Yesterday’s Daily Graphic carries an article about a plea made by one Kwesi Amoafo-Yeboah, identified as an “independent presidential aspirant”, directed at the main political parties here and urging their followers to avert the violence he foresees in the electoral campaign. In doing so, Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah joins, well, pretty much everyone. Since my arrival in June, not a single issue of The Graphic has passed beneath my eye without containing a similar plea from some junior regional minister, some paramount chief of an obscure traditional area, some reverend, some CEO, some actor or some musician. On Mondays, there are frequently several such pleas, since the newspaper doesn’t publish on Sunday and the exhortations tend to stack up. Added to these, on a more-or-less weekly basis, are reports of Walks for a Peaceful Election, Prayer Meetings for a Peaceful Election and Concerts for a Peaceful Election. Every two weeks or so, The Graphic runs an editorial of its own, usually not only calling for peaceful elections, but also calling on Ghana’s citizens to call for peaceful elections. The pleas are repeated on the radio stations, TV broadcasts and, as I saw last week, at comedy shows. An observer could not be blamed, based on the tone of the local media, for confusing Ghana with Somalia.
This has all been patently absurd, of course; it has been completely divorced from both past and present reality. The best explanation for all of the alarmism is probably that people are spooked by the violence that followed the elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe this year. Most of the pleas cite these examples, never mentioning that in those countries, violence-plagued elections are very much the historical norm. Ghana simply does not have this kind of history, however. While its fifty years of post-independence history do contain some cases of political and ethnic conflict, the conflicts have been tied overwhelmingly to local chieftaincy disputes rather than electoral politics. Since democracy was reintroduced in the mid-1990’s, Ghana’s elections have been free, fair and peaceful. As the newspaper exhortations never fail to mention, to date Ghana has been a model for African democracy.
How long it remains so is an open question, and one that hinges largely on the behavior of the media. Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah’s plea is unique in that it follows in the wake of a bona fide case of electoral violence (which is probably why he was joined, in other articles, by the editorial board of The Graphic and something called the Bawumia Fun Club). This weekend, a scuffle at a political rally in the Northern Region resulted in a reprisal attack that killed 6 people and the torching of a fair bit of a town called Gushiegu. In addition to auguring poorly for the next three months, the attack seemed to confirm the fears that so many had aired in the media. However, did their utterances really represent foresight, or were they just self-fulfilling prophecies?
In his book, When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani analyzes the psychology of the Rwandan genocide: what, he asks, turned thousands upon thousands of Hutu farmers, shopkeepers and clergy into genocidaires? One of the necessary ingredients, he found, was fear. The Hutu-dominated government sowed fear deep into the Hutu population; the Hutus were told stories of the Tutsi militia that lay just over the border, ready to commit all manner of atrocities to the Hutus once they had the chance. When the Tutsi guerillas advanced, and when the Hutu President’s plane was shot down, it seemed to confirm all of the worst fears that had been cultivated in the population. It was at that point that the genocide began. Throughout the Rwandan genocide, vernacular radio stoked the flames of violence by repeating claims about Tutsi plots; during the electoral violence in Kenya, Kalenjin and Kikuyu vernacular radio stations spurred attacks by reporting (false) stories about the atrocities committed by other ethnic groups. In Rwanda and Kenya, violence became acceptable as revenge, as pre-emptive protection, as the norm for behavior.
I think something similar is happening, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Ghana. All of the pleas for a peaceful election carry the subtext that the situation is desperate, that danger is afoot, that someone is plotting trouble. Though intended to instill restraint and cooperation, the real effect of these remarks is to create fear and distrust. Supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) accuse each other of plotting to incite violence (and now, in the wake of the clash at Gushiegu, the two parties are trading blame for the violence there). Every newspaper article about the need for peace and every radio commentator warning about the prospect of electoral violence just makes the likelihood of that violence greater.
The media needs to act more responsibly, by reminding the population of the peace that has prevailed throughout most of the country, even during past elections. It needs to place the remarks of the doomsayers into context and rebuild trust and confidence. Unfortunately, this would mark a significant departure for the vast majority of Ghanaian journalists, who seem to fanatically adhere to the philosophy espoused by Stephen Colbert (at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner a few years ago) that the media’s job is simply to accurately transcribe what is told to them. For their part, the luminaries who make these pleas for peace could better spend their time taking concrete steps to eliminate some of the structural factors that encourage electoral violence. The registration process is an ungodly mess and the firewalls designed to separate traditional authority, the bureaucracy and elected offices are woefully inadequate. Fixing these problems would help ensure peaceful elections. I fear, however, that simply airing pleas for a peaceful election will prove self-defeating.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Live from Accra...it's Saturday Night!
There’s an old truism out there that you’re not really fluent in a language until you can joke and be joked to in it. There’s some logic to that; to get a joke, you must have a quickness with, and a command of, the language’s vocabulary that would elude a novice. I think it’s a principle that can be extended further, though: you’re not really fluent in any subject until you can joke about it. In my view, the AP American History exam could be replaced by a wonderful joke I heard about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, with the score from 1 to 5 determined by the quickness and vehemence with which the test taker laughs after hearing the punch line. It would certainly save time and trouble and, as a side benefit, would probably open the eyes of a lot of kids who have received that abstinence-only sex ed.
I bring this up because Saturday night I tested myself and went to a comedy show featuring Ghana’s leading political satirist. It was held in the National Theatre in Accra, which I guess is Ghana’s Chinese-built answer to the Kennedy Center. Its exterior, which looks like nothing so much as a gigantic ship in dry dock, is admittedly impressive in a “we shut down the country’s public schools and hospitals for 12 years to pay for this” sort of way. Inside, though, it looks like the architects used the losing design for a small liberal arts college’s auditorium. There was only a little time to linger over the bizarre modernist balconies or the terrible acoustics, however, with all of the people-watching there was to do. Because every Ghanaian newspaper article is essentially a transcript of what a politician or a politician’s flunky has said, accompanied by a blurry. underexposed photo, I was well acquainted with the words and the rough outline of the faces of the VIPs that were scattered around the hall- the kind of pundits and insiders who, if they were American, would go see the Capitol Steps at the Kennedy Center. Truly rarefied air.
Unfortunately, we all had to wait for the political comedy. The event turned out to be a kind of variety show, with reggae duos, R&B groups, and dancers. At one point, the MC said that the show was a celebration of “indigenous, African creativity”, which sent my mind racing with thoughts of Wole Soyinka, Ali Farka Toure and Cesaria Evora. I was on the wrong track, however, as the act he was introducing turned out to be a man who played the flute with his nose. Finally, though, after a pitch from a bank rep and another for Amarula liquer, the comedian KSM took the stage.
He was funny- even I thought so. He made a few jokes about religion, Indians (channeling Joe Biden, perhaps), and returned expats, but the vast majority of the segments were about the campaign leading up to December’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Granted, the jokes were of the Maureen Dowd and Saturday Night Live variety (he made fun of one presidential aspirant for being short, one for being old and sick and the third for being irrelevant); still, I was pleasantly surprised that I got them. Yet as funny as the show was, there was something unsettling about the performance. The show was called “Castle or Suicide”, referring to Osu Castle, the seat of government. Throughout, there was an undertone of fear that the intensity and competition of the campaign were in danger of spinning out of control. This was made explicit at the end of the night when KSM passionately implored the audience- a portion of which, no doubt, actually has influence over how the election is to be conducted- to ensure a peaceful campaign through December. And as the writers for Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL no doubt know as well as I do, that is just not a good, parting laugh line.
I bring this up because Saturday night I tested myself and went to a comedy show featuring Ghana’s leading political satirist. It was held in the National Theatre in Accra, which I guess is Ghana’s Chinese-built answer to the Kennedy Center. Its exterior, which looks like nothing so much as a gigantic ship in dry dock, is admittedly impressive in a “we shut down the country’s public schools and hospitals for 12 years to pay for this” sort of way. Inside, though, it looks like the architects used the losing design for a small liberal arts college’s auditorium. There was only a little time to linger over the bizarre modernist balconies or the terrible acoustics, however, with all of the people-watching there was to do. Because every Ghanaian newspaper article is essentially a transcript of what a politician or a politician’s flunky has said, accompanied by a blurry. underexposed photo, I was well acquainted with the words and the rough outline of the faces of the VIPs that were scattered around the hall- the kind of pundits and insiders who, if they were American, would go see the Capitol Steps at the Kennedy Center. Truly rarefied air.
Unfortunately, we all had to wait for the political comedy. The event turned out to be a kind of variety show, with reggae duos, R&B groups, and dancers. At one point, the MC said that the show was a celebration of “indigenous, African creativity”, which sent my mind racing with thoughts of Wole Soyinka, Ali Farka Toure and Cesaria Evora. I was on the wrong track, however, as the act he was introducing turned out to be a man who played the flute with his nose. Finally, though, after a pitch from a bank rep and another for Amarula liquer, the comedian KSM took the stage.
He was funny- even I thought so. He made a few jokes about religion, Indians (channeling Joe Biden, perhaps), and returned expats, but the vast majority of the segments were about the campaign leading up to December’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Granted, the jokes were of the Maureen Dowd and Saturday Night Live variety (he made fun of one presidential aspirant for being short, one for being old and sick and the third for being irrelevant); still, I was pleasantly surprised that I got them. Yet as funny as the show was, there was something unsettling about the performance. The show was called “Castle or Suicide”, referring to Osu Castle, the seat of government. Throughout, there was an undertone of fear that the intensity and competition of the campaign were in danger of spinning out of control. This was made explicit at the end of the night when KSM passionately implored the audience- a portion of which, no doubt, actually has influence over how the election is to be conducted- to ensure a peaceful campaign through December. And as the writers for Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL no doubt know as well as I do, that is just not a good, parting laugh line.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Tongue-Tied
An interesting problem popped us last night as the Peer Educators and I were making preparations to perform a play about HIV in Ankwaso. “Nick,” one of them said pointing to our script, “we have to translate this from Sefwi to Twi. They don’t speak our language there.” Ankwaso, mind you, is the neighboring village, maybe 2 or 3 miles down the road.
That’s the way it goes in a polyglot country like Ghana. Sefwi is spoken by just 100,000 of Ghana’s 20 million people- imagine a small American county with its own language- and no mother tongue in the country is spoken by more than about 4 million people. I’m at the very edge of the Sefwi-speaking region; in one direction are the Wasa Twi speakers of Ankwaso. Pivot ninety degrees and keep going and you’ll hit a Fante-speaking region. These languages- and the dozen or so other languages in the Akan family- are similar to one another, but they are certainly not identical.
To enable people to talk with others in neighboring villages, the different groups of southwestern and south-central Ghana have adopted (Ashanti) Twi as a kind of lingua franca, a common language similar enough to their mother tongues that they can learn it easily. Because about half the country’s population belongs to one Akan group or another, Twi has become the dominant language in most of the country- it is the language of business and the media even in some non-Akan areas like Accra. As a result, Twi is the language that most foreigners, myself included, are taught upon arrival. The obvious disadvantage is of course that I can’t speak the language of my own village and have no idea whatsoever as to what is going on around me.
That said, learning Twi is an absolute pleasure. This is thanks mostly to Jonas Yeboah-Dankwa’s Basic Twi For Learners (Asante). I picked up the locally-published, 83-page book on impulse in Kumasi, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa, who once pursued an MA (the back cover tells us) at the “University of Bloomington, Indiana”, has managed to avoid the mistakes made by so many writers of language books. Remember the unnatural, vocabulary-filled practice dialogues in high school language class (e.g. Q:“What pastimes do you enjoy in springtime? A: In springtime, a pastime I enjoy is playing baseball. Q: What pastimes do you enjoy in winter? A: In the winter, a pastime I enjoy is going skiing. What pastimes do you enjoy in winter?”)? Or the dated dialogue in those travellers’ language guides? I had a Swahili-for-travelers book that made no mention of cell phones or internet cafes, but instructed me on how to say “Sir, please lead me to the best tobacconist in town.”
