Volta

The weekend of March 17 was Mom’s last in Ghana. She took the bus from Cape Coast to Accra on Friday evening. Saturday morning we went to the tro tro station and boarded a car bound for Akosombo, a town at the southern tip of the Volta Region.

Covering 8,502 sq. km., Lake Volta (seen from space here) is the world’s largest manmade lake in terms of surface area. It was formed in 1965 when Ghana’s government dammed the Volta River at Akosombo to build a hydroelectric power station there. As the valley flooded, 80,000 villagers were relocated to higher ground. Today, just a couple of winding miles downstream from the dam, the river is wide and smooth. It looks undisturbed.

Our first stop was a few miles west of the wide and smooth river, at the Krobo-Odumase market, famous for its beads. From the paved road it looks like a typical town market with produce, secondhand clothes, meat, household items, shoes, and groceries; but it extends far back on vast cement slabs and on dirt paths, a jumble of homemade tables and stalls and blankets and baskets. We arrived eventually at the bead section, which was mostly vacant although Saturday was supposed to be the market day. The vendors that had come, though, stood behind tables laden with bright bracelets and necklaces.

Most Ghanaian beads are rough glass cylinders, about ¾” long and ½” wide, of a single background color painted with bright geometric designs. They almost feel like clay to the touch. Judging by their inclusion in the general town market—as opposed to in a handicraft/souvenir bazaar designed specifically for tourists—I have to assume there is some local demand for the goods; but this week was the first time I have noticed a Ghanaian wearing any jewelry of that kind. He was a taxi driver and he had a bracelet of chunky yellow beads with red and green zig-zags.

Besides the standard fare, some vendors also had beads made of smooth batiked cow bone. Others had smooth glass beads with bright color inside like cat’s eye marbles. These were imported from Mali, the Gambia, Italy, and China. Still others had necklaces of smooth grey river stones—each about the size of a Silly Putty container—that must have weighed a few pounds in total.

From the bead market we made our way to the Aylo’s Bay Hotel on the west bank of the Volta River, a few miles downstream from the dam and about 500m upstream from the Adomi Bridge, whose sturdy steel arch is pictured on the front of the GHC 2,000 note. The water was smooth and warm and, incredibly, flowed the wrong way. Even with the dam so close and the ocean more than sixty miles away, the river was tidal.

There was a good reason why the outflow from the only dam on the world’s largest manmade lake was insufficient to overcome the push of a distant tide, and this we learned the following morning. We rode a tro tro from the hotel a few miles to the town of Akosombo. It was Sunday morning and the place was largely deserted. Even the tro tro station was mostly empty. A few taxi drivers laid in wait for the infrequent arrivals and some tro tro drivers and mates slept on the bench seats of their vehicles.

A taxi driver told us that a director of the Volta River Authority, the organization that serves as operator and gatekeeper of the Akosombo dam, had recently come through the station and had gone to the VRA office just around the corner. If we wanted to see the dam, we’d need to get a pass from him, so we walked to the office and were received by a young man who looked to be about my age. He invited us inside and began to arrange a tour.

The two-room office was full of reports, papers, photos, and charts. On one wall of the first room was a whiteboard with large T-chart displaying the water level of the dam day by day for the past three weeks. The young man described the situation: the dam was designed for a water level of 240’ or over. Below 238’ they have to shut down four of its six turbines. With so much less water passing through the dam, the river downstream becomes quite still and is left to rise and fall with the tide. That’s why it was flowing backwards at the Aylo’s Bay Hotel.

When they step down to two turbines they also stop providing electricity to Togo, Benin, and much of Ghana’s own industrial sector. When its factory is working at full capacity, VALCO, a private aluminum company based outside Accra, consumes a third of Ghana’s total electricity output. For Togo and Benin the partial shutdown is a bitter pill to swallow, as they each rely on the Akosombo dam for upwards of 90% of their power. If the water level falls below 236’, the last two turbines will be shut down and Ghana’s power output will fall instantaneously by 65%.

