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.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
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.
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