Tony Mears had arrived in Ghana at a bad time. The harmattan wind was blowing—clouds of white dust, dryness in the nostrils—and on it the smells from the beach where Ghanaians relieved themselves went through the city and didn't even spare the guests of first-class hotels. Accra was swollen with young men. Expelled from Nigeria with millions of other illegal migrant workers, uneasy and unwanted here, they idled in the streets, radios blasting juju, and spoke the pidgin they'd acquired in Lagos, shamming as money lords, waylaying whites: "Change! Dollar, sterling, deutschmark!"

Lonely on his first night at the hotel, Mears had called Sampson Omaboe from the lobby phone.

"Here so soon, jallay! I thought it was to be March."