Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  Legend has it that the first white person ever to visit the area now known as Ghana arrived on a Sunday. Ever since, light-skinned people—often men and women alike—are called kwesi obronis, literally “Sunday foreigner” or colloquially “Sunday white man,” often shortened to Kwesi or obroni. On the street, the appellation is said so fast and with such eagerness that it often sounds like “Kwesi ‘broni.” There is no pejorative racial connotation at all. Obroni is almost always said with a welcoming smile and a wave. Starting the first morning in Accra, I heard cries of “Ei, ‘broni, ‘broni!” as soon I set foot outside.

  Are they trying to say hello to me?

  But then I noticed that some of the Ghanaians I encountered were holding a newspaper and pointing to it. Thanks to the exquisite timing of that photographer, my picture was on the front page of the Ghanaian Times, sent to record the arrival of three American high school exchange students. I didn’t really understand why anybody would think this was newsworthy, but I decided to pick up a copy to send back to my parents, as proof that I’d made it this far safe and sound.

  Over the next few days in Accra, all over town, Ghanaians I’d never seen kept greeting me: “Ei, ‘broni, ‘broni!” Had one newspaper photograph made me famous? You’d think I was a movie star.

  You don’t always get to choose your celebrity.

  * * *

  After a week in Accra, I was to spend most of my summer in Sunyani, the capital of Brong-Ahafo, one of ten administrative regions in Ghana. My first—but certainly not my last—encounter with a Ghanaian parastatal, or state-owned business, was riding the State Transport Corporation bus to Sunyani. The German-built Setra was packed full of smiling passengers for the 250-mile trip up-country from Accra. The happiness of the passengers no doubt stemmed from relief after queuing in line for over an hour to secure a seat. There were fold-down jump seats in the center aisle of every row, and I wound up on one of these, a claustrophobe’s nightmare: an aisle full of seats meant there was no way to get to the door unless everyone in front of you exited first. The meandering ride took nearly ten hours. We stopped frequently to let off a bulbous market woman with her broad-brimmed hat, or to discharge a wiry youth who scuffled off the bus in red leather sandals. The bus driver sifted through the static of the radio until he found a brassy, high-life tune from the Super Uppers International or JK and the Boom Talents.

  It was long past nightfall when, stiff-kneed and weary, I arrived in Sunyani. The bus lumbered into the lorry park, an unpaved patch of dirt off the main traffic circle. There was no depot, and apart from the bus’s headlamps, no lights. I disembarked and squinted into the darkness. The air was a madrigal of scents: kerosene, fruit, and cigarettes. A man wearing a togalike robe motioned for me to hop in the back seat of a battered Toyota Corolla. For a moment, I thought he must be Yaw Brobbey, my host father. He was, instead, my host father’s driver.

  “You are most welcome,” the driver said, bowing slightly and using the formal Ghanaian greeting.

  “Thank you,” I replied, thinking we had the conversation backward, since “thank you” usually precedes “you’re welcome.”

  We rode silently along unpaved roads, the driver chewing a camphor stick as he hunched over the wheel, dexterously working the gearshift. Apprehensive and impatient, I tried to see anything in the darkness, but only the occasional cooking fire or lantern met my gaze. I knew that Sunyani wouldn’t look like Milwaukee, but what did it look like? Was that a goat or a dog by the side of the road? I couldn’t tell. At last the headlights fell on a heavyset, single-story concrete structure, and for the first time I saw my Ghanaian home, a rectangle of rooms surrounding an open courtyard. Yaw Brobbey waited to greet me with the kind of embrace that assured me immediately that he intended to take the role of “host father” seriously. He took me into the house and offered me two drinks: a glass of water and a bottle of Tata beer.

  “This is customary, to welcome a guest,” Yaw Brobbey explained, handing me the water.

  “And the beer?” I asked.

  Yaw Brobbey laughed. “This is, ah, not so customary!”

