In the last post we learned that Elizabeth, our housekeeper, didn’t want to put a cast on her broken leg. She wanted to spend another month’s wages on a second round of topical herbal treatment, but we convinced her to have a consultation with the doctor before putting her money down.

Nobody said it would be easy. Elizabeth went to Korle-bu Hospital on Monday morning, signed herself in, and waited. Around midday she was told that the doctor wasn’t coming in; she should come back Wednesday. So she was there Wednesday morning, name on sign-in sheet, sitting in the folding chair. In the afternoon the woman came out from behind the reception counter and told Elizabeth she had seen her name on the sheet with “x-ray” written next to it and watched her all day in the waiting room. Didn’t she know she should be at Ridge Hospital? If she wanted to see a doctor for an x-ray she was in the wrong place. By now it was too late to go to Ridge, though, so she should go tomorrow morning, first thing. Thursday at Ridge Hospital the doctor should have been in—he hadn’t called in sick—but nobody could find him. Surely he would come tomorrow.

In fact he did come Friday and Elizabeth was there waiting for him. He took an x-ray of her lower leg and reviewed it with her. The partial fracture that was a hairline crack in her January x-ray had opened into a wider fissure, which helped to explain why the swelling and pain persisted, even months after the injury. Fissure or no fissure, the fact that a PoP cast would leave her foot slipperless for a month spelled ignominy at church; and this was reason enough to seek other options.

The doctor was adamant that the cast was the right treatment. Nothing else would do. Refusing a cast now, he said, might earn her an amputated foot somewhere down the line. Understandably, this proved to be the decisive blow; after all, an amputated foot is just as unslippered as one wrapped in plaster. It looked like some amount of disgrace at church was inevitable. Elizabeth opted for the PoP right then and there (though she would spend about 16 more hours in hospital waiting rooms over the next three days before actually having the cast put on).

Elizabeth has taken a temporary leave of absence until it is removed. I suppose it’s only fair that some of the waiting be passed on to us, though it is less clear why an immobilized foot is a greater impediment to work than a broken one. The slipper issue is a moot point since housework is done barefoot. We certainly will not argue, though; after so many months of constant aggravation, any excuse she finds to take a load off is a good one.

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A few days ago I hailed a taxi on the street just in front of the bank. We were driving down Beach Road, smooth and newly-paved, not much traffic. I asked the driver my usual suite of questions—whether he owns his taxi, who pays for repairs, whether he’s married, how many children he has, whether he saves money with a bank or susu association—and he asked me about my work. When I told him I was working with the bank where he had picked me up, he wanted to know more.

His goal was to own his own car, and he felt he needed a loan to buy one. He asked good questions about the process of accessing credit through the bank. Would he have to hold a savings account? (Yes.) What kind of interest rates do they charge? (3.17% per month, flat, on the initial balance of the loan.) How often would he have to make payments? (Monthly.) Could he repay over a year? (No, the maximum maturity of the first loan is six months.) Does he need to use land to secure the loan? (No, he must provide a guarantor for security—not collateral.)

By the time he eased the car around the traffic circle in front of Independence Square, he was enthusiastic. “Tomorrow morning I will come straight to the Banking Hall before I start work,” he said. He knew what documents he would need to open an account and whom to ask about starting a loan application. The path forward had been illuminated. You could tell by talking to him that he had the will and the aptitude to succeed; he had just been unaware of the resources he could access.

He had one question left: “Do you know another obruni at that bank called Matthew?” He recalled driving Matt home from work one day some time ago. “At least one year. I think even more than that.” Still, he remembered his name and where he lived. During their cab ride, he said, Matt had answered “so many questions” and told him all about the bank’s products and procedures. I asked, “Well, what did you say to Matthew once he told you all of that?”

There was no irony here: it was as clean as a clean plate. He said, “I told him I would come tomorrow.”

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The rainy season has begun. Sometimes the sky darkens up like someone pulled a great gray cloak over the city. It gets very cool all of a sudden, and the air feels empty and thin. When the wind blows, the dust on the roads and sidewalks swirls up into your eyes. It tickles the inside of your nose. The rain comes lashing down furiously in sheets. It plays a very loud drumroll on the tin roofs of our house and our neighbors’ houses. Sitting on the couch inside it roars like white noise on TV. If it keeps up for more than an hour, the seams of the corrugated roofing sheets start to leak. Then little droplets of water splash down on the back of the couch and on the tile floor. They explode into tinier droplets that collect on me like dew on the grass.

