R.S. is a Jehovahs Witness, a tall, thin young man who feels intensely the cold of the English winter. He comes from Ghana, where his parents, who belonged to different ethnic groups, were split apart by the hostility between their extended families and separated, while he was still a small boy.
His mother, accused of being a witch by her own family, died two years ago, leaving a younger daughter who is blind and disabled. After her death, the girl was taken into care. R.S., the only other child, went in search of his father.
My father left my mother when I was only three, so I did not remember him. But I knew the village in the north that he came from. After my sister was taken away, I took a bus and went to look for him. I found him very quickly.
He was a farmer, and he was living in the village with many members of his family. He took me to live with him. But soon, some of his brothers and their families objected to the way that I had no tribal marks down the sides of my face. They demanded that I should be given them. They also said that I should be circumcised. My father and his other brothers wanted them to leave me alone.
One day, my father went off to his fields to work. Some of the men in the family came to get me and put me into a small hut, like a cage, with walls of baked earth and a corrugated tin roof. They locked me inside. Then they came back with a very sharp knife, which they heated until it was red hot and then dipped in oil. When they tried to mark me, I fought. The knife slipped and went into my neck. (R.S. shows scars from the knife wounds.)
I kept on fighting and they couldnt hold me still, and the knife kept cutting into me. (R.S. has scars on his right shoulder and on his left leg.) Then they beat me and dragged me along the ground.
R.S.s father never returned. Later it turned out that he had been killed in a fight with his brothers over R.S.s fate. For a week, R.S. was kept in the hut. From time to time, members of the family appeared. He was badly beaten, but resisted being marked. He was kept naked.
The family disagreement continued, with some brothers advocating forcible marking, while the others demanded that R.S. be released. One evening, under cover of darkness, a young man from the family appeared outside the hut and opened the door. He told R.S. that he should escape, and get as far away from the village as possible. R.S., still naked, ran towards the village.
I was standing by the road, not knowing what to do, when the driver of a lorry leaving the village stopped beside me. I told him what had happened, and he gave me something to wear and offered me a lift to Accra, saying that he too had had a fight with his family and he knew what it was like.
When we got to Accra he took me to his home and I stayed there several days. He said that he would help me, but that I had to swear to pay him money once I started earning some. He made a cut in my wrist, then a cut in his own, and mixed our blood together. Then he mixed in some ashes, and one of my hairs. Then we drank it and I had to swear on my life that I would pay him back money.
The driver had a friend who was an agent. Between them, they arranged a passport and a ticket for Britain. R.S. travelled with the agent and when they reached Heathrow, they took a bus and then a car to Telford, where the agent had another Ghanaian friend. Two days later, the agent left, taking R.S.s passport with him. He did not return.
The agents friend left the house every morning, telling R.S. that he should never go outside or he would be arrested. So I stayed there all day, waiting for the agent to come back. I cleaned the house, ironed, and did all the cooking. I stayed there for nearly a year. I never once went out. I kept hoping the agent would come back and tell me what to do.
The day came when his host in Telford told R.S. that he was going to America; he would be closing the house and not coming back. I put what I had, one extra shirt and a pair of trousers, into a plastic bag and walked into the street. It was a street full of shops and I wandered up and down. It was July so quite warm. I didnt know where to go. Some police came up to me and took me with them to the police station. I told them my story, but they didnt believe me. They put me in detention.
R.S.s experience of exile has been bewildering and lonely. His application for asylum, made while in detention, has been turned down. He himself knows that the hostility shown towards him by his fathers family does not amount to state persecution and, having now been alone in Britain for nearly two years, he admits that his life might be better in Ghana.
But R.S. is full of fears. Jehovahs Witnesses in Ghana, he says, are not well treated. He cannot return to his fathers village, and his mothers family want nothing to do with him. He is haunted by the blood ceremony with the driver who lent him the money to come to England, and terrified that he will find him and punish him for not sending back any money.
Most of all, however, he feels himself to be utterly alone. He carries a mobile phone around with him, as do many of the refugees; it is, apart from his spare trousers and shirt, his only possession. But no one ever rings me up, he says.
