Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- No Wings
- Preface to Second Edition
- Foreword to Second Edition
- Introduction to Second Edition
- A Note of History
- Should I Ever…
- THE COUNTRYSIDE
- AKAN
- EWE
- GA-ADANGME
- DAGOMBA
- HAUSA
- THE TOWN
- Tumble-Down Woods
- Tough Guy in Town
- In the Streets of Accra
- Snuff and the Ashes
- Radio Dance Hour
- This is Experience Speaking
- Palm Leaves of Childhood
- Hot Day
- The Literary Society
- It's Ritual Murder
- The Wrong Packing Case
- Lines on Korle Bu
- Pay Day
- The Walk of Life (Agbezoli)
- Peace
- Heaven is a Fine Place
- Ata
- Complaint
- To My Mother
- Oh! My Brother
- The Homeless Boy
- The Lone Horse
- The Perfect Understander
- The Woods Decay
- On Parting
- To the Night Insects
- The Blind Man from the North
- A Second Birthday
- In God's Tired Face
- The Executioner's Dream
- Had I Known
- Re-incarnation
- Ancestral Faces
- ‘O Forest, Dear Forest’
- My Sea Adventure
- The Passing of The King
- Patriotism
- African Heaven
- The Ghosts
- The Herdsman from Wa
- Pa Grant Due
- The Mosquito and the Young Ghanaian
- Unity in Diversity
- The Journey to Independence
- Ode to the Hon. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
- The Dawn of the New Era
- The Meaning of Independence
- National Anthem
- The Contributors
- Index
The Homeless Boy
from THE TOWN
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- No Wings
- Preface to Second Edition
- Foreword to Second Edition
- Introduction to Second Edition
- A Note of History
- Should I Ever…
- THE COUNTRYSIDE
- AKAN
- EWE
- GA-ADANGME
- DAGOMBA
- HAUSA
- THE TOWN
- Tumble-Down Woods
- Tough Guy in Town
- In the Streets of Accra
- Snuff and the Ashes
- Radio Dance Hour
- This is Experience Speaking
- Palm Leaves of Childhood
- Hot Day
- The Literary Society
- It's Ritual Murder
- The Wrong Packing Case
- Lines on Korle Bu
- Pay Day
- The Walk of Life (Agbezoli)
- Peace
- Heaven is a Fine Place
- Ata
- Complaint
- To My Mother
- Oh! My Brother
- The Homeless Boy
- The Lone Horse
- The Perfect Understander
- The Woods Decay
- On Parting
- To the Night Insects
- The Blind Man from the North
- A Second Birthday
- In God's Tired Face
- The Executioner's Dream
- Had I Known
- Re-incarnation
- Ancestral Faces
- ‘O Forest, Dear Forest’
- My Sea Adventure
- The Passing of The King
- Patriotism
- African Heaven
- The Ghosts
- The Herdsman from Wa
- Pa Grant Due
- The Mosquito and the Young Ghanaian
- Unity in Diversity
- The Journey to Independence
- Ode to the Hon. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
- The Dawn of the New Era
- The Meaning of Independence
- National Anthem
- The Contributors
- Index
Summary
My father was an Englishman,
‘Whose blood was hot from fathers of warproof’;
My mother, a dark African
Whose blood was sluggish and deplasmatised:
But I, no African or Englishman,
I wander craving for Man's love:
Am spurned by African and Englishman,
And reap the hate I did not sow.
My father felt great Shakespeare's pulse;
My mother danced perpetually to tomtom
Or the xylophone!—But I, displaced,
And neither gong, nor golden verse
Inspire my breast and feet of molten lead.
And these once pirouetting toes.
Decline the ballet and barbaric dance.
I cannot blame my mother's love,
Nor cast a stone against the boy
Whose parents were both Englishmen.
I seek a home neither Africa
Nor British Isles can give, a home
Away from man and beast, who all disown
My kinship with their hearts of stone—
And yet one day another African
Shall seek divorce and separation from his kind
And seek the graces of an English girl:
And then, perhaps, ‘all passion spent’,
And chastened by the voice of faith,
My brother shall be brother to the Englishman,
And I regain my home in Africa,
And yet desire the British Isles, which still
Remains my spiritual home:
No bastard now, no child of Ham,
My blood shall fuse the poles apart
And reconcile my parents’ heart.
This is the vision of the boy
Whose mother was an African,
And heir of all the gold of India,
Egypt and the Western World,
This is the song of the lost mulatto,
And this the prayer of the despised quadroon!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Voices of GhanaLiterary Contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System 1955–57, pp. 213Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018