Well, here is most of Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa’s dialogue in the travel and transportation section, set on one of the minibuses that are called tro-tros here. To set the scene, the driver’s mate, who touts for business and collects the fare, has just tried to overcharge the passengers, citing a rise in gasoline prices in the recently-announced government budget:
Passengers: Ho! You are a liar! You are a thief! You are a cheat!
The mate relents and charges them the old fare.
Passengers: You are ashamed.
Mate: I am not ashamed
Driver: Stop talking!
Passengers: Driver, mind your own business and let’s go.
Driver: If you do not stop talking, I won’t continue.
Passengers: Is that so? We shall see.
(All the passengers burst into laughter. The driver continues the journey to the lorry station at Kwame Nkrumah Circle).
That’s it. No instruction on how to ask where a tro-tro is going, or ask what the fare is, or anything remotely useful. Yet Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa has captured, in its essence, the Ghanaian tro-tro experience. He similarly captures the Ghanaian tomato-buying experience and the Ghanaian taxi-chartering experience. Almost always, his dialogues are punctuated by derisive laughter- and maybe that is the real lingua franca of Ghana.
That’s the way it goes in a polyglot country like Ghana. Sefwi is spoken by just 100,000 of Ghana’s 20 million people- imagine a small American county with its own language- and no mother tongue in the country is spoken by more than about 4 million people. I’m at the very edge of the Sefwi-speaking region; in one direction are the Wasa Twi speakers of Ankwaso. Pivot ninety degrees and keep going and you’ll hit a Fante-speaking region. These languages- and the dozen or so other languages in the Akan family- are similar to one another, but they are certainly not identical.
To enable people to talk with others in neighboring villages, the different groups of southwestern and south-central Ghana have adopted (Ashanti) Twi as a kind of lingua franca, a common language similar enough to their mother tongues that they can learn it easily. Because about half the country’s population belongs to one Akan group or another, Twi has become the dominant language in most of the country- it is the language of business and the media even in some non-Akan areas like Accra. As a result, Twi is the language that most foreigners, myself included, are taught upon arrival. The obvious disadvantage is of course that I can’t speak the language of my own village and have no idea whatsoever as to what is going on around me.
That said, learning Twi is an absolute pleasure. This is thanks mostly to Jonas Yeboah-Dankwa’s Basic Twi For Learners (Asante). I picked up the locally-published, 83-page book on impulse in Kumasi, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa, who once pursued an MA (the back cover tells us) at the “University of Bloomington, Indiana”, has managed to avoid the mistakes made by so many writers of language books. Remember the unnatural, vocabulary-filled practice dialogues in high school language class (e.g. Q:“What pastimes do you enjoy in springtime? A: In springtime, a pastime I enjoy is playing baseball. Q: What pastimes do you enjoy in winter? A: In the winter, a pastime I enjoy is going skiing. What pastimes do you enjoy in winter?”)? Or the dated dialogue in those travellers’ language guides? I had a Swahili-for-travelers book that made no mention of cell phones or internet cafes, but instructed me on how to say “Sir, please lead me to the best tobacconist in town.”
Well, here is most of Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa’s dialogue in the travel and transportation section, set on one of the minibuses that are called tro-tros here. To set the scene, the driver’s mate, who touts for business and collects the fare, has just tried to overcharge the passengers, citing a rise in gasoline prices in the recently-announced government budget:
Passengers: Ho! You are a liar! You are a thief! You are a cheat!
The mate relents and charges them the old fare.
Passengers: You are ashamed.
Mate: I am not ashamed
Driver: Stop talking!
Passengers: Driver, mind your own business and let’s go.
Driver: If you do not stop talking, I won’t continue.
Passengers: Is that so? We shall see.
(All the passengers burst into laughter. The driver continues the journey to the lorry station at Kwame Nkrumah Circle).
That’s it. No instruction on how to ask where a tro-tro is going, or ask what the fare is, or anything remotely useful. Yet Mr. Yeboah-Dankwa has captured, in its essence, the Ghanaian tro-tro experience. He similarly captures the Ghanaian tomato-buying experience and the Ghanaian taxi-chartering experience. Almost always, his dialogues are punctuated by derisive laughter- and maybe that is the real lingua franca of Ghana.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
A Dispatch from the Holy Ghanaian Empire
It’s nearing 11:00 PM as I write this. I’m sitting in my bed, under a mosquito net and a ceiling fan which is struggling against one of the hottest nights I can remember. It is not just the heat that’s keeping me awake, though; it’s the incredibly loud yelling and clapping coming from the Community Center forty yards away.
The Community Center gets a lot of use, from meetings of the youth wings of the two major political parties, from community meetings with the chief and his elders, and from bogus-sounding medical screenings. However, I know without asking what’s going on tonight, because there’s only one draw that would get villagers, who are normally asleep by 8 PM, to stay up so late: Jesus.
It was only a matter of time before they started using the place for prayer meetings. Southern Ghana is the most emphatically Christian place I’ve ever been. I know I said the same about Kenya last year, but I was a fool; in comparison, Kenyans come off looking like a bunch of Gomorrans. Kenyan Christianity is, if not discreet, at least discrete. Sure, the airwaves are completely taken over by God, but just on Sundays. Kenyans will speak at length about their faith, but usually only when you ask them about it.
In Ghana, Christianity is everywhere, all the time, to an extent that probably would have made Jerry Falwell uncomfortable. On a 4 AM Tuesday morning bus ride, I was treated to a window-rattling radio sermon urging me to resist the temptation of fornication (thankfully, too- you know how 6-hour pre-dawn bus rides get people all hot and bothered otherwise). I think I was the only person bothered by this, though, as most Ghanaians are very much prepared to recite Biblical verse and have Biblical verse recited to them at any moment, much the way my brother and I quote lines from Will Ferrell movies to each other. I used to regret not knowing enough Twi or Sefwi to eavesdrop on people here and strike up conversation, but my trip to Accra, where English is fairly widely-spoken, cured me of that curiosity. It was as if the whole English-speaking population of the capital was in competition to see how many times they could fit “Thank God” and “God Bless” into their conversations.
Accra was educational in other ways, too. Throughout my time in Ghana, I’ve occasionally seen or run into Western missionaries, which always strikes me as funny. There are apparently enough of them that any white person is usually called Kwasi Bruni (“Sunday-born White Person”). What can all these missionaries do here? They are quite literally preaching to the converted. Perhaps Ghana is where they send missionaries with self-esteem issues, to buck up their confidence or something, as I can’t think of a place where they’d be more warmly received. At any rate, Accra showed me the other side of coin.
I was loitering in the neighborhood of Osu when a Ghanaian woman approached me and asked me if I had a minute to speak. I was so obviously killing time that I did not even try to lie, and it turns out she was from the Baptist church down the street and wanted to know the “exact nature of my relationship” with Jesus (“Just really good friends, thanks”). A few hours later, in a cab stuck in one of Accra’s many, many traffic jams, we were approached by a boy who came up to my window. It’s pretty common here for vendors to come up to car and bus windows proffering their wares, so I looked straight ahead and prepared to ignore him in order to convey my lack of interest. I was surprised, then, to feel a book fall into my lap. It was the New Testament. The boy announced that it was free, and when I told him that I had no need for it and tried to give it back, he thrust it towards me again. The driver said, “Go away, of course he already has a Bible.” The boy shook his head; there are enough brunis hanging around Osu for him to have known that we are more-or-less heathens. “Most of these brunis do not believe in Jesus, or even God,” the boy said with disgust. The driver looked at me, his face contorted by shock and his eyes reflecting a sense of betrayal. “No, no,” I stammered, hoping to restore peace and reward the driver for sticking up for me in the first place, “It’s just that I already have several Bibles at home. But thank you.” The boy shrugged and moved along.
Even here in the village, after one of the American volunteers declared himself agnostic, a local took it upon herself to convince him that God existed. It was a painful week of debate, like watching a Scopes Monkey Trial in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had been replaced by the hosts of Crossfire, but I must admit that whether in Accra or the village, I enjoy the irony of Ghanaians targeting Americans and Europeans for their evangelizing. How long until Samoan ministers are building mission churches to save the godless New Yorkers, Ugandan Mormons start knocking on doors in San Francisco and Amazonian tribesmen begin telling European sunbathers that God wants them to cover their breasts? Papal watchers say we will probably see a Latin American or African pope in our lifetime, and why not? In religious fervor, we have nothing to teach the colonized and converted, and they have much to teach us. It may have taken a few centuries, but it’s about time they return the favor.
The Community Center gets a lot of use, from meetings of the youth wings of the two major political parties, from community meetings with the chief and his elders, and from bogus-sounding medical screenings. However, I know without asking what’s going on tonight, because there’s only one draw that would get villagers, who are normally asleep by 8 PM, to stay up so late: Jesus.
It was only a matter of time before they started using the place for prayer meetings. Southern Ghana is the most emphatically Christian place I’ve ever been. I know I said the same about Kenya last year, but I was a fool; in comparison, Kenyans come off looking like a bunch of Gomorrans. Kenyan Christianity is, if not discreet, at least discrete. Sure, the airwaves are completely taken over by God, but just on Sundays. Kenyans will speak at length about their faith, but usually only when you ask them about it.
In Ghana, Christianity is everywhere, all the time, to an extent that probably would have made Jerry Falwell uncomfortable. On a 4 AM Tuesday morning bus ride, I was treated to a window-rattling radio sermon urging me to resist the temptation of fornication (thankfully, too- you know how 6-hour pre-dawn bus rides get people all hot and bothered otherwise). I think I was the only person bothered by this, though, as most Ghanaians are very much prepared to recite Biblical verse and have Biblical verse recited to them at any moment, much the way my brother and I quote lines from Will Ferrell movies to each other. I used to regret not knowing enough Twi or Sefwi to eavesdrop on people here and strike up conversation, but my trip to Accra, where English is fairly widely-spoken, cured me of that curiosity. It was as if the whole English-speaking population of the capital was in competition to see how many times they could fit “Thank God” and “God Bless” into their conversations.
Accra was educational in other ways, too. Throughout my time in Ghana, I’ve occasionally seen or run into Western missionaries, which always strikes me as funny. There are apparently enough of them that any white person is usually called Kwasi Bruni (“Sunday-born White Person”). What can all these missionaries do here? They are quite literally preaching to the converted. Perhaps Ghana is where they send missionaries with self-esteem issues, to buck up their confidence or something, as I can’t think of a place where they’d be more warmly received. At any rate, Accra showed me the other side of coin.
I was loitering in the neighborhood of Osu when a Ghanaian woman approached me and asked me if I had a minute to speak. I was so obviously killing time that I did not even try to lie, and it turns out she was from the Baptist church down the street and wanted to know the “exact nature of my relationship” with Jesus (“Just really good friends, thanks”). A few hours later, in a cab stuck in one of Accra’s many, many traffic jams, we were approached by a boy who came up to my window. It’s pretty common here for vendors to come up to car and bus windows proffering their wares, so I looked straight ahead and prepared to ignore him in order to convey my lack of interest. I was surprised, then, to feel a book fall into my lap. It was the New Testament. The boy announced that it was free, and when I told him that I had no need for it and tried to give it back, he thrust it towards me again. The driver said, “Go away, of course he already has a Bible.” The boy shook his head; there are enough brunis hanging around Osu for him to have known that we are more-or-less heathens. “Most of these brunis do not believe in Jesus, or even God,” the boy said with disgust. The driver looked at me, his face contorted by shock and his eyes reflecting a sense of betrayal. “No, no,” I stammered, hoping to restore peace and reward the driver for sticking up for me in the first place, “It’s just that I already have several Bibles at home. But thank you.” The boy shrugged and moved along.
