The Central Market of Kumasi (With Pictures!)

Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti kingdom and seat of its highest chief, the Asantehene, is Ghana’s second-largest city. It sits some 170 miles northwest of Accra, in the lush, rolling hills of central Ghana.

I boarded a bus in a dusty parking lot near Circle around 11am Thursday. Having paid the full GHC 80,000 (about $9) for the “luxury” bus, I was ready for a smooth and relaxing ride in a cool, spacious seat, just like I’ve seen in Amtrak Acela ads. As it turned out, the ride was admirably cool thanks to full-time air-con. There was also room to stretch my legs! Smooth was unfortunately out of the question due to the condition of the road; and relaxing was a pipe dream, anyway. The entire 6 hour journey (for readers without a pocket calculator handy, that’s a blistering 28mph average speed) there were Nigerian movies playing on the TV at the front of the bus. These films, well-loved by millions of Ghanaians, are incredibly low-budget and outrageous. They are the West African descendants of the Jerry Springer Show. Although they visit the usual dramatic themes—love, death, betrayal, ambition, etc—they are so (unintentionally) shoddy and over-the-top that they serve mainly to insult the tastes of the people who watch them.

Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s hard to be complimentary when these movies are being amplified over the crackling, hissing bus PA system at unimaginable volumes as we trundle through hour five down the jalopy highway between Accra and Kumasi.

But eventually we arrived and I found my way to the Central Market—the largest outdoor market in West Africa, according to the guidebooks. It is the lowest part of the city, sitting in a depression between four hills. In the picture below, taken from the hill overlooking the southwest corner, the area bordered by the tro-tro station in the immediate foreground and by the substantial buildings on the hills to each side is the market. It’s well over a square mile.

But on Thursday I hardly walked through it—it was almost sunset and I didn’t want to find myself (or lose myself) in that impossible maze in the dark. So I stayed mostly to the edge and continued around the west side, where I saw a familiar sight in the waning daylight: trees whose branches were heavy with hanging bats like big dead leaves curled up on themselves. There were many thousands of them. I watched for a few minutes and, without obvious provocation, the trees began exploding one by one in whirling clouds of chattering and flapping that merged before the setting sun.

Had it not been for the persistent ringing of the wake-up call, I probably would have slept through most of Friday morning. Burrowed under a bedspread, head buttressed by soft pillows, heavy drapes drawn, the exotic sting of cold air in my nostrils—these are pleasures well known to (and often taken for granted by) experienced business travelers. But opening my eyes in the air-conditioned cave that was 6:30am in Room 110 at the Royal Park hotel, getting up wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me.

Nonetheless, by 8am I was at the Kejetia branch of OI, which sits on one of the hills overlooking the Central Market (actually, it’s just to the left of the frame of the photo above). There I met with the branch manager who arranged for me to accompany one of the Susu collectors on her daily rounds through the market. Susu is a savings product designed specifically for petty traders where the customer commits to deposit a daily deposit of a certain size—usually between GHC 10,000 and GHC 100,000 ($1 to $10)—and a bank officer visits his business each day to collect. Cynthia, the collector I went out with Friday morning, had 125 clients to visit. She led me through the streets, into courtyards, along narrow alleys, up crumbling stairways, down impossibly crowded aisles of the market, weaving a path whose complexity I cannot describe. Theseus would have run out of thread in our labyrinth. And as we slid along our incredible route, passing thousands, tens of thousands, of dark black faces, she would stop at a stall and *pop* familiarity! A short conversation, an exchange of soft-worn bills, a line on the ledger card, and the interaction was done. As it was Friday, about half of her clients didn’t make any deposit; she explained that they wanted to save their money for the weekend, but that on Monday they would all pony up their appointed sums.