  I started to drink the water, but he stopped me. “No, no, Steven. Like this.” He spilled a few drops of water on the concrete floor, then drank. I followed his cue, as we poured libation to the gods, in honor of my arrival. The water was cold and tasted of clay as if it had been drawn straight from the earth. It’s hard for a Milwaukee boy to admit, but at sixteen years of age, I didn’t like the taste of beer, regardless of whether it was Schlitz or Pabst or Tata. I do want to be polite, I thought, but—and then, before I could resolve my dilemma, my twenty-one siblings entered the room to greet me with shy formality, one at a time. The younger children could barely conceal grins of excitement at their new obroni brother.

  Yaw Brobbey showed me to my room; my brothers would be sleeping five to a bed so that I could have my own mattress. My father’s room was right next door. He had three wives, one of whom was the widow of his deceased brother, now part of Yaw’s family, by whom he had several children. Two wives slept in separate bedrooms at the far end of the house; though they passed my room to meet my host father, I was never once aware of any late-night rendezvous. The third wife lived at a midwife’s house nearby, because she was heavily pregnant.

  My first morning in Sunyani, I woke to what sounded like the laconic swish of brushes on a jazz drummer’s snare. My sister Faustina was sweeping the patio with a passel of stiff reeds tied together at one end; the makeshift broom rhythmically scraped the cement. Roosters cawed in the fresh morning light. Yaw Brobbey greeted each day with a glass of scotch in one hand and a straight shaving razor in the other as he stood bare-chested in the courtyard. This space, I quickly learned, was central to almost everything the Brobbeys did. My sisters cooked succulent groundnut stew over an open fire in the courtyard. The boys chopped firewood here. Everyone washed their laundry here. The youngest played skipping games—like jump rope, but without the rope—that ended with the children clapping, hopping, and falling over one another with laughter. Here in the courtyard, too, Yaw (Dad) Brobbey dispensed an allowance to each of his children. Every few days, the children crowded around him as he pressed the worn cedi bank notes into their little palms.

  The first morning, as every morning, Yaw stood shirtless, smiling, massaging his Santa Claus belly and extemporizing on all matters of life, love, and commerce. He tousled the hair of his sons and let his daughters try to wrap their arms around his midriff. Dad Brobbey gargled his scotch and sent a son to fetch more hot water from the charcoal fire. Then he grinned at me, raising his half-empty tumbler in a jovial toast.

  “Steven, you would like?”

  It was shortly after 7:00 am.

  “Ah, Steven, it is verrryyyy fine. It will make you feel bettah.”

  Since my third day in Accra, I’d been fighting a terrible case of diarrhea. I shook my head and smiled, patting my stomach, smiling gamely.

  “To your health then, Steven!”

  The Brobbey house sat about ten yards back from the road, on the outskirts of Sunyani. Across the street, a small road curved into the distance, with a few homes scattered about, and chickens strutting as if they owned the place. Behind our house stood a fragment of forest, tall grass and fronded trees, their muscled trunks brocaded with vines. A cocoa-red dirt pathway snaked through the bush until it emerged in the yard of an elementary school. This was the shortcut to the town center and my host father’s store, the Littlewood Grocery, a cramped kiosk in the center of Sunyani. The word “grocery” was foreign to most people in Ghana, I later learned, and confused some in town. The word represented Yaw Brobbey’s aspiration to have a shop with global cachet; “grocery” conjured up visions of high street supermarkets with bright linoleum floors.

  Sunyani seemed tidy, modest, and compact. Two-story concrete buildings lined dirt roads that converged at the city center. The zongo, the name for the often pitiable, heavily Muslim enclaves found in nearly every city in Ghana,
lined one side of the road. Kwabena Kraa, the town goldsmith, had his forge there, and I often detoured so I could pass his shop as I walked to the Littlewood Grocery. I was transfixed by the boy who industriously pumped the bellows, as Kwabena annealed lumps of Obuasi gold. On the other side of the road was a wooden kiosk where the tailor pedaled an old Singer sewing machine, embroidering batik shirts with the traditional embellishment of whorls and spirals known as jaromi. The smell of Sunyani on my morning walk was redolent of warm earth. It was the scent of fried plantains, palm oil simmering in an iron cauldron, and decaying palm fronds.