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Our landlady is Elizabeth Amankwa, wife of the late O.B. Amankwa, former Ghanaian ambassador to China and all-around heavy hitter. Recently she had to travel to Kumasi to attend to the preparations for the funeral of a tribal chief. She left her house in the care of her daughter and the two small girls, Bridget and Irene.

These two are the girls who make the sounds that populate our mornings and our nights. They are the ones bent over the brooms that scratch on the pavement; they are the ones pounding the plantain and cassava into fufu; they are the ones who sing gospel songs in voices soft and light like dandelion fuzz. Only one of them sings at a time, so the tune is always like a fine silk thread.

If you sit on the couch and listen, you won’t have to wait long to hear Elizabeth call one of them her signature harsh, barking tone. Akosua! Akosua! Bra! (Irene! Irene! Come here!) Either there is some secret, untranslatable affection in grandma’s voice, or the girls have learned through years of painstaking practice not to cringe. The sound, like a wet and rusty cheese grater gnawing through an old brown tire, doesn’t seem disturb them at all. In fact, they’re almost always smiling.

But how much more does the age of fifteen have to offer Bridget than the perfection of quiet, deferential obedience? What buds would burst open while the shadow of unceasing obligation was briefly cast out? This is what we hoped to discover when grandma took a trip.

I came home one day last week and found her standing near the front gate. Her head was down, resting on her forearms, which were crossed and laid on the flat top of the compound wall. When I approached, she looked up. “Oh, Bridget. How are you this evening?”

“I’m very well, thank you. How are you, too?”

“I’m also fine, Bridget. Are you taking a nap on the wall?”

“No.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“How long have you been not doing anything?”

“A long time. I can’t remember.”

“Up to an hour?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean you weren’t doing anything?”

“I’ve just been watching the road.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Irene and I were watching for beautiful cars to pass by.”

“Did you see any?”

“Yes, we saw about three.”

“Which was the most beautiful car you saw?”

“A Hummer.”

Later that night I was happily scandalized to find Bridget inside the compound leaning against the wall of the house, talking with a boy. The moon, almost full and very bright, caught her cheeks and her white, white teeth. She laughed and fidgeted and flirted, oh the boy was flirting, too, and this was easy to see because the flirting of fifteen-year-olds is unmistakable in any language; it was all very chaste and very fine. I only watched long enough to see her smile flash a couple of times in the moonlight.

In a small, dark cabinet under the bar, a vicious snarl of dark cables guards the open USB ports. I felt around for a place to insert a flash drive and hit my head. It was another Thursday Trivia Extravaganza at Champs, and we stalled while we tinkered with the projector that would display our questions on a big screen at the front of the bar. The usual crowd of ex-pats, Tex-Mex platters, and beer was on hand. There isn’t a great deal to say about it. Although some people are bound to feel that the contest is unfair, we still refuse to ask about cricket, former British PMs, and Formula One racing. These and other grumblings were drowned out by the din of conversation and the clatter of plates and mugs on servers’ trays.

On my way out of the washroom a young, skinny Lebanese man with a ponytail struck up a conversation about a company he had recently joined. As he explained the work, which was going exceedingly well for him, it became clear that he was describing a pyramid scheme. I tried to convince him of this but he became incredulous, even agitated, and moved to put the conversation to rest, summarizing his position with great conviction: “The market for making money can never be saturated. There is no bottom rung!” Beware the olive-skinned seller of souvenir coins.

Soon after the Trivia contest finished, the bar closed and I went to the road to hail a taxi.

It was after midnight when I stepped out on the shoulder of Ring Road. I crossed the wooden bridge over the deep gutter and walked onto the rough track just beyond. Some cars drove by on the main road, traveling fast; but because they didn’t honk they seemed quiet. The main sound that could be heard was a rhythmic chanting from a group of men crowded around a small fire in the scrubby area between the rough road and the gutter.

