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.