Category: Short Fiction

Kwame Mainu was driving his daughter, Akosua, and her friends back to Coventry from their school in Warwick. The girls asked him for a story about trees to put in one of their school assignments. Kwame said that he would give them a brief outline of a traditional Ashanti folk tale and Akosua would fill […]

In 1996, in Kumasi, Ghana, Kwame Mainu had succeeded in persuading the albino linguist, Kofi Adjare, to leave what remained of the drugs cartel. A few days later, his estranged wife, Comfort, telephoned to tell him to come quickly because Kofi had been kidnapped. He drove quickly to Comfort’s house where he found his wife, […]

Kwame Mainu’s wife, Comfort, had left him with their daughter, Akosua, in 1988, just before he took his final examinations in mechanical engineering at Warwick University. Succeeding in her business as a shoe importer, Comfort lived in a comfortable house in the fashionable Garden City district of Nhyiasu, in Kumasi, Ghana. Now in 1996, working […]

In the 1990s, Kwame Mainu was employed by Warwick University in England on a partnership programme with Kumasi University in his homeland, Ghana. The programme provided opportunities for junior academics and technical staff from Kumasi to undertake short upgrading assignments in Coventry, but selecting the right people was always a challenge. The universities wanted everyone […]

One of Kwame Mainu’s assistants at Warwick University, Sandra Garg, had fallen in love with one of the Kumasi academics chosen in 1996 to come to Warwick on a short research assignment. Unfortunately, the young man, Nelson Evans-Agyei, had been persuaded to carry wooden artefacts to Coventry that were found to contain cocaine and had […]

Kwame Mainu’s partner, Afriyie, had a small part-time business making ladies’ dresses and providing repair and adjustment services, mostly for the ladies attached to Warwick University. As the work-load increased, she had brought her niece, Elsie, from Ghana to serve as an apprentice seamstress. Attending the local Pentecostal church in Coventry, Elsie had been encouraged […]

At the end of an earlier war, King Freddie of England had negotiated a treaty with Scotland to establish a fifty-mile demilitarised zone north of Hadrian’s wall within which there was a ban on the playing of bagpipes. The Scottish King, Duncan, had long resented this curb on his freedom of action and planned a […]

Kwame Mainu’s mission in Kumasi had been greatly helped by his now not so estranged wife, Comfort. Together they had sought the intervention of the Asantehene, King of Ashanti, in persuading the remnants of a drugs cartel to stop their illegal activities. This meant that in future, junior academics from Kumasi coming to Warwick University […]

During visits to Kumasi in the mid-1990s, Kwame Mainu’s feelings for his estranged wife, Comfort, had revived, and he had begun to hope that a reconciliation might be possible. It was Comfort who had made the break, citing Kwame’s lack of ambition for his family and his complicity in helping the British authorities apprehend Ghanaians […]

It was in the days of Good King Freddie. The king’s onerous duties kept him in London for most of the year but usually, in the summer, and when there was a quiet period in international affairs, he liked to take a holiday in his castle by the sea. Well, it used to be by […]