Angel Boy

In this short novel, a young boy’s adventurous journey from Accra to the slave fort at Elmina turns into two days of terror when he is captured by street kids and forced to beg from tourists at the fort gate. When his distraught father finds that Leonard is missing, he searches first at the quarries near Accra where he knows that abducted children are used to break stone for road making. And this lost boy, in a way, stands for all of Africa’s kidnapped children, taken into various forms of modern bondage just as surely as their forefathers were shipped across the Atlantic from the fort. However, I am not entirely convinced by Leonard’s story. Would streetwise kids really believe that they could hold a boy against his will, without adult help, and entrust him with the job of collecting money for them? Would it not be the street kids themselves, with no adults to look out for them, who would be more likely to be abducted (and by adults) than Leonard, the respectable church-going school boy with a hard working father and a loving Nana ready to use any and every way of finding him? All that said, Ashley knows how to tell a story. Leonard’s fear and his father’s anxiety are palpable. The story is emotionally real enough for you to never know how it will end, and the fraught relationship of a poor country with the rich tourists on which it depends is sketched in well.