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.

Overdue Update

Two words: New Digs. Ten days ago I packed my things and brought them to another 3BR house about a mile away from my house in South Labadi Beach Estates. This one is smaller and sits on a compound behind a larger house occupied by a Ghanaian family. My room here is not large and is oddly shaped. There are windows on two sides and the floor is smooth tile. High on the south wall is my new best friend: a Deltac air conditioner with remote control. As I write this paragraph I’m delightfully chilly. Last night it was so cold I had to pull my sheet over my legs.

There are other perks, too—consistent water, comfortable couches, and two new roommates. On the day I moved in there was also a generator by the front door, but it was removed soon afterwards for repairs, since it was found to be leaking gasoline into the living room. You can’t have everything. But my fingers are crossed and I’m patiently waiting for its return.

It’s likely to turn out to be an important appliance in the coming weeks. Actually, the important appliance. The last report from Akosombo was ominous—2.1” of water and two spinning turbines separating most of Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso from a merciless light off. Now the two turbines are down to one and the 2.1” is down to an even slimmer margin.

A lot of the expats working in development here “know somebody” at “the embassy”, and he invariably has some dismal news to report on the power issue. Besides these rumors there are two facts: (1) In 25 years of assiduous daily recordkeeping of the water level at Akosombo, the reservoir’s lowest day has never come before 1 August, and (2) A dam is being constructed in the south of Burkina Faso, upstream from Lake Volta on one of its chief tributaries, and the reservoir behind it is currently being filled. (1) tells us that we shouldn’t expect rising water levels for quite a while, and (2) tells us that, even when the rains come up north and the tributaries start to flow, we’ll only get a modest trickle while the reservoir in Burkina swells.

That guy at the embassy, though, has a number of forecasts, none of which is very optimistic. The best of them has lights off in Accra for a full 24 hours every third day starting in mid-May; the worst has a total blackout for the whole country beginning May 1 (tomorrow).

Whatever is the case, it’s good that Cathy made it here while the power schedule is consistent and fairly accommodating. She walked out of Kotoka International last Sunday at 9:30am, fresh off the direct flight from JFK, with a banjo in one hand and a big duffel stuffed full of Entenmann’s multigrain bars over her shoulder. Cathy taught me number theory, cofounded the legendary folkgrass outfit Twenty-second String, and is my good friend. She ditched her last week of lectures to come to Africa with her banjo and multigrain bars.

We went straight to the Regency Coconut Grove Hotel, where there were no rooms available. Luckily there were beers available and so we had that instead.

Like most Ghanaians I’ve met, Cathy is friendly, good-natured, and not shy. She likes to laugh, too, and that served her well. We went together to the OI office Monday morning and she quickly struck out for Makola market with a pocketful of cedis on a mission for cloth. She navigated the place easily, never stepped in a gutter, made friends, and bought fabric. She also established her M.O. for the week: Go, Do. Between Monday morning and Friday afternoon, while I inconsiderately spent many daylight hours in the office, Cathy crisscrossed the city, tracing a seemingly effortless arc from dressmakers to drum lessons.

Wednesday afternoon was a highlight in the long cement building where the Africana dance troupe practices. It was hot. The way the drumming rings deep inside the ears, so that when you step outside all the sounds seem far away; and the black nylon running pants the men wear, soaked completely through. When they stand in one place in between dances they drip pools of sweat. Cathy said the dancers redefined “sexy”.

I think they also redefined “friendly”. Cathy arranged with Junior, whose bead creations were pictured in a long-ago post, to buy a drum. He makes those, too. Thursday she went back to the long cement building, picked up her djembe, and took a two-hour drum lesson from Aziz. And then the three of them were friends.

Friday afternoon we went up to Akosombo, almost the same trip I made with Mom about a month before. We arrived at the Akosombo Continental Hotel soon after dark and sat on a patio jutting out over the river’s edge. Just downstream was the unlit Adome bridge. Lonely cars drove over, silent pairs of ghostly headlights trundling low and flat through the black sky. We ate drank and talked and also sat quietly for a little while. There were tiny winged ants and other bugs. One was long and skinny like a flying grasshopper. It flew right into the side of Cathy’s head, then sputtered off to land on some other piece of the patio. There was an animal somewhere close by making an electronic hiccup sound.

