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.
