In 1937 the cocoa farmers of the Gold Coast held their crop off the market for eight months, and won. What they won was a Board. Kwame Nyaako spent eleven years as a clerk in that Board's Accra office, entering two columns of figures in ink. On the left, what the world paid for the crop. On the right, what the farmer received. He was accurate to the shilling for eleven years, and he never once carried one book across the room to the other. Between those columns, unvoted and unnamed, sat the money that built the schools, the harbour, the university, and four boys' passage to England. One of those boys signed a bond at seventeen, came home, and served his five years to the day. One never came back at all and sent money home every month for forty-one years. And the farmer's son who was better at figures than any of them never got on the ship, because his father had given away two acres to keep an oath sworn in a courtyard in 1937. Across sixty years, three governments, two coups and one famine, Nyaako assembles the record: four hundred and eleven conversations, eleven exercise books, and a question a farmer asked in a field in 1944 that nobody ever answered. Who wrote it down? Then, in a basement with no light beneath a government ministry, a records officer conducting a routine inventory lifts out a file that was closed in 1953, and finds tied to it a second folder that nobody has ever opened. The Tradition is a novel about the difference between a crime and a gap. There is no thief in these pages. Almost nobody does anything wrong. Every man who did harm had a reason, and most of the reasons were good, and the arrangement they built took everything from the people it was designed to protect and left no name under it anywhere.