The next morning we walked in the hotel’s impressive menagerie. They have at least ten monkeys of various species in three cages, parrots and parakeets, a crocodile, two duikers, and a huge turkey. Cathy observed that the turkey could probably beat either of the duikers (miniature antelopes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duiker) in a fight.

We also hired a small powerboat (with a captain) for a trip to the low side of the dam. Speeding up the Volta River past mud huts and dugout canoes dragged up on the shores, we passed under the swooping powerlines stretched a quarter mile between Erector-set towers. Six black cables on the six arms of each tower and as you approach, pass underneath, and retreat, their smooth arcs seem gracefully to bend and tilt, intersection points sliding along the curves; the steep lush hills on the east bank of the river; scalloped cirrus clouds in a high sky—the place was wide, wide open.

At the base of the dam the river is a wide basin. We approached close enough to see the meager bubbling of the outflow, one grate of six gurgling quietly, the rest still and silent. After a couple minutes looking around we sped back down the wide river, under the slow-motion dance of the catenary powerlines.

On the way back to Accra we stopped at the bead section of the Krobo-Odumase market, aisle upon aisle of brightly-colored glass. As we walked in from the street Cathy carried a plastic bag full of the last of the multigrain bars. Having handed out some 30 lbs of them over the course of the week, she didn't have many left--maybe 40 bars or so. As we approached three teenage boys walking out towards the street Cathy produced a handful of the individually-wrapped bars and offered them: "Do you want some multigrain bars?" The boys happily accepted and one asked me for some water from my bottle. By the time I handed it to him a small crowd had assembled around us and Cathy reached into the bag and held out fistfuls of bars and the people grabbed at them. The crowd grew and the number of outstretched arms multiplied and within half a minute it was a roiling scene of groping hands gobbling up as many bars as they could. Some bars fell on the ground and then people dropped to the ground and the hands gobbled them up immediately. People began to ignore the handfuls and reach directly for the bag, which was getting light anyway, and Cathy cracked a smile. She let go of it and for an instant it was suspended there by a web of black arms, hands kneading and pulling in all directions. It broke and the remaining bars fell like a pinata's cargo onto the dusty ground and there was a mad scramble for them. People hoarded and tug-o-war'd and yelped. Cathy was laughing and we walked deeper into the market towards the beads.

Cathy’s flight was scheduled to depart from Accra at 10:30 Sunday morning. She left my house at 5am although it’s only 15 minutes from the airport. She had heard that check-in closed three hours before flight time and wanted to be extra safe. Before she left she used my phone to call Junior and Aziz. When she got back to New York she told me that, after she called, they had biked halfway across the sleeping city to the airport and waited with her until she walked to the gate at 9:30. They just wanted to see her off. I wonder if it ever occurred to them as they pedaled through the hushed predawn that they had met Cathy only four days before. My guess is it didn’t.

Easter Weekend

We had Friday and Monday off from work for the Easter holiday, and Oti had arranged a party Sunday night for his girlfriend Millicent’s birthday. It had been a couple weeks since I saw him last. His car has been on the fritz and I have been traveling on the weekends. But when we spoke Saturday he arranged to pick me up in the evening and take me to the party.

It was scheduled to start at 8 and I was ready. Oti came at 9:30 with his friend Eddie in the front seat of the Astra. We drove halfway down the block before the unmistakable flapping of a limp, deflated tire caused the car to shudder. Conveniently there was a gas station nearby. We rolled gingerly up to a tiny sagging shack on the edge of the station, outside which a few men sat amid stacks of bald used tires.

Oti and Eddie got out of the car and explained our situation to the attendants. Apparently he had been at the station earlier that day to inquire about a new set of tires. He had arranged to purchase them the following day; but now the attendant wanted him to buy a brand new inner tube which would be useless as soon as the new (tubeless) tires were mounted. Oti tried to convince him to lend him the inner tube for the night, to be returned the next morning when he came for the new tires, but the attendant wouldn’t budge. A fairly heated exchange ensued, which was less an argument than a series of vigorous repetitions of Oti’s proposal and persistent appeals to the attendant’s sense of fairness. In a few minutes of loud talking and gesticulating, there seemed to be no new ideas and no rebuttals or counterarguments. Ultimately Oti won out, proving his case by what some math professors call the method of sufficiently emphatic assertion. Though they proceeded to agree on a price of GHC 60,000 for the repair, he paid GHC 40,000 and no questions were asked about the sum. We left around 10:15.

