Better Late than Never

Long time since my last post—sorry for the delay.

In an earlier post I mentioned our stay in paradise at the Green Turtle Lodge on the beach near Dixcove. If that was contentment’s lodging, the Safari Beach Lodge, a few hundred meters to the east along the same soft sand, is its penthouse. Just opened in January by an American couple, it is a collection of neat self-contained bungalows with thatch roofs and shutter doors of dark wood that open out onto a sandy grove of palms. The sea breeze blows through, rustling the fronds with the same lazy clatter of falling rain.

We arrived around 5:30 on Friday afternoon, in time to place our orders for dinner and take a swim. The water is velvety smooth and the waves break hard. There is a strong current pulling to the east and it makes a hollow wet vacuum sound around your legs as the wash from one big wave is greedily sucked back to topple and crash with the next.

Dinner was lamb steak with a sweet balsamic reduction and a colorful tower of sliced roasted vegetables. Cloth napkins, oil lanterns, heavy silverware, big clean white plates, real wine glasses, and the breeze. After eating we walked along the beach. There was lightning in and behind the clouds striking every few seconds, and the whole enormous sky would light up silently in pale, pale yellow and blue-gray, revealing a vast landscape of clouds. It looked like the first light of morning. We turned back and came eventually to the bungalow, where we rinsed the sand off our feet in the outdoor shower and stepped inside.

Less than a minute later the rains came: mighty and exquisite pouring, as if from giant pitchers. Between the rain and the thunderclaps, the sound of pounding waves was drowned out. It was perfectly dark except for the lemon flashes of lightning. We lay in a big bed hung with a big rectangular mosquito net. When I opened my eyes, all that came in were sheets and sheets of the sound of heavy rain, borne on the cool, wet wind. Beyond our feet the shutter doors were wide open and behind our heads the wooden louver-slats of the window were open, too; but we stayed perfectly dry. Still, it seemed as if the rain was pouring right onto—or into, or through—me. Like I was lying in that drenching rain with my skin turned inside out.

The whole weekend the food was absurd—kingfish, quail, corn pudding, crepes, butternut squash soup—and we walked up and down the beach, swam and dried off, read, and played half a game of Scrabble. We talked to the owners, who had become proud parents just three weeks before, and cooed at their pudgy new son, Parker (Ghanaian alias Kwame). Like the last time at Green Turtle, there was an unmysterious quality to much of it: it feels damned good because it is damned good, and relaxing, too. Buy the ticket, take the ride. But Friday night in the rainstorm was different: a crackling electric feeling of wanting to burst right out of your skin and stretch and squeeze and curl your toes up tight.

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Fast forward. It is a couple weeks later, about 1:30 on Saturday night, and I am in a taxi riding back to my house. We pass through Cantonments circle and head towards Danquah circle. Just past the circle we approach a police checkpoint and are waved down by an officer in a dark blue uniform. He motions with his flashlight for the driver to roll down his window. In Twi he says, “We will ride with you.”

The driver complies and the officer calls the other two from their post on the other side of the road. All three, big Ghanaian men in dark blue with black berets, pile into the comically small backseat of our taxi, leaving the checkpoint empty and with its movable barriers stretched halfway across the dark road. They place their guns—automatic rifles with long banana clips, like those carried by all Ghanaian police officers at all times—with stocks in between their feet and barrels pointing up. Nobody talks until I say, in English, “Good evening, officers. How is it?”

One answers, “Fine.”

“You are closing for the night?”

“Yes. To the station.”

About a kilometer ahead one of the officers taps the driver on the shoulder and says, “Here.” We pull over and the three men clamber out in front of the police station. The driver asks for a bit of water to fill the radiator of his car. The officers decline at first, then reconsider when the driver asks again. One begins to head for the station, then turns around and says (in Twi), “We don’t have any. Go.” So the taxi driver eases the wheezing taxi into the street and drives away.

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Oti’s grandmother died about a month ago, of complications from diabetes. Oti has been living in her house for a few months and had been looking after her. She fell ill one day and was taken to the hospital two days later. Oti said, “They came to take her, but she had died before they reached. That was the end of my grandmother.”

This past Wednesday night I attended the wake-keeping for her. It was my first Ghanaian funeral. They are a ubiquitous social exercise here. Typically they are three-day affairs, beginning on Friday evening and ending Sunday afternoon. It starts with wake-keeping, which lasts through the night. The second day begins with more wake-keeping and eventually moves to the burial ground. The last day is centered at the church, where the deceased is mentioned in the service. A reception follows with food and drink.

Wake-keeping takes many forms, most commonly sitting in plastic chairs under a canopy set up in the middle of street while popular music blares at incredible volumes from a tower of rented speakers. There is frequently food and drink, and almost always some dancing. Walking around Accra on any Saturday, one is very likely to encounter at least one such gathering. Crowds range from the tens to the hundreds. To my knowledge, there is no eulogizing or speechmaking about the deceased—it is a party held in her honor. But while it is not really somber, neither is it terribly exuberant. Older attendees sit quietly in chairs and submit to the violence of the speakers. Younger ones eat and drink and dance and wander off to other weekend engagements. More than anything it seems to have the flavor of an obligatory exercise—and it is nothing if not obligatory.

Any family with the means to do so is expected to provide a proper funeral for its dead. Frequently this means breaking the bank; and almost always one relies on the attendees’ donations to offset the cost of renting equipment and space, catering food, and settling bills from the church and the mortuary. It represents such a shock to expenditure that most microfinance loans have a funeral insurance policy built in. (It is also available as a standalone product, but almost nobody buys it.)