To try and give some sense of the variety of the customers’ livelihoods, here is an incomplete list:

• Rice and Stew (prepared)
• Fabric
• Rice (raw)
• Shoe adhesive and leather
• Butchers
• Vegetables
• Shoe heel wedge cutter
• Groundnut paste
• Sugar/flour/milk powder
• Toiletries
• Bread
• Cooking pots
• Candy
• Sandal manufacturer
• Machete sales
• Beaded jewelry
• Secondhand clothing
• New clothing
• Newspapers
• Ground red pepper
• Electrical supplies
• Secondhand shoes
• Luggage
• Plastic bags
• Laundry soap
• Lamps
• Embroiderer
• Legumes (raw)
• Cosmetics
• Tailor
• Sunglasses
• Radios

And that was only the morning. I left after two hours, less than half way through Cynthia’s appointed rounds, and headed back to the branch. During that time I didn’t have my camera, but I had it when I returned alone in the afternoon to try (unsuccessfully) to develop some rough mental blueprint of the market and to consider the possibility of breaking it down into smaller clusters for the purposes of our study (prognosis: impossible).

Below are some of the pictures I took. General warning: the pictures do not capture the intensity of the market, its overwhelming size and scope. In fact, they’re completely deceiving because they are silent, self-contained, and individual: single stalls, tables, or people. But to stand there is to be inundated by many: many bodies, many smells, many colors, many sights, many sounds. Maybe it will suffice to say that, every time I snapped a picture, there was someone just inches outside the frame calling out, “Hey! Obruni! What are you doing?” or grabbing my arm, or laughing, or making a sale, or otherwise creating waves in the fabric of space-time. Serious warning: there are five shots from the butchering shed. Why so many gruesome pictures of raw meat? For two reasons: (1) the butchers were, on the whole, the nicest group of people I met at the market, happy to talk and let me take pictures. Go figure. (2) I’ve never seen anything like the inside of that shed, and suspect most of you haven’t either.

Shoe Alley: The first place I walked through with Cynthia. I can’t believe I managed to find it again in the afternoon. It is accessed by going through dark passage at the back of the dusty courtyard of a nondescript building on a side street. About 300 yards long and five feet wide, it climbs up a hill beside the market (of which it is not technically a part). On both sides are stalls with floor-to-ceiling lattices hung with leather shoes and sandals.

My Favorite Pepper Seller: This woman called to me and spoke very good English. We talked for a little while and she agreed that I could take a picture of her and her peppers. After I snapped it, she smiled and asked, “Where’s the money?” I told her I wouldn’t pay her, but that she could have some candy (I had just bought a big bag of individually-wrapped caramels). She said, “Okay!” and grabbed the bag out of my hand, emptied half of it onto her lap, and laughed the heartiest laugh I’ve heard in a long time. I screwed up my face and said “Oh!” but the women sitting at the tables near her saw what happened and started howling, too. There was nothing else for me to do, so I laughed so hard I almost cried.

Butchering Shed Pictures

What’s Inside a Cow?: At bottom left is the lung, bottom center is the gizzard (the flesh inside is incredibly deep ruby red), dominating the center are the intestines, the furry bag at right is one of the stomachs (turned inside out), the bubbly-looking stuff at top left is mostly fat (I think), and the blurry part being sliced at top center is the penis (which looks like a 3’x 2” tapeworm). Hungry?

Fat, and The Butchers Who Sell It: The greenish-white lumps at right are portions of pure beef fat.

Goat Heads: Mainly for soup, though I’m told that people eat the brain separately.

A Man and His Cow Head Halves: Maybe gratuitous, but this is here on a table along with everything else. And the man pictured, who produced this incredible gore, was one of the nicest people I spoke to all day.

The Whole Damned Thing: The man at this table let me take a picture, but couldn’t tell me what these are used for. I have to guess this one weighed at least 30 lbs. Who’s carrying that home for dinner? This was probably the hardest thing for me to look at all day. The skin is rough, like sandpaper.

No More Butchering Shed Pictures

Cloth and More Cloth: This one stall was bursting with so much color that I couldn’t pass by without taking a picture (or two).

The staggering variety of the single cloth stall above illustrates a difficulty that I have hardly begun to digest. The thousands of aisles of stalls, the myriad skills at work and products for sale, the impossible mass of humanity in that low-lying market in Kumasi—it is a composition of individuals so numerous that any attempt to grasp them is immediately confounded. But cutting a razor-thin path through that mayhem I came face to face with hundreds of them, exchanged words, made real human contact, and continued on, knowing that I could never find my way back. How numerous, and how brief, those sparks—and how much more numerous the sparks that were not struck, the aisles I never did (and never will) walk down…

Thomas Wolfe says:

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?”

