The Inheritance

Somebody forgot to lock the safe. That is all it was.

Abena Sowah is a party organiser from the north, competent and unglamorous and entirely loyal, and she is in a private office in Accra to collect four thousand two hundred and sixty cedis she paid out of her own account for six hired buses. She is left alone in a room for eleven minutes. She photographs forty-one pages of a bound document dedicated to those not yet born, and she cannot afterwards give any account of why.

She keeps it for fifteen months. It costs her a position, two friendships and very nearly a marriage, and she cannot tell anybody what she is carrying.

When it is finally published, the country does not ask what the document describes. It asks whether the document is real. Two sets of experts reach opposite conclusions from the same photographs. A defamation action is filed and never tried and never withdrawn. Three years pass.

Meanwhile, in a back room with a standing fan and eleven boxes, a retired supervisory officer who kept his own working papers for thirty-two years is teaching a reporter from a four-person newspaper how to read a file. They are not looking for anything. They are checking a service date, for a correction, to a story that has already run.

What they find is two dates on two public documents, eleven days apart, that cannot both be true.

The Inheritance is a novel about the difference between a leak and a proof, and about a mechanism that leaves no thief: a family that wrote its plans down, a state that can take everything from you by administrative act without breaking a single law, and a national argument about a piece of paper that ran for three years while the answer sat in a registry, obtainable by anybody, on a form, for a fee.

Nobody in these pages does anything wrong. That is the problem.

For readers of Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah and Abdulrazak Gurnah.