by CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Before dawn, when most New Yorkers are fast asleep, Isaac and Elizabeth Osei have already been working for hours. On a recent morning, Mr. Osei drove his wife from New Jersey to the half-abandoned outer blocks of Midtown Manhattan to oversee the 4:30 a.m. transfer of their fleet of 50 taxis. With Ms. Osei leading the way and a sliver of moon still hanging in the sky, they scouted three square blocks to make sure all of their taxis had been picked up by drivers. Then, over the screeches emanating from auto-body shops and the smell of gasoline wafting from a Hess station crammed with cabs, they surveyed their troubled taxis just as sunlight faintly appeared over Manhattan.
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After arriving in Accra, the capital of Ghana, he will don a delicate gold crown, take a seat on his throne or stool and work 20-hour days out of his 10-room palace. Rather than focus on taxi tune-ups and inspections, Mr. Osei will assume judicial and other powers, like mediating family disputes. Ms. Osei, who is happiest talking about chassis and alternators, will have to fulfill the responsibilities of a chief’s wife by running women’s groups in each town and helping with preparations for a 1,000-person banquet in September, at which Mr. Osei will bless the yam harvest. Residents are waiting to eat the yams until after Nana Gyensare’s arrival.
“Here we are very busy — but at least I don’t have my people around me here, because I am more free,” Mr. Osei, a stout and succinct man more prone to chuckles than words, said of his life in New York. He nodded at his wife and added, “At times, she gets angry because she can’t even see me.”
Many immigrants in New York lead double lives: restaurant dishwasher in Queens and family patriarch in Mexico, or manicurist in Midtown and financial provider back in China. But Mr. Osei’s story is far more extreme. It’s as if he spends summer vacation with the hybrid responsibilities of a mayor and a royal, said Richard Rathbone, a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies who has done research near the towns Mr. Osei oversees.
As Ghana has grown more stable in recent years, Professor Rathbone said, emigrants are returning and accepting these chiefly roles. They have many of the social responsibilities of politicians, but they also carry the historical gravitas of a royal title.
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