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.