But my feeling is not one of grief, or of missed opportunities; but rather of dizzying awe at the inescapable randomness of my jaunt through this continent. And the detail in this infinitesimally thin slice—does it even make sense to speak of a whole pie? Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, and standing inside Kumasi’s vast Central Market one couldn’t disagree. But then, climbing the hill back to the Kejetia branch, the particular fading into the general, the swarm of activity blurring continuously into a nebulous cloud and eventually into a bounded whole, the deception of sight and the conceit of knowing.

Every night at dusk the bats fly, millions of them, over the dispersing atoms of the market while the place folds in on itself and lays down to sleep.

The Silent Guardian

Warning: the following took place here in Accra, but is not expressly about Accra. Is this a welcome increase in the scope of this blog’s reportage? Or am I just overstepping, wandering onto subjects about which I’m not qualified to speak at all? I apologize in advance since it’s likely to be the latter.

Tuesday night I ate dinner at Sarah’s apartment. Not, loyal readers, the Buddhic Sarah of OI fame whose profile appeared in a prior installment of this blog, but rather Sarah the recent Yale graduate and Fulbright scholar. She has a beautiful apartment in the upscale Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra that she shares with five other young ladies. We ate a delightful meal of chicken, potato pancakes, and tomato-and-bread salad, kicked back, drank wine, and generally savored the high life in all its temperature-controlled splendor.

After dinner had finished the doorbell rang and it was Ryan, one of the six US Marines stationed in Accra—guarding the embassy—and the boyfriend of one of Sarah’s roommates. We found ourselves in a conversation that somehow meandered onto the topic of non-lethal weapons. I had recently read a BBC article on the Silent Guardian (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm), a weapon designed mostly for crowd control that has been recently unveiled by the US military. It’s a large Humvee-mounted dish that focuses a high-energy beam on a point up to 500m away. The beam penetrates clothing and the first .5mm of human skin, and produces an excruciating burning sensation which subsides immediately when the beam is removed. It leaves no physical trace. Claims about its effects have been verified by journalists who volunteered to be shot by it while it was demonstrated at an Air Force base in Georgia.

I mentioned the article to Ryan, who had not heard of the Silent Guardian but thought it sounded “cool”. He chuckled and advised me that I should never volunteer to be a test subject for a non-lethal weapon. I didn’t need much convincing.

He went on to describe the general purpose of non-lethal weapons and he mentioned a few examples that he had seen or experienced firsthand. “’Non-lethal’ just means ‘pain-compliance’,” he said—that is, distinct from impositions of force designed to incapacitate a target. When you shoot a would-be attacker in the leg (or in the head) the idea is to render him physically incapable of harming you, but the pain-compliance approach seeks to make the would-be attacker decide not to harm you. In the former, pain is a side effect; in the latter, it is a means to an end.

Consider the following from John Alexander, formerly of the US Army Special Operations and now an advocate for non-lethal weapons: “There is a misconception that war is about killing. War is about the imposition of will.”

Indeed, the US military has devised a number of creative ways to impose its will without killing: mace, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the Silent Guardian are some examples. Ryan discussed the first three, in whose application he has been trained, with clinical matter-of-factness. Mace—actually concentrated red pepper—inflicts extraordinary pain but is completely non-lethal (there have been no recorded deaths from it). The 15% concentrate used by the military is enough to cause burning “bad enough that if you had a gun you’d want to shoot yourself,” but the sensation goes away shortly after the spray is washed off. (If the spray is water-based it can be washed off with running water; but if it is oil-based it bonds to skin and you need special soap.) If it gets in your eyes it severely distorts vision but does not permanently impair it. Ryan would know, because every Marine must be a sprayee before he can be a sprayer, and so he has been shot directly in the face with the stuff and made to guess how many fingers his C.O. was holding up. Looking on the bright side, one can at least be happy that they use the low test (15%) version—100% concentrate “would melt your skin straight off.”

Tear gas is similar to mace, but is neither as strong nor as non-lethal—there have been deaths from exposure to very high concentrations of the gas. Typically, though, it is used on large crowds in open areas, while mace is usually applied at close range; its effects are comparatively mild. Ryan suggested that they ought to make a similar crowd-control device with an oscillating sprinkler mounted on a Humvee and connected to a tank of mace inside, thus combining the broad application strategy with the increased pain (read “compliance”).

