Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (London)

August 10, 2000, Thursday

HEADLINE: Mr Otte, I presume

BYLINE: Martin Fletcher

BODY:

In Amsterdam, Henk Otte is an unemployed builder. In Ghana he is revered by thousands as a tribal chief. Martin Fletcher reports

It is Durbar Day - the biggest feast day of the year - in the ramshackle collection of thatched mud-huts, squat breezeblock buildings and rickety roadside stalls that sits on the lush green bank of Ghana's mighty Volta River and goes by the name of Mepe.

The people of the Ewe tribe have poured in from surrounding villages dressed in their most colourful costumes. The vendors have also arrived in force to peddle soft drinks and sweets, flip-flops and soap, dried fish and tomatoes. Together they have transformed Mepe's only paved road into another turbulent river - this one composed of singing, dancing, exuberant African humanity. Through this almost impassable throng inches a procession of tribal chiefs, of whom the most remarkable is Togbe Korsi Ferdinand Gakpetor II. The two dozen chiefs are all striking in their own ways. The warrior chiefs are conveyed high above the melee in palanquins. The clan chiefs and land chiefs walk beneath great twirling, tasselled parasols to shield them from the sun. They are mostly tall, lean and muscular, their smooth black skin gleaming like ebony in the intense humidity, but not Togbe Gakpetor II. He is a shortish man of considerable girth, and distinctly flabby. He also happens to be white. Like the other chiefs, Togbe (meaning "chief" or "king") Gakpetor II is attired in multicoloured robes worn in the style of a Roman emperor. He is festooned with golden necklaces and jewellery, has a golden crown perched on his curly brown hair and golden sandals on his feet. He carries a stick of elephant hair, symbolising power.

Like the other chiefs, this improbable figure is surrounded by his own crowd of chanting, dancing, reverential followers and by his own deafening band of frenzied drummers. Before him walks a woman balancing his ornate stool, or throne, on her head, and a man bearing a staff topped by a finely carved crocodile. Beneath his parasol he is flanked by his equally resplendent wife and several of her relatives who dab the perspiration from his fleshy face, fan him with their handkerchiefs and keep the riff-raff at a respectful distance.

But despite the trappings, and despite the solemn demeanour he has adopted on this day, there is nothing regal about Togbe Gakpetor II. He was not born a leader. For most of the year he is plain Henk Otte, a 43-year-old unemployed construction worker from The Netherlands who lives on disability benefit.

Most fairytales involve pretty girls from humble homes marrying handsome princes and living happily ever after. Henk's story turns that formula back to front. He is a cheery, good-natured Dutchman who met and married a beautiful Ghanaian of noble lineage and found himself a "kingdom" with tens of thousands of subjects. He is as bemused as anyone else by this extraordinary twist in his previously humdrum life. "I'm just a normal, modest person," he says. "Every day I ask myself, 'Why me?' I'll never know the answer."

In The Netherlands Henk lives in a cramped, rather messy top-floor flat in a tough, multiracial public housing project on the edge of Amsterdam. There is no lift. The flat is reached via a cold, bare stairwell with frosted-glass windows. On the day I visited, shortly before he left for Ghana, there was a crate of empty beer bottles outside the front door and an expatriate Ewe named Paul was mending the loo.

As the beat of reggae music drifted in through the window Henk recounted how he met his wife - a warm smiley woman named Patience - when she was visiting relatives in Amsterdam in 1981. They married the year after, but he had no idea that her late grandfather was a tribal chief.

Henk loved Ghana from the moment Patience first took him there in 1987. "It was a dream come true. I had always dreamt about going to Africa. It was like a homecoming," he says. "Everybody liked me. People liked me from day one. It was a big party for six weeks." The following year he fell from a platform at work, permanently damaging his back, but when they returned in 1995 Patience's uncle asked Henk to be chief of a village called Adzijo. Henk was astonished, but accepted the honour.

In preparation, he had to spend the night before his inauguration alone in a dark room full of animal heads in the grandfather's house. The following morning the elders dressed him in ceremonial robes. They said prayers, talked to their ancestors and spirits and poured alcoholic libations on the floor. Hundreds of people flocked to the day-long festivities. They ate, drank, played drums, sang war songs and slaughtered a sheep.

When Henk and his wife returned in 1997, "I was thinking I would just go to my little village, talk to my people, have an easy time and that would be it". Instead he was summoned by Mepe's paramount chief. At an even grander ceremony he was made a chief with special responsibility for development for all the 60 or so villages comprising the "Mepe traditional district". He received two plots of land and the name of his wife's revered grandfather, Ferdinand Gakpetor. Patience was made a "Queen Mother" and given the name Mamaa Awo Mepeyo Kpui II.

Henk was soon embraced not only by his new subjects in West Africa, but also by the 20,000 Ghanaians who live more than 3,000 miles away in Amsterdam. He now holds court in his living room - literally.

Amid the usual domestic clutter - sofas, a television, a pile of videos topped by The Lion King - stand two "thrones", one for him and one for Patience. His is an upright chair covered in antelope skin and brass studs and hers a traditional African stool, with a set of talking drums between. There is a thick white sheepskin rug and assorted paraphernalia, including a ceremonial sword, a carved golden staff and wooden sticks topped by tufts of elephant and sheep hair.

