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.