As I walked towards them more sounds emerged. The edge of a butter knife was tapping on a beer bottle and there was the shrill scream of a metal referee’s whistle. Plastic elephant horns, like the ones that were so ubiquitous during the Cup of Nations tournament, accented the chanting. They seemed to slice stinging crescents out of the heavy night air. There were about ten men by the small fire and most of them were in a tight circle, stomping around and around it in rhythm with their chanting, “HEY com bey sey la la la OH come bey sey la la la…”

About 20 feet away, across the rough track, two women sat on the edge of a cement slab in front of a metal shipping container that had converted into a barber shop. Beside each of them was a bare candle standing up on the concrete. The night air must have been very still not to blow them out. The women were wearing Western-style skirts and blouses, sitting comfortably with their legs extended and crossed at the calves. Each one held a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, which glowed in the soft light of the candles. I wanted to sit down on the slab with them and watch the men, but it seemed that I would have been gawking.

I continued past them, but then thought better of it and walked back to the women. When I came up to them I said, “Please, madam, I’m sorry. What are these men doing?”

“Our brother has passed away, one year today. They are mourning him.”

“Oh, Ok.”

I didn't sit down beside them, though I’m sure they would not have protested. Probably I could have sat there and the women wouldn’t have said anything more to me, in the remarkable way Ghanaians often sit together without talking at all. I wanted to ask questions about the chanting, what the words meant and which tribe it came from; but it was the wrong time for asking questions. I nodded deliberately to the women, wished them a good night, and turned around for home.

As I walked the short distance—not even 100 yards—along the rough track to the gate of my compound, the men’s chanting grew quieter, but the despairing crescent calls of the elephant horn could still be heard clearly. I went inside the house and the sound followed me there, too. It was like a dog pawing at the door to be let in. Sitting on the couch by the louvered windows, all at once I felt very lonely, like a clump of dried leaves and grass bobbing down through the eddies of a cold creek.

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Elizabeth, our housekeeper, injured her ankle almost two months ago. She was crossing a ditch at the market, walking on a plank that had been laid across it. The plank broke and she fell a couple of feet onto the uneven dirt. Her son Godswill, held on her back by the usual fabric wrap, was lucky not to be hurt.

I found out about the incident a couple weeks afterward when I called Elizabeth to ask why she hadn’t been coming by the house to clean. I said, “Elizabeth, we haven’t been seeing you recently.”

“Oh, Brother Jake, I’m sorry I haven’t been coming. I broke my leg."

“Oh, Elizabeth! What happened?”

“I was at market and I fell inside a ditch.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes, I went to hospital.”

“And the doctor told you your leg is broken?”

“Yes. He said I have twist it near the foot.”

“Oh, so it is twisted. But is the bone broken?”

“Yes, the bone is not broken.”

We had reached the limit of our ability to communicate over the phone. Elizabeth said she would come the following Monday and tell me the whole story then.

When I came home from work that day I found her sitting on the front porch of the house. Her left leg was extended awkwardly in front of her, swollen below the knee and wrapped tightly in an Ace bandage from the shin down to the foot. She wore her usual wide smile and greeted me kindly. As we talked she described the accident and her visit to the hospital. The doctor had recommended she seek treatment at an herbal clinic. There they put her on a one-month regimen of weekly checkups and daily applications of a topical cream to the affected ankle. The cost was GHC 60, about half her monthly salary.

Elizabeth wasn’t told what was in the cream, but it seemed to be a mild analgesic. Patients at herbal clinics are rarely allowed to know what medicines they are taking, since most of them could be acquired much more cheaply at a local market.

There were good days and bad days. Sometimes her leg seemed normal and wasn’t painful or sore at all; other times, when it was swollen, she was forced to walk tenderly on it. She unwrapped it and rewrapped it tighter. On these days she sometimes described pain coming “from inside,” pointing just above her ankle. Through the ordeal she was convinced that the treatment was helping, though, and that she was getting better. She wanted to sign on for another month of the regimen, but didn’t have the money for it.

Last Monday her leg looked worse than ever, and I asked her to tell me again about her initial visit to the hospital. Now she said she had been x-rayed and that the doctor had first recommended a cast. Only when she refused did he refer her to the herbal clinic. I asked, “Why didn’t you want to have a cast?”