Even here in the village, after one of the American volunteers declared himself agnostic, a local took it upon herself to convince him that God existed. It was a painful week of debate, like watching a Scopes Monkey Trial in which Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had been replaced by the hosts of Crossfire, but I must admit that whether in Accra or the village, I enjoy the irony of Ghanaians targeting Americans and Europeans for their evangelizing. How long until Samoan ministers are building mission churches to save the godless New Yorkers, Ugandan Mormons start knocking on doors in San Francisco and Amazonian tribesmen begin telling European sunbathers that God wants them to cover their breasts? Papal watchers say we will probably see a Latin American or African pope in our lifetime, and why not? In religious fervor, we have nothing to teach the colonized and converted, and they have much to teach us. It may have taken a few centuries, but it’s about time they return the favor.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Trying Hard not to Title This 'A Tale of Two Cities'
I just completed what I suppose is the first business trip of my life. While Ghana’s two largest cities, Accra and Kumasi, aren’t going to the land on the top of many Fodor’s readers’ lists, there are certainly worse destinations; my brother’s first trip in his new job was to Akron, Ohio. At any rate, it was instructive to see Accra and Kumasi, which, with respective populations of three million and two million, contain more than a fifth of Ghana’s population.
I was not a complete stranger to Kumasi. At two hours’ distance, it is the nearest real city, so I’ve run errands there a few times and become fond of it. It is one of the oldest cities in southern Ghana; founded as the capital of the nascent Ashanti kingdom in the late 17th century, its fortunes rose with those of the Ashanti, peaking at the turn of the 19th century, when it was the seat of power for an empire stretching from Cote d’Ivoire to Togo, from the coast to Burkina Faso. By the end of the century, though, the slave trade which funded Ashanti expansionism had been abolished, and the British had established the coastal towns- first Cape Coast, then Accra- as the center of power in Ghana. The Ashanti resisted colonial rule, but the ensuing wars saw Ashantiland placed under British administration and robbed Kumasi of much of its old architecture and city plan.
What has replaced it is a bustling, modern and very commercial city. At all hours, the traffic is jammed like a Manhattan rush hour, and the sidewalks are full of pedestrians and vendors. What is most striking, however, is the market. Kajetia is reputed to be the largest market in West Africa, and standing at the administrative tower in the middle of the madness, one could certainly believe it. It spreads out, a giant bowl in the heart of the city, covering almost 15 square hectares. It is difficult to think of something so large being too small, but it is; the 11,000 vendors in the market cover every inch of space in the market, and spill out into neighboring streets. There are plans afoot to start building up, since there is no place to build out.
From high atop the tower, Kajetia seems orderly and calm. It spreads out in neat rows of rusty, corrugated tin roofs. On the ground, however, it is a bit overwhelming. Giant wheeled carts pass through the narrow alleyways; you find your path impeded by a shipment of cow heads or a stack of cheap Chinese radios. You can find just about anything you could think of, and a fair number of things you wouldn’t think of: cowbells and percussion instruments made from auto parts, mancala boards decorated with pictures of players from the English Premiership. One vendor sells nothing but sandals made from old truck tires, another the fine leather ahenemaa sandals traditionally reserved for Akan chiefs. Do you want pre-colonial beads? There’s a row of stalls for those. A t-shirt from the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament last spring? Several hundred vendors could help you with that. Maybe a thousand vendors sell fabric, ranging from cheap imports to the finest locally-made kente and adinkra. As you work your way around the market, the smells change, too: from dry, salted fish and pig’s feet to handmade soap to freshly packaged cloves.
Yet beating under the surface of Kumasi is its old Ashanti heart. Behind walls (ironically) advertising skin bleaching cream, the National Cultural Center preserves a collection of artifacts from the reign of Osei Tutu, the first asantehene and the man who founded Kumasi and started the empire more than three hundred years ago. Across the road is a mausoleum, housing the remains of generations of Ashanti royalty, located on the grounds of Komfo Anokye Hospital, itself named after Osei Tutu’s fetish priest, who consulted the gods and called forth the golden stool. Behind the counters of many businesses, the proprietors have hung calendars and pictures of the current asantehene.
Even in Kajetia, tradition is not completely forgotten behind all of the commerce. Tucked in a corner near an old disused railroad track, the fetish section offers up the paws of giant cats, desiccated turtles, tiger skins and animal bones. All of this is used as part of the juju, the black magic and traditional healing, which after a century of Christianity, still has a foothold in Ghana. It would make Komfo Anokye proud.
Accra has an equally long, though more complicated, history. Before colonial rule, it was the seat of power for a non-Akan people called the Ga. It is still the headquarters for the Ga, but because of its importance to the nation and the overwhelming number of outsiders who have moved in over the past century, it is not a Ga city in the same way that Kumasi is an Ashanti city. Its colonial history was a strange one; in its different neighborhoods, it housed a Dutch castle, a British castle and a Danish castle. Though the British secured a monopoly over the city (and all of the Gold Coast) by the nineteenth century, Accra still feels disjointed. It is hard to comprehend that the bustle of Adabraka or James Town can exist in the same city as the leafy embassy-and-NGO-lined streets of Cantonments.
I was in Osu, once the Danish quarter, and now a rather upmarket neighborhood that houses the president (in the old castle) and attracts a lot of westerners. Like Kajetia, it offered any number of unimaginable of things for sale, though they were of a different variety: Vietnamese food, Arizona Iced Tea, root beer. I ate frequently at a food court, which served fast food chicken, pizza and burgers, but the real draw was the soft-serve ice cream. It also has a knock-off McDonald’s playground attached to it, complete with paintings of knock-off Disney characters (I suppose they’ve confused their giant American franchises). The whole neighborhood looked and felt less like the Ghana I have come to know than it did some middle-class commercial district in a Sun Belt city. Navigating its streets, I felt as disoriented as I had in the alleys of Kumasi.
I was not a complete stranger to Kumasi. At two hours’ distance, it is the nearest real city, so I’ve run errands there a few times and become fond of it. It is one of the oldest cities in southern Ghana; founded as the capital of the nascent Ashanti kingdom in the late 17th century, its fortunes rose with those of the Ashanti, peaking at the turn of the 19th century, when it was the seat of power for an empire stretching from Cote d’Ivoire to Togo, from the coast to Burkina Faso. By the end of the century, though, the slave trade which funded Ashanti expansionism had been abolished, and the British had established the coastal towns- first Cape Coast, then Accra- as the center of power in Ghana. The Ashanti resisted colonial rule, but the ensuing wars saw Ashantiland placed under British administration and robbed Kumasi of much of its old architecture and city plan.
What has replaced it is a bustling, modern and very commercial city. At all hours, the traffic is jammed like a Manhattan rush hour, and the sidewalks are full of pedestrians and vendors. What is most striking, however, is the market. Kajetia is reputed to be the largest market in West Africa, and standing at the administrative tower in the middle of the madness, one could certainly believe it. It spreads out, a giant bowl in the heart of the city, covering almost 15 square hectares. It is difficult to think of something so large being too small, but it is; the 11,000 vendors in the market cover every inch of space in the market, and spill out into neighboring streets. There are plans afoot to start building up, since there is no place to build out.
From high atop the tower, Kajetia seems orderly and calm. It spreads out in neat rows of rusty, corrugated tin roofs. On the ground, however, it is a bit overwhelming. Giant wheeled carts pass through the narrow alleyways; you find your path impeded by a shipment of cow heads or a stack of cheap Chinese radios. You can find just about anything you could think of, and a fair number of things you wouldn’t think of: cowbells and percussion instruments made from auto parts, mancala boards decorated with pictures of players from the English Premiership. One vendor sells nothing but sandals made from old truck tires, another the fine leather ahenemaa sandals traditionally reserved for Akan chiefs. Do you want pre-colonial beads? There’s a row of stalls for those. A t-shirt from the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament last spring? Several hundred vendors could help you with that. Maybe a thousand vendors sell fabric, ranging from cheap imports to the finest locally-made kente and adinkra. As you work your way around the market, the smells change, too: from dry, salted fish and pig’s feet to handmade soap to freshly packaged cloves.
Yet beating under the surface of Kumasi is its old Ashanti heart. Behind walls (ironically) advertising skin bleaching cream, the National Cultural Center preserves a collection of artifacts from the reign of Osei Tutu, the first asantehene and the man who founded Kumasi and started the empire more than three hundred years ago. Across the road is a mausoleum, housing the remains of generations of Ashanti royalty, located on the grounds of Komfo Anokye Hospital, itself named after Osei Tutu’s fetish priest, who consulted the gods and called forth the golden stool. Behind the counters of many businesses, the proprietors have hung calendars and pictures of the current asantehene.
Even in Kajetia, tradition is not completely forgotten behind all of the commerce. Tucked in a corner near an old disused railroad track, the fetish section offers up the paws of giant cats, desiccated turtles, tiger skins and animal bones. All of this is used as part of the juju, the black magic and traditional healing, which after a century of Christianity, still has a foothold in Ghana. It would make Komfo Anokye proud.
Accra has an equally long, though more complicated, history. Before colonial rule, it was the seat of power for a non-Akan people called the Ga. It is still the headquarters for the Ga, but because of its importance to the nation and the overwhelming number of outsiders who have moved in over the past century, it is not a Ga city in the same way that Kumasi is an Ashanti city. Its colonial history was a strange one; in its different neighborhoods, it housed a Dutch castle, a British castle and a Danish castle. Though the British secured a monopoly over the city (and all of the Gold Coast) by the nineteenth century, Accra still feels disjointed. It is hard to comprehend that the bustle of Adabraka or James Town can exist in the same city as the leafy embassy-and-NGO-lined streets of Cantonments.
I was in Osu, once the Danish quarter, and now a rather upmarket neighborhood that houses the president (in the old castle) and attracts a lot of westerners. Like Kajetia, it offered any number of unimaginable of things for sale, though they were of a different variety: Vietnamese food, Arizona Iced Tea, root beer. I ate frequently at a food court, which served fast food chicken, pizza and burgers, but the real draw was the soft-serve ice cream. It also has a knock-off McDonald’s playground attached to it, complete with paintings of knock-off Disney characters (I suppose they’ve confused their giant American franchises). The whole neighborhood looked and felt less like the Ghana I have come to know than it did some middle-class commercial district in a Sun Belt city. Navigating its streets, I felt as disoriented as I had in the alleys of Kumasi.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Clearing the Bad Air
Having signed up for a stint as the Health Coordinator for an NGO, I have no right to complain. Nonetheless, sometimes I feel like my days are devoted, in one hour increments, to all the scourges of modern Africa: a morning spent in a staff meeting on HIV/AIDS and calling a supplier about hookworm drugs, an afternoon of Yellow Fever, teenage pregnancy and overpopulation. All that’s missing, and I’m sure one day this will land on my agenda, is the horde of locusts to which I will devote exactly one hour of my time.
This week has stood in contrast to the ADD of Health Catastrophes. My attention has been devoted, almost wholly, to malaria. A group of volunteers has arrived from the US to work with us on a malaria survey and a public education campaign in Humjibre, as well as the distribution and retreatment of bed nets. For two weeks, it is Malaria Malaria Malaria here.
