Oxford Street, Accra

Today I wandered around the central district in Accra for a little over an hour alone, with the equivalent of 20 US cents on me. I was starving but I couldn't buy anything to eat with so few cedis, so I went into an old bookstore to escape the heat and the persistance of the vendors.

The bookstore, right across Frankie's Hotel (an overpriced restaurant), was called The Bookshelf.net. Its selection wasn't anything impressive--mostly outdated textbooks, yellowing and dog-earred paperback romance novels, quarterly publications, and never-heard-of titles from the 80s and 90s. I weaved in and out of the bookcases, feeling rather disoriented and alone and bored with the titles available, my fingertips dusty and grimy from running them along the rows and stacks of uninspiring works. However, there was a single shelf titled "classics," and of the two hundred or so books in that section (most of them decidedly not classics at all, nor anything remotely literary in nature), I found two slim paperback volumes of Thornton Wilder's plays. Here was my favorite American playwright/novelist, in this dusty unnoticed corner of this small West African capital. Heartened and feeling less alone, I started looking around the bookstore for some Shakespeare.

It seems that everyone here raves about Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Any reference to him makes me squirm with embarassment because for the first couple of days I couldn't even say the dude's name, nor did I have the slightest clue who he was. Yet all the Ghanaians spoke of him as if the world knew of this Kwame Nkrumah just as they did. So then I got to thinking, well, maybe our Shakespeare is like this hero Nkrumah. Perhaps the Bard isn't so universal as I'd like to believe he is. So I decided that I'd put Shakespeare's reknown to the test right here in this dusty corner of a bookstore. If I found at least one of his works, I would give myself the right to continue holding fast to my belief in the universality and genius of the Bard. So I began my search, but nothing came up; Shakespeare was nowhere to be found. Embarassed in front of myself for my own egocentrism, I was about to give up my hunt when I spotted two of Shakespeare's histories in spotted, stained paperback: Richard II and Henry IV, Part I.

They're those wonderful lines spoken by the poet-king Richard in Act III, upon learning of Bolingbroke's return to England:

Of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so — for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

I would say in general what Richard says is true, but after today, I still think that the Bard himself remains the exception to the rest of humanity's common fate. Five hundred years after he lived and died, Shakespeare is still thriving in this dusty Accra bookshop.