On that Sunday the water level was at 236’2.1”; and over the previous 20 days the water level had fallen between .06” and .08” per day. If the trend persists, the dam will shut down sometime around April 20.

What would such a doomsday scenario entail? “There will be light off,” said the young man. Questioned further, he explained that efforts would be made to keep Accra’s power grid up and running to the greatest extent possible; the rest of the country might well be cut off indefinitely.

And what is the operative plan to forestall this disaster? “We are really hoping for rain,” he said. Anything else? “We are also praying.”

As it turned out, the young man we were speaking to was a recent university graduate doing his national service with the VRA in the Publicity department. One of the VRA’s directors showed up soon afterward and suggested that, in addition to hoping and praying, they might try to avoid a catastrophic full shutdown by increasing the frequency of scheduled power outages—now every fifth night—as the water level creeps lower and lower.

The director assigned the young man to be our driver and tour guide and handed him keys to a car parked outside. The four of us walked out together and the director gave him some hurried instructions about how to use the clutch. Then we pulled out and began up the winding road.

Standing on top of the dam, leaning over the fence and looking down into the pool on the high side, we could see fish at the edges and two gentle whirlpools spinning in opposite directions (Coriolis effect be damned) above the intakes to the long, steep penstocks that feed the two operational turbines. Light on, light off; air-con; water pump working or spoiled; demand for gasoline to run generators; ceiling fans; light to read by—a variegated strand composed of these fine filaments wound round and round in two mesmerizing spirals, sucked down and unspooled all the way to the ocean.

The dam itself is huge and made entirely of stones, sand, and clay. During its construction in the early 1960s the town of Akosombo was built essentially from scratch to house the laborers who built it. It must be considered a testament to the farsightedness of the construction authority that such a small town, not obviously different from the others nestled along the Volta’s banks, can boast of the region’s only waste treatment plant.

From the top of the dam one can also see the Ghanaian equivalent of Camp David: a special retreat for the President and his guests, accessible only by helicopter, perched high atop a hill overlooking the lake, the dam, and the river below. According to our guide, Bill Clinton stayed there.

Our last stop before returning to Accra was at Dan’s Bead Factory, a tourist-oriented spot along the main road. Although the factory itself was closed Sundays, one of the women manning the showroom brought us to the thatch-roofed production area and showed us how Ghanaian beads are made. Glass bottles (wine, soda, beer, etc.), divided by color, are collected and smashed into tiny pieces. These are placed in clay molds and heated in a clay oven for almost an hour. Then they are cooled, removed from the molds, painted, fired again to set the paint, and strung into necklaces or bracelets or keychains. At that point they are ready for sale. At this particular factory, some empty bottles are purchased from stores, while others are donated by wine-swilling friends of the owner who are residents of Accra.

Finally, I will indulge myself in recounting a very beautiful dream from our night at the Aylo’s Bay Hotel that I can’t stop thinking about:

I woke up laying on a hard chaise lounge on a dark beach and turned my head to the right, looking towards the water. Just where the waves were washing up on the sand, a long line of sea turtles was advancing from left to right. They were of many different shapes and sizes. I couldn’t see either end of the line but they kept coming, Slow and Steady as only turtles can. Then all at once they stood up on their hind legs and hind flippers and faced the breaking waves, the whole line of them, and from the infinite distance to the left they began diving one after the other, like a great domino chain, into the dark surf. The collective sound was a great big effervescent shhhhhhhhhhh and they slid under the water, leaving the beach clear. Then I looked out over the ocean and saw the moon huge and perfectly round, sitting on the horizon line, all its craters clear as a bell. High in the black sky above it was another moon, this one a bright ghostly metallic-white, casting a glow over the whole scene and making the crest of every ripple flash like a cool, wet lozenge of pure silver.

Many Places, Long Entry

I just finished eating my favorite Ghanaian dessert: a Cape Coast pineapple. Unlike the standard variety, these are cone-shaped and more green than yellow on the outside. On the inside they are white, and have less pulp and juice. They are sweet and crisp. I selected the one I had tonight from a large pile of attractive candidates on a roadside table just outside Cape Coast. I don’t usually go 200km for fresh fruit, but in the past two weeks I have visited more of Ghana than I did in my first four months in the country.