“Oh, Brother Jake, if I get POP [a plaster of Paris cast] then my leg would be too big. I could not put a slipper on this one foot. And I could not go to church wearing only one slipper.”

George Tries for the High Note

In the weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day, which finds a devoted following in the residents of Accra, the local radio stations change their playlists. Edem from the Audit Department keeps his radio on all day, and the office is filled with love songs. Favorites include the original Lionel Richie/Diana Ross version of “Endless Love” and Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You”. Those familiar with the latter (or with the movie “Vegas Vacation”) will know that it is notable not only for its sweet sentiment, but for its outrageous high note. Not many popular songs make use of the elusive whistle register of the human voice.

Nor is this lost on listeners at the office. There is a lot of humming and singing along with all songs, and there is a real feeling of anticipation when the unmistakable opening of “Lovin’ You” wafts out of the Audit corner. Most people are on board through “La la la la la/La la la la la/La la la la la/La la/Doo doo doo/Doo doo”. When the high note hits you can adjust your ear to hear a thin, quiet caterwauling from the desks of many big, hulking men who continue looking at their computer screens like nothing was going on. It sounds like recorder hour in the third grade mouse class.

The exception is George, who takes time out from work for the attempt. He puts his hands on the edge of his desk and pushes his chair out a little bit to give space. When the time comes he squints his eyes, tilts his head back, and tries to squeeze the note out from the base of his spine. He doesn’t get very close.

One time I asked him if he thought he could hit it. He said, “Yes, I’m going to get it.”

“But George, you’re nowhere close to it. You’re at least two octaves below it.”

“I know I’m not getting it now, but if I practice I could get it."

“I don’t think any amount of practice will let you get it.”

“No, Jake, I know I can do it. Hey, maybe on the weekend I can just stay indoors and practice it straight. If I come down—Doo doo doo/Doo doo—then the next part I’m going to get it.”

“Well, George, I’d love to see it.”

So the gauntlet was laid. For a couple weeks George updated me on his progress every day before lunch. He would sing the part as we walked down the street to the rice seller: “Okay, I’m coming.”

“Okay, George, I’m ready.”

He would put his hand out flat in front of him and raise and lower it with the pitch like he was marking out the tune on staff lines. The approach came, “Doo doo doo/Doo doo” (middle down middle/up up-slide-middle), then he would stretch his mouth into a wide, flat line, screw up his face, and send his hand way up while he tried to wrench out the “Oooohhh” from the very top of his throat. The hand always came fluttering down with his finger wagging while I started laughing. “I’m coming close to it. I didn’t get it yet but I know I will get it. I’m very sure of it. I’m going to get it!”

I’ll be sure to let you know if he does get it, but I still don’t think he will.

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Elephantiasis Lady

She sits on the sidewalk in front of the Central Post Office, around the corner from work. Her back is up against a low wall that forms the edge of a cement patio, which wraps around the outside of the Post Office. Most of the day the sun is behind her and she is in the shade of the patio.

She always wears the same flower-print dress. Maybe it was white once, but now it’s as grey as the sidewalk. She sits with her right leg flat on the ground, pointing straight out towards the street. Her leg is turned out slightly so her foot sags down to the side. A rubber sandal dangles by its thong between her first and second toes. It is badly askew like a sloppy wooden signboard in the Old West that says “Keep Out”.

Her left leg is bent at the knee. Its upper half is hidden by her dress and its lower half is ballooned up with elephantiasis. The flesh is so swollen that the network of tiny, fair-colored canyons in her skin has been forced out flush with the surface, where it appears as a web like the fat in marbleized meat. I have never touched it but you can see that her leg is scaly and hard. Her foot is swollen in the same way and it looks like a badly-drawn cartoon foot, like a football with stubby toes. I’m not sure whether the condition comes with chronic pain, but to see her leg you can only think that it must hurt all the time, some kind of dull stinging from the skin being stretched so taut.

All day she angles for coins from the passers-by, and she keeps the money in a thin red handkerchief that stays spread out on the sidewalk next to her. When someone presses a coin into her outstretched right hand, she slowly folds her rough, callused palm fully around it, and as she makes her fist she raises her head. Then she deposits the coin onto the handkerchief and replaces her hand in front of her.