Attendance is strictly required for all extended family members, and expected for almost anyone who knew the deceased. It is not uncommon for a family in Accra to pack up its things for a week and travel across the country for a relative’s funeral.

The wake-keeping for Oti’s grandmother took place at the family house in the South Osu neighborhood of Accra. Family tradition dictated that the first night be a quieter affair (no sound system). Oti led me inside the compound, where about 30 people sitting in small groups scattered in a sea of plastic chairs under a large canopy. Some were talking quietly, others were just sitting. I sat with Oti and his cousin while they discussed the FA Cup Final (halftime had just ended and AC Milan was ahead 1-0), and Oti explained to me the significance of wake-keeping. Traditionally, it is a ritual that marks the final departure of the deceased from the family house. They pour a libation and wash out the front stoop and entryway with water. In some cases, it is also an opportunity for attendees to see the deceased one last time.

Oti’s grandmother was laid out upstairs in the house. I wasn’t aware until he and his cousin got up and he said, “We are going to see the body. Do you want to watch?” I said I would be up in a minute.

When I reached the top of the stairs the two were standing in the hall just outside an inner room. An eerie, clinical white light spilled through the door. The inner room was not very large, maybe 12’x15’. All the walls were hung in lacy white fabric that glowed in the light of a naked fluorescent bulb. From the ceiling a runner of the same fabric hung in a complicated meander pattern and led to a runner of bright woven kente cloth in the center. The kente described a rectangle under which was a bed laid in smooth white cloth. On it was Oti’s grandmother’s body, dressed in a perfect white satin gown with sequins and delicately ruffled sleeves. She wore a rhinestone tiara. Her skin was very smooth and her face looked puffy. From the stillness in the room you could tell immediately that she was dead—she looked like a wax figure. But all along I couldn’t shake the feeling that she might bolt upright and jerk her eyes open.

The three of us continued downstairs and I told Oti that the funerals I had attended at home normally included some kind of remembrances of the person who had died. I asked him to tell me something about his grandmother.

“She loved to crack jokes. And when it comes to food, no one could ever get her. She would send people from the neighborhood to pick things for her cooking, then she would make enough food for the whole neighborhood. She was always cooking. And she loved to make people happy.”

He said a little more which I can’t remember word for word. But from his descriptions I understood that she was a grandmother, the kind of grandmother that is essentially the same everywhere, but cooking different foods: pasta in Italy and jao tse in China and fufu in Ghana and a casserole in Ramsey and gefilte fish in Brooklyn.

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My room is in the corner of the house, nestled in the southwest corner of the compound. The compound wall is about 6’ high and is separated from the south and west walls of our house by a narrow cement path. The exterior walls of my room have louver windows that give out onto the path. When the power is on I usually sleep with the air-con humming away and the windows shut; otherwise I crank them open and hear the sounds of the night and the morning.

Our house is about 5km from Kotoka International airport and lies directly underneath one of its most popular approach patterns. Most flights originating from Europe land in Accra between 9pm and 1am. More than once I have been jolted from sleep by the furious roar of a jet passing overhead. It sounds as if they’re just inches above the roof.

Every flyover is followed by a spirited chorus by the neighborhood dogs. Like so many third world dogs they are skinny, sinewy, light-brown mutts with pointy snouts and ribs showing. They seem at their most natural when they’re yelping. And that’s what they do, mostly—they are not bold enough to bark and not hearty enough to howl. So for a minute or two after the jet engine roar subsides, the night air is alive with a cacophony of yowling and whining. It’s like they were all hit simultaneously with rolled-up newspapers.

About 6am every morning the youngest daughter of the landlady (who lives with her family in the house just in front of ours) takes about an hour and a half to sweep the entire compound. The Ghanaian broom is a powerful counterexample to the theory of evolution. It is a bundle of shoots, like straw but stiffer and pointier, about 18” long and tied by a string about 4” from one end. The preferred sweeping method is to hold the bundle at an oblique angle to the floor and swipe in a crescent shape, proceeding forward in small steps between each swipe. Of course, since there is no handle, it is necessary hunch way over at great expense to the lower back.

It’s not as if they haven’t seen the broomstick; American-style brooms are available all around town—and at competitive prices. One might think that the benefits of a broom that allows its operator to stand would be immediately obvious to someone who spends a couple hours each day hunched over in a deadly “C” shape, but one would be wrong. It just hasn’t caught on.

The sound of morning sweeping is ksh, ksh, ksh. Sometimes the girl sings while she sweeps, usually religious songs in Twi or English. Her voice is soft and very light. It sounds like it could blow away.

The other sound I hear regularly from my bed is the high-pitched scream of a young boy from the neighboring compound while he is being smacked by his father. About a quarter of all mornings it cuts through the air while I’m sleeping or sitting. It is always accompanied by the loud, aggravated jabbering of the father in Twi—fast, savage nonsense punctuated by sharp slaps. I wonder what could possess a man to beat his son in the morning, in the courtyard for the whole neighborhood to hear.

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In other news, the study I came here to work on is underway, after seven months of preparation, piloting, training, and jockeying. Even with so much time leading up to the launch, the past few weeks have been incredibly hectic. Since the roll-out on May 28 I have worked more than in any other two-week period I can recall. But the important thing is that it’s going on and hasn’t run off the rails yet. Hopefully that will continue to be the case; and with some luck it can be achieved without logging too many more 80-hour weeks. Because, really, it’s screwing up my blogging schedule.