My parents arrived on February 26 from India, where they had traveled to attend the wedding of a friend’s nephew. For the first few nights they stayed at the plush Labadi Beach Hotel, in whose locker room I have often snuck a hot shower when the water is out at my house. After a few days exploring Accra, we set off together Thursday afternoon for Cape Coast. It’s about three hours’ drive to the small city that was once the capital of the British Gold Coast.

That night we stopped just short of our destination in the town of Biriwa, where we had booked two rooms in the Biriwa Beach Hotel, a long, low, white cement building with wide triangular buttresses on each side. To me it looked like a futuristic structure that wouldn’t have been out of place on the moon. It was perched on a steep hill overlooking a curving beach and a quiet piece of the Atlantic Ocean. We put our bags down and went for a walk around the grounds and down to the beach. Our lap ended by the patio restaurant, where we found an old German couple (the proprietors) and a couple of Ghanaian staff looking on with concern as thick black smoke rose from the cabinet housing the hotel’s fuse box. No one could say exactly how the fire had started; it was fairly certain, though, that we would be spending the night with “light off”.

The restaurant stayed open despite the power failure, and incredibly it seemed that the entire menu was available. Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to eat German food by candlelight in the heat of a tropical night, Mom ordered pork chops and sauerkraut. When dinner ended we retired to our rooms. Due to my extensive training in the art of living “light off”, I was able to fall asleep fairly quickly. But for Mom and Dad, unused to the still air and the constant beading of sweat, sleep was an impossible dream. For all its futuristic design, the hotel was poorly equipped to deal with the failure of its air conditioning system. (Or maybe this was consistent with the lunar base idea—who cares about airflow in the deadly vacuum of space?) The rooms were L-shaped, with the entrance and window at the top of the long piece and the bed pushed to the far end of the short piece; and what few zephyrs might have stumbled through the lone window were blocked by the solid, wide-sweeping buttresses that ran along the length of the building. We didn’t stay a second night.

We did visit Cape Coast and Elmina, and toured the castles there. These are two of the best-preserved forts that dotted the Gold Coast. Built at first as trading posts for gold, ivory, timber, and spices, they eventually became the African nodes of the triangular transatlantic slave trade. It worked roughly as follows: Europeans brought finished goods (notably firearms, alcohol, and glassware), exchanged them for gold, ivory, and Africans, and transported them to the New World where they exchanged the Africans for raw goods (especially sugar) to bring back to Europe. The guns that ended up in Africa ensured a constant supply of slaves by enabling local marauders and tribal armies, now heavily-armed, to conquer and capture other Africans and sell them to the Europeans.

The castles were the points of departure for slaves headed to the new world, but a typical African’s ordeal began in the bush. Taken prisoner by a neighboring tribe, he might be made to walk hundreds of miles through dense jungle to the coast. There he would be held in an overcrowded underground dungeon like the one at Cape Coast castle until a ship came in—typically about six weeks—at which time he would be taken out for inspection. Incredibly, many of the slaves that were judged too weak to survive the harsh journey across the ocean were simply released. To me, this illustrates the completeness of dehumanization that characterized and enabled the slave trade. That some might be set free simply because they were unsaleable suggests that they weren’t viewed as people at all—the concepts “freedom” and “captivity” may never have occurred to the traders (African or European). Does one consider the freedom of the runts when he buys only the strongest puppies from the litter? Somehow the thought of the weak ones stumbling out free onto the streets of Cape Coast while the most vital men and women trudged in chains towards the filthy hold of a wooden ship begins to capture the perversity of the whole enterprise. Of course, it falls far short: countless European soldiers and civil servants fathered children by the captured women and some even installed their families in sturdy stone houses near the castles.

