English writer Sarah Mussi lived in Ghana for many years and is married to a Ghanaian. She currently lives in England and teaches in south-east London. Her debut novel, The Door of No Return, won the Glen Dinplex Award in 2007.

Madelyn Travis met up with Sarah to talk about the historical and cultrual background to her novels The Door of No Return and Return of the Warrior Kings.

You live in London, but for many years you lived in. Ghana. How did that come about?

I won a scholarship to study in Cameroon and I also studied in Nigeria as part of university, so I had put down some very solid roots in West Africa. After that I came back to England. I met my husband at the Africa Centre in London and he was Ghanaian, so we relocated there in the 1980s. It was in the early years of the Rawlings administration. We didn’t start living there permanently until 1989. The university system in Accra is excellent, but my eldest daughter wanted to do film at university in England so I came back in 2001 to establish residency.

Do you start with your characters or is the historical event at the heart of your books?

Something just captures my imagination. It’s like a cauldron full of tasty things but you don’t quite know what kind of meal they’re going to be. The ingredients catch my imagination and then develop into a storyt.

With The Last of the Warrior Kings I’d been living in London for a while and I wanted to write something about the children I was teaching in south London, from their point of view. I live in Brixton and teach in Lewisham. I teach a lot of children very like Max. But I also have this call to West Africa. When I was at university in Nigeria I was just around the corner from Benin and a lot of the children I teach are Nigerian.

Anyway, the plot started with a visit I made to the British Museum with a friend. We were in the Africa room and I was standing in front of a display of wall plaques from Benin. Someone came up behind me and said “spoliation”. I didn’t know what they meant. And they gave me a newspaper article about a piece of wood that was being lent from Australia for an exhibition. I was trying not to listen because I was looking at the bronzes. But afterwards I read the paper and thought: yes, these bronzes have to go home. So then I had to figure out the plot to bring them home. It was very difficult and I had many sleepless nights. South London kids wouldn’t want to become a thief in that way and probably wouldn’t know about the Benin bronzes. No south London boy I teach would ever think about going to the British Museum, let alone stealing the bronzes to get them back to Nigeria. They would probably feel quite dislocated from the history of Nigeria.

That’s been one of my main themes. I want to build bridges for  kids who are dislocated from their African history so they can have a look at their own histories or the way in which their own countries have suffered. I thought tit was very important that  my children understand the Ghanaian half of their heritage.

 How did you do the research?

With The Last of the Warrior Kings I found an amazing website where they sell old parliamentary papers. I bought all the old correspondence which covered the Phillips massacre and the Punitive Expedition, so I had all the documents. They were so detailed: there were lists of crew, how many rounds of ammunition were packed in each ship, all the deaths tallies, if there were unidentified dead. At the same time there was the angst coming from Sir Ralph Moor: “Well we’re here and we’ve got this far, and this is what we’re doing”. So there was an incredible sense of being there. I also went to the British Museum.

 I was looking for a reason why a kid like Max would steal the bronzes. The late MP Bernie Grant had this website about a reparation movement for African artefacts and other things. I know a lot of people in south London who are very dedicated to world change and to making the world a better and fairer place and I got the idea for political movement, the Black Army, that would de dedicated to the reparation of artefacts. This became the back story for Max’s family and was inspired by Bernie Grant’s website. He worked so hard in so many ways to make the world a better place.

For The Door of No Return the research took place on site in Ghana.. Ghana is great because everyone knows somebody who knows somebody. I knew the curator of the wonderful museum at Cape Coast Castle. He showed me lots of things and introduced me to another curator at another museum, who took me round the Abanzi fort. There were a couple of eminent researchers who have written books on the slave forts in Ghana but you have to go to Ghana to get hold of them.

You embed the history and politics very cleverly in The Last of the Warrior Kings. It’s highly political, but could easily be read just as a mainstream adventure.

