Every Monday, since ‘many, many years ago’, as Philip speculates, hundreds of traders from Djenné, and the towns and villages around it gather around the Grand Mosque for market day, taking over the square to sell dried fish, clothes, pagne, rice, beans, millet, thick blankets, motorbike parts, beads, goats, chickens, tomatoes, peanuts and peanut butter, piles of second-hand clothing, spoons and pots, glasses, jugs and buckets, five-litre bottles of palm oil, fish oil, red onions, okra, potatoes that are still covered with soil, and pens and exercise books. There’s even a box with a black strap-on dildo on display at a stall manned by two boys who fall over with laughter after flashing the box at me.
There are wholesale traders and those who are scraping by, with stalls that are marked by covering a patch on the ground with a pagne or grass mat to sell dried fish and little pyramids of tomatoes, red onions and wilting carrots. Butchers hang their carcasses in the open air, slicing the animal off piece by piece as and when people buy. Dusty kids chase each other and run after tourists to ask for cadeau – gift, in French. The market women bargain hard and fast, tucking shrivelled franc notes into knots formed at the corners of the pagne they wrap around their hips. ‘This is just like they did forty-five years ago,’ according to an old European couple I overhear at one of the stalls. They’re in Djenné retracing steps they first made when their faces were still smooth and their bodies supple with youth. I want to be like them and find my way back Djenné.
I leave for the port city Mopti when traders pack up to get taxis to Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. We cram into the narrow seats with our luggage and only stop for the last prayer of the day. We spend the night at the border, where I sleep on my seat while everyone slums it on the ground. Burkina Faso finds me with a bout of home sickness that I want to cure by getting to Accra as soon as possible. I spend one night in Bobo partying until morning at a club that plays Xitsonga disco music from South Africa, and go sight-seeing in the morning before trekking to Ouagadougou to apply for my visa to Ghana. I pass time with what’s becoming usual trips to the market, museums and other sights. I’ve never been as happy in West Africa as I am stepping inside the bus to Accra.
IV
SUN, SAND AND SEX
Accra, December 2006
MY FIRST TRIP TO West Africa, the region of my obsession since reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at fourteen, is a media trip to cover a charity fashion event. The four days in the city go by in a blur and we mostly move around in a group. We go dancing and hang out at Golden Tulip Hotel’s pool drinking cold Star beer. We go to an orphanage outside Accra for the customary mix-and-mingle between the press and the poor.
Still, Accra gets under my skin with the loud high-life music that’s played everywhere, the fellows who drip sex appeal, the old men dressed regally in togas, the beaming smiles everyone flashes when we make eye contact, the first taste of plantain, the first sip of sweet hibiscus juice, and the laughter that ricochets around the city.
Everything I see and do enthrals me. When we stop to buy water at Koala supermarket in Osu, my spirit feels out of balance; there is something different about the experience that I can’t immediately put my finger on. I realise later that everyone who works at the supermarket is black: The manager, packers, cashiers and security guards who don’t want to see our receipts or peek into our shopping bags at the exit.
Accra feels so good, things that should offend me make me laugh, like the men at Boomerang nightclub assuming I’m a prostitute. This I discover after asking another guy who hits on me why all the men approach me like they’re sure I will say yes to them. ‘You’re wearing a mini skirt and you were dancing on the stripper’s pole.’ Ordinarily, I’d tell him off for thinking that my existence as a woman is as a nun or a whore. Tonight, I grind my body against his and laugh at him, and with him.
We go to Makola market on our last morning to buy ankara cloth. I leave with three prints and a tie-dye kaftan I buy for a rip off at 100 000 cedis. It’s the first dress I wear that makes me feel drop-dead gorgeous. Watching a colleague buy gold from a stall on the road – a setting I don’t associate with buying jewellery – I realise that I don’t want to leave Accra. As I tend to do when flirting with fate, I make a pact with God: I’m moving to West Africa if I see a Woolworths store.
