Chapter One Sometimes, when I''m poring over a newly arrived set of photographs on the computer in my home office at 6 a.m., or I''m huddled with a photographer and a superstar model on set past midnight with three more looks left to shoot, I feel at my most content. Through bougie Western eyes, this probably looks out of balance: I''m overworking at the expense of my personal life; I need to create boundaries, or whatever. But I''ve never seen work and life as truly separate. It''s not how I was raised. My parents were both hard workers; their careers were at the centre of their lives. Even as they were surrounded by six kids and an endless extended family, nobody went hungry.

And I''ve been my parents'' son since the day I was born, at the tail end of a dry African winter in 1972. I can''t imagine any other line of work for my father, Major Crosby Enninful, than the military, with its authoritarian rigour and devotion to order. By the time I was born, the Ghanaian military was one of the most powerful in all of Africa, and it made for a prestigious career. Officers had solid, middle-class lives, with houses on military bases and enough pay to ensure education and upward mobility for their children. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana''s first president, the first in Africa to sever his nation from the British Empire, had a pan- Africanist vision for the country that was once known as the Gold Coast. As Ghana was relatively socially and economically advanced among its neighbours, it meant that Ghanaian soldiers traditionally did frequent tours abroad, often aiding United Nations Peace keeping forces. So, for most of my childhood, whether he was in Liberia, or Egypt or the Middle East, my father was elsewhere. That suited his children just fine.

I was born in Takoradi, one of the bigger port cities along the coastline, the fifth of what would become a family of six children. There was Crosby, the eldest, named after our father, my sister Mina, brothers Luther and Kenneth, and baby sister Akua. In Ghana, it''s common to take the name of the day on which you were born. As I was born near midnight on 22 February, the hospital had one date, and the post office another. So my mother Grace gave me two Ghanaian names: Kobina Kweku, or Tuesday Wednesday, as well as my Christian name, Edward. I was really only Edward in school. Most people called me Asiamah. In Akan, the country''s most dominant language after English, it means ''Blessed Child''.

We lived on a military base in Takoradi, a cocoon of pristine order inside the more laid-back city. The base was dotted with neat little stucco bungalows on stilts that we used to run and hide underneath. When I was still quite little, we relocated from Takoradi to the capital city of Accra, where we lived on another base called Burma Camp, just across the road from the sea. It was a similar dynamic: our family living on an island of tidiness surrounded by a city unconcerned by order. Burma Camp looked so organised and perfect to me as a child, with its clipped lawns and freshly painted little houses. That order hid a darker reality. Ghana suffered from political instability and frequent military coups. Whoever was in charge at the time was often settling scores with whoever came before.

Our home was the last in a cluster of cottages, and we had a clear view of a hill that had a string of wooden posts erected on top. That was where they''d execute, by firing squad, whoever was considered an enemy of the state. Every few weeks or so we could see it happening from the window of our house: the soldiers would march condemned men with pomp and ceremony, cover their heads with hoods, take aim and fire. We''d hear the gunshots crack as their bodies would slump. ''Oh, is it firing-squad day?'' we''d ask each other. Anything habitual becomes normal when you''re a kid. We had a lot of space in Burma Camp, with five bedrooms to shelter my siblings and me, who ran in a pack together. I was the baby until 1977, when Akua was born, so most of the time, everyone took care of me.

Much of it involved keeping away from our father, who was a believer in distributive justice - if one of us acted out of line, we all got yelled at. Or worse, we''d get the leather strap on our hands. As we were constantly making noise, we spent a lot of time at the beach, playing in the sand, and taking part in deadly serious track-and-field competitions. I was a shy kid but a good student and confident in my abilities - I''d end up skipping two grades before I got to secondary school - so I''d show other neighbourhood kids how to do maths on the beach with rocks. They would call me ''teacher''. I was, above all, watchful, shy, spacey, and totally consumed by my imagination. Some days, as my brothers ran about kicking up sand, I would find a quiet spot and take those same rocks and turn them into a pretend class of my own. Each rock became a character.

