BBC News Magazine
One recent Sunday afternoon, amid the yellow dust, sunshine and traffic fumes of Accra, I met a man who told me that Colonel Gaddafi was the messiah.
The man's name was Karim Mohamed, an ebullient 45-year-old tailor who had spent three years living and working in Libya before the fall of Gaddafi.
He was married with three children, and lived in a six-bedroom house that he had built himself using the money he had earned in Libya.
"In Libya, everybody was happy," he told me. "In America, there are people sleeping under bridges. In Libya, never. There was no discrimination, no problems, nothing. The work was good and so was the money. My life is all thanks to Gaddafi. He was the messiah of Africa."
Karim was far from unusual in this part of Ghana. As we talked, two other men sauntered over to join the conversation, and turned out to share his passion for the late Libyan dictator.
"Gaddafi was a nice guy," said Mustafa Abdel Momin, a cheerful, 35-year-old construction worker who had worked in Libya for seven years. "He never cheated anybody. He was perfect. The best."
"What was the point of killing him?" added Eliyas Yahya, the local imam, who had a round hat, a pointed beard and a very loud voice. "You kill someone to solve the problem and now the problem is worse. Why kill Gaddafi?"
Gaddafi may have been a ruthless autocrat, but for years the relative affluence and stability of his rule was a godsend to migrants desperate for work. My new friends were among the tens of thousands of Africans who had used money earned in Libya to break themselves from the cycle of poverty at home.
As we talked in the shade of a small grocery shop, the evidence was all around us. This was a district in the north of the city known locally as the Libyan Quarter, home to a community of Ghanaians who had made their money under the Gaddafi regime.
The ramshackle houses that characterise many parts of Accra were nowhere to be seen here. Instead there were modern, spacious residences lining the orange dirt road, stretching into the distance.
