Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond.

Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond by Ekow Eshun, illustrations by Chris Ofili Pantheon Books, June 2006 $23, ISBN 0-375-42418-0

The search for one's roots can be both frustrating and rewarding. However, for those whose African ancestors were enslaved in the Americas and the Caribbean, the process can be especially painful, often fraught with dead ends, unexpected turns and false leads. Lack of information serves as a reminder of the loss of language, culture and a past beyond the Middle Passage.

In this sense Ekow Eshun, a British writer of Ghanaian parentage, is fortunate. For Eshun, whose parents were voluntary immigrants to the United Kingdom, slavery is not necessarily a part of the equation. When he embarks on a trip across Ghana to explore his heritage, he discovers a country full of contradictions and a family history more complex than he could have imagined.

Eshun's eye for detail allows readers to see the country as he does after a 28-year absence. While Eshun's writing is fluid and self-assured, much of the story is about his insecurities, his loneliness and his inability to feel at ease in his own skin. Eshun hopes that Ghana will restore what life in a predominantly white country has cost him: a sense of wholeness. "Even though my roots were in Britain ... I'd felt like an outsider all my life. In Ghana, I'd be another face in the crowd. Anonymity meant the freedom to be myself, not the product of someone else's prejudice."

Eshun, however, soon learns that he is no less an outsider in Ghanaian society; his foreign accent, his inability to speak Fante and his casual attitude toward money set him apart. Within days of his arrival in an Accra suburb, local children dub him "Burenyi," the Fante word for "white man." In fact, Eshun spends much of the book relating the ironies present in almost every encounter. Early on, he shares his disappointment after entering a nightclub and finding it no different from those "in London, New York, Kingston, or anywhere else that black people gathered. It was as if we had taken our cues from music videos and magazines to learn how to dress, how to hold ourselves, how to articulate what it meant to be black. We had become consumers of our own image."

Scenes of Ghanaians dressed in basketball jerseys, African-born Rastafarians speaking with Jamaican accents, and African Americans dressed in dashikis drive his point home: While those from the Diaspora traveled to Africa, "in their eyes, a land of enduring wisdoms ... both groups saw in the other a reflection of their own dreams." As Eshun digs deeper into Ghana's colonial past, he unearths a terrible secret about one of his own ancestors.

While many black Americans have written about their journeys to the African continent, it's refreshing to read a story that originates on the other side of the Atlantic. Eshun writes freely, if self-consciously, about his experiences, his emotions and even his inability to shake the sense of entitlement derived from his British upbringing. His wistfulness and wry sense of humor add to the book's charm--although one gets the sense the author is, at all times, aware of his otherness and his surroundings and, by extension, quite concerned about how he is presenting himself to his audience. Even so, Black Gold of the Sun is an engaging and eye-opening account of one man's journey towards self-discovery.

--Reviewed by Denise Simon Denise Simon is a writer in New York.