During the few steps while I approached her, as I dug in my back pocket for some coins, I decided I would smile and greet her as I made the handoff; but when she looked at me I saw her eyes for the first time and got stuck. The centers were painted with milky clouds and the whites were a sickly, mucus yellow. My greeting caught in my throat and I just had to keep walking as I thought: That must hurt all the time, too.

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Free Cinderblock

When a friend left two issues of Men’s Health on the coffee table in our house I was inspired to try one of the exercises inside. It’s a simple exercise:

(1) Find something pretty heavy

(2) Hold it out in front of you at chest height with your arms straight and your hands pushing in on its sides

(3) Put it down when you can’t hold it anymore

I knew that if I could do (1) I could do (2) and (3). But I found out that it’s not easy to assemble a home gym on a budget, even here in the capital city. I tried a plastic bag full of 30 water sachets but it was big and awkward to hold. Next I figured I should try a cinderblock. Luckily there were some nearby.

The land between my compound and the main road is divided into three distinct strips: first is a narrow, rough road the runs parallel to the larger one; second is a strip of uneven, dusty dirt about 30’ wide with some scraggly trees and scrub grass growing on it; and third is a wide, deep gutter.

Directly across the rough road from my gate on the dirt strip, in the shade of a wide neem tree, there is a neat pile of cinderblocks. There must be 100 cinderblocks there. I walked over and found a man sleeping on the ground with his feet up against the pile. He woke up when I approached.

“Good evening, sir. Are these cinderblocks for you?”

“No, they are for somebody.”

“Oh. Is he here?”

“No, he is not here now.”

“Do you know if he plans to use them?”

“Yes, he is using them.”

“What is he doing with them?”

“He is building a house.”

The cinderblocks in the pile are nice enough, but they aren’t the right amount for a house, even a very small one. The whole neat pile of them isn’t more than 3’x 3’x 6’.

“Where will the house be?”

“Just here.”

The dirt strip is also nice enough, but it isn’t the right place for a house. There are no structures anywhere along it, though it runs the whole length of the main road. It’s too small and scrabbly and uneven to do any serious building on.

“I don’t know if he can build a house here with these blocks.”

“Oh, he is building it.”

“Well, do you think he would mind if I took one block from here?”

“Oh, you can take all.”

“Oh, sir! I only need one. Anyway, wouldn’t it be difficult to build the house if I took all?”

“This man, don’t mind him. For the house, the blocks wouldn’t catch.” (To say something doesn’t catch is to say it’s not enough for its intended purpose. Taxi drivers will often tell you that your offer doesn’t catch.)

“Well, I agree. Anyway, I will be very happy just to take the one.”

“You can take it.”

So I took one of the nicest blocks from the top of the pile and carried it to the alley behind my house. We already had a good wooden pole with a bent nail in it, which could be wedged into the corner at the base of the back wall to herd the clotheslines to one side. That way there is plenty of space to stand up and hold the cinderblock out at chest height, then put it down when it becomes too heavy. Voila, home gym.

Have we done this before?

They woke me up for breakfast: a cereal bar, a banana, and a custard cup of orange juice with a foil top. Clunk, clunk is the sound of Ghana coming up under the wheels. Soon we are stopped and people are prying their plaid jute bags from overstuffed overhead compartments, and when the cabin door is opened the air rolls in like a hot fog. Down the stairs, across the tarmac, through the queue to the immigration officer whose accent is, for a second, too thick to make out. He is asking me how many books I’ve written, and whether I’m famous enough that he should get my autograph. On my entry card I’ve listed my occupation as “Writer”.

Outside I can taste the dust. It’s the Harmattan, O the evil Harmattan and its choking haze! Last year I lost my voice for two weeks when the cruel silt took up residence in my throat. It makes the morning sky look like a big brown smudge left by a junky pencil’s hardened eraser. And the taxi drivers, so anxious to help me home. Only GHC 15, you say?

It feels pretty automatic this time around. The lively taxicab tango (resulting in a fare of GHC 3) is a well-rehearsed show for no audience. When my pants start to stick to my shins after four minutes outside, I make a mental note: that’s probably twice as long as it’s ever taken before. After eight months of preparation the plastic sheeting has been removed from the edge of Cantonments Roundabout—also known as Deforestation Circle, for its center island full of venerable old trees that were chopped down in an effort to drive away the prostitutes known to hide from the police in their shadows at night—revealing an area of sparse grass with a sizeable podium in the middle. The statue on the podium is hidden under a cloak of garbage bags. My house has not moved, but the pitted track that runs in front of it has seen some repairs, as the deepest potholes have been filled with loose chunks of cement.