I''d dole out praise, correct their mistakes. I would sass them and make jokes at their expense. When I was in my comfort zone with my brothers and sisters at home, no adults to yell at me, I felt free. When I had my confidence up, I found joy in making people laugh, even the older kids. When I remember my childhood, its powerful scents come rushing back to me first. The sea air and fried fish, which we''d eat with fermented corn dumplings called kenkey, and hot peppers. In Ghana, you buy groceries either from the central market if you''re in a larger city, or on the street from trailers, which were all over, loaded with vegetables and fruit and peanuts, colourful and abundant and waiting to be turned into something delicious. In stalls they''d sell grilled turkey tails, which are just the end of the bird, crispy and loaded with fat.

I remember the smell of bodies close by at the crowded markets, the air full of spices. Fish and meat would sit out on display in the muggy air, while fierce women strolled by carrying massive pots of soup on their heads, their babies strapped to their backs. Ghanaian cuisine is often starchy-my grandmother''s specialty was fufu: pounded cassava and plantain dumplings, which she''d make with a massive, waist-sized mortar and pestle. You''d dip the fufu into fragrant, peppery soups. Ghana''s climate is mostly tropical, with a summer monsoon, and anyone who comes from a tropical part of the world knows that spicy, high- temperature food is an important part of cooling the body down. I still eat hot pepper with every meal, no matter my location. There is a lot of depth of flavour in our cuisine, much of which we have in common with our West African neighbours. Stews are full of beef, fish, crab, chicken and shrimp, sometimes all together, and layered with dried shrimp powder, bitter herbs and peanut flour, spiked with tomatoes and chillies and onions and lime.

My nose always knows if I''m visiting someone from Ghana from the smell of that cooking-there are a lot of us in London-and every time, it takes me back home. The coastal cities in Ghana were well developed, but the countryside was another story. When I was really little, my mother would take us to visit my grandmother in her tiny village of Brakwa, in a forest belt about sixty miles from the coast. She lived in a small, squat house fashioned from mud and cement block, which had no electricity. The drive on dusty, red-clay roads was rough and bumpy. When we''d get there, I would have to say hello to all of my aunts and cousins and grandmother''s friends. There could be fifty of them, because my grandmother was like royalty in that town, and everyone had to show respect. It was scary in those little houses, especially once the sun went down and left us in the dark.

Even though I held my mother''s hand, as a visitor I felt poked and prodded by curious hands. I kept my head down and wished it would be over soon so I could get back to our comfortable house and my books and drawings and records. I was coddled by my mother, brothers and sisters, and in their company I was happy, though sometimes I was in excruciating physical pain. I was born with the blood disorder sickle cell trait (and then later diagnosed with a related disorder, thalassaemia), which means my blood cells form a kind of hook that doesn''t flow well into the tiny vessels in my joints. When my condition flares up, as it does from stress, or poor diet, or, today, taking a lot of aeroplanes, it''s like having an especially piercing case of arthritis and only morphine can really take the pain away. Because of this, I bounced back and forth to hospitals to have my blood checked. My mother would always be there with me as the doctors did their work. Because I had more of these attacks when I was younger, I could never be too far from her.

I have so many early memories of her arguing with doctors, pleading with them to do something to ease the pain. Much less was understood about the disorder than is known today, and even as a tiny boy, I could feel my mother''s worry and frustration that we had to keep coming back to the hospital over and over. Why did this pain keep coming back? She couldn''t understand what was wrong with her baby, much less make it stop. My mother was my comforter and my champion, and a formative example for me of courage and the power of the imagination. In Brakwa, when she was just a teenager, one of twenty-two kids (as is typical in extended polygamous African families), she started making dresses for the local ladies. She had an amazing eye for colour and, as she honed her skill, a talent for fitted shapes. A few of her brothers became tailors, too, so perhaps awareness of clothes runs in our family. At seventeen, my mother assembled her best samples and travelled.