The Nima boy who came home in a Rolls-Royce

Kofi Wayo died early on Saturday at Nyaho Medical Centre in Accra. He was 71. Read the obituaries and you’d think his whole life was a list of party cards. GhanaWeb’s long piece on him walks you through it carefully: the NPP and Ayawaso East in 2000, the PNC in 2004, his own United Renaissance Party, a seat on the Energy Commission board, and then farming. About the decades he spent in America, it manages one line.

That’s a strange way to remember Kofi Wayo, because America was the whole point of him.

From Nima to Albany

He was born around 1955 in Kofi Pare in the Eastern Region. His exact birth date isn’t known, Wikipedia notes, because his parents couldn’t read or write. His father farmed cocoa and served as a soldier. Kofi was the first of ten children. The family moved to Nima. They were poor, and as a child he worked as a hawker.

I know that part of Accra. I went to primary school at Aggrey Memorial International School in Kanda, behind the Kanda cluster of schools and next to GBC. Kanda shares a boundary with Nima. Growing up, I’d walk through Kanda and Nima 441, cut across the Newtown bridge, and go on to Malata Market to help my brother Samuel, who sold second-hand clothes there. Folds, we called them, and you say it “foes.” There was no Kanda Highway then. So when I read that Wayo grew up poor in Nima, I don’t have to imagine much.

Then a friend of his father’s, a Captain Charles Simons, took him to live in Georgia and later adopted him. The hawker from Nima spent four years at Albany High School in the American South. That’s a long way for a teenager to travel, and nobody back home could have guessed what he’d come back with.

Detroit

After Albany, as he told it in his GhanaWeb profile, he enrolled at the “University of Hardknocks.” He drifted to Tennessee, then Detroit, where his first job was washing car tyres for about $30 a day. He started selling pistols, got a licence, and went into business with a policeman friend. By his own account they turned $600 into about $260,000 a year. Later he sold guns abroad, traded arms for oil in the Middle East, and in 1988 sold his company to become a partner in an oil firm.

I can’t check every number in that story, and you should hold them loosely. Most of it comes from Wayo himself, and he was never a modest narrator. But the shape of it is clear enough: a poor boy from Nima went to America and, in the language of the time, made it.

The return

And then he came home, and he made sure we noticed. By his own count he owned 19 cars, five of them Rolls-Royces, with one Rolls parked in Accra alongside a Cadillac, a Lincoln and a Jaguar. He talked the way he drove. In 2008 the journalist Emmanuel Dogbevi wrote that Wayo’s fame rested on the return from America, the open display of money, and a near-permanent seat in front of a microphone. Dogbevi was no fan. He described an interview in which Wayo threw out accusations without evidence and answered hard questions with insults. Yet he also admitted that the money bought Wayo respect, and that some Ghanaians heard his bluntness as free speech at work.

That was the Wayo most of us remember: the man who said what others wouldn’t, from the back of a car most of us would never sit in. Oddly, his GhanaWeb profile has him saying he felt uncomfortable driving luxury cars while so many people around him stayed poor. In 2017 he quit politics and spent his time handing out tools to rural farmers. Maybe the man and the image were never quite the same thing.

You can draw a line from Wayo to Shatta Wale. The dancehall star built the Shatta Movement on ghetto youth, and dancehall took hold early in neighbourhoods like Nima, which a 2015 GhanaWeb piece called “Dancehall City.” Shatta Wale had his Lamborghini. Long before him, a Nima boy had his Rolls-Royces. Both turned money into a loud public voice, and both understood that in Ghana, being seen to have made it is half of making it.

The ones we cheer and the ones we blame

In my last post I wrote about Javits Frimpong, the 15-year-old shot dead on his way to school in the Bronx, and about the people who mocked his father for taking him abroad. Kofi Wayo is the other half of that story. He’s the version of leaving that we like.

We’ve always had two scripts for Ghanaians who go abroad. If you come back with Rolls-Royces, you’re a hero, and your money buys you a hearing on the radio and even a political party of your own. If it goes wrong, you should have stayed home. Wayo spent years telling Ghana what was wrong with it, and people listened partly because of where he’d been and what he’d brought back. A taxi-driving father in the Bronx doesn’t get that hearing. Same journey, different ending, and we judge the journey by the ending.

Plenty of Ghanaian parents who send a child abroad today are chasing some version of Wayo’s story, whether they’d say so or not: the hawker who left Nima and came home rich enough to say whatever he liked.

What the obituaries left out

So yes, record the party switches and the presidential bids. They happened. But Kofi Wayo’s real biography is the story of Ghanaian migration in one life: the poverty that pushes a boy out, the hard and sometimes murky work abroad, the flashy homecoming, and the uneasy way a country both admires and resents the people who come back rich. Strip America out of his story and all you’ve got left is a man who kept losing elections. Put it back, and you have a story plenty of Ghanaian families will recognise.

Some days I still think about that walk from Kanda, through Nima 441, over the Newtown bridge to Malata. The Kanda Highway has changed that route since. Wayo’s story started in that part of town, and it deserves to be told from there, not only from the party offices.

Rest well, Charles Kofi Wayo.