Word: delights
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...commonplace in Africa for one child to be invested with such massive expectation. "You have to force out the one that is intelligent," says Kwame. "So he can be the breadwinner for the family." That's tough for those left behind - Delight's older brother and sister both left school at 16 and now struggle with whatever work they can find. It can be tough on the chosen one, too. Delight was singled out from a young age and sent off at 13 to live with his grandfather so he could attend a good junior high. "I feel responsibility...
...wouldn't know it to talk to him, though. Delight is warm and personable and has the relaxed confidence of youth. He loves school, especially science classes, and understands the importance of education. He is in many ways like his grandfather, with whom he is close. "I like studying, you know," he told me. "There's constant discipline. If you feel lazy or not, you have to study...
...During a holiday break back at home in Accra, Delight sits outside his family's tiny house talking with a neighbor who recently returned to Ghana after a failed attempt to get to Europe. Jerry Senanu Nyonator is 28, and like millions of struggling Africans, dreams of working in Europe or the U.S. Three years ago, following the well-worn path of thousands before him, he set out for Europe, catching a bus to Lagos and then to Chad, where he eventually ran out of money and found his papers weren't good enough. "Maybe when I get a passport...
...Later, inside the house, Delight picks up a book he is reading for school, The Gods Are Not to Blame by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, which transplants Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Africa. He talks about his school and having to go to mass every day. He pronounces Catholic Cad-lick in his wonderful, treacle-thick Ghanaian English. There is a small table in the corner with a stove sitting on it. Pots and pans stack up under chairs that line the walls and on the shelves of a bureau that also holds a tiny color television. There is a small...
...Such are the scaled-back hopes of Africa these days. Call it realistic optimism. Delight is neither as optimistic as his grandfather was at independence nor as pessimistic as his mother. His generation has lived through the time of the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu militias killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus; the brutality of Sierra Leone, with its arm-chopping gangs of child soldiers; the elemental fighting in Congo, beginning in the mid-'90s, known as Africa's First World War, a series of conflicts that killed 4 million people. But he and the millions of young Africans...