Friday morning we visited Kakum National Park, just north of Cape Coast. There we walked over a series of cable bridges suspended between platforms built around tree trunks that thrust straight up out of the canopy. The highest platform is 40m above the ground. The bridges themselves are known to be sturdy, but they still sway as one walks along. It’s a long way down from there. Mom noted that the tree trunks around which the platforms were built were crawling with ants. Why were they scurrying so far above terra firma? Why were we?

After the canopy walk we engaged a guide who offered to take us on a walking tour and teach us about the medicinal uses of some of the plants there. He showed us the rough, deep-furrowed bark of the ebony tree and explained that elephants use it to scrape themselves clean after bathing. Many of the trees he showed us were used in reproductive medicine. The ya-ya (as in “Yeah! Yeah!”) promotes virility, while the stinkwood tree removes fibroids in women. His expertise came from his grandfather, a traditional doctor who in turn had learned from a forest dwarf. According to the exhibit at the visitors’ center, there exists a race of dwarves native to Kakum whose feet are turned backwards. If you step onto the ground where one has recently urinated, you will lose your way in the forest.

Fast forward one week. Dad returned home Saturday night, the day after our canopy walk. Mom had spent the week in Cape Coast working with Women In Progress, a local NGO founded by two former Peace Corps volunteers. WIP provides local batikers and seamstresses with designs and training to make their goods export quality, then sells them in the US and England. The marketing arm of the organization, Global Mamas (www.globalmamas.com), supplies about a hundred retail outlets in the US and also sells directly through the website. Mom was there to do training in bookkeeping, both for employees of WIP and for the sewing and batiking women they serve. Despite the Tuesday-Wednesday holiday for Ghana@50, she managed to work with WIP’s bookkeeper and also ran a couple of trainings for the clients.

But the weekend came and we hit the road again. Throughout the week in Accra and Cape Coast, and again the following weekend, we had the pleasure of riding in a private, air-conditioned car. Our driver was Ben. He had been recommended to us by neighbors from New Jersey who rode with him when they came to visit their daughter who was studying abroad here this past Fall. At that time he had been working for a company, but after their experience with him they offered to make him a loan so he could buy a car and go into business for himself. When the new year began, he was the proud owner/operator of a tan 2006 Toyota Corolla and the Managing Director of Combay Enterprises. Ben is knowledgeable, friendly, and as professional as anyone I’ve met. He is happy to be working for himself and is anxious to pay off his loan. He takes pride in his car, which is always spotless. Judging by the way he uses the word “tidy”, he believes that cleanliness is next to godliness. It was a pleasure to ride with him. If you or anyone you know is planning to visit Ghana and want a driver, I give Ben my highest recommendation.

Ben picked me up at the office Friday at noon. We swung by Cape Coast to pick up Mom and then continued another two or three hours to Kumasi. For all but about 15km the road is good enough to support cruising at about 60mph. The bad 15km, though, is a patchwork of deeply-cratered pavement and rocky dirt. There are long islands of tarmac that end abruptly, dropping six inches onto deep-grooved dusty dirt that looks as if it has never been paved. Here lanes don’t apply; the strategy is to take the path of least resistance on the rough sections and to get on and off the paved islands where it will do least damage to the vehicle. So cars and tro tros wander down the road like grazing cows, occasionally slowing way down to ease themselves over treacherous obstacles.

Once Ben had removed the slightly rickety front right hubcap, we bounced happily through the bad section and cleared it before sunset. From there it wasn’t far to Kumasi and the Rexmar Hotel, where an idyllic outdoor dinner setting was all but shattered by an overenthusiastic rock band playing poolside. They weren’t bad, but when the saxophone was shrilly belting out the lead line of “When a man loves a woman” I could feel it in my teeth. They played until around midnight, so Mom and I fell asleep with headphones in our ears.

Saturday morning we got pleasantly lost in the huge market. When we walked through the butchering shed many of the men, recognizing me from my visit a couple weeks earlier, warmly greeted me. I told one of the butchers whose picture I posted in the blog that he was now “on the net.” He was overjoyed to hear it. Mom wondered whether the free global advertising had set his business booming. I think he was more excited at the prospect of having his face pop up on computer screens in distant corners of the world.

