I imagine Kumase must have kissed silence the way new butterfly bones break after the British hellfire. The city, like the unfinished flesh of something hatched from the moon's skull. I imagine the market tress sirening in their live-coal pelts, branches snapping like the cleaved heads of dead kings gone to Seychelles Island.

Children exploding where they play; what once was their eyes now alcoves filled with wild bats on fire. The stench of the baked crops like a tortured sea. Mothers feeding their newborns their own vomit. Husbands swallowing torches on their wives breasts. The sky sealed shut and roasted red clay. And the birds, the birds are always the first people to lose the sky. Something, skyless, wounded, self-immolation marched from Accra to Cape Coast to Kumase; a flame born seasick and British.

My nanankansowa said: There was rain coming down like paratrooper elephants the night that followed. Darkness bawling its eyes out, thunder and lightning like two mirrors kissing their teeth as they crushed into each other. And the fire did not wash out; could not wash off; we remember, we remember. But before then, our ancestors gazed upon Garnet Wolseley and hurled spit at him as if it was a doomsday device.