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.