Finally there are the rubber bullets or, more broadly, any projectile shot from a non-lethal launcher. This is an air-powered rifle with a .62” barrel (like a paintball gun) that shoots missile-shaped projectiles. These may be designed to burst and distribute a payload (e.g. mace or tear gas), or they may simply be made of hard rubber. The weapon is rated non-lethal for 3-150 yards so long as you don’t shoot anybody in the face. While he was on guard duty at a base in the Middle East, Ryan was stationed on a tower overlooking the chainlink fence that marked the boundary of the installation. They had been instructed to keep the fence clear; so whenever someone was too close, or leaning directly on the fence, the Marines would yell to him to move away and would eventually shoot him if he refused. Normally tower guards are armed with traditional rifles but eventually they acquired a couple of non-lethal launchers. Referring to the military leadership, he remarked, “I guess they said it was more humane.”

He mockingly emphasized the word just as people mockingly emphasize other poorly-defined or generally ridiculous terms from the vocabulary of political correctness. Ultimately his attitude was that such a nebulous concept was ill-adapted to the strict utilitarian calculus of military decision-making, and so it ought to be abandoned up front. If nothing else, this seems, to me, (brutally) honest.

But the untraceable and excruciating pain of a concentrated energy beam as a means of persuasion? This is dark magic and finds application in places where blatant military force has generally been deemed inappropriate: places where, when it is put to use despite general condemnation, the best way to fight back is to make public some record of the brutality. An unseemly demonstration or a tight-lipped suspect under interrogation? Zap and it’s a memory—and who can tell the story of the suffering under the ray? There is no scar to testify to the ordeal.

The ease with which Ryan imagined these scenarios suggested that the military has in mind uses of precisely this sort. Imagine the irony: you might be at a rally protesting the use of these weapons when you hear, from the Humvee behind the barricades, the mechanical whine of the Silent Guardian’s dish pivoting to focus on you…

But one hopes such fears won't be realized, so long as we all stay in line. Reassuring, no?

Ashaiman Market: The Top Three

I have to interrupt the other entry I’m writing now for the following urgent report.

Background: The greater Accra metropolitan area, which is usually referred to simply as “Accra”, is actually composed of the city proper and a number of outlying towns. It stretches along the Atlantic coast from the western city limits of Accra to the port at Tema, some 40km to the east. The northern boundary of the city is marked by Achimota forest in the west and Ashaiman in the east. OI recently opened a shiny new branch in Ashaiman and has begun serving the community there. The town of 100,000 is a sprawling jumble of wooden shacks and two-story cinderblock buildings. Many of its residents are petty traders and the economic activity of the town centers around a large outdoor market with long rows of vendors selling goods of all kinds, from produce to clothing to flatware to radios.

I went to the branch there today to talk about incorporating its service area into the interest rate sensitivity study. After meeting with some of the members of the credit department I went out for a loop around the market to try and get a feel for the place. Besides the bright piles of red and green peppers, tables of pungent grilled fish, baggies of sugar and cassava flour, calls of “White man!” and “Krasi Obruni!” (Krasi means Sunday-born, and Sunday-borns are supposed to be lucky. One is also considered lucky to be white. Thus, one is frequently called out as Krasi Obruni.), there were three things that stood out as exceptional:

1) Up against a wooden kiosk was a drift of wicker baskets filled with a variety of things, and on the left side of the drift were three baskets that seemed to contain strange dried animal parts. On closer inspection I found goat skulls with hair still attached; frighteningly large birds’ heads; lizard skulls with rows of shiny white teeth; an entire basket of whole dried salamanders and chameleons whose leathery skin had become delicate like phylo dough and was torn in some places, revealing withered organs inside; and some animals more recently dead that might have been roadkill. I knew that sheep and goat heads are sometimes used to make stock for soups, but I’ve never seen a chameleon-liver pate on a Ghanaian menu, so I had to ask.

The animals are there for use in traditional medicine. They might be ground up and put into salves, balms, or pastes, or they might be ingredients in a remedy to be ingested. Although I wanted to ask more, and perversely wanted to see what strange carcasses were deeper inside the baskets, the smell was a little much, and I made to leave. The woman I had been talking to, seeing that I was getting skittish, made a face of mock disbelief: “Oh! You don’t want to buy anything, white man?” she asked with a kind smile. “Here! I dash you a bird skull!” She picked it up, six inches long with the beak, and presented it.