We also visited Manhyia Palace, home of the Asantehene, the king of the Ashanti tribe, whose empire was once as large as present-day Ghana. There was a lawn with strutting peacocks that led to a staid, squareish house of painted cement. This, the former palace, was converted into a museum in 1970; the current palace was deeper in the compound and was not open to the public. The first floor of the museum was kept more or less as it had been when the king lived there. There were two sitting rooms, an office, a living room, and a dining room. The relics on display were fairly modern, dating back no further than 1925, when the place was built. Notable were three rotary telephones, an old color TV, and a radio. There were also photographs of the royals and life-size effigies in full dress seated in chairs, festooned with yards of bright golden bracelets and necklaces. The guide insisted that all the jewelry was pure gold.

The second floor had more photographs and also featured display cases with some older relics. There were ceremonial swords and axes, carved stools, royal Kente cloth, and two leather satchels, each about the size of a small backpack, said to have once served as the treasury of the whole Ashanti kingdom. One held the gold and the other the silver. They were secured with gold and silver padlocks, respectively.

I was surprised to hear that all the Ashanti gold could ever have fit in such a small bag. The Ashanti region of Ghana is known—and envied—for its natural resources. It produces much of Ghana’s best timber, and almost all its bauxite and gold. The Ashanti tribe became wealthy by trading gold with the Mali empire in the 14^th century, and they continued to prosper by trading it with the Europeans until they were defeated by the British in 1900. According to legend, the Ashanti kingdom was born in the late 17^th century when, at a meeting of local Ashanti chiefs, a fetish priest conjured a golden stool that floated down from the sky onto the lap of the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu I.

On the same day, the same priest thrust a sword into the ground, burying it all the way up to the hilt. Fixed in its place by his miraculous power, he warned that, whenever it is extracted, the Ashanti kingdom will fall. It can be found in Kumasi today, housed in a small round cement building on the campus of Ghana’s second largest hospital. We came to the place and paid the GHC 10,000 ($1.10) to get in, then continued inside. In the middle of the single round room is a pit about 4’ in diameter and about 3’ deep. At the bottom, in the middle of a nondescript patch of red-brown gravelly ground, is the sword’s hilt standing at a slight angle. It looks suspiciously like a fancy newell post.

The man who had collected our entrance fee came up behind us and perfunctorily recounted the story of the sword’s origin. He finished with its recent history: “When building the hospital here, they came with their bulldozers but the sword would not move from its place. Then they dug all around it and the sword disappeared mysteriously for two days, then reappeared in the same spot. In 1964 Mohammed Ali, heavyweight champion of the world, visited the hospital and tried to pull the sword from the ground. He failed. Later, a boxer from Ghana who claimed he was stronger than Mohammed Ali also tried to pull it. But he also failed. That is the story of the sword.”

This week it has been back to work. Tuesday it was George’s turn to lead OI-SASL’s morning devotion. He had been assigned the topic of Confidence and the passage Philippians 1:6—“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” As I have said before in this space, George is excitable, a fast talker prone to nervous laughter. From what he has told me, he’s not very religious at all. But standing in the middle of the banking hall he seemed entirely at home.

He began by leading the group in a few songs in a powerful, spirited voice I’ve never heard him use before. Somewhere far inside his wiry frame he shaped deep tones like smooth round bowls. And when he moved onto his discussion he spread his arms wide on the counter in front of him and spoke with great conviction. I almost cracked a smile because I can hardly imagine George as a fiery preacher, but his performance was sincere. He even interjected “Hallelujah!” and “Praise God!” with complete naturalness. More than any exegesis of the text, his delivery spoke to the topic he had been assigned. I wonder whether it was his careful preparation, the receptivity of the audience, genuine religious fervor, or something else altogether that brought out his flashing eyes and resonant voice. George surprised a lot of people Tuesday morning—maybe even himself.