So some things are different; others are the same.

I walked into an empty house, put down my bags, and fell asleep. The first couple days always feel slow and arduous. I notice things that aren’t: the hours aren’t passing; the air isn’t crisp; the loved ones aren’t around; the acquisition of a good meal isn’t likely; the shower isn’t hot and the pressure isn’t good. Happily, Ghana is so many things that the tide turns irresistibly. The vegetable lady remembers my name and dashes me a mango. Elizabeth, our cleaning lady, has mounted festive newspaper pages and hand-drawn Christmas cards from her kids on the walls of our living room with medical tape. The newspaper pages are scrawled with kind messages in thick black permanent marker. I miss you, you are welcome! Well, I guess I missed you, too.

CAN 2008 is the biggest thing since Ghana@50. It’s the African Cup of Nations, the continent’s most soccer tournament, held every other year. From January 20 – February 10, Ghana is hosting the 16 best African teams as they play for a golden trophy and valuable bragging rights. It is no small matter.

In Accra alone the construction has been going on for over a year. The main sports stadium has been completely renovated and the deadly construction on the beach road was finally completed a day before the opening match. Imagine: they’ve turned the earth under every square inch of that road so many times by now, dug and filled and pressed and graded so many tons of dirt over and over with such hopeless Sisyphean sincerity that the project had become almost wholly symbolic—and they finished it. Curbs are freshly-painted and street lamps have been installed.

The people are also keeping up with the masonry. Every car—yes, every car—has at least one Ghanaian flag visible in or on it. Sales of whistles and plastic horns are through the roof. The plastic horns are in green, red, or yellow and they make a triumphant elephant sound. Those who can beg, borrow, or steal for them have bought CAN 2008 shirts. There are no less than 100 unique styles.

It’s not just for Ghana, either. Along the main roads, compound walls are draped with the flags of all 16 participating countries, and they’re all being purchased. Angolans, Namibians, Moroccans, even the much-maligned Nigerians are in the streets. With brightly-colored flags hung like capes over their bulging backpacks they are shiny, exotic beetles. Mostly they roam the terrarium freely, but they are sometimes forced to scurry aside when a herd of those damned hornblowing elephants comes trundling down the sidewalk.

So it is a real to-do, a combination of competition and pageantry that amounts to something like a medieval joust on safari. As such, it is not to be missed.

A well-connected manager at the office who has been sidelining with the company printing tickets for the entire tournament managed to wrangle one for me: blue section 13, seat S0050 of the popular stands (cheap seats) for the opening match. I gave that one to George to ensure his attendance; then when Sunday came we went to the stadium at midday to try our luck with the scalpers. How do we look?

It was, as expected, a madhouse. All the red, yellow, and green paint in the city seemed to have been bought up and used to color the people walking around. They had been dipped like dark fried meat in fondue. It wasn’t too hard to find a ticket. It cost GHC 30 for a GHC 4 ticket, but that was what the market would bear. George feigned outrage (or wasn’t it feigned?) at the scalper, who happily exchanged blue section 12, seat U0002 for my three green bills. He added them an ample stack which he folded neatly in half and put in his pocket.

With tickets in hand we took some time to amble around the outside of the stadium and see what was going on: mostly rowdy fans and the noise of plastic horns, whistles, kazoos, and foghorns is what it was. One guy, though, was handing out little glossy prayer-a-day booklets, and another was promoting Trashybags, a neat organization that makes handbags, backpacks, duffels, etc., from discarded water and FanYogo sachets.

We went into the stadium around 2:15. The match wasn’t beginning until 5 but the gates were to be closed at 2:30 in order to “encourage” ticketholders to attend the opening ceremony in addition to the game itself. It worked. When President Kufuor and the heads of both continental (CAF) and global (FIFA) soccer governing bodies made opening remarks at 3 they were met with thunderous applause and not a little hornblowing.

