Secret spectacles - BBC News

Azeteng was a middle child but an odd one out. Of his seven siblings, he was the only one with a different mother. He grew up on a rural police barracks in northern Ghana with his father, step-mother, and three half-sisters in two rooms. His own mother lived in central Ghana, and when Azeteng’s father was away, which was often, Azeteng felt like a stranger in his own home.

He was supposed to follow his father into the police, but Azeteng dreamed of being a spy. He spent his pocket money on James Bond films and low-budget CIA thrillers, burned on to blank DVDs by traders at the local market. On the weekends, when his father sent him to cut grass for the family’s livestock in a garden behind the police station, Azeteng would pretend he was on a mission, and tiptoe up to the door to listen in.

What he heard on those weekends killed off what little ambition he had to join the police. He heard poor women come to the office to report that their husbands had beaten them, only to be told they would have to pay for a pen to take their statement, or for petrol to drive to make arrests. The tricks were cheap, and the sums pitifully small, but they had an outsized impact on young Azeteng. When he saw prisoners whipped with sticks in their cells, he knew for sure he would not be a policeman after all.