As well it should be, given the scope and impact it has. Malaria is caused by an infection of tiny parasites, transmitted by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito. The parasites enter the liver, then after an incubation period, spread to the bloodstream where they wreak havoc, causing problems that start with a fever and degenerate from there. What is perhaps most striking about the disease is its dual nature: it can be both banal and terrifying. To the adults of a nearby village, Suroano (“On the River Bank” in Sefwi), malaria is foremost a simple economic problem. The disease strikes them several times per year, disabling them for weeks and sending them for expensive treatment at the clinic. Here in Humjibre, virtually everyone has had malaria, and it is spoken of in much the same way we speak of the flu.
Yet malaria can be frighteningly dangerous. It preys on society’s most vulnerable: the very young, the physically weak and malnourished and, most of all, those without access to healthcare. For healthy adults, a course of pharmaceutical treatment and a week of bed rest is usually all that is needed to fight off the disease. But for babies and young children, and even adults who do not get treatment quickly, the disease can be overwhelming: the intense fever degrades the body’s organ system and can eventually disable the nervous system, causing seizures, comas and death.
Malaria is the single most important disease in the world, and except for a few years when the Plague ran wild, it always has been. Malaria has existed for as long as homo sapiens have, and it has taken its toll on us. By one estimate, fully half of all the people who have ever entered into this world have exited it because of malaria. It is a historical oddity that most of us will not only go through life without contracting malaria, but will never even meet someone who has. This is a disease that once made Washington, D.C. virtually uninhabitable, and killed more Civil War soldiers than did enemy bullets. Its footprint stretched far out of the tropics, from Europe (its name is Italian for bad air, the supposed source of the illness that would strike Rome every summer), across Asia to the United States.
Now it is has been sequestered. It exists in much of Latin America and southern Asia, but its stronghold is Africa, where the most virulent strain, plasmodium falciparum, predominates. It is here that malaria claims about 90% of its victims. The tactics of eradication- the filling in of swamps and drying of wetlands, the construction of secure homes, the improvement of sanitation and construction of closed sewers- which worked so well in Europe and the American South nearly a century ago have either never been employed or have failed here. For those with the money to afford it, chemical prophylaxis has always offered some measure of protection. Malaria, however, with its long history of interaction with humans, has become adept at outflanking these defenses. Quinine and chloroquine, two stalwarts, are nearly obsolete now, with most strains of malaria having become resistant.
Nevertheless, fifty years ago, it looked like malaria could be totally eradicated, even here: the spraying of DDT to keep mosquitoes out of homes cut sharply into the prevalence of the disease in Africa. Then, in a post-Silent Spring world, such spraying campaigns fell out of acceptability, and the disease came roaring back. In the intervening years, scientists have found anopheles that are resistant to DDT, which means spraying is no longer a silver bullet. So Africa remains, as badly afflicted by malaria as ever, a reminder of the time when we were all in malaria’s peril. The problem, however, has taken on grotesque proportions: there are regions of the continent with average annual infection rates above 100%, as many people contract it multiple times in a year.
Here we are, then, in the second century of our battle against malaria. We have returned to what worked last century, trying to reshape the environment rather than directly attacking the parasites or the mosquitoes. However, it is not with bulldozers and thousands of miles of cement that it is being reshaped. It is with simple nylon netting. If you cannot get rid of the mosquitoes- and in this environment, you cannot- you must create a barrier against them. The battle has become one of getting mosquito nets into the houses, shanties, shambas and kraals of sub-Saharan Africa and getting the residents of these homes to sleep under the nets.
The first task is difficult. Bed nets cost about $6 each, so equipping a large family with nets could cost $24, nearly a month’s pay here. The second task, however, is equally daunting. Our survey is designed not just to determine who will get the 50 new nets we plan to distribute, but will also follow up with past recipients of nets, to make sure they are using them properly. We fear they have not. Partly, this is because bed nets are uncomfortable. It is stifling to sleep under a net, and the hot, unventilated rooms that most people sleep in are stifling enough already. There is also a degree of acceptance of malaria. It has always been in the community, and so people feel a certain complacency. Finally, bed nets are not foolproof- like other methods of prevention, they only lower the risk and frequency of infection. A foot kicked out from under a net is susceptible to bites, and anyway, the nets obviously only work during the times you’re actually in bed. If, after some period of bed net usage, someone falls sick again, he is much less likely to put up with the annoyance of sleeping under the net.
This is not to say it is impossible. In Suroano, about 1,000 of the village’s 1,500 people sleep under bed nets, which were provided by us for free. We know that they still use them because community health workers come and inspect the homes to make sure that the nets are still hung and in working order. The people report that childhood mortality has decreased, as has the number of days lost to the disease and the amount of money devoted to curing it. The cash savings have been reinvested in building the infrastructure of the village. Of course, this required not just a huge influx of cash, but also the dedication of the town, from the chief and elders on down. We’re working toward that here in Humjibre, but it’s going to be tough. It might even take more than a whole week’s attention.
This week has stood in contrast to the ADD of Health Catastrophes. My attention has been devoted, almost wholly, to malaria. A group of volunteers has arrived from the US to work with us on a malaria survey and a public education campaign in Humjibre, as well as the distribution and retreatment of bed nets. For two weeks, it is Malaria Malaria Malaria here.
As well it should be, given the scope and impact it has. Malaria is caused by an infection of tiny parasites, transmitted by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito. The parasites enter the liver, then after an incubation period, spread to the bloodstream where they wreak havoc, causing problems that start with a fever and degenerate from there. What is perhaps most striking about the disease is its dual nature: it can be both banal and terrifying. To the adults of a nearby village, Suroano (“On the River Bank” in Sefwi), malaria is foremost a simple economic problem. The disease strikes them several times per year, disabling them for weeks and sending them for expensive treatment at the clinic. Here in Humjibre, virtually everyone has had malaria, and it is spoken of in much the same way we speak of the flu.
Yet malaria can be frighteningly dangerous. It preys on society’s most vulnerable: the very young, the physically weak and malnourished and, most of all, those without access to healthcare. For healthy adults, a course of pharmaceutical treatment and a week of bed rest is usually all that is needed to fight off the disease. But for babies and young children, and even adults who do not get treatment quickly, the disease can be overwhelming: the intense fever degrades the body’s organ system and can eventually disable the nervous system, causing seizures, comas and death.
Malaria is the single most important disease in the world, and except for a few years when the Plague ran wild, it always has been. Malaria has existed for as long as homo sapiens have, and it has taken its toll on us. By one estimate, fully half of all the people who have ever entered into this world have exited it because of malaria. It is a historical oddity that most of us will not only go through life without contracting malaria, but will never even meet someone who has. This is a disease that once made Washington, D.C. virtually uninhabitable, and killed more Civil War soldiers than did enemy bullets. Its footprint stretched far out of the tropics, from Europe (its name is Italian for bad air, the supposed source of the illness that would strike Rome every summer), across Asia to the United States.
Now it is has been sequestered. It exists in much of Latin America and southern Asia, but its stronghold is Africa, where the most virulent strain, plasmodium falciparum, predominates. It is here that malaria claims about 90% of its victims. The tactics of eradication- the filling in of swamps and drying of wetlands, the construction of secure homes, the improvement of sanitation and construction of closed sewers- which worked so well in Europe and the American South nearly a century ago have either never been employed or have failed here. For those with the money to afford it, chemical prophylaxis has always offered some measure of protection. Malaria, however, with its long history of interaction with humans, has become adept at outflanking these defenses. Quinine and chloroquine, two stalwarts, are nearly obsolete now, with most strains of malaria having become resistant.
Nevertheless, fifty years ago, it looked like malaria could be totally eradicated, even here: the spraying of DDT to keep mosquitoes out of homes cut sharply into the prevalence of the disease in Africa. Then, in a post-Silent Spring world, such spraying campaigns fell out of acceptability, and the disease came roaring back. In the intervening years, scientists have found anopheles that are resistant to DDT, which means spraying is no longer a silver bullet. So Africa remains, as badly afflicted by malaria as ever, a reminder of the time when we were all in malaria’s peril. The problem, however, has taken on grotesque proportions: there are regions of the continent with average annual infection rates above 100%, as many people contract it multiple times in a year.
Here we are, then, in the second century of our battle against malaria. We have returned to what worked last century, trying to reshape the environment rather than directly attacking the parasites or the mosquitoes. However, it is not with bulldozers and thousands of miles of cement that it is being reshaped. It is with simple nylon netting. If you cannot get rid of the mosquitoes- and in this environment, you cannot- you must create a barrier against them. The battle has become one of getting mosquito nets into the houses, shanties, shambas and kraals of sub-Saharan Africa and getting the residents of these homes to sleep under the nets.
The first task is difficult. Bed nets cost about $6 each, so equipping a large family with nets could cost $24, nearly a month’s pay here. The second task, however, is equally daunting. Our survey is designed not just to determine who will get the 50 new nets we plan to distribute, but will also follow up with past recipients of nets, to make sure they are using them properly. We fear they have not. Partly, this is because bed nets are uncomfortable. It is stifling to sleep under a net, and the hot, unventilated rooms that most people sleep in are stifling enough already. There is also a degree of acceptance of malaria. It has always been in the community, and so people feel a certain complacency. Finally, bed nets are not foolproof- like other methods of prevention, they only lower the risk and frequency of infection. A foot kicked out from under a net is susceptible to bites, and anyway, the nets obviously only work during the times you’re actually in bed. If, after some period of bed net usage, someone falls sick again, he is much less likely to put up with the annoyance of sleeping under the net.
This is not to say it is impossible. In Suroano, about 1,000 of the village’s 1,500 people sleep under bed nets, which were provided by us for free. We know that they still use them because community health workers come and inspect the homes to make sure that the nets are still hung and in working order. The people report that childhood mortality has decreased, as has the number of days lost to the disease and the amount of money devoted to curing it. The cash savings have been reinvested in building the infrastructure of the village. Of course, this required not just a huge influx of cash, but also the dedication of the town, from the chief and elders on down. We’re working toward that here in Humjibre, but it’s going to be tough. It might even take more than a whole week’s attention.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Turning on the Lights in Muoho
There was most of a village crowded under that tin roof, or trying to press their way in. Five hundred people, from toddlers to nanas, squeezing into a space meant for a few dozen. Dusk was falling on Muoho, and for once there was electricity in the air. Quite literally.
It was not the presence of us obrunis that attracted the villagers, though once they arrived many certainly gaped at the foreigners. It was not the Peer Educators who attracted the villagers, though once the play about good and bad marriages began, the audience was in stitches. No, what brought the crowd was a bad Nigerian movie- the same bad Nigerian movie, in fact, that I panned last week.
It did not really matter that The Staff of Odo is a bad film, with stilted dialogue and paper-thin characters; after all, it is in English, a language which only a handful of people in the crowd could really understand. The crowd came just for the spectacle of it: the boom of the speakers we had rented, the video projected across the 5’X6’ whiteboard we had brought with us from the library in Humjibre. These were new things to Muoho.
Occasionally National Geographic or something like it will publish satellite photos of the world taken during nighttime, showing where the lights have been turned on and where they have not. Europe, the US and Japan are bathed in white, and most of the rest of the world is speckled or splotchy. In general, where there are people, there are lights. Then there is Africa: a few veins of light in South Africa, a spot here or there denoting the city lights of Nairobi, Lagos or Luanda, but otherwise it is indeed the Dark Continent.