The hour that followed featured a real spectacle with a cast of thousands: dancers, tumblers, men on horseback, etc. George explained that the first part was a visual retelling of Ghana’s evolution from disparate tribes to unified nation. One group represented each tribe, wearing its traditional dress and dancing its traditional dances. Gradually these separate groups coalesced into a single mass doing a single dance. Apart from these there were drums ten feet high, men dressed up as kings with huge gaudy golden scepters, and hundreds of dancers carrying giant crescent horns. Taken together, the performers’ costumes made a squirming kaleidoscope shawl of mardi gras sequins and glittery wet fish-scales in the sun, which the field wore with distinction like a bag lady movie star showing up to the Oscars drunk on good champagne.

There was also the part where everyone came out with colored umbrellas and glided into perfect formations: the flag, the outline of Africa, the tournament’s logo, etc.

And that was before the game. A good hour before, actually. Once the spectacle ended the grounds crew came out and wadded up—did not roll up—the field-size white tarp and carried it off with some difficulty, revealing a yellow surface covering the middle half of the field. Many more workers rushed out from three directions with big cardboard boxes on their heads and ran to the edge of the yellow amoeba, which they began to dismantle pixel by pixel from the outside in. The amoeba was made up of thousands of interlocking tiles intended to protect the grass below. This was less of a precision drill than the performance. Tiles were removed in odd strips and shapes and thrown haphazardly into the boxes, which were quickly filled and carried off, leaving the amoeba only half-dissolved, pixels bleeding out onto the pitch. Workers looked around at each other confusedly for a minute and then resumed their work, now carrying the tiles to the edge of the field and heaving them over a waist-high barrier into a buffer zone between the closest seats and the field.

George watched the jumbled yellow piles grow and spread in the buffer zone and plainly saw the result of poor planning. He lowered his head into his hands, chagrinned: “They have failed. The tiles should have been attached to the white cloth. This is terrible. They have disgraced themselves.”

Later, with the field clear, the teams limbered up, the starting lineups announced, and the sun finally sinking, the match began. All the fans’ noisemakers, flags, face paint, and road flares had survived three hours in the sun and were fully functional. We happened to be in the unofficial Guinean cheering section (Guinea being the opponent) and didn’t realize it until well into the match when the differences in cheering became obvious. It’s hard to tell based on flag-colored attire alone. (See host's and visitor's flags below, respectively.)

Towards the end of the first half two men walked up the steps towards our section carrying two large jute bags each. They stopped right near our row, unzipped the bags, produced two handheld foghorns, and declared, “Ten Ghana cedis!” Well, it was really a success. It wasn’t five minutes before they had sold all their horns to fans within twenty seats of George and me. Groups of people were pooling money to buy them.

What made them so great was probably the amount of sound you got in return for pushing a button with your pointer finger. Meanwhile, you could use your breath for screaming. One foghorn was easily equivalent to three or four plastic elephant horns in terms of decibels; and it produced a unique pitch which resonated with the cranial bones, creating the sensation of a balloon being inflated in the hollow pressure-point space behind all the listeners’ ears.

Understandably, they needed to be tested out. All possible combinations of short blasts, long blasts, and very long blasts were examined. The results were summarized in a comprehensive report consisting of a single continuous blast that lasted minutes and exhausted the compressed air in the foghorn of a man a few rows behind us. George, whose ears are tender, was beside himself. “We would have been better to see the match on TV,” he said; but I could tell he was enjoying himself.

The second half was coming to a close. Ghana and Guinea were tied 1-1 and the match was getting sloppy. The clock crept towards 90 minutes and an unsatisfying draw. Then in the 89^th minute Sulley Muntari wound up and sent a laser from 20 yards out into the top right corner. The stadium erupted. For all the screaming I couldn’t hear the foghorns. People flailed wildly with uncapped water bottles in their hands, sending big sloppy arcs of warm water across the stands. George took off his glasses and waved his flag so hard I thought the plastic pole would bend in half. We were all soaked and the noise was deafening well through the ending whistle about four minutes later.

Afterwards, as we walked home past the cemetery, groups of wet fans with paint running down their faces lifted stuck cars out of the roadside ditch. There was music and honking in the streets, car horns and foghorns and plastic elephant horns.