Gold Coast Customs

In Ashantee, a hundred years ago, the death of any rich or important person
was followed by several days of national ceremonies, during which the utmost
licence prevailed, and slaves and poor persons were killed that the bones of the
deceased might be laved with human blood. These ceremonies were called Customs.

ONE fantee wave
Is grave and tall
As brave Ashantee's
Thick mud wall.
Munza rattles his bones in the dust,
Lurking in murk because he must.

Striped black and white
Is the squealing light;
The dust brays white in the market place,
Dead powder spread on a black skull's face.

Like monkey skin
Is the sea -- one sin
Like a weasel is nailed to bleach on the rocks
Where the eyeless mud screeched fawning, mocks

At a negro that wipes
His knife . . . dug there
A bugbear bellowing
Bone dared rear --
A bugbear bone that bellows white
As the ventriloquist sound of light,

It rears at his head-dress of felted black hair
The one humanity clinging there --
His eyeless face whitened like black and white bones
And his beard of rusty
Brown grass cones.

Hard blue and white
Courie shells (the light
Grown hard) outline
The leopardskin musty
Leaves that shine
With an animal smell both thick and fusty.

One house like a ratskin
Mask flaps fleet
In the sailor's tall
Ventriloquist street
Where the rag houses flap --
Hiding a gap.

Here, tier on tier,
Like a black box rear
In the flapping slum
Beside Death's docks.
I did not know this meaner Death
Meant this: that the bunches of nerves still dance
And caper among these slums, and prance.

[Extract]