a home in the hereafter—a real home, with a real father. Our eternal hope gives us a meaningful relationship to our life in the here and now. Without the latter, Eshun has neither, and this is the most poignant search I’ve ever seen for the former. Heartbreakingly beautiful writing, tragic and bizarre overreaches for hope—this book is deep. Read it with your Bible in hand.
-Paul Grant
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