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?