The irony really was that the party was just a few blocks from my house, not more than ten minutes’ walk. When we pulled up Oti stopped to let Eddie out and told me he needed to pick something up from his house. We drove the two blocks there and Oti took me inside where he changed into his “whites”—a pair of white cotton pants, a white cotton shirt, and white sneakers—and took a small suitcase from his room.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Clothes.”

“Are you staying at Millie’s house tonight?”

“No. These are for the party. I will need to change outfits throughout the night.”

Back into the car and up two streets and we parked in a driveway. It was 11 o’clock. The party was outside and extended a full block down the street to its dead end. There were tables and chairs, a dj with a mountain of speakers, and a grill serving up chicken and kebabs. Oti had arranged all of it. He hadn’t even turned off the engine when he caught sight of Millicent and realized something was amiss. She had changed out of her white cocktail dress and into a black skirt with a white blouse. So before getting out of the car he dove into the backseat and shimmied out of his white pants, exchanging them for dark jeans. “I cannot be wearing my whites once Millicent has changed from hers,” he explained.

As soon as he got out of the car he was surrounded by friends and guests, and Millicent walked up and they circulated easily together from table to table for a little while. There were close to a hundred people there by my count. Oti is fairly short, a couple inches shorter than Millicent at about 5’4”, but he walked tall next to her. He was beaming. When he leaned in to talk to someone over the loud music he would put one arm behind him with his hand at the small of his back like a waiter at a fancy restaurant.

After a few minutes of socializing Oti excused himself and we went together to the corner store where he bought a couple cases of beer. We carried them back to the end of the street, gathering the beer-bearer’s Pied Piper trail of guests as we walked. Everyone seemed happy but Oti wasn’t content yet. Back up the street, through the knots of people dancing and talking and sitting on plastic chairs, and over to a drinking spot where Oti bought Angostura bitters, local dry gin, and two other bottles of unidentified hooch. Then we returned to the party for good. Oti continued to buzz around, the consummate host, bringing out plates of piri-piri chicken and offering drinks, collecting pats on the back and occasionally indulging in a short conversation. Whenever he walked past me he swooped in and introduced me to the nearest few people. He seemed to know everyone.

At one point he sat down for a few minutes with me at a table. He told me that both he and Millicent were glad I could come, and then he said, “You are like the bone taken from my own body. Without you I could not stand.” He smiled, and to me he seemed so rich in good feeling—happy that so many people came, satisfied that Millicent was having fun, grateful that he could plan and pay for it—that all he could do was share it. I had to smile, too. The contentment he exuded felt like an August afternoon sun, the way it warms the flesh beneath the skin. I don’t know why, but it fed an awareness that other people are exactly as real as myself, each of us a tiny star in every other’s unique night sky. His happiness was a generous unspooling of tightly-wound gravity. Imagine the opposite of a black hole.

Before long he moved on, gliding around with more plates of chicken and making sure everyone was having a good time. I wandered over towards the dj’s mountain of speakers. In the road just in front of it people were dancing in tight groups to the ubiquitous soundtrack of American hiphop and Ghanaian hiplife. The scene was unmysterious—good company, dancing, food, birthday cheer. A nighttime block party on a long weekend is an enjoyable thing. No quiet epiphanies should be required. But I was tired, so I found Oti and Millicent, thanked them for the party, and set off for home.

Monday night I had dinner at a friend’s apartment in the Airport Residential neighborhood of Accra. It was late, almost 2:30, when I left. It is about 500m to junction where I could get a taxi. Walking out of the compound I put on my headphones and started down the quiet street. About halfway to the main road I saw two young men coming up the opposite side of the street. I kept my eyes forward and continued, but I could see from their gestures that they were calling to me. Though I pretended not to notice, they continued. Somehow it seemed like a bad idea to ignore them completely, so I took out one ear bud and looked over at them. Immediately they started crossing the street to my side. I feared I had made the wrong decision.

When they came close to me one said, “So you are afraid of us.”

“No, I was listening to some music. I am just on the way to pick a taxi at the junction here.”

