“The light from the bus moved uncertainly down the road until finally the two vague circles caught some indistinct object on the side of the road where it curved out front. The bus had come to a stop. Its confused rattle had given place to an endless spastic shudder, as if its pieces were held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart.”

The beginning of the novel introduces the slow pace of the book. The drudgery, uncertainty, and monotony become important indicators of the Ghanaian people’s frustrations and disappointed hopes in post-independence Ghana.

“So in a way the thing was new. Yet the stories that were sometimes heard about it were not stories of something young and vigorous, but the same old stories of money changing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased. Only this time if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old.”

One of the major themes of the novel is stagnation: even when society goes through great political upheaval, nothing really changes except for who is reaping the rewards at the top. This is a duality that is explored in the book—at the same time, there is rapid change and a complete lack of significant change. The man frequently expresses his disappointment that the new Ghanaian leaders have become so similar to the old British colonizers.

“In the intervals, between successive layers of distemper, the walls were caressed and thoroughly smothered by brown dust blowing off the roadside together with swirling grit from the coal and gravel of the railroad yard within and behind, and the corners of the walls where people passed always dripped with the engine grease left by thousands of transient hands. Every new coating, then, was received as just another inevitable accretion in a continuing story whose beginnings were now lost and whose end no one was likely to bother about.”

The layering of dirt and grime on the railway administration building represents the slow accretion of corruption and social decay in Ghana. It can also be interpreted as a symbol of the British colonial legacy: layers of dirt and grease that can never be fully stripped away.