I imagine Kumase must have kissed silence the way new butterfly bones breakafter the British hellfire. The city, like the unfinished flesh of something hatchedfrom the moon’s skull. I imagine the market tress sirening in their live-coalpelts, branches snapping like the cleaved heads of dead kings gone to SeychellesIsland.Children exploding where they play; what once was their eyes now alcoves filledwith wild bats on fire. The stench of the baked crops like a tortured sea. Mothersfeeding their newborns their own vomit. Husbands swallowing torches on theirwives breasts. The sky sealed shut and roasted red clay. And the birds, the birdsare always the first people to lose the sky. Something, skyless, wounded, self-im-molation marched from Accra to Cape Coast to Kumase; a flame born seasickand British.My nanankansowa said: There was rain coming down like paratrooper elephantsthe night that followed. Darkness bawling its eyes out, thunder and lightninglike two mirrors kissing their teeth as they crushed into each other. And thefire did not wash out; could not wash off; we remember, we remember. But beforethen, our ancestors gazed upon Garnet Wolseley and hurled spit at him as if itwas a doomsday device.