“Let us escort you back to your place,” the same one said.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. My laptop was in my backpack and my hip pockets held an iPod, a cellphone, and GHC 700,000 (about $80). “Thank you, I’m sure I will be fine.”

With a lazy smile the other said, “But you must need an escort. There are too many armed robbers around.” His speech was a little bit slurred and only then did I recognize that both men were drunk. Their eyes were glassy and, trying to stand still, they swayed slightly. This made me feel better.

I turned the conversation to them and found out they were on their way home from a late night at a drinking spot. Our exchange turned cordial. They asked about my holiday weekend and told me about theirs. Soon they were squinting in the dim street light, writing their phone numbers on the back of a matchbox, and telling me to be sure to call them. “I’ll try,” I said. They still wanted to walk me to the junction and wait with me for a taxi, but I convinced them not to.

At the junction I got a taxi in less than a minute. I struck up a conversation with the driver, who had spent the holiday relaxing at the beach with his family. Just a couple hours earlier he had dropped them off at home and set out to drive for the night. As we continued to talk he told me he was impressed with my English. “Most obrunis I cannot hear it when they speak English, but you I hear it very clear.” It’s true—when I speak with Ghanaians I meet casually my diction and inflection change. My sentences start to look more like the above. Though I can only imagine that it sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth, it does wonders for comprehension.

Well, the driver was very excited and apparently really thought it was a hoot. “Excuse me, I must call my wife,” he said. And so he did, at 2:30am called her giggling and saying quickly in Twi something about the obruni in his car who speaks like a black man, etc, etc. Then he handed the phone to me, saying, “You must greet her.”

Her voice was hoarse and creaky. I said, “I’m very sorry to wake you. You sound as if you have been sleeping.”

“Yes”

“Well, do I sound like a black man?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Sound sleep.”

“Good night.”

I handed the phone back and they spoke only a few seconds more, then he hung up. He seemed completely satisfied with the exchange. I always consider it a sign of exemplary service to disturb one’s family members at all hours of the night on behalf of the customer, so I dashed the driver GHC 5,000 when he dropped me at my house. As I got out of the car I said to him the standard Twi farewell and he said “Oh!” and drove off down the street laughing.

Paradise, etc.

Friday morning 3/23 I played hooky, packed up my mosquito net and bathing suit, and went to the STC bus terminal by Circle. The 9:30 bus to Takoradi, not known for its punctuality, was elsewhere. Around 10:15 an old hulk lumbered creaking into the loading area and the crowd of passengers assembled on the platform rushed inexplicably for the ticket kiosk. As it turned out, everyone there had paid for a luxury bus with air-con; and since the route would be serviced by an older model, riders were entitled to a refund. Fifteen minutes later, after considerable jostling and grumbling, each rider settled into his sticky vinyl seat with a crisp GHC 20,000 ($2.20) bill while the heavy diesel air of the station wafted indolently through the open windows.

The engine’s hacking, phlegmy report signaled our departure. The driver shook the rust off with a couple of lurching stalls, then got the bus rocking back and forth, performed a remarkable start without plowing into the loading platform, and backed cautiously out of the slip and the bus yard into the stagnant midmorning traffic approaching West Africa’s largest roundabout. Once we got outside the city the air in the cabin cleared and the ride was comfortable. Five and a half hours later we arrived at the STC terminal in Takoradi, Ghana’s third largest city.

As soon as we stepped down we were descended upon by taxi drivers. Our group of six backpack-toting obrunis was an obvious target. “Green Turtle or Ellis’ Hideout?” was all they asked. That both of these are more an hour outside the city speaks to Takoradi’s cachet as a tourist destination. They were referring to two of the best-known ecotourism spots on Ghana’s coast. Tremendously popular with backpackers and semester-abroad students, each is a cluster of bungalows and tents right on the beach, outfitted with solar panels and composting toilets. I think every white person I know here has visited one of them at least once. I wished that we could have defied their expectations—“Take me to city hall,” or “Where can I find some good okra stew in this town?”—but like so many other palefaced paradise-seekers before us, we waddled off with our bags of plantain chips and our iPods towards the tro tro station and hightailed it to Agona junction, then haggled for a taxi that rambled through Dixcove and down 15km of rough road to deposit us at the entrance to the Green Turtle Lodge.

