Malaika: "Angel"

By Kwabena Date-Bah

This book contains Short Stories about people who have been weakened by life circumstance not caused by their fault, who have gone on to use that disadvantage to inspire them to triumph over adversity. Often the main character in the book has been an ethnic minority who has been able to use his coping mechanisms for the unfair challenges that life has thrown at him as a strategy to motivate himself to successfully secure paid work in a profession that he wants. Also along this unlikely life journey, the main character finds unconditional love, which is completely unexpected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481787932

Kwabena Date-Bah

Mr Kwabena Date-Bah is a British lawyer, originally from Ghana in West Africa. He was educated at Berkhamsted Public School; University College, London; Keele University; and Cass Business School in City University in London. He has worked in real estate for a number of years.

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© 2013 Kwabena Date-Bah. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 3/15/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8792-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8793-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Table of Contents

1.   Prologue

2.   Greg’s Birth and Childhood in the Gold Coast

3.   Exam Blues

4.   Greg and Sally’s Spring Break in Paris – April 1956

5.   Ode to Cambridge

6.   Greg’s Crisis of Cultural Identity

7.   Greg’s Gargantuan Efforts to Join the Popular Conservative Party

8.   Greg’s Attempt to Be Selected as a Conservative Candidate for Member of Parliament

9.   Stranger than Fiction

10.   The Tribulations of the Ghanaian Bar Exams

11.   Marital Bliss?

12.   About the Author

I would like to dedicate Malaika to my wife, Mrs. Victoria Date-Bah, for her continuous encouragement and support.

Prologue

Greg, Greg, where are you? Come and remove your dirty boots from the hallway!

Greg Agyemang – a black African sixth-former already six-foot-one – could hear Aunt Ethel calling to him from the lobby downstairs in their small end-of-terrace home in Northwood, North London. His mud-stained size-nine football boots lay dripping wet on the cream carpet of the lobby downstairs. Dark-skinned Auntie Ethel, still pretty though advancing in age, was his only living relative since his father, a wealthy Gold Coast trader, and his Kenyan mother, a housewife, had died in a horrific road accident in June 1949 in the country of his birth, the Gold Coast.

Despite his impending STEP exams for possible entrance to Cambridge University and his lack of preparation and review for those life-changing exams, Greg found it impossible to tear himself away from his football passion and his dream that one day he might be good enough to play for Chelsea Football Club. He lay on his bed, listening to a West Indian calypso band, the Shadows, and Elvis Presley on his small bedside radio. This music was very popular with the students at the boys’ school that Greg now attended in England – Merchant Taylors Public School in Northwood, Middlesex.

As far as Ethel was concerned, Greg was malaika because his presence in her home had rescued her from her previous frequent bouts of depression and unbearable solitude. Her solitude had become unbearable since the untimely death of the love of her life some fifteen years before, the white English coffee trader she had married. He had brought her to the UK only some five years before his death. This