Muoho is one of those countless dark places on the map. Perhaps it was the decision of some bureaucrat in Accra or Takoradi, or the District Assembly in Bibiani or the chief in Bekwai, maybe it was the work of a contractor skimming off the top and not finishing a job, or the result of a World Bank loan that never quite came through; whatever the reason, Muoho has been bypassed by electricity. Humjibre, three miles to the east, has electricity. Bekwai, three miles to the west, has electricity. Muoho, however, is a village of gas lamps, of tinny battery-powered radios, of early bedtimes.
What this means, if you’re a small NGO with a generator and the fuel to power it, is that you have a more-or-less captive audience for your message. So we rolled up to Muoho in a creaking 14-seater van, with 18 people, two 5’ speakers, an amp, a mixing board, lights, the 5’x6’ white board we took from the library, a laptop and a projector. If we passed through an American town with this retinue and hardware, we could be mistaken for a down-on-its-luck multi-racial rock band, but down-on-their-luck multi-racial rock bands don’t get the sort of reception we did. By the time we were setting up, there were a hundred people gathered under the tin roof of the open-air meeting place. By the time we put some hiplife songs over the sound system, there were three hundred. By the time we beamed the movie from my laptop onto the board, there were five hundred, and we had to stop the film shortly thereafter to make announcements to prevent a crushing or stampede. Even when we interrupted the movie so that we could get to real purpose of our visit, the educational play, the crowd pressed in. We had them hooked.
I feared a riot when we stopped the movie for good. We had played about fifteen minutes of it, interrupted it for the Peer Educators’ drama, and then played another forty minutes. It was getting late, though, and there remained at least an hour left on the film before we found out the secret of Odo (those of us, that is, who understood enough English to know that Odo had a secret). After much hand-wringing, we decided to pull the plug. There was no riot, however; people took it in stride and stayed in place as we stopped the movie, removed the lights, packed up the speakers, lit up the darkness with the sparks of poor electrical connections being undone. Then, eighteen of us piled back into the fourteen-seater van and left Muoho to its gas lamps, its tinny battery-powered radios, its early bedtime.
It was not the presence of us obrunis that attracted the villagers, though once they arrived many certainly gaped at the foreigners. It was not the Peer Educators who attracted the villagers, though once the play about good and bad marriages began, the audience was in stitches. No, what brought the crowd was a bad Nigerian movie- the same bad Nigerian movie, in fact, that I panned last week.
It did not really matter that The Staff of Odo is a bad film, with stilted dialogue and paper-thin characters; after all, it is in English, a language which only a handful of people in the crowd could really understand. The crowd came just for the spectacle of it: the boom of the speakers we had rented, the video projected across the 5’X6’ whiteboard we had brought with us from the library in Humjibre. These were new things to Muoho.
Occasionally National Geographic or something like it will publish satellite photos of the world taken during nighttime, showing where the lights have been turned on and where they have not. Europe, the US and Japan are bathed in white, and most of the rest of the world is speckled or splotchy. In general, where there are people, there are lights. Then there is Africa: a few veins of light in South Africa, a spot here or there denoting the city lights of Nairobi, Lagos or Luanda, but otherwise it is indeed the Dark Continent.
Muoho is one of those countless dark places on the map. Perhaps it was the decision of some bureaucrat in Accra or Takoradi, or the District Assembly in Bibiani or the chief in Bekwai, maybe it was the work of a contractor skimming off the top and not finishing a job, or the result of a World Bank loan that never quite came through; whatever the reason, Muoho has been bypassed by electricity. Humjibre, three miles to the east, has electricity. Bekwai, three miles to the west, has electricity. Muoho, however, is a village of gas lamps, of tinny battery-powered radios, of early bedtimes.
What this means, if you’re a small NGO with a generator and the fuel to power it, is that you have a more-or-less captive audience for your message. So we rolled up to Muoho in a creaking 14-seater van, with 18 people, two 5’ speakers, an amp, a mixing board, lights, the 5’x6’ white board we took from the library, a laptop and a projector. If we passed through an American town with this retinue and hardware, we could be mistaken for a down-on-its-luck multi-racial rock band, but down-on-their-luck multi-racial rock bands don’t get the sort of reception we did. By the time we were setting up, there were a hundred people gathered under the tin roof of the open-air meeting place. By the time we put some hiplife songs over the sound system, there were three hundred. By the time we beamed the movie from my laptop onto the board, there were five hundred, and we had to stop the film shortly thereafter to make announcements to prevent a crushing or stampede. Even when we interrupted the movie so that we could get to real purpose of our visit, the educational play, the crowd pressed in. We had them hooked.
I feared a riot when we stopped the movie for good. We had played about fifteen minutes of it, interrupted it for the Peer Educators’ drama, and then played another forty minutes. It was getting late, though, and there remained at least an hour left on the film before we found out the secret of Odo (those of us, that is, who understood enough English to know that Odo had a secret). After much hand-wringing, we decided to pull the plug. There was no riot, however; people took it in stride and stayed in place as we stopped the movie, removed the lights, packed up the speakers, lit up the darkness with the sparks of poor electrical connections being undone. Then, eighteen of us piled back into the fourteen-seater van and left Muoho to its gas lamps, its tinny battery-powered radios, its early bedtime.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Who'll Stop the Rain?
Last night was supposed to be a landmark evening. It was to be the first health outreach of my tenure, a performance in the neighboring village of Mouho. The Adult Peer Educators had written and rehearsed a play about the physical and mental strain that can accompany a bad marriage, with Ozuu stealing the show as the villainous husband who refused to help his wife with food preparation or even to help her lift the load of cocoa off her head. The generator was brought from storage, lights assembled, a DJ hired. It was to be an event. Instead, I spent the evening hunched over a laptop in my house, watching a low-budget Nigerian movie called The Staff of Odo.
The film told the story of a pre-colonial king who sought to ensure that the farmland would be held communally and the aristocratic elders who consequently plotted his downfall; it could have been an allegory for Lumumba in the Congo or Allende in Chile. The scene that stuck out to me, however, came when the king was trying to anoint his son as his successor. The king was slowly dying, perhaps of poison, and needed to quickly hold the ceremony naming his son the next king, lest the stool fall into the hands of the plotters. The catch, however, was that this was rainy season. Such a ceremony, his aides assured him, could not be held during the rain. Eventually the king found a mystic who was able to assure him that it would not rain on the selected day.
I wish I had such a person here, for it was not a fuel shortage or a funeral which stopped the show last night. It was a light rain. This was not exceptional: two of my three meetings last week were rained out, as were classes, visits and meals. We are in the very heart of the long rainy season. It rains several inches most days, usually late in the afternoon, when storm squalls build across the ridge and flood over town with lightning, strong winds and the kind of rain you almost never see in North America. It is a tropical rain, which seems to fill every inch of the space between the clouds and the ground, the sort that makes you wonder if there’s enough air left between the water to keep you from suffocating. If you’re inside, under one of the metal roofs that cover most buildings here, the sound of the rain on tin first chokes out all other noise, stops conversations short, and then builds to a climax so overpowering, so terrible that you think there must be a tornado, a train and a hurricane colliding above you.
The rain last night was not like that. It was a gentle rain, like Montreal in May, New Jersey in November. It didn’t matter; Ghanaians hate rain. Or, more accurately, they hate being in the rain. Rain is actually quite welcome here. Three quarters of the people in the district make their livelihood through agriculture, the majority of them with cocoa, a crop that needs abundant rainfall. Yet, while rain is welcome, it is wildly disruptive. When it rains, school attendance suffers, church attendance suffers, work attendance suffers. Meetings are aborted, events are cancelled, and if it comes before dinner is cooked, you may go to sleep hungry.
This is the result of a man-made environment ill-suited for the rain. African life, by and large, occurs outdoors. Transport is mostly by foot, occasionally by bicycle. Shopping occurs at open-air stalls. Manufacturing occurs along the side of the road. Outdoor ovens or fire pits are as common as indoor kitchens. The heat makes closed-wall buildings unattractive, so meeting grounds and even churches are frequently open-air affairs. When the sun is shining, this makes for a lively environment. I love watching the scene from a bus window here, because you can see virtually every facet of life. Women hunch over cauldrons, vendors walk down the street with their bananas, water and crab legs on their heads, schoolchildren file by in uniform, church groups pour out in caps and gowns, singing gospel songs, people weld car parts and sand down coffins in front of their stores, sending sparks and wood shavings flying into the street. Everything from love to commerce is on display. If you ride around an American town, you will learn almost nothing about its inhabitants. If you ride around one here, you can get an (admittedly superficial) glance at almost everything.
Yet this quality which makes Ghana such a fascinating place during good weather makes it dreadfully boring when it rains. There are no heated houses to warm soaked bodies, no driers to warm soaked clothes. The paths and small dirt roads turn into muddy creeks. The idea of going outside is as unappealing to me as it is to the locals. I can sit on the porch and watch the storm roll over me, but once night falls and the rain continues on, I’m left with little choice. I retire to my poorly-lit room, wait to do battle with the mosquitoes that breed in all of this water, and pop a Nigerian movie into my computer.
The film told the story of a pre-colonial king who sought to ensure that the farmland would be held communally and the aristocratic elders who consequently plotted his downfall; it could have been an allegory for Lumumba in the Congo or Allende in Chile. The scene that stuck out to me, however, came when the king was trying to anoint his son as his successor. The king was slowly dying, perhaps of poison, and needed to quickly hold the ceremony naming his son the next king, lest the stool fall into the hands of the plotters. The catch, however, was that this was rainy season. Such a ceremony, his aides assured him, could not be held during the rain. Eventually the king found a mystic who was able to assure him that it would not rain on the selected day.
I wish I had such a person here, for it was not a fuel shortage or a funeral which stopped the show last night. It was a light rain. This was not exceptional: two of my three meetings last week were rained out, as were classes, visits and meals. We are in the very heart of the long rainy season. It rains several inches most days, usually late in the afternoon, when storm squalls build across the ridge and flood over town with lightning, strong winds and the kind of rain you almost never see in North America. It is a tropical rain, which seems to fill every inch of the space between the clouds and the ground, the sort that makes you wonder if there’s enough air left between the water to keep you from suffocating. If you’re inside, under one of the metal roofs that cover most buildings here, the sound of the rain on tin first chokes out all other noise, stops conversations short, and then builds to a climax so overpowering, so terrible that you think there must be a tornado, a train and a hurricane colliding above you.
The rain last night was not like that. It was a gentle rain, like Montreal in May, New Jersey in November. It didn’t matter; Ghanaians hate rain. Or, more accurately, they hate being in the rain. Rain is actually quite welcome here. Three quarters of the people in the district make their livelihood through agriculture, the majority of them with cocoa, a crop that needs abundant rainfall. Yet, while rain is welcome, it is wildly disruptive. When it rains, school attendance suffers, church attendance suffers, work attendance suffers. Meetings are aborted, events are cancelled, and if it comes before dinner is cooked, you may go to sleep hungry.
This is the result of a man-made environment ill-suited for the rain. African life, by and large, occurs outdoors. Transport is mostly by foot, occasionally by bicycle. Shopping occurs at open-air stalls. Manufacturing occurs along the side of the road. Outdoor ovens or fire pits are as common as indoor kitchens. The heat makes closed-wall buildings unattractive, so meeting grounds and even churches are frequently open-air affairs. When the sun is shining, this makes for a lively environment. I love watching the scene from a bus window here, because you can see virtually every facet of life. Women hunch over cauldrons, vendors walk down the street with their bananas, water and crab legs on their heads, schoolchildren file by in uniform, church groups pour out in caps and gowns, singing gospel songs, people weld car parts and sand down coffins in front of their stores, sending sparks and wood shavings flying into the street. Everything from love to commerce is on display. If you ride around an American town, you will learn almost nothing about its inhabitants. If you ride around one here, you can get an (admittedly superficial) glance at almost everything.