“Ahh…thank you. I have too many at home, though, already.”

“Oh! Then take a whole bird!” And now she produced one of the roadkill-looking carcasses, small and squashed and dirty, and held it between her thumb and forefinger, making as if to pass it off to me.

She laughed at my involuntary grimace of disgust and let me turn to leave. “Next time, white man!”

2) In a corner of a less-crowded alley near the back of the market a dark man sat on the ground with his legs fully extended to each side in a right angle. In the empty space in front of him was a pile of charcoal. In Ghana charcoal (i.e. wood that has been buried in sand and partially burned, leaving black chunks that can smolder at high heat for hours) is a common cooking fuel. It is sold in sacks and put to use in simple stoves made from old car wheels or sheet metal. In order to fit in the stoves, the logs of charred wood that are dug up from the burning pits must be broken into fairly uniform pieces, and that was this man’s job. His arms, legs, shirt, pants, and feet were completely black. He was so black that the silty dark grey dust from the rough surface of the alleyway that settled on him, kicked up by passersby, stood out like flour against the skin of his feet. I watched him for just a few seconds as he broke down big chunks from the pile in front of him into smaller chunks that he placed in a pile to his side. The ground on which he sat was pure black, too.

But he wore a huge, broad hat of woven dried palm fronds that kept his face and chest in shadow; and it was light brown and clean as a whistle.

3) A little further on from the charcoal man, along a narrower portion of the same alley, an older woman was sitting on a bench against a side wall. I was walking towards her and when I was a few steps away we made eye contact and smiled at each other. Since she was sitting, as I walked closer to her I had to look down to hold her gaze, and just when I came even with her I realized that she was holding a baby. In fact, she was breastfeeding the baby from her fully exposed right breast. You’d think that I would notice such a thing when I first saw her from no more than ten feet away—but I can only suppose that my brain didn’t really process the scene because the proportions were off: her right breast was (not kidding!) as large as the baby itself. And it wasn’t a very small baby. I think her breast was more than twice as big as my head. That’s just incredible.

Don’t you wonder what your Top Three would have been, had you walked through Ashaiman market today?

Thursday of last week I returned home from work by taxi and pulled up to the gate to my house. As we pulled to a stop I noticed that across the street, in front of another house’s gate, stood a group of school children still in their uniforms. The uniforms are brown bottoms—shorts for boys and bibbed overall-style dresses for girls—and light yellow collared tops for all. I recognized most of them from the neighborhood. There were about seven of them, and I’d say they ranged in age from six to ten. All bunched up together, they seemed poised like a group of carolers waiting for someone to answer the door.

Sure enough, as soon as got out of the taxi, they began chanting and pumping their fists: “Serious! Serious! Serious! Serious!” (Ghanaians say it SEER-yus.) It wasn’t my first time being chanted at here, but in past instances the cry has been “Obruni!” (oh-BROO-ni), and it has always seemed better not to encourage it by reacting. But my interest was piqued; why was I “serious”? As I fumbled with the key in the gate I weighed my options.

I turned to them and said loudly across the road, “Hey! Who is Serious?”

“You! You are Serious!”

“I thought I was Jake. Why am I Serious?”

One of the older girls broke away from the group and ran across the street towards me, beaming a wide smile. She came to face me, stood up straight, and hollered: “Cause you’re a ‘ARDWORKIN man!”

At this punchline, she and the rest of the group burst into rollicking laughter. The others cascaded across the street and crowded around for high-fives and a couple minutes of general merriment. It was, without a doubt, the best I’ve felt in weeks.

Lest anyone think I am acquiring a devoted fan club here, I will note that nothing like this had occurred before or has occurred since. It was, as far as I can tell, a one-time thrill. I still have no idea why they were all assembled there in front of the neighbor’s gate on that Thursday afternoon, looking as if they were anxiously awaiting my arrival. In fact, I don’t even know whether or not they were making fun of me. I can only guess from their giddiness that, at the time, I was a goofy and incongruous neighborhood character who needed to be addressed. Whatever the motivation, the encounter made me feel light as a balloon. I’ll take a Ghanaian under-13 cheering section any day of the week.