 I did not and do not intend to bash any child over the head with history or politics or polemics of any kind. I hope it’s not in-the-face political. I don’t think kids need that; having said that, the historical political and cultural background can enrich stories. I hope you can read the book on many levels. You could read it as a good old chase story but you could also take on the question posed: where does that leave the disenfranchised youth of today in London? Hopefully it will appeal to children on whatever level they want to take it without them feeling they have to understand it in a different way.

Are you particularly trying to write for that hard to reach readership of teenage boys?

I asked myself and do ask myself whether maybe there are no recognisable black heroes because that doesn’t sell. I think it would be a sad thing if my books and other books about black characters sink into the educational niche of the market. I intended to write a mainstream book that just happened to have a black hero. My son is black. I wanted kids like him to be able to read books where there is a character like him and all my students. But it’s also true that I can’t really take off the teacher hat. I want to get boys reading, and boys who don’t feel there’s anything out there for them.

I was certainly thinking of the kids I teach when I created the character of Max. They taught me a lot of about the street and how they talk and think. They taught me very willingly, and probably not knowing that they were teaching me all the time that I was teaching them.

 Max is based on kids like them – they’re not quite aware of what’s going on around them and they can be in a lot of danger. Max is in danger from the conspiracy around him, but most ordinary kids are in danger from the whole world of gangs and violence. We all shudder every time there’s another stabbing or shooting. The kids I teach walk through that kind of street every day.

 I see kids coming over from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Somalia who are vulnerable to gang culture. Once they get involved in gang life it’s a slippery slope into violence, crime, drugs and then we see the statistics in newspaper headlines.

Although it has very serious themes, The Last of the Warrior Kings does have some humour. Max thinks he’s so cool and Sapphire thinks he’s ridiculous.

That’s my daughter. She says, “This is just so not cool.” My son and his friends would sit in my front room and chat the chat: “Man’s trying to keep Man’s courage up.” Some of the kids I teach buy into that whole cultural thing, but they are eternally surprising and refreshing. They can be the most horrendously behaved and then change so much a few years later.

And Roland, the rich white boy, wants desperately to be in a gang.

very fond of Roland. I know kids who want to be cool but aren’t. Or they are in their own way, if only they could see it.

The characters just pop up. They’re there waiting to be discovered. It’s almost as if you look at the story and say “Hello, who’s in there?” and they come out. Dreader Dread just sprang onto the page. I don’t know if it’s because I’d recently been reading about the sacking of the Rastafarians from St Agnes Place, which had been a longstanding enclave of Rastafarian rebels. He was just there, waiting in south London, as a street poet and visionary, modelled a bit on Benjamin Zephaniah and John Agard, with his poetry and idealism. I only had to knock on the top of the story and he came out.

Both The Last of the Warrior Kings and The Door of No Return remind me a little of The Constant Gardener – the conspiracy, the African connection.

I admire The Constant Gardener. I was in Nairobi during the filming, staying with an actor friend who played the high commissioner. Maybe ideas trickle.

What are you working on now?

It’s about third world debt and the Cold War in Ghana. I’m going back to Ghana, away from the streets of London for a while. Ghana was the first country to gain independence from Britain, which it achieved right in the middle of the Cold War years. There was pressure from China, Russia and America to see which political system it would choose. Ghana agreed to an enormous debt from America that they could never repay. This debt has ground the country down, so Ghana is now on the list of the most heavily indebted poor countries in the world. It doesn’t sound an interesting topic for kids, but I’m going to make it interesting. The story is based on the case in Zambia, where a vulture fund swooped in to buy a debt of $3m and brought the case to a British court and sued Zambia for $55m, which was the entire debt. They won the case but they didn’t win the whole amount. They won $25m, so Zambia is now penniless. In my story a kid will defeat the vulture funds that are trying to buy up an old debt. His mission will be to find a way to prove that it’s not a debt that they owe. So there will be sinister vulture fund people trying to get rid of him before he exposes them. And there will be lots of Cold War shenanigans.

Sounds exciting! Thank you Sarah Mussi, for talking to Write Away.