Yet this quality which makes Ghana such a fascinating place during good weather makes it dreadfully boring when it rains. There are no heated houses to warm soaked bodies, no driers to warm soaked clothes. The paths and small dirt roads turn into muddy creeks. The idea of going outside is as unappealing to me as it is to the locals. I can sit on the porch and watch the storm roll over me, but once night falls and the rain continues on, I’m left with little choice. I retire to my poorly-lit room, wait to do battle with the mosquitoes that breed in all of this water, and pop a Nigerian movie into my computer.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Stoolish Intrigue
“The seat of power”. “The sitting governor”. The Throne. The judges’ bench and the lowly Parliamentary backbenchers. The executive chair. Power is what you sit in, and this is no less the case in Ghana than in the West. The difference is that Ghanaians exalt what may be, to the Western mind, the lowliest form of sitting implement: the stool. Wobbly and backless, the province of barstool philosophers, the stool is what we carry up from the basement and dust off when we have more guests than we do seating capacity.
Not here. The stool is the essential symbol of the hereditary, divinely-willed chieftainship for many of Ghana’s peoples. The most famous of these is the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, upon which the Ashanti king, the Asantehene, sits. At the peak of Ashanti power in the nineteenth century, southern and central Ghana as well as a large swatch of Cote d’Ivoire was administered from that stool. When the British seized the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, at the turn of the last century and deposed King Prempreh I, they also sought to seize the Golden Stool. The elders had anticipated this demand, however, and had created a fake stool which they gave to the British, while hiding the real Golden Stool until the reign of Prempreh II started in the 1930’s.
The chieftainship here in town also revolves around a stool. As it so happens, a new chief was just enstooled a few weeks before I arrived. He stopped by the office the other day, dressed in traditional attire (a Ghanaian toga, essentially) and trailed by his council of elders. He made a much more majestic first impression than had the chief of Dol Dol, who I first encountered as he was wondering alone down a path through the bush, carrying an assault rifle and dressed in military fatigues. But then, this chieftainship is much more significant. Among the Maasai of Dol Dol, authority was always decentralized to peer age groups and family elders, with no strong tradition of chiefs. They were the creation of the British colonial government, and even today they are appointed by the federal government and serve at the pleasure of the District Commissioner. In much of West Africa, including most of Ghana, authority has for centuries been vested locally in village chiefs and regionally in paramount chiefs. Disputes and disagreements are still brought before the chief to be adjudicated. He is not entirely autocratic, however. He has a council of elders with whom he must consult, and though his term is theoretically a lifetime one, he is forced to abdicate if he violates traditional law or loses the support of the elders or population at large. Since colonial times, chiefs have also had competition from bureaucrats, judges and politicians who have taken over some of their functions, and there exists
From what I’ve been told, this most recent chiefly transition was not without controversy. The outgoing chief was abdicating the stool because he was living in the US and the townspeople were dissatisfied with his absentee rule (in fact, the story is that he formally abdicated to the council of elders during a ceremony which he conducted over speaker phone from Virginia). Traditionally, the chiefs inherit the stool and the finery that goes with it, and they’re obliged to add to that finery during their reign, so that each succession makes the stool more magnificent. The problem is that this particular chief had not added to the finery, and being in the US, was rather outside the reach of traditional social control which might compel him to do so. The elders had a trump card, however. The chieftainship here rotates among the four branches of a ruling clan, and the elders warned the chief that if he did not contribute to the improvement of the stool, his branch would be cut out of the rotation. The chief’s extended family here in Ghana- which had ambitions of their children getting a shot at the stool- raised hell with the chief, and miraculously the objects appeared shortly thereafter. The stool’s glory was enhanced, the ruling dynasty was maintained and authority passed from one set of cheeks to another.
Not here. The stool is the essential symbol of the hereditary, divinely-willed chieftainship for many of Ghana’s peoples. The most famous of these is the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, upon which the Ashanti king, the Asantehene, sits. At the peak of Ashanti power in the nineteenth century, southern and central Ghana as well as a large swatch of Cote d’Ivoire was administered from that stool. When the British seized the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, at the turn of the last century and deposed King Prempreh I, they also sought to seize the Golden Stool. The elders had anticipated this demand, however, and had created a fake stool which they gave to the British, while hiding the real Golden Stool until the reign of Prempreh II started in the 1930’s.
The chieftainship here in town also revolves around a stool. As it so happens, a new chief was just enstooled a few weeks before I arrived. He stopped by the office the other day, dressed in traditional attire (a Ghanaian toga, essentially) and trailed by his council of elders. He made a much more majestic first impression than had the chief of Dol Dol, who I first encountered as he was wondering alone down a path through the bush, carrying an assault rifle and dressed in military fatigues. But then, this chieftainship is much more significant. Among the Maasai of Dol Dol, authority was always decentralized to peer age groups and family elders, with no strong tradition of chiefs. They were the creation of the British colonial government, and even today they are appointed by the federal government and serve at the pleasure of the District Commissioner. In much of West Africa, including most of Ghana, authority has for centuries been vested locally in village chiefs and regionally in paramount chiefs. Disputes and disagreements are still brought before the chief to be adjudicated. He is not entirely autocratic, however. He has a council of elders with whom he must consult, and though his term is theoretically a lifetime one, he is forced to abdicate if he violates traditional law or loses the support of the elders or population at large. Since colonial times, chiefs have also had competition from bureaucrats, judges and politicians who have taken over some of their functions, and there exists
From what I’ve been told, this most recent chiefly transition was not without controversy. The outgoing chief was abdicating the stool because he was living in the US and the townspeople were dissatisfied with his absentee rule (in fact, the story is that he formally abdicated to the council of elders during a ceremony which he conducted over speaker phone from Virginia). Traditionally, the chiefs inherit the stool and the finery that goes with it, and they’re obliged to add to that finery during their reign, so that each succession makes the stool more magnificent. The problem is that this particular chief had not added to the finery, and being in the US, was rather outside the reach of traditional social control which might compel him to do so. The elders had a trump card, however. The chieftainship here rotates among the four branches of a ruling clan, and the elders warned the chief that if he did not contribute to the improvement of the stool, his branch would be cut out of the rotation. The chief’s extended family here in Ghana- which had ambitions of their children getting a shot at the stool- raised hell with the chief, and miraculously the objects appeared shortly thereafter. The stool’s glory was enhanced, the ruling dynasty was maintained and authority passed from one set of cheeks to another.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
A Weekend on the Ghanaian Coast; or "Accuracy no Rasta"
It may seem obvious, but a visit to an old slaving fort is not the best way to start a fun beach vacation. This is, I would think, one of the main impediments to Ghana developing a conventional tourism industry- its long coastline along the Gulf of Guinea is punctuated, at regular intervals, by old slave castles. Nowhere on the coast is too far from the forts that you could justify not visiting one- it would be willful ignorance, burying your head in the sand.
So it is that Ray and I came to Cape Coast Castle. The most famous of them all, it sits above the small harbor in the old capital of the Gold Coast colony. The city of Cape Coast is an atmospheric place; the British colonists contributed much of the design and the architecture and the local inhabitants contributed much of the color and life. Its focus, however, is unquestionably the Castle. Western tourists troop there, not so much with a sense of excitement, but one of obligation, even dread.
My first thought was that the Castle was far too pretty a building for the purposes it served. A slave fort should be austere, even scary- dark stone walls, parapets and turrets, distorted gargoyles, spikes and bars. Cape Coast Castle looks like the nicest administrative building in Gibraltar or Santa Barbara. It is white walls, red tile roofs, balconies and staircases- the exterior fortifications and the cannons seem like after thoughts. It was originally built in the seventeenth century, changed hands many times, and ended up, after the close of the slave trade, as the administrative center for the colony, which perhaps explains its current benign look. Regardless, coming upon this place was a bit like finding Auschwitz set in a sun-dappled meadow, traversed by clean, babbling brooks.
The real horror of the place comes below, however, in the slave dungeons. This is where the captives were held, for weeks or months, in near total darkness, awaiting the ships that were to carry them to the Americas. The thing that strikes visitors, and unsettles them when it does, is just how small the dungeons are. A thousand slaves at a time were kept in a handful of chambers the size of classrooms. This was spacious compared to what was to follow in the Middle Passage.
The tour itself is, if not light, as far from maudlin and melodramatic as you could make it. It is understated in its horror, I should say. At the end, there is even a display about the positive impacts of the slave trade. And while those of us from the West- white and black- were stony-faced the whole time, the Ghanaians were more laid back, trying to lift up the old ammunition rusting away by the cannons and letting their children run around on the ramparts. There is just one real gut-punch stop on the tour and it comes near the end. There is a doorway through which the slaves passed, on the way out of the dungeon and towards the transport ships. It is labeled The Door of No Return.
We emerged from the fort destined for days at the beach, but I was hardly in the mood for it. We traveled down the coast to the twin villages of Butre and Busua. Ghana does not receive many normal tourists, but it does do good business with the do-gooders, volunteers and NGO workers not just in Ghana, but from throughout West Africa. Busua is the center of this trade, the place to which every Peace Corps volunteer from Togo to Ouagadougou seems to turn for relaxation. It is like any other small town in Ghana, except much of it is given over to serving the whims of homesick foreigners. As such, it provides an interesting look at what we miss when we’re far from home: pancakes (there are dozens of places advertising them), Thai food and pool tables. Mostly, though, I’d guess that they miss each other, which is why they all flock to one otherwise non-descript section of coast.
That is in-season, of course, and this was decidedly out of season. Rain, clouds and wind mark this time of year, the rainy season, and keep the foreigners away. There were as many tourists in town as hotels, making it a sad, sleepy place. In one restaurant, the proprietor had to have us pay in advance so that he could afford to buy the ingredients. After the meal, he got on his knees and begged for money so that he could pay his electricity bill and have his lights restored. On the walls, the messages scrawled by past diners- “Your food is SO FETCH- Chrissy, USA”, “Wish I could live in this restaurant- Owen, PCV, Burkina Faso”- seemed, like Mayan glyphs on an old temple wall, to be legacies of a glorious, but ancient, past. The dates, however, were from just seven, eight, nine months ago.
Across the headland in Butre, I stayed in a small place on the beach which had also, incidentally, lost its electricity for some number of months. The place was owned by a Swede, but came with a number of hangers-on, mostly Rastafarians. I’ve found my tolerance for Rastas lasts about five minutes, after which every banal piece of advice (“Gotta live wit’ no worries”), every verse of a cappella reggae they sing, every utterance of “Respect!” just adds to my aggravation. I was not happy. Ray is a member of an ultimate Frisbee team, so he pulls out the disc whenever he gets the chance. We were tossing it around on the beach with one Rasta who, I suppose aiming it towards me, threw it 90 degrees in the wrong direction and into the deep ocean. After many minutes of searching, we finally found the Frisbee. The Rasta pulled me aside.
“You got to work on your pursuit, young man.”
“You have to work on your accuracy.”
“Accuracy no Rasta.”
So it is that Ray and I came to Cape Coast Castle. The most famous of them all, it sits above the small harbor in the old capital of the Gold Coast colony. The city of Cape Coast is an atmospheric place; the British colonists contributed much of the design and the architecture and the local inhabitants contributed much of the color and life. Its focus, however, is unquestionably the Castle. Western tourists troop there, not so much with a sense of excitement, but one of obligation, even dread.