We drive past a Woolworths store less than a kilometre later. On our way to the airport in the afternoon, our driver Joseph suggests that we stop at Labadi Beach. We don’t have a lot of time, he knows, but a trip to Accra is incomplete without going to its premier party spot, he insists. Labadi is made for people-watching, with its bars and cafés, and people sporting incredible beach bodies. There are drummers, hot boys with thick chains around their necks and acrobat dancers moving between tables for dance shows.
There are grills fired up with sausages, mobile manicurists, people hawking second-hand swimwear, boiled eggs and groundnuts, and hustlers selling knock-off CDs of Alpha Blondy. One of them pushes The Best of Lucky Dube, a Brenda Fassie compilation, Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s Thank You Mr DJ and Rebecca Malope’s Greatest Hits into my hands. Lovers stroll hand in hand, beach boys flirt with tourists, and heavily made-up girls wrap themselves in the arms of very old white men. The smells of the sea, ganja and sausages waft in the air, and as Joseph rounds us up, Lucky Dube’s ‘I’ve Got You Babe’ blasts from a stage that’s being set up for a party. We run to a circle forming next to the stage and dance our hearts out. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be delirious.
Accra, August 2008
I arrive from Ouagadougou just after midnight hoping the Young Women’s Christian Association has a room for me. The night watchman, as guards are called here, is not in the mood to entertain me. No one is allowed to enter the premises after 10pm.
‘You’ll have to come back in the morning,’ he says, with his head peeking out of the gate.
‘I don’t have anywhere to go,’ I say.
‘Try a hotel,’ he counters.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I confess.
‘That’s too bad. There is nothing I can do.’
He tries closing the gate. I block it with my foot and push my way in.
‘I don’t think you understand me. I don’t have other options – you will not turn me away from this place. Besides, who stays at YWCA unless they’re desperate?’
He doesn’t help me with my backpack, and says nothing when I trip on my skirt, fall on the concrete path and graze my knee. He doesn’t slow his brisk walk down now that I have to hobble. ‘Don’t move,’ he says, shining his flashlight on a steel bench where I sleep until the residence opens. I spend my first night back in Accra hoping that the big rats running around don’t crawl up onto me.
My stay at YWCA goes downhill from here. Morning breaks, and even though the dormitory is open, and the young Christian ladies start their day, I remain on the bench until the matron arrives at 9am. The ladies file past me without a word. This is not the Accra of 2006, with the smiles, laughter and akwaaba – welcome in Twi – that follow me everywhere. The yard has over-grown grass and weeds. The outdoor kitchen is a wall-less structure held together by poles and a zinc roof; you use a brazier to cook. The empty rooms at the back of the dormitory used to be a nursery, with pictures of cars, trains, toys and the alphabet painted on the wall.
The nursery becomes my go-to place to hide from the hymns and the loud, Holy Spirit-infused prayers that can be heard everywhere at the YWCA but here. There’s a hall that holds prayer meetings for about two hours every evening, and a church service that lasts all morning on Sundays. And then there’s the office block, where the matron spends most of her days policing our morality. The YWCA in Accra is the most miserable, soul-crushing place I know, thanks in no small part to the matron.
I find her waiting for me on the veranda of the office block, her hands on her waist. She has a medium-length permed afro and is dressed to please Jesus in a long black A-line skirt, a three-quarter sleeved white shirt, and black kitten heels.
I look around her office to stop myself from back-chatting. The posters of aid organisations and campaigns against violence and child abuse are more comforting than she is. ‘Remember the rules,’ she says on my way out: No sex, no fun, no boys or living like a regular student. They should change the name to The Christian Association for the Infantilisation of Young Women.
The dormitory is worse than the rules. There are six rooms that sleep three and four inmates each. I feel the springs through the thin mattress. We use shared bathrooms with wet floors and toilets that always harbour a piece of crap floating or stuck around it. The basins have a rusty streak from the permanent droplets of water leaking from the tap. There’s a bare lounge with a small TV and some chairs. Silence reigns.
