![]() ![]() Or we could travel in another cultural direction to the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology-known always as “Tech”-where I went to primary school, and where many of my friends’ parents were professors. ![]() We could go higher up the hill, to Asante New Town, to the palace of the Asante king, Prempeh II, whose first wife, my great-aunt, always called me “Akroma-Ampim” (the name of our most illustrious ancestor) or “Yao Antony” (the name of the great-uncle and head of the family from whom I acquired my anglicized name, “Anthony”). Near the center of the second largest city in Ghana, behind our hibiscus hedge in the “garden city of West Africa,” our life was essentially a village life, lived among a few hundred neighbors out from that village we went to the other little villages that make up the city. Our home was opposite my grandparent’s house-where scores of her kinsfolk and dependents lived under the direction of my stepgrandmother, “Auntie Jane,” who baked bread for hundreds of people from Mbrom and the surrounding areas-down the street from many cousins of various, usually obscure, degrees of affinity. My first memories are of a place called “Mbrom,” a small neighborhood in Kumasi, capital of Asante, as that kingdom turned from being part of the British Gold Coast colony to being a region of the Republic of Ghana. ![]()
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