Paradise is a gently curving beach of powdery sand glowing pink in the light of a low sun. There are leaning palms for effect, and the sound of the surf. The sun stayed out the whole time we were there and at night we slept under the mosquito net while the breeze made the palm fronds clatter together like rain. There was also bodysurfing. And real coffee from a French press. More than once I was nudged by that delicate, fleeting feeling that seems to come only when the world offers no resistance: a slippery awareness that I managed to forget that I am right now falling backwards through a clear sky. Nonsense?

Like my recollections of most events and places that have allowed that mysterious sensation to unfold, my mind’s Green Turtle has the sharpness, coherence, and satisfying completeness of a clever short story.

But more often life here is a novel, and Monday I was back at the office. On Tuesday it rained hard for about an hour. First it became dark and the wind began to whip through the streets, stirring the silty sidewalk dust into little cyclones. The ubiquitous black plastic bags took to the air like the ashen ghosts of jellyfish and migrated towards the ocean. Then came the rumble of thunder and the tropical monsoon.

While the vast network of open sewers was overflowing, flooding the low-lying parts of Accra with impossible filth, we were perched comfortably on the third floor of OI’s head office. There it stayed completely dry, save for a few drips from the edges of the window frames. Most buildings in Accra have louver windows, but since the office was built for air-con, it has large horizontally-sliding panes set in metal frames. So much for an airtight seal; still, what little water managed to sneak through was quickly mopped up without incident.

Most of the next day it was impossible to work because the sound of a power drill boring into metal cut through the entire building. The office maintenance crew was repairing the window frames. To keep water from leaking in and collecting on the floor, they had contrived to create drainage by drilling holes through the frames themselves. The thought was: If we can’t stop the water from coming in, we can at least give it a way out. Unfortunately the drainage holes they drilled are level and gouge just underneath the track where the panes slide. So, temples throbbing after a day full of the torturous dentist’s-chair squeal of the drill, the windows scrape closed on their deformed tracks and outside water has some new ways in. However airtight the seals were (not very), now they are less so. Thus, the cool air we condition for the office we now share to a greater degree with the whole city. In the microfinance business they call that “outreach”.

Though the rain was severe enough in Accra to press into service all the ingenuity of our maintenance squad, it didn’t do a lick of good up at Akosombo, where it might really have helped. On Wednesday afternoon the Volta River Authority shut down a fifth turbine, leaving just one, and instituted a new schedule for the rolling power outages. Now every other day will have 12 hours light off, alternating 6am-6pm and 6pm-6am. For instance, if lights are out Monday during the day, they will also be out Wednesday night, and again Friday during the day, etc. Since I arrived in October they had managed to keep power on all day, cycling light off for just 12 hours every fifth night. Naturally the new arrangement is less than ideal for Accra’s businesses.

Happily OI has a huge diesel-powered generator on the premises, nestled right up next to the building. It is the size of a small SUV. Normally it kicks in only when the power cuts out; I don’t think it was designed to be used for hours on end. It drones and rattles and radiates heat and emits thick diesel exhaust and generally makes the whole area feel like the engine room of an ocean liner.

When it runs continuously it is necessary to keep the building sealed; otherwise, since the exhaust shoots directly onto an outer wall where an updraft carries it to windows on every floor, one ends up inhaling diesel fumes all day. And only when I caught a noseful of that sweet oil smoke wafting through the drainage holes on Friday morning (the first daytime light off at the office) did I appreciate fully what the maintenance crew had achieved with their window repair. The only thing left for them to do is to plug the holes with asbestos when it’s not raining. I think that’s scheduled for next week.

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.

The Central Market of Kumasi (With Pictures!)

Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti kingdom and seat of its highest chief, the Asantehene, is Ghana’s second-largest city. It sits some 170 miles northwest of Accra, in the lush, rolling hills of central Ghana.