  Among all the citizens of Sunyani, Yaw Brobbey was one of the most prominent, and, like my own father, he was a remarkable teacher in the ways of business—his skill resting largely on his ability to listen earnestly to people and talk to them with credibility and a degree of modesty. He was chairman of the Brong-Ahafo United football club, a team that played in Ghana’s premier league, which was unusual for such a small municipality. A high-spirited entrepreneur, Dad Brobbey held an import license, probably the only way a person outside the government could make serious money under the military dictatorship of General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. An import license held the key to enjoying the good life in Ghana. Disco dancing at the Moustache Club or buying goat kebabs in the market—all this required money—and one could earn cedis with an import license. For those with a trader’s mind and an entrepreneurial bent, an import license was better than the purest Obuasi gold.

  My host father used his import license to buy a Ford tractor and three manual-transmission Toyotas. He leased the tractor to neighboring farmers and promoters working on small construction projects. They paid a high price to use the town’s only working piece of heavy machinery. Dad Brobbey painted the fenders of two of his Toyotas orange, the Ghanaian livery for taxicabs. He had no trouble leasing the vehicles for a fee that included trading shifts as one of his personal drivers. Dad Brobbey liked to sit in the front seat next to his driver instead of the back, as if he could never comfortably delegate the task of driving and navigation. The third Toyota my father kept for himself.

  He oversaw his little empire of diversified holdings from the back room of the Littlewood Grocery. Without the benefit of an MBA or classes on asset allocation and diversification of risk, Dad Brobbey crafted a portfolio of investments well-suited to the vicissitudes of Ghana’s economy—an economy that, in 1978, was in ruinous shape. I had brought about $200 with me to last the summer. At one point, I briefly contemplated spending it all on a single bottle of Coca-Cola, when an evanescent spell of homesickness descended on me, but there was no supply of Coke—an imported beverage—to be found in all of Sunyani at any price. Ghana lived hand-to-mouth in 1978. On July 3, I wasn’t surprised to hear that, in a sort of preemptive salute to the US Independence Day celebration, General Acheampong had been overthrown in a coup d’etat led by another soldier, General Fred Akuffo.

  The novelty of seeing an obroni, and a relatively young one at that, in Brong-Ahafo in 1978, seemed a singularly pleasing and auspicious occurrence, like spying a leprechaun. Cheery cries of “Ei! Kwesi ’broni!” followed me everywhere. Sometimes the people knew who I was—“Brobbey’s American!”—and sometimes they didn’t. It didn’t seem to make any difference. “Kwesi ’broni!”

  On quiet days, I often wandered to the store through the yard of the elementary school behind our house. If I was lucky, the children would be out for recess, for I was a celebrity. A schoolboy might spot me when his soccer ball rolled astray, and he would approach, smiling gregariously and shaking my hand, pumping my arm furiously.

  “Good morning, sir!”

  “Good morning! I am not a sir.”

  “You are very welcome! Are you well today, sir? Are you very well this morning?”

  Soon his teammates would swarm me, and then, overcoming their shyness, dozens of schoolgirls joined us. So many schoolchildren, all inquiring after my health, wishing me a good morning, and hopping up and down with excitement as they practiced, perhaps for the first time, their textbook English on a real obroni. One girl grabbed my forearm. My tan skin flushed white at the spot where she poked me. Her mates found this blushing fascinating. In an instant, everyone wanted a turn, dozens of school children poking me with unrestrained glee, intently regarding my skin blush as they pressed their sturdy little digits into my sunburned skin, all the while chirping “Obroni, obroni!” The best recess of the entire year. I was spared further experimentation by a school bell, rung by a worried teacher who stood, shaking the bell for all he was worth, on the porch of the school.

  When I arrived at the Littlewood Grocery, I would sit and listen to the men who congregated around the counter, chatting in Twi. I barely understood what they said. If it weren’t for the demonstrative facial expressions and the dramatic intonations of the men, I could not have followed the conversations at-TALL (the quintessentially Ghanaian pronunciation, as if the two words were one, with the accent on the second syllable, pronounced similar to the word “atoll”).

  “Ei! Kwesi ’broni, wo ho te seyn?” “How are you?”

  “Me ho-yε,” I answered. “I am fine.”

