The Consession

By: Don Paton

The Colony never lost its land. Two attempts at Crown land legislation failed, and what the administration got instead was a statute requiring that any concession granted by a chief be surveyed, publicly notified, enquired into by a court, and certified.
So the instrument at the centre of this novel is perfect.
Ohen Kobina Ackah III is forty three, Cape Coast educated, advised by a barrister in Sekondi, and he negotiates for eleven months and wins the rent, a road, a labour clause, a covenant to plant and a determination condition, and the court modifies two terms in his favour and seals a certificate that nobody has questioned in ninety nine years.
He also grants four hundred hectares that were never his, in the eleventh month, against written advice, for reasons he could have defended to anybody. He means to put it right. He is on the stool for another twenty two years.
On the fourteenth of August, 2026, the term expires. Efua Ackah, a land valuer of thirty six, is engaged to value the reversion, and expects an unhappy number arrived at by arithmetic.
What she finds over seven months is that some of the damage on the northern section is nine years old and not ninety, that four hundred hectares has not lawfully been the company's since 1971, that the country manager has been obstructing her for reasons that have nothing to do with any of that, and that the parcel was never her great grandfather's to grant.
And that there are men on that ground who need August to arrive with her figures unwritten, because after that date ninety nine lawful years and six criminal ones become one undifferentiated mess that nobody will ever again have a reason to separate.
Nobody in this book ever gives an order about her. There is no meeting at which anybody decides anything. The most frightening thing that happens is ninety seconds on a path in which nothing at all is said.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFWLLK1N
• ISBN13: 9798193195160
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 158 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.4" x 5.5"