Also from the sublime/ridiculous file: On Tuesday’s ride home from work Oti saved a kitten and nearly killed a tro-tro full of people. We were driving down a narrow section of High St (the main road) that runs through South Osu, a dense town area. Like most improved roads in Accra, this one is bordered on both sides by open cement sewers about 1.5’ wide and 2’ deep. It was nearly 7:00, and completely dark. The dim headlights of Oti’s Opel Astra illuminate only a few feet in front of the car, so even at a modest 25mph objects in the road ahead seem to materialize out of thin air.

One such object was a little grey-and-black striped kitten that appeared in our path, scurrying across the road from left to right with back bowed in a moving crouch. Oti let out a muffled Oooh! and, eyes on the cat, swerved to the left so we could straddle it between the tires. When we swerved I looked up and my eyes met the headlights of an oncoming tro-tro rambling down the road as only a tro-tro can. To help you appreciate the way these vehicles move, the way they rattle and bounce and list to one side, the baldness of their tires, their utter ricketiness, I will try to post a video soon. It suffices for now to say that it’s not the kind of vehicle into whose path you’d want to swerve.

But swerve we did, and the tro-tro responded with its own evasive maneuver. With the agility of a three-legged cow it lurched to the side and teetered on the edge of the sewer, its topheavy bulk leaning precariously over the ditch, until in an instant we passed each other and it lurched back towards the center of the road. As we continued driving in opposite directions, Oti and I could not help but hear the fading spasm of yelling and the wheezing honk of the tro-tro’s overused horn, which was quickly drowned out by the rattling of our own vehicle. The whole event lasted maybe four seconds.

Oti ensured the incident’s induction into the Hall of Absurdity with his elegantly ambiguous summary: “Oh! We didn’t hit it!”

You lose some, you win some.

A week ago today I was back at Champs. It was trivia night, and I had promised Chang (a recent graduate of U. Chicago and OI’s newest intern) I’d show her what little I knew about the social opportunities for ex-pats here. It seemed like an obvious choice; the place was packed as usual and there was hardly a Ghanaian to be found, save the wait staff. Our motley crew won the tequila round and took home the coveted second place honors (GHC 200,000 prize, with no obligation to run the contest the following week), and in the process ate an impressive quantity of greasy food. Enchanting!

But Friday I suffered from post-Champs disorder (PCD). This is the only time I have known a restaurant to poison its patrons with such regularity that the infection has earned a name of its own. Yet Champs remains a popular spot, and even claims many experienced PCD sufferers as regulars. (By now, one assumes, they know their way around the menu.) For the record, this uncanny client retention attests more to the dearth of alternatives than to Champs’ “delightful ambience”, “hip, attractive crowd”, or “distinctive character”. There’s only one trivia game in town.

PCD is a combination of food poisoning and self-condemnation. Inevitably, the discomfort of a digestive tract gone haywire is compounded by the knowledge that you gambled and lost. Frequently exacerbating the latter is the fact that PCD seems impervious to the “safe-ordering” prophylaxis. That is, although you order fried chicken strips and French fries while the rest of your table opts for octopus sashimi, you’re the one bent over a toilet the next morning. (For those who like the taste of irony, though, this can actually be a mitigating factor.)

Friday morning my alarm sounded at the usual 6:15, and the act of sitting up seemed to crack open a delicate capsule of hot, black bile lodged somewhere in my lower back. Its contents diffused immediately through my midsection and, vaguely aware of what was in store (but hoping it was a fluke), I went back to sleep immediately. I woke up again at 8:00 to throbbing kidneys that somehow powered a belt of hurting like an evil heating pad all the way around my midsection. But the pains were not as sharp as they had been earlier, so I tentatively got dressed, took some yerba mate tea bags—“Tones stomach and aids digestion,” says the package—from home, and headed for the office.

I hadn’t sweated through my first cup of tea at work when I knew the day was over. Quickly I gathered my things and made for the exit, but halfway down the stairs I had to divert into the bathroom (better there than in the taxi home, anyway). Then at home I laid flat on my back on the foam mattress, alternately sweated and slept, watched a bootleg DVD of The Departed—probably not the best treatment for nausea—and then spent some time focusing in on the visceral feeling of sickness: What hurts exactly? And how does it hurt? I drifted off to sleep staring inwardly at the glowing iron spikes in my kidneys.