I boarded a bus in a dusty parking lot near Circle around 11am Thursday. Having paid the full GHC 80,000 (about $9) for the “luxury” bus, I was ready for a smooth and relaxing ride in a cool, spacious seat, just like I’ve seen in Amtrak Acela ads. As it turned out, the ride was admirably cool thanks to full-time air-con. There was also room to stretch my legs! Smooth was unfortunately out of the question due to the condition of the road; and relaxing was a pipe dream, anyway. The entire 6 hour journey (for readers without a pocket calculator handy, that’s a blistering 28mph average speed) there were Nigerian movies playing on the TV at the front of the bus. These films, well-loved by millions of Ghanaians, are incredibly low-budget and outrageous. They are the West African descendants of the Jerry Springer Show. Although they visit the usual dramatic themes—love, death, betrayal, ambition, etc—they are so (unintentionally) shoddy and over-the-top that they serve mainly to insult the tastes of the people who watch them.

Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s hard to be complimentary when these movies are being amplified over the crackling, hissing bus PA system at unimaginable volumes as we trundle through hour five down the jalopy highway between Accra and Kumasi.

But eventually we arrived and I found my way to the Central Market—the largest outdoor market in West Africa, according to the guidebooks. It is the lowest part of the city, sitting in a depression between four hills. In the picture below, taken from the hill overlooking the southwest corner, the area bordered by the tro-tro station in the immediate foreground and by the substantial buildings on the hills to each side is the market. It’s well over a square mile.

But on Thursday I hardly walked through it—it was almost sunset and I didn’t want to find myself (or lose myself) in that impossible maze in the dark. So I stayed mostly to the edge and continued around the west side, where I saw a familiar sight in the waning daylight: trees whose branches were heavy with hanging bats like big dead leaves curled up on themselves. There were many thousands of them. I watched for a few minutes and, without obvious provocation, the trees began exploding one by one in whirling clouds of chattering and flapping that merged before the setting sun.

Had it not been for the persistent ringing of the wake-up call, I probably would have slept through most of Friday morning. Burrowed under a bedspread, head buttressed by soft pillows, heavy drapes drawn, the exotic sting of cold air in my nostrils—these are pleasures well known to (and often taken for granted by) experienced business travelers. But opening my eyes in the air-conditioned cave that was 6:30am in Room 110 at the Royal Park hotel, getting up wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me.

Nonetheless, by 8am I was at the Kejetia branch of OI, which sits on one of the hills overlooking the Central Market (actually, it’s just to the left of the frame of the photo above). There I met with the branch manager who arranged for me to accompany one of the Susu collectors on her daily rounds through the market. Susu is a savings product designed specifically for petty traders where the customer commits to deposit a daily deposit of a certain size—usually between GHC 10,000 and GHC 100,000 ($1 to $10)—and a bank officer visits his business each day to collect. Cynthia, the collector I went out with Friday morning, had 125 clients to visit. She led me through the streets, into courtyards, along narrow alleys, up crumbling stairways, down impossibly crowded aisles of the market, weaving a path whose complexity I cannot describe. Theseus would have run out of thread in our labyrinth. And as we slid along our incredible route, passing thousands, tens of thousands, of dark black faces, she would stop at a stall and *pop* familiarity! A short conversation, an exchange of soft-worn bills, a line on the ledger card, and the interaction was done. As it was Friday, about half of her clients didn’t make any deposit; she explained that they wanted to save their money for the weekend, but that on Monday they would all pony up their appointed sums.

To try and give some sense of the variety of the customers’ livelihoods, here is an incomplete list:

• Rice and Stew (prepared)
• Fabric
• Rice (raw)
• Shoe adhesive and leather
• Butchers
• Vegetables
• Shoe heel wedge cutter
• Groundnut paste
• Sugar/flour/milk powder
• Toiletries
• Bread
• Cooking pots
• Candy
• Sandal manufacturer
• Machete sales
• Beaded jewelry
• Secondhand clothing
• New clothing
• Newspapers
• Ground red pepper
• Electrical supplies
• Secondhand shoes
• Luggage
• Plastic bags
• Laundry soap
• Lamps
• Embroiderer
• Legumes (raw)
• Cosmetics
• Tailor
• Sunglasses
• Radios

And that was only the morning. I left after two hours, less than half way through Cynthia’s appointed rounds, and headed back to the branch. During that time I didn’t have my camera, but I had it when I returned alone in the afternoon to try (unsuccessfully) to develop some rough mental blueprint of the market and to consider the possibility of breaking it down into smaller clusters for the purposes of our study (prognosis: impossible).