Oti Installment:
Tuesday morning I had Oti pick me up early so I would be sure to arrive in time for George’s devotion at 8:00. We left my house around 7:15 and made our way towards the office. The fuel gauge needle was resting lifelessly in the red stripe at “E”. Oti pulled into a gas station and made his usual purchase of GHC 30,000 ($3.30), paid the attendant, and turned the key. The starter wheezed a couple of times but didn’t catch. Oti turned the key again and again the wheezing came. Over the next five minutes he turned the key more than sixty times, experimenting with myriad combinations of different gears, of pumping the gas pedal, and of popping the clutch just as he sparked it. He never waited more than two seconds between successive attempts and never seemed confused, frustrated, or the least bit worried. I offered more than once to give us a push, but he declined. Sometime between attempts sixty and seventy the engine caught and Oti gave it a couple hard revs. Then he put it first gear and we drove on.

Three Scenes from Ghana@50

One

Tuesday Ghana turned fifty and threw a big party to celebrate. For months they cleaned, decorated, practiced, programmed, and outfitted for the bash. Preparation included everything from the sacking of the vendors in Makola market to the purchase of 150 new luxury cars with fifteen million tax dollars to fresh coats of white paint on the curbs of every main road in Accra to the construction of mansions for visiting heads of state. It was a big party, and it was called Ghana@50.

It began just minutes into the day with a huge fireworks display blooming over the ocean, launched from the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and Mausoleum. We found a spot at a restaurant about a mile away right on the shore. The show was scheduled for midnight sharp, and so when we hadn’t seen anything after a half hour we began to think that maybe we had made some mistake. Cynically we wondered aloud whether “they” would screw this up, and start Ghana@50 off on the wrong foot. But around 12:40 they came like only fireworks can.

There were red, yellow, green, blue, and purple ones that burst in perfect spheres; gold ones that spilled out in enormous fountains and left lingering tails like glowing fingerpaint; clouds of hanging glitter; silver shooting stars that each burst into three more snaking flares, tracing a gnarled tree in the sky; color-changing ones; bright red embers that stayed lit as they smoldered through the sky all the way down to the ocean; and all the other usual suspects.

It lasted about twenty minutes in all, during which time I think the residents of Accra must have been as collectively quiet as they ever have been. For the most part I only heard the spontaneous oohs and ahhs of those bewitched by the miracle that is a professional fireworks display. Afterwards everyone, Ghanaian and obruni alike, was gushing about how great it was. And really, when it goes off without a hitch, as it did, what a fine, fine thing—who can find fault with those bright, fiery spiders arching confidently across the sky?

Two

Tuesday morning I woke up at 10, quickly dressed, and made my way towards Independence Square, Accra’s main parade ground, by taxi. Close to our destination the traffic was completely stopped, so I got out and continued on foot through the street jammed with cars and streaming with people. Most were wearing some Ghana@50 regalia—t-shirts, hats, pendants, and flags as capes or skirts or dresses. In general people were talkative and excited. There were some unofficial parade groups weaving through the stopped traffic playing drums and bells, waving flags, pumping fists, and hollering exuberantly.

Approaching the entrance to the square I passed increasing numbers of vendors, mostly of small food—Fan Ice, popcorn, sausage kebabs, doughnuts, plantain chips—and finally reached the gate. It was very crowded, but people were moving, entering and exiting in what seemed like equal numbers. The program was supposed to have started “around 9”, which is Ghanaian for “in the morning”, so I was surprised to see so many people leaving. But as I came closer to the edge of the parade ground I could see that events were well underway.

Independence Square is almost a quarter mile square, and except for the north edge, which is open to leave an unobstructed view of the Arc-de-Triomphe-style Independence monument across the street, it is bordered by covered bleachers. In the center of the south edge the bleachers are interrupted by a large arch with seats for optimal viewing. These are reserved for VIPs. I had entered at the northeast corner and I walked towards the center of the north edge, where the crowd was least dense. Eventually I took my place in a throng of people pressing up against the portable police barricade that separated the viewing area from the parade ground itself. I was about eight people deep from the barrier, and just behind me the crowd was much more dispersed, leaving ample room to back up.