Whether it was due to the above exercise or to the nature of PCD itself I cannot say, but by Saturday morning I was much improved, and by noon I was right as rain.

On Tuesday the sun was scorching, it was dusty, I haggled with a taxi driver for the fare to work (Oti has been MIA for over a week), ate my usual egg-and-bread breakfast, and settled into a day at the office like any other. Around 10 Mavis, Stanley, and I set out for Makola, the site of last week’s massive sacking by the AMA.

The streets still seem empty, but the market has begun to grow back like the branches of a harshly pruned forsythia. From the storefronts lining the streets tabletop stands and blankets sprawled with goods emerge like spry green shoots. For sale are bags of candy, plastic wastebaskets, lanterns, soap, hand-wrapped baggies of powdered indigo dye, wheelie suitcases. A few young women sashay down the sidewalks with big plastic tubs on their heads, mostly selling the ubiquitous half-liter sachets of water. “Jaaaaahhz pyooAHtahhhhhhh….” (“Just pure water.”) Because my eyes wander, and maybe because I’m a lanky, gawky obruni, people call me out while I walk. “Hey white man! What do you want? Come take a look.”

It is buoyant, vital commerce in the hot and dusty streets. I am sweating through my shirt. The roads themselves are rough and strewn with mango-sized chunks of cement and rock. In some spots the sidewalk has caved in to form treacherous, gaping holes down into sludge-filled sewers. But there is no problem, no contradiction there; nor is there any sense of a problem solved or an obstacle overcome. The hazards are as sure as sunrise. They are not cause for complaint, and they do not require repair—they hardly demand attention. (In fact, it appears as if I’m the only one who thinks they are “hazardous” at all.) The water-selling women’s feet seem to know instinctively where to step.

Meanwhile, I’m engaged in a Frogger-like meander: fast in the straightaways, awkward lateral steps, queer shuffling in narrow bottlenecks. I have felt this way before in some train stations, glancing nervously between the departures board and the track signs, squinting, looking again, doubling back. All around is a flowing stream of daily commuters who glide effortlessly to the right track at the right time. It’s like watching fish in water.

I think that’s one reason it’s so enjoyable to come to Makola: here the characters are entirely in their element—the adaptation is complete. What appears to the outsider as an impediment is to the expert no such thing, having been smoothed by the force of repetition. And since it is the individual who adapts to the market (and not vice versa), the result is the resident population of savants who—each one with miraculous nonchalance—make up the buzzing, chattering whole. Along the invisible time-smoothed grooves of the marketplace flows the stuff of daily life; and what appears chaotic is actually ordered, even efficient.

But it is certainly not efficient like a Target Greatland with its acres of aisles of shelves of individually-wrapped and barcoded goodies. No, this model’s efficiency (and magic) lies in its immediacy. It is more like a stock exchange than a store. No prices; just deals. Supply and demand are spontaneous, organic forces to be coordinated by hand. So here one truly makes deals—makes them from nothing at all. And that, surely, is another reason why walking here is invigorating: one can’t help but observe hundreds of these exchanges, and so one constantly bears witness to that great human alchemy—mutual gains from trade.

I guess that’s just a fancy (obnoxious?) way to say that it feels good to see people bargain, agree, and exchange. It feels good to be yelled at by a lady who is trying to sell me a huge (like two of my fists!) live land snail. It feels good not to step into the fetid knee-deep sludge.

At the risk of oversimplifying (it wouldn’t be the first time), Makola this morning—bright noise, snails, rebirth from the sacking, indigo dye—seems to be the living and continually-unfolding expression of a single fact: You go into the marketplace to get the things you need. What could be simpler? Just say it—it even sounds plain. But here it is, articulated in a hundred colors and a thousand sounds, the kingdom from the mustard seed.

Hell, maybe it just feels good to be out of the office and in a setting where I can’t even pretend to know what I’m doing. Whatever it is, or was, it seemed to be in abundant supply; and I plan to return and fill my cup as needed. Who knew the elixir was so close at hand?