This is where Henk receives official visits from expatriate Ghanaians wishing to invite him to funerals, birthdays and other community events. Propped against the leg of his throne is a bottle of gin bought as a traditional tribute by one such supplicant.

Henk almost always accepts. He dons his chief's robes and jewellery and sets off into Amsterdam with a tiny retinue consisting of Paul, who drives him, and another devoted Ewe named Ben, who walks before him with his staff and acts as his interpreter. Until recently Paul's car was a tiny Japanese model, prompting a Dutch television station to label Henk "The King in a Nissan Micra".

On one occasion he attended a football match in Amsterdam between Ghana and Holland as the guest of the Ghanaian community. To the bewilderment of the Dutch fans, the Ghanaian supporters roared their approval as Henk entered the stadium in his full regalia. "That was hard," he says. "I'm a Dutchman and that can never change, but I couldn't stand there dressed like a Ghanaian chief and shout for Holland. I was thinking: 'Let it be a draw so everyone can go home happy.'"

Henk takes his duties very seriously. He keeps in touch with his subjects in Mepe by fax and telephone and hopes one day to place a computer in the middle of the township so that he can communicate by e-mail. He receives no remuneration. "The honour and respect are enough," he says.

He also tries to help his people materially, for Mepe's is largely a subsistence economy. He shows me a spare bedroom packed with a jumble of medical equipment, typewriters, wheelchairs, books, clothes and toys. All this he will ship out to Mepe when he can afford to. He also hopes to raise enough money to repair its schools.

Henk's modus operandi is to ask interviewers for donations. He has so far raised nearly Pounds 3,000, but it is a risky technique, as he has just found out. Last January he was interviewed by Associated Press. The story that went around the world portrayed him as "King Henk", the reincarnation of an Ewe monarch who had died 17 years earlier and had never been replaced. It gave the impression that he thought Mepe's elders were barmy to have given him such status, and claimed that he could go nowhere unescorted, even to the toilet.

When Henk applied for a visa for this summer's visit to Ghana the Government initially refused, saying that he had damaged the country's reputation. Only after Mepe's Paramount Chief - Joe Gecker Anipati IV - intervened with Ghana's foreign minister was Henk reprieved.

But Henk still had some explaining to do when he arrived in Mepe. The township is 100km from coastal Accra. It received electricity only three years ago, and has just three telephones, but news of the AP interview had reached there, too. Thus when some Western journalists reached Mepe on the eve of Durbar Day late last week, we were summoned to one of the more bizarre press conferences that we had ever attended.

It was held in a small, bare, whitewashed room with a cloth stretched across the window to exclude the sun. Togbe Anipati IV, the bald and bespectacled Paramount Chief, lay stretched out on his back in a reclining chair, with his fellow chiefs and counsellors squatting or sitting around him.

From his prone position the Paramount Chief informed us that Mr Otte was the development chief, not a king. The Mepe traditional district had not been leaderless for the past 17 years. It was nonsense to suggest that Mr Otte was a reincarnation of his wife's grandfather: "How can a black man reincarnate as a white person? We gave him the name because that man was also an outstanding man here."

The Paramount Chief's various declarations drew applause from his chiefs. He then asked Henk to explain himself. The Dutchman said he needed publicity to raise funds, but had been misquoted and misunderstood. "If I say that sort of thing I insult the whole of the Mepe traditional area. If I talk about Mepe, I talk with great respect," he said.

The Paramount Chief was satisfied. Mr Otte would remain a chief. "I would now plead with you to make known to the whole world that this is the situation," he urged us.

Henk loves Ghana. "I belong here. If I am here I am happy. If I am here I am home," he says, and would like to move to Mepe once his seven-year-old son Michel completes his schooling in The Netherlands.

But being a chief is tough. He can no longer crack jokes or eat and drink in public. Mepe's farmers and fishermen bring gifts of fruit or fish, but they can no longer shake his hand unless he is seated. They can no longer address him directly - only through an intermediary. "I can't do silly things in the street any more. I have to be serious," he says. For him Durbar Day had begun at 4am, when the first of four different groups of drummers arrived outside his wife's family home to wake him and pay their respects. He had then visited the late grandfather's house to say prayers and pour libations. The morning's procession had covered only a mile, but lasted at least four hours.

Throughout the afternoon he and the other chiefs sat beneath a canopy at the dusty Durbar field in an amazing array of chairs, listening to interminable speeches. That was where I left Henk. He was red in the face. His back was killing him. "I'm so hungry I could eat everybody here," he groaned. He longed to put his feet up, but first he had to process all the way home again. The next day he had to attend a three-hour church service, and the day after that the traditional canoe races on the Volta. It was all a great honour, he insisted, but "people mustn't think this is fun, or a day out in the park. It's hard work".

As I boarded an ancient, rattling minibus for the two-hour journey back to Accra, I looked back. Henk was still just visible - a lone European face in a sea of black; a good man in Africa, a white chief in a land that threw off the yoke of British rule more than 40 years ago.