When I stood on my tip-toes I could see past the dark blue military vehicles parked along the north edge to the many columns of army, navy, air force, police, and schoolchildren that made up the marching corps. Various columns of schoolchildren wore different uniforms: brown and yellow, green and white, blue and white, and purple. Some of the military were in their dress, complete with white gloves, and others were in camouflage. But when I arrived, and for the first 30 minutes or so, everything on the parade grounds seemed stationary.

During that time the vast crowd must have grown bored. Most people, not being six feet tall, couldn’t see anything. There was a lot of banter, some jockeying for position, some rounds of “Happy Birthday to Ghana” (followed by “How Old Are You Now?”) and even a couple choruses of the lesser-known “Ghana oooohhh”. I was wearing a thoroughly ridiculous homemade hat that I bought yesterday on the way to work: a hand-painted affair with “50 Yrs” scrawled in Sharpie a couple times on its yellow panels. It was extremely well-received. And whenever I took out my camera, people wanted to pose for pictures.

During this time many people introduced themselves to me, a lonely obruni in a sea of black faces. One man named Johnson had his children with him: a teenage son and two younger daughters wearing cream-colored dresses that looked like satin. He was alternately lifting each daughter onto his shoulders so they could see the action (or lack thereof). Each time they got up there on his shoulders, surveying it all, they smiled so big and deep they almost went walleyed. Even surrounded by the overwhelming crowd, their expressions radiated the contentment and security that only Dad can provide. Johnson and I talked for a few minutes and he gave me his business card; then we were separated by the slow shuffling of the crowd. But our brief interaction, and just seeing him there with his children at the parade grounds, a family man doing all the things that are right and good on a national holiday, was a great gift and my fondest memory from the day.

I guess there was some point when people got too hot or too tired and so became agitated; or maybe there were just a few who wanted to see something happen, but there began some light pushing at the barricades and some loud chanting right in the faces of the police officers manning them. The barricades would be pushed back and the crowd would sway as one. The continual hollering and hissing from the few loudmouths was such amateurish goading that I thought people would just ignore it. But each time the police pushed back the barrier, the crowd would lean and shuffle, and then some more would join in the hissing and push it forward again.

I kept checking behind me to make sure I wasn’t boxed in from all sides. Meanwhile, the jostling became more spirited, and some police officers incredibly started removing their belts and whipping them (not too hard, but with the buckle out!) indiscriminately into the crowd. I even saw one brandishing a splintery piece of scrapwood, waving it around like a toy sword.

The back and forth continued in fits and starts. During what seemed to be a lull I heard the sound of shuffling feet. All at once a hole opened up in the crowd about twenty feet to my left, as if invisible, irresistible hands were pushing out from the center. People started listing like concentric rings of dominoes, then stepping, then stepping faster. I turned around to find that the open area behind me had closed in, and I was part of the tilting, moving herd. All around, people picked up their flimsy plastic chairs and held them over their heads while they pressed on; the empty area at the center had widened. It was the horrifying feeling of trying to run in a dream where you know your legs should be pumping faster, but they can’t. Hands grabbed onto the shoulders in front of them and involuntary, plaintive yelps were heard all around. The chaos was excruciatingly slow and persisted for about 30 seconds. Then the shuffling sound stopped; the crowd quieted and stood up straight. The center area began to fill in again. I continued outward made a hasty exit to the main road. In the end, I only suffered a scrape on my toe.

Three

Around midnight I was in Osu, the nightlife district, walking with Sarah and Pamela to find a taxi. The main street was jammed full of people having a block party. But it had not been closed to traffic, so despite the music blasting from speakers just beside the road and the throngs of revelers dancing in front of them, cars tried to inch through. The Silent Majority, whose representative I had met earlier at the parade grounds, was fast asleep, and the madness was that of any mass gathering of mostly drunk, mostly male young adults: generally well-intentioned, wild, and bursting with a teetering potential energy. Here were three young men writhing on the ground in front of (slowly) oncoming traffic. And here was a guy trying to grab Pamela by the waist and pull her into a small pod of dancers as we walked by. She brushed his arm away without much trouble and we continued towards the main road.