  This would result in much laughter, chattering in Twi, and enthusiastic handshakes, followed by the Ghanaian finger snap: you shake hands, and then, as you release, you keep your middle finger extended and simultaneously snap your middle finger to your thumb as your partner’s middle finger slides away.

  Then I added for comic effect, “Me ho-yε, pah, pah, pah!” “I am very, very, too much fine!”

  “Whoa, Steven, you are toooo funny, ei!” a man the size of a middle linebacker said as he adjusted his traditional robe over his shoulder, shaking his head in wonder. Mr. Kwame Adjei-Frimpong, a friend of Yaw Brobbey’s, constantly battled the force of gravity that kept pulling his robe down off his shoulder. Adjei-Frimpong’s cloth often drooped about his belly like a sagging diaper, revealing pendulous breasts that jostled like bowls of fufu when he laughed. We carried on like this for quite a while; I could spend most of the morning imitating their Twi as they laughed at my antics.

  The Littlewood Grocery consisted of a counter, behind which were rows of shelves, like those in an old-time general store. Yaw Brobbey artfully arranged boxes of nails, tins of tea, jerry cans of kerosene, and bottles of schnapps along the shelves to give the impression that business was far brisker than it really was. In truth, there were only a few times all summer when anyone came into the store to buy something—and each time it happened, Yaw Brobbey treated the event more as an interruption of a good conversation than as the raison d’être of the establishment. A customer would enter, scan the shelves, more in hope than in anticipation; the moribund economy had a depressing effect on both mood and pocketbook. Then, the customer would look expectantly at the men, who regarded any interloper with polite indifference. An uncomfortable silence. The customer would sigh, turn, and leave, the departure barely disrupting the political discussion taking place.

  In Ghana, then as now, the worse the government, the more people talk about it. It is a shame, I tell myself, that people don’t talk so much about politics when a government gets things right, delivers basic services. The reward of good governance—government with a light, unobtrusive touch—is that everybody simply goes about their business unaware.

  Only once did my host father invite me into the small back room where he had his private office. A young assistant came out to the front, deferentially interrupted the political discourse going full throttle, and motioned for me to follow him. He led me into a windowless closet of a room so small that the desk, behind which my host father sat, nearly filled the room. Yaw Brobbey must have climbed over this desk to get to his chair, no small feat for a man of his girth.

  “Steven, are you well?” He was inquiring after my health, not just extending a polite greeting; my amoebic dysentery was fast becoming something of a local legend. “Shall I cash traveler’s checks for you? Four times the bank rate?”


  His cherubic eyes smiling, he penciled the exchange rate in the margin of a green baize ledger, the kind with leather trim on the corners. A small wax candle was the only source of light in the room.

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  Dad Brobbey nodded his approval and resumed his calculations as I stood waiting. I expected he might ask about my day, or else pay me right then and there. Perhaps he would offer me a scotch. He did nothing. His assistant tapped me on the shoulder, as if furiously pecking out a disaster message on an old-fashioned telegraph key, and ushered me out of the room without a word.

  The longer I observed Yaw Brobbey in his general store, the easier it became to discern the shifts in his character. Focused and serious when he dealt with money, my host father transformed into a jovial elf when socializing. And yet the socializing itself was integral to conducting business. Socializing comprised sharing information, striking deals. Unwittingly, I began my education in how to do business in Ghana.

  Some days, Dad Brobbey took me to meet some friends at a nearby Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) rest house, a small establishment owned, as was almost everything at this time, by the government. “Government” in this context could mean the national government in Accra, or the Brong-Ahafo regional government, or some outpost of a ministry, say Road and Transport, or a quasi-government entity like the SSNIT, Ghana’s state pension fund.

  Dad ordered Gulder beers for us all and introduced me to his friends. The beers arrived glistening with condensation, and while the men chattered away, I stacked the bottle caps on the worn Formica tabletop. My host father talked about football, how BA United would fare against Accra Hearts of Oak or Sekondi Hasaacas, before he turned to the price of cocoa, yams, or fuel, which he pronounced foo-el. From time to time, he smiled at me and made an effort to include me in the conversation, conducted almost entirely in Twi.