For a residence full of young women, the mood at YWCA is sombre, which is a pity, because in Ghana, even funerals are boisterous; with music and dancing to celebrate the dearly departed. I’m in a room with Rose, a Togolese girl who is in Ghana to study English. I’m reeling from the difference between the Accra of my nostalgia and my current experience. Shy and reserved, Rose keeps to herself and clings to me as much I hold on to her. Her English is as scratchy as my French, and we mostly listen to Oumou Sangaré’s music and talk about how much we love it. Our cell of two grows to three when Diana joins us. She’s a forty-five-year-old business woman from the Volta Region in Eastern Ghana. She’s in town for a wedding.
‘I’m too old for this nonsense,’ she says on her second evening. She flings her legs off the bed and tells me to wait for some time while she makes a plan. About an hour later, we have a bottle of red wine.
‘We’re too old to be told what to do,’ she says, laughing until she starts coughing. We raise our glasses towards the matron’s office.
‘Here’s to sex, drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll,’ I say. We laugh until we cry and nickname the matron Jesus’ bride.
Ghana is obsessed with God. In the morning at markets around the city, shopkeepers start their days by blasting gospel songs. ‘Oh Nyame,’ I overhear one man say tenderly, as if he is talking to his lover. Nyame is the Akan word for God. Businesses have names like Blessed Hands Beauty Salon, Saviour Phone Shop, Innocent Blood cold store, as butcheries are called. There’s a God’s Time Unisex Boutique, Stay Blessed Real Estate and Leap of Faith Catering Services. Consequently, the only man whose name is mentioned loudly at YWCA is Jesus. He is everywhere at the hostel. Where other girls their age may have posters of sports and pop stars, the inmates at YWCA cover their walls with tributes to Christianity and the Blessed Child; with Bible verses and posters of Jesus. ‘Did you remember to thank Jesus todei?’ a note in the bathroom asks. ‘Did you remember to ask Jesus to teach you how to spell?’ I hiss back.
With its position on the shores of Korle Lagoon, Jamestown should make for a pretty picture. It does – to some extent – with a lighthouse that affords sweeping views of the area. The beach bursts with brightly painted boats. People go about their life; smoking fish in griddles or disappearing into its streets. Jamestown is the grittiest place I have been to. The houses are stacked in small spaces and the smell of crap from overflowing communal toilets hangs in the air. I meet Johnson at the lighthouse and take him up on his offer to show me around his neighbourhood. We end up at his house, where I hang out with him and five other guys, drinking palm wine. They spark a joint; I eat sugar cane. Johnson keeps getting up to follow a slow but steady trickle of people who walk into his shack. They all walk out after about thirty minutes – sometimes more.
‘Hey, come inside,’ someone says to me. An orange flame glows in the dark, followed by thick white smoke spiralling upwards.
‘You want a hit?’ he asks, offering to share his heroin.
‘We thought this what you are here for,’ he says when I decline. I leave Johnson’s a few minutes later.
I meet John on my walk to the road to get a tros tros to Adabraka. He has been following me since I left Johnson’s drug den. He stands with his thin torso leaning outwards. He puts his left arm across his chest.
‘I hear you’re from South Africa,’ he says; no greetings, no smiles, no akwaaba. He strokes his chin with his right hand.
‘Why did you kill your own brothers?’ His soft voice rises with anger. His brother works on the boats in Cape Town. He hasn’t been able to get hold of him since the xenophobic attacks that left sixty-two people dead. The attacks were in Johannesburg.
‘I guess I’m just worried, you know, I hope you didn’t kill him.’ I don’t know what to say; there’s nothing I can say, so I just listen in silence.
‘Anyway, akwaaba, we don’t hate Africans – you’ll be fine.’ We part with a hug.
