The first time I saw Cape Town, I was seventeen. The plane dipped through clouds and I pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Below, a city unfurled around the grand Table Mountain, its flat top cut sharply against the sky. The shores gleamed with quartz sand that shimmered like spilled milk. Ocean breezes scented the air with salt and adventure. A thrill ran through me: this was a new chapter.
On campus, my Ghanaian accent and kente shirt made me stand out. But Prof. Adomako, a visiting Ghanaian physicist, spotted the Bosomtwe stone peeking from my bag and walked over with a grin. "You're from Kumasi, no?" he asked in Twi. I nodded, surprised. He was a kind man who had studied in Accra and Adelaide, and recognized his homeland in me. "Keep your roots as you reach for the stars," he said.
He took an antique book from his shelf and pointed to a passage on cosmic radiation. We spoke of Ananse the Spider spinning worlds of stories, and of how a stone from the sky might fit into our research.
One friend I found was Thandi, a Cape Town astrophysics student. One evening she and I lay back on the campus quad, tracing constellations with our fingers. She told me Xhosa tales of the Southern Cross and the Spear of Orion. In return, I shared Anansi myths of the Northern sky. Under that shared sky, it felt as if the whole universe listened to us. We laughed at how all our myths pointed to the same stars.
In the corner of my dorm room I stuck a small Adinkra sticker: Gye Nyame — "Except God." I whispered a prayer to Nyame every night before sleeping, thinking of the hushed skies over Kumasi. My dorm mates thought me strange, but I slept soundly.
On weekends I climbed Table Mountain and gazed out at Robben Island far below. The wind up there felt ancient, and the sea whispered of freedom. I remembered Sankofa and the silent strength of Mandela on that distant rock. I whispered quietly, "Nyame yɛ" — God is good. For a moment I felt all my old weights lift off me.
I attended lectures under bay trees and worked late in the physics lab. Every week I felt a pull between logic and lore. Sometimes, without warning, oscilloscopes would jitter and readouts flicker. "Obasi," whispered Prof. Adomako one evening, noticing the anomaly, "the machine is wondering what you are." He chuckled kindly.
One afternoon, I cradled a coil of copper wound around basalt. "This will focus the field," Prof. Adomako said, adjusting the gauges with care. He left me to run one last calibration. The machine hummed and gentle lights pulsed. Outside, a storm gathered over the mountain. In that charged air, my Bosomtwe stone throbbed in my pocket as if it, too, sensed the moment's gravity.
I closed my eyes and recalled one of Nana's Akan proverbs: "Nya asɛm a, bɔ suban" — a wise man considers before acting. I steadied the controls. The lab fell silent except for the faint electronic sigh of the lens bending light in mid-air. Somewhere in the coils I felt a connection, as if the mountain's ancient presence and the sea's endless depth converged within me. I opened my eyes and whispered, "This is just the beginning."