My first thought was that the Castle was far too pretty a building for the purposes it served. A slave fort should be austere, even scary- dark stone walls, parapets and turrets, distorted gargoyles, spikes and bars. Cape Coast Castle looks like the nicest administrative building in Gibraltar or Santa Barbara. It is white walls, red tile roofs, balconies and staircases- the exterior fortifications and the cannons seem like after thoughts. It was originally built in the seventeenth century, changed hands many times, and ended up, after the close of the slave trade, as the administrative center for the colony, which perhaps explains its current benign look. Regardless, coming upon this place was a bit like finding Auschwitz set in a sun-dappled meadow, traversed by clean, babbling brooks.
The real horror of the place comes below, however, in the slave dungeons. This is where the captives were held, for weeks or months, in near total darkness, awaiting the ships that were to carry them to the Americas. The thing that strikes visitors, and unsettles them when it does, is just how small the dungeons are. A thousand slaves at a time were kept in a handful of chambers the size of classrooms. This was spacious compared to what was to follow in the Middle Passage.
The tour itself is, if not light, as far from maudlin and melodramatic as you could make it. It is understated in its horror, I should say. At the end, there is even a display about the positive impacts of the slave trade. And while those of us from the West- white and black- were stony-faced the whole time, the Ghanaians were more laid back, trying to lift up the old ammunition rusting away by the cannons and letting their children run around on the ramparts. There is just one real gut-punch stop on the tour and it comes near the end. There is a doorway through which the slaves passed, on the way out of the dungeon and towards the transport ships. It is labeled The Door of No Return.
We emerged from the fort destined for days at the beach, but I was hardly in the mood for it. We traveled down the coast to the twin villages of Butre and Busua. Ghana does not receive many normal tourists, but it does do good business with the do-gooders, volunteers and NGO workers not just in Ghana, but from throughout West Africa. Busua is the center of this trade, the place to which every Peace Corps volunteer from Togo to Ouagadougou seems to turn for relaxation. It is like any other small town in Ghana, except much of it is given over to serving the whims of homesick foreigners. As such, it provides an interesting look at what we miss when we’re far from home: pancakes (there are dozens of places advertising them), Thai food and pool tables. Mostly, though, I’d guess that they miss each other, which is why they all flock to one otherwise non-descript section of coast.
That is in-season, of course, and this was decidedly out of season. Rain, clouds and wind mark this time of year, the rainy season, and keep the foreigners away. There were as many tourists in town as hotels, making it a sad, sleepy place. In one restaurant, the proprietor had to have us pay in advance so that he could afford to buy the ingredients. After the meal, he got on his knees and begged for money so that he could pay his electricity bill and have his lights restored. On the walls, the messages scrawled by past diners- “Your food is SO FETCH- Chrissy, USA”, “Wish I could live in this restaurant- Owen, PCV, Burkina Faso”- seemed, like Mayan glyphs on an old temple wall, to be legacies of a glorious, but ancient, past. The dates, however, were from just seven, eight, nine months ago.
Across the headland in Butre, I stayed in a small place on the beach which had also, incidentally, lost its electricity for some number of months. The place was owned by a Swede, but came with a number of hangers-on, mostly Rastafarians. I’ve found my tolerance for Rastas lasts about five minutes, after which every banal piece of advice (“Gotta live wit’ no worries”), every verse of a cappella reggae they sing, every utterance of “Respect!” just adds to my aggravation. I was not happy. Ray is a member of an ultimate Frisbee team, so he pulls out the disc whenever he gets the chance. We were tossing it around on the beach with one Rasta who, I suppose aiming it towards me, threw it 90 degrees in the wrong direction and into the deep ocean. After many minutes of searching, we finally found the Frisbee. The Rasta pulled me aside.
“You got to work on your pursuit, young man.”
“You have to work on your accuracy.”
“Accuracy no Rasta.”
Monday, June 9, 2008
Inheritances
I’m a bit inactive at the moment- I don’t yet know enough to be much good to anyone, and so I’ve mingled with the neighbors, gone to briefings, and spent a lot of time sitting on the porch. I have a lot of time to write but very little to write about. So I’ve read. I finished up Primary Colors, which seemed much more topical when I started it Tuesday night in the departure lounge at JFK, straining my ears to listen to Obama’s speech, than it did here in Ghana (though Obama is as much a media darling here as anywhere; I learned about Mama Clinton’s decision to drop out while riding the bus Thursday, someone translating the Twi radio broadcast for me). I’ve also been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun. It is a collection of the Polish journalist’s dispatches from Africa, written between the late 1950’s and mid 1990’s, and it is the best book on Africa I’ve ever read. Thematically, his writings are not so noteworthy- they tend towards the human interest, day-in-the-life narratives that you can find many places (I’m thinking here of Nick Kristoff’s column in the Times, which probably has Kapuscinksi, at some level, as its inspiration). However, Kapuscinski is a splendid writer, and the book exists at the nexus of journalism and literature. Further, he has a wonderful analytical mind. Several times, I’ve recognized his observations and arguments, formulated decades ago, repeated- knowingly or otherwise- by contemporary political scientists and anthropologists.
The best chapters in the book deal with the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when most of Africa gained its independence. It was a fascinating time, of hope and optimism among the native African population (to be read now, I suppose, with dramatic irony) and fear, sadness and nostalgia among the European administrative class. Many writers- Kapuscinksi, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Chinua Achebe among them- have mined the plight of these whites for material. Those final days of the ancien regime: the master of the estate saying goodbye to his loyal, but deeply conflicted, servants; the bureaucrat aghast to find an African sitting behind his desk; old colonial service lifers meeting one last time to drink and swap stories about so-and-so at the post in Banjul back in ’37; and, invariably, bidding farewell to the family dog. Every colonial official, in literature and reportage, had a dog. Found and tamed, the dog would be passed along to the next person to inherit the post, so that the position of exchequer general in Ibadan or postmaster of Jinja would come with a house, a staff, an official car and Scooter, the collie, or Scooter would be given to a colleague who, and this was rare, did not have a dog already.
This practice has continued among Africa’s expat community. One does not have to dig deep psychologically to understand why this would be: in a land that is frequently foreign, bewildering and lonely, dogs remind us of comfortable domesticity. If you are the one to train the dog, you will have an English-understanding friend in a land where you struggle to make yourself understood in Chewa. And so it is that I’ve come to inherit Scruffy from a predecessor. I don’t know what kind of breed Scruff is, though she’s the kind of smaller dog I’m usually more tempted to kick than to adopt. I’m a bit torn on Scruff. On one hand, she’s cute and she’s very sweet to me (knowing who butters her bread) and she’s low maintenance. On the other hand, I think she’s trouble. She hates sheep, and whenever one wanders near the house she snarls and bolts after it. I’m afraid one day she’ll catch one of the lambs- afraid because lambs, unlike Scruff, are worth something here. She also hates children, hates when they come close. I think this must be because the children throw rocks at her- I’ve seen children throw small stones at chickens and lambs and adults throw them at children here, so I assume they do it to dogs- but regardless, a constant stream of terrified, crying kids running away from my house is not the impression I wanted to make. There is also the question of priorities. My left-overs go into Scruff’s bowl, not to the hungry here. I was left with instructions to take Scruff to the vet if she gets sick; this in a district where thousands of human cases of malaria go untreated. Once Ray asked if there was an obedience school we could take Scruff to, in a country where one-in-five children will never see the inside of a school. Yet here I am, taking care of Scruff. Maybe it’s partly out of obligation, but I’m sure it’s partly out of the feeling I get when Scruff ignores someone’s Sefwi commands but runs over immediately when I say “Come.” A friend, a compatriot.
I’ve inherited something else from my predecessors: a gnarly food stash. I’m about three hours from the nearest supermarket, so I had figured my culinary fate was to go native. This is not quite the punishment it would have been in Kenya, since Ghanaian food is heavy on starches, good, spicy sauces and rice dishes. Nevertheless, there are only so many ways to prepare plantains and yams, and five months of it would kill me. So, I was excited to stumble across a container of preserved food: ramen noodle packets, mac and cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant gravy, miso soup mix, boil-in Indian food bags, powdered refried beans, even a vacuum-sealed, Southwestern-seasoned chicken breast. A lucky find, indeed, as now I won’t have to eat my other inheritance.
The best chapters in the book deal with the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when most of Africa gained its independence. It was a fascinating time, of hope and optimism among the native African population (to be read now, I suppose, with dramatic irony) and fear, sadness and nostalgia among the European administrative class. Many writers- Kapuscinksi, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Chinua Achebe among them- have mined the plight of these whites for material. Those final days of the ancien regime: the master of the estate saying goodbye to his loyal, but deeply conflicted, servants; the bureaucrat aghast to find an African sitting behind his desk; old colonial service lifers meeting one last time to drink and swap stories about so-and-so at the post in Banjul back in ’37; and, invariably, bidding farewell to the family dog. Every colonial official, in literature and reportage, had a dog. Found and tamed, the dog would be passed along to the next person to inherit the post, so that the position of exchequer general in Ibadan or postmaster of Jinja would come with a house, a staff, an official car and Scooter, the collie, or Scooter would be given to a colleague who, and this was rare, did not have a dog already.
This practice has continued among Africa’s expat community. One does not have to dig deep psychologically to understand why this would be: in a land that is frequently foreign, bewildering and lonely, dogs remind us of comfortable domesticity. If you are the one to train the dog, you will have an English-understanding friend in a land where you struggle to make yourself understood in Chewa. And so it is that I’ve come to inherit Scruffy from a predecessor. I don’t know what kind of breed Scruff is, though she’s the kind of smaller dog I’m usually more tempted to kick than to adopt. I’m a bit torn on Scruff. On one hand, she’s cute and she’s very sweet to me (knowing who butters her bread) and she’s low maintenance. On the other hand, I think she’s trouble. She hates sheep, and whenever one wanders near the house she snarls and bolts after it. I’m afraid one day she’ll catch one of the lambs- afraid because lambs, unlike Scruff, are worth something here. She also hates children, hates when they come close. I think this must be because the children throw rocks at her- I’ve seen children throw small stones at chickens and lambs and adults throw them at children here, so I assume they do it to dogs- but regardless, a constant stream of terrified, crying kids running away from my house is not the impression I wanted to make. There is also the question of priorities. My left-overs go into Scruff’s bowl, not to the hungry here. I was left with instructions to take Scruff to the vet if she gets sick; this in a district where thousands of human cases of malaria go untreated. Once Ray asked if there was an obedience school we could take Scruff to, in a country where one-in-five children will never see the inside of a school. Yet here I am, taking care of Scruff. Maybe it’s partly out of obligation, but I’m sure it’s partly out of the feeling I get when Scruff ignores someone’s Sefwi commands but runs over immediately when I say “Come.” A friend, a compatriot.
I’ve inherited something else from my predecessors: a gnarly food stash. I’m about three hours from the nearest supermarket, so I had figured my culinary fate was to go native. This is not quite the punishment it would have been in Kenya, since Ghanaian food is heavy on starches, good, spicy sauces and rice dishes. Nevertheless, there are only so many ways to prepare plantains and yams, and five months of it would kill me. So, I was excited to stumble across a container of preserved food: ramen noodle packets, mac and cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant gravy, miso soup mix, boil-in Indian food bags, powdered refried beans, even a vacuum-sealed, Southwestern-seasoned chicken breast. A lucky find, indeed, as now I won’t have to eat my other inheritance.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
The On-High Road to Humjibre and Battling The Nightmare Bugs
Greetings from the center of the known universe: Humjibre, Ghana. It’s Saturday morning, the people are up, the mosquitoes are napping, and the palm trees are shimmying in the breeze. Life is good.