In the evening, I lie in my bed with a throbbing headache and joints that feel like they’re being hacked at. I’m shivering, and my body has goose bumps, but I’m also hot. Beads of sweat form on my forehead. I’ve spent the day walking around the city, visiting museums, the art market and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial; maybe I’m sick from choking on the heat and exhaust fumes. Rose brings me packets of cold water and tries to get me to eat some rice and canned mackerel stew. ‘Your eyes,’ she says, her own round, becoming bigger. I gasp when she holds a mirror to my face. They’re bloodshot-red. I pop aspirins and pass out.
When I eventually wake up, I take baby steps to the internet café. It’s about three hundred metres around the corner from YWCA, but I stop often until my breathing calms. P-Square has just released their breakout album Game Over. The single, ‘No One Like You’, is on full blast and repeat. The volume makes me dizzy. I surrender to the tears I’ve been suppressing. I feel lonely and defeated; I bit off more than I could chew by thinking I could just uproot my life to wander around West Africa. My friend Sarah-Jane has also moved countries, to Belgium. She’s been travelling since her teens. She uses her Friday off work to talk to me until my tears and grunts turn to laughter. She reckons I need a holiday; a place with Rastas, where I spend my days reading on the beach and cool tropical nights swaying to reggae. I leave for Kokrobite two days later.
September 2008
I get a tros tros from Adabraka to Kaneshie station, where minibuses that connect Accra to the coast are found. The station feels like a place that’s holding its breath, trying to contain hundreds of people with their luggage and families, and just as many buses and minibuses. Hawkers walk around the station selling water, biscuits, juice, slices of pineapple and watermelon. Tros tros keep to Ghana’s taste for bright colours, especially along the coast, where houses are painted lime, fuchsia, yellow, pink, red and other animated colours. Minibuses to these places are mostly yellow, white, red, green and blue. Drivers have assistants who collect money, called Chalé, like a lot of boys and young men are called here. Chalé looks like he’s between sixteen and twenty-three. He keeps one eye on the road while calling to customers and taps a coin on the door to tell the driver when to stop. He’s the link between the passengers and the driver, whose only job is getting us around.
A slow one-and-a-half-hour trip from Accra, Kokrobite is a great first-stop on my travels around the coast. Nature gives the village views of the Atlantic Ocean on one side, while hills dot the horizon with their green tops on the other. To this, people have added houses that look like candy floss with white-washed pink and green homes. As always, there’s a Lucky Dube tune blasting from somewhere. I’m at Big Milly’s Backyard; chosen for its beach-front location and a guidebook review that promises lots of Rastas and lots of partying.
Walking into the compound, the first thing my eyes land on is the bar. The tables around it have mixed groups of people who look cool in shorts that
show off athletic legs. Girls with previously pale skins that are now brown have flowing hair and strings of beads on their wrists. Even hotter local boys and men hang on their arms. I find a seat at the counter and introduce myself to Noah, the barman on duty, by declaring that I drink orange juice with vodka. It’s my first time living at a beach that’s deliciously tropical.
I waddle back to the bar, where Noah adds personality in the form of a double shot of vodka to my orange juice, and make friends with a Liberian guy called MD; he of the smoothened accent, dancing eyes, wide smile, and a flair for conversation. MD is the type of fellow who has everyone he meets at hello. He knows it and he works it. A few people come over to him and, by extension, meet me. Kofi looks like a taller and hotter version of Thierry Henry; Francis’s dark black skin glows in the light. He lives around the block and performs here as an acrobat on weekends. He looks interesting, with cowrie shells dangling on the thick dreadlocks that fall into his face. The rest of his ’locks are tied in a bun that makes it look like a carrot top. Alex is on a break from her life in Australia and is working as a volunteer legal representative. Alex’s cousin lives in the overland truck that’s parked in the yard with her man and dog. Darren is from Australia, I think. He’s turning the house next door into a guesthouse. There are several people I meet and greet without leaving my chair. We holler at each other and jump into each other’s conversations. The place reverberates with laughter. This is the Ghana I fell in love with.
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