Below are some of the pictures I took. General warning: the pictures do not capture the intensity of the market, its overwhelming size and scope. In fact, they’re completely deceiving because they are silent, self-contained, and individual: single stalls, tables, or people. But to stand there is to be inundated by many: many bodies, many smells, many colors, many sights, many sounds. Maybe it will suffice to say that, every time I snapped a picture, there was someone just inches outside the frame calling out, “Hey! Obruni! What are you doing?” or grabbing my arm, or laughing, or making a sale, or otherwise creating waves in the fabric of space-time. Serious warning: there are five shots from the butchering shed. Why so many gruesome pictures of raw meat? For two reasons: (1) the butchers were, on the whole, the nicest group of people I met at the market, happy to talk and let me take pictures. Go figure. (2) I’ve never seen anything like the inside of that shed, and suspect most of you haven’t either.

Shoe Alley: The first place I walked through with Cynthia. I can’t believe I managed to find it again in the afternoon. It is accessed by going through dark passage at the back of the dusty courtyard of a nondescript building on a side street. About 300 yards long and five feet wide, it climbs up a hill beside the market (of which it is not technically a part). On both sides are stalls with floor-to-ceiling lattices hung with leather shoes and sandals.

My Favorite Pepper Seller: This woman called to me and spoke very good English. We talked for a little while and she agreed that I could take a picture of her and her peppers. After I snapped it, she smiled and asked, “Where’s the money?” I told her I wouldn’t pay her, but that she could have some candy (I had just bought a big bag of individually-wrapped caramels). She said, “Okay!” and grabbed the bag out of my hand, emptied half of it onto her lap, and laughed the heartiest laugh I’ve heard in a long time. I screwed up my face and said “Oh!” but the women sitting at the tables near her saw what happened and started howling, too. There was nothing else for me to do, so I laughed so hard I almost cried.

Butchering Shed Pictures

What’s Inside a Cow?: At bottom left is the lung, bottom center is the gizzard (the flesh inside is incredibly deep ruby red), dominating the center are the intestines, the furry bag at right is one of the stomachs (turned inside out), the bubbly-looking stuff at top left is mostly fat (I think), and the blurry part being sliced at top center is the penis (which looks like a 3’x 2” tapeworm). Hungry?

Fat, and The Butchers Who Sell It: The greenish-white lumps at right are portions of pure beef fat.

Goat Heads: Mainly for soup, though I’m told that people eat the brain separately.

A Man and His Cow Head Halves: Maybe gratuitous, but this is here on a table along with everything else. And the man pictured, who produced this incredible gore, was one of the nicest people I spoke to all day.

The Whole Damned Thing: The man at this table let me take a picture, but couldn’t tell me what these are used for. I have to guess this one weighed at least 30 lbs. Who’s carrying that home for dinner? This was probably the hardest thing for me to look at all day. The skin is rough, like sandpaper.

No More Butchering Shed Pictures

Cloth and More Cloth: This one stall was bursting with so much color that I couldn’t pass by without taking a picture (or two).

The staggering variety of the single cloth stall above illustrates a difficulty that I have hardly begun to digest. The thousands of aisles of stalls, the myriad skills at work and products for sale, the impossible mass of humanity in that low-lying market in Kumasi—it is a composition of individuals so numerous that any attempt to grasp them is immediately confounded. But cutting a razor-thin path through that mayhem I came face to face with hundreds of them, exchanged words, made real human contact, and continued on, knowing that I could never find my way back. How numerous, and how brief, those sparks—and how much more numerous the sparks that were not struck, the aisles I never did (and never will) walk down…

Thomas Wolfe says:

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?”

But my feeling is not one of grief, or of missed opportunities; but rather of dizzying awe at the inescapable randomness of my jaunt through this continent. And the detail in this infinitesimally thin slice—does it even make sense to speak of a whole pie? Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, and standing inside Kumasi’s vast Central Market one couldn’t disagree. But then, climbing the hill back to the Kejetia branch, the particular fading into the general, the swarm of activity blurring continuously into a nebulous cloud and eventually into a bounded whole, the deception of sight and the conceit of knowing.

Every night at dusk the bats fly, millions of them, over the dispersing atoms of the market while the place folds in on itself and lays down to sleep.