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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.