I arrived here Thursday night. After long flights and a very short rest, my boss and I hopped on an Accra-Kumasi bus, transferred to a Kumasi-Sefwi Bekwai bus and then took a shared taxi down the surprisingly well-paved Bekwai-Humjibre road. It was an all-day affair, 10 hours of heat and tsetse flies, of snake-oil salesmen pitching their ointments and bus drivers leading us in prayer (which instills less confidence than you would think). The scenery was pleasant, but bland. The landscape seemed to alternate between densely scrubby and lightly wooded, except for the minute and a half during which we passed through what must be the smallest rainforest in the world.
This is just as well, because it allowed me focus in on one of my favorite developing world activities: sign reading. The hobby started in Cayambe, Ecuador when I passed a store called Lolita’s Children’s Clothing Bazaar, but I think Ghana is proving to be my most fertile hunting ground. The Ghanaians have taken the Kenyan business owners’ habit of plastering the interior of their businesses with religious slogans and gone a step further. Thus, you have the Choose Jesus Hair Salon, Christ the Redeemer Food Kiosk and the Christians’ Drinking Spot. All told, I’d say about one in every eight businesses has an overtly religious name. My personal favorites were the By His Will Rasta Hair-Do Salon and the Holy Virgin Photography studio (which would be engaged in something entirely different if it were located in the San Fernando Valley). There are, as everywhere, those that don’t quite conform to this piety, and I am particularly fond of the owner- whoever he is- of the Lover Boy Internet Café in Kumasi.
Having survived- physically and mentally- that journey, I am safely ensconced in Humjibre. I’ve gotten a tour of the village, seen its schools, its churches, its bars, its stores, its cocoa farms and its cocoa depots. I’ve met some of its people and some of its more spectacular insects. There was the 9-or-10” long snail, which we flung off our porch and which left a breathtaking trail of slime. There were also the insects, which I’ve never seen before or even heard of, that I can best describe as flying scorpions. Seemingly better-suited for the late Jurassic period or a particularly fevered nightmare, these almost-baseball-sized creatures are heavily-armored, equipped with a stinger and can draw blood if they fly into you (though, from what I’m told, they’re not poisonous). They seem to be attracted to the light on our porch, so after a few near-misses, my housemate Ray and I decided to shut off the light and enjoy the darkness. I think daylight will be my friend here, so I am off to enjoy it.
I arrived here Thursday night. After long flights and a very short rest, my boss and I hopped on an Accra-Kumasi bus, transferred to a Kumasi-Sefwi Bekwai bus and then took a shared taxi down the surprisingly well-paved Bekwai-Humjibre road. It was an all-day affair, 10 hours of heat and tsetse flies, of snake-oil salesmen pitching their ointments and bus drivers leading us in prayer (which instills less confidence than you would think). The scenery was pleasant, but bland. The landscape seemed to alternate between densely scrubby and lightly wooded, except for the minute and a half during which we passed through what must be the smallest rainforest in the world.
This is just as well, because it allowed me focus in on one of my favorite developing world activities: sign reading. The hobby started in Cayambe, Ecuador when I passed a store called Lolita’s Children’s Clothing Bazaar, but I think Ghana is proving to be my most fertile hunting ground. The Ghanaians have taken the Kenyan business owners’ habit of plastering the interior of their businesses with religious slogans and gone a step further. Thus, you have the Choose Jesus Hair Salon, Christ the Redeemer Food Kiosk and the Christians’ Drinking Spot. All told, I’d say about one in every eight businesses has an overtly religious name. My personal favorites were the By His Will Rasta Hair-Do Salon and the Holy Virgin Photography studio (which would be engaged in something entirely different if it were located in the San Fernando Valley). There are, as everywhere, those that don’t quite conform to this piety, and I am particularly fond of the owner- whoever he is- of the Lover Boy Internet Café in Kumasi.
Having survived- physically and mentally- that journey, I am safely ensconced in Humjibre. I’ve gotten a tour of the village, seen its schools, its churches, its bars, its stores, its cocoa farms and its cocoa depots. I’ve met some of its people and some of its more spectacular insects. There was the 9-or-10” long snail, which we flung off our porch and which left a breathtaking trail of slime. There were also the insects, which I’ve never seen before or even heard of, that I can best describe as flying scorpions. Seemingly better-suited for the late Jurassic period or a particularly fevered nightmare, these almost-baseball-sized creatures are heavily-armored, equipped with a stinger and can draw blood if they fly into you (though, from what I’m told, they’re not poisonous). They seem to be attracted to the light on our porch, so after a few near-misses, my housemate Ray and I decided to shut off the light and enjoy the darkness. I think daylight will be my friend here, so I am off to enjoy it.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Ghana, Ho! As opposed to Ho, Ghana
In about 48 hours, my plane to London will take off from JFK, carrying me to a connecting flight to Accra, and I'm as excited to be heading off as I am sad to be leaving McGill. I'll be spending the next five months in Ghana, a country on Africa's Gulf of Guinea. My home for the next half-year is in the western region of the country, in a village called Humjibre, located between the major city of Kumasi and the border with the Ivory Coast (the nearest city on this map is Awaso). It's a community of cocoa farmers, from the Sefwi ethnic group- distant cousins of the nearby, famous Ashanti.
My job should not be so different from what I did in Kenya. I'm working for an NGO in Humjibre as the health program coordinator. I'll be helping two groups of peer educators spread messages about disease prevention and treatment, family planning, nutrition and other health issues, and I'll also be helping to coordinate the stay and work of some short-term volunteers from North America and Europe. There are other projects and duties, but I'll talk about them as they come up.
Anyway, I don't have a whole lot to say at this point. I really just needed an excuse to post these maps while I still have an internet connection with the capacity to do so. I'll write again from the other side of the ocean.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Blogging anew, as I audition for a Poli Sci Ph.D.
Well, hello again! It's sure been a while. A lot has happened since last I wrote: I started school, Kenya fell into shambles and then resurrected itself with, somehow, a more ridiculous form of government, I graduated from school. Oh, and I got a job in Ghana, which is why this blog has returned at all.You'll note the slightly tweaked title here- this is to reflect the fact that we're moving beyond the cozy, machete-ish confines of Kenya.
Before I head off to Ghana, though, I want to say a few things about Kenya, since I was sorely tempted to do so in January but figured it wouldn't get read. And I warn you, this is entirely analytical; I wish I had stories about running roadblocks of burning tires or of rescuing (and subsequently hugging in a photogenic manner) African children to spice this up, but I followed the crisis in Kenya from a couch in Pennington and a futon in Montreal. You're warned, then, that this is dry, but I promise to make it up to you when I begin taking my anti-malarials next week and start to hallucinate.
Anyway, I will say that I was a bit surprised by the amount of media coverage devoted to Kenya last winter. So often, major events in Africa slip away relatively unnoticed. A few thousand people killed in eastern Congo, a TB epidemic in South Africa, famine in Niger- these stories pop up on the margins of the BBC website, but make little dent in our consciousness. Even avid newshounds can be unaware of longstanding conflicts- has the name Casamance been uttered once on CNN during the decades-long war there? So, in this context, I was surprised to see pretty widespread coverage of the violence in Kenya. I suppose Kenya is famous enough, with its Out of Africa romance and its tourist resort relevancy, that it merits news attention.
That said, the coverage was almost uniformly bad. The violence was portrayed as the product of a deeply-flawed, deeply-divided society, in which the members of the different tribes had just been biding their time before they could sink their machetes or arrows into the flesh of one another. Reporters seemed to follow a template left-over from Rwanda (never-mind that their coverage of Rwanda was wrong, too), and failed to see Kenyan society as it really is. Tribal violence is rare outside of election periods, and is largely confined to cattle raiding. On a day-to-day basis, tribe appears to actually be a much less important division in Kenya than race is in the United States. There's no legacy of legal segregation of tribes, nor is there as much self-segregation as there is in the United States. Neighborhoods, even families, are rather mixed. A lot of people hold allegiances, through blood or marriage, to multiple ethnic groups. And if the Democratic campaign this spring has taught us nothing else, it's that voting along racial lines is not the sole province of dysfunctional African democracies.
The dysfunction in Kenyan democracy is the real story, however. The violence stems not from flaws in the social structure, but from flaws in the political structures. The political parties were bankrupt in their ideology and in their policies- the consequence, perhaps, of the international demand for balanced budgets and the cuts to discretionary spending as a result. The police are incapable of stopping violence even at the best of times, and the courts cannot effectively adjudicate disputes or administer justice. The Electoral Commission is not autonomous enough or strong enough to oversee a real campaign (though, I suppose, it's no more messed up than the FEC is). In short, many of the important institutions necessary for a democracy are missing in Kenya. The violence in Kenya was not the product of some ancient, tribal hatreds, it was the product of decades of failed policy and institution-building.
Alas, soon I'm off to Ghana. Apparently that country "works", with fair and safe elections and a government that occasionally improves the lives of its citizens. I'll run some roadblocks, hug some children and tell you how it goes.
Before I head off to Ghana, though, I want to say a few things about Kenya, since I was sorely tempted to do so in January but figured it wouldn't get read. And I warn you, this is entirely analytical; I wish I had stories about running roadblocks of burning tires or of rescuing (and subsequently hugging in a photogenic manner) African children to spice this up, but I followed the crisis in Kenya from a couch in Pennington and a futon in Montreal. You're warned, then, that this is dry, but I promise to make it up to you when I begin taking my anti-malarials next week and start to hallucinate.
Anyway, I will say that I was a bit surprised by the amount of media coverage devoted to Kenya last winter. So often, major events in Africa slip away relatively unnoticed. A few thousand people killed in eastern Congo, a TB epidemic in South Africa, famine in Niger- these stories pop up on the margins of the BBC website, but make little dent in our consciousness. Even avid newshounds can be unaware of longstanding conflicts- has the name Casamance been uttered once on CNN during the decades-long war there? So, in this context, I was surprised to see pretty widespread coverage of the violence in Kenya. I suppose Kenya is famous enough, with its Out of Africa romance and its tourist resort relevancy, that it merits news attention.
That said, the coverage was almost uniformly bad. The violence was portrayed as the product of a deeply-flawed, deeply-divided society, in which the members of the different tribes had just been biding their time before they could sink their machetes or arrows into the flesh of one another. Reporters seemed to follow a template left-over from Rwanda (never-mind that their coverage of Rwanda was wrong, too), and failed to see Kenyan society as it really is. Tribal violence is rare outside of election periods, and is largely confined to cattle raiding. On a day-to-day basis, tribe appears to actually be a much less important division in Kenya than race is in the United States. There's no legacy of legal segregation of tribes, nor is there as much self-segregation as there is in the United States. Neighborhoods, even families, are rather mixed. A lot of people hold allegiances, through blood or marriage, to multiple ethnic groups. And if the Democratic campaign this spring has taught us nothing else, it's that voting along racial lines is not the sole province of dysfunctional African democracies.
The dysfunction in Kenyan democracy is the real story, however. The violence stems not from flaws in the social structure, but from flaws in the political structures. The political parties were bankrupt in their ideology and in their policies- the consequence, perhaps, of the international demand for balanced budgets and the cuts to discretionary spending as a result. The police are incapable of stopping violence even at the best of times, and the courts cannot effectively adjudicate disputes or administer justice. The Electoral Commission is not autonomous enough or strong enough to oversee a real campaign (though, I suppose, it's no more messed up than the FEC is). In short, many of the important institutions necessary for a democracy are missing in Kenya. The violence in Kenya was not the product of some ancient, tribal hatreds, it was the product of decades of failed policy and institution-building.
Alas, soon I'm off to Ghana. Apparently that country "works", with fair and safe elections and a government that occasionally improves the lives of its citizens. I'll run some roadblocks, hug some children and tell you how it goes.
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