With the entire street façade devoted to commerce, entrance to Whit’s flat was through a paved rear courtyard shared by another block of buildings behind us. This communal outdoor living space served as a playground, laundry room, kitchen, and bathroom for perhaps a dozen large families. Along one side of the courtyard ran an open concrete sewer, perhaps eighteen inches deep and as wide, through which coursed a slow-moving stream of soapy gray effluvia and floating trash. While genuine sewage of the toilet-flushing variety did not appear to drain into this fetid trough, my brother’s kitchen and bathroom sinks could be plainly traced as tributaries, from drainpipes running down the side of the building. At any rate, the sewer’s status as a conduit of relatively innocuous sink water was undermined by the fact that most of the courtyard’s residents—men and women alike—freely peed into it. At least one uninhibited child regularly emptied his bowels into the babbling slipstream. The courtyard itself was sloped so rainwater would roll into the trench—along with every child’s ball and other toys, which then got picked out, occasionally washed, and put into play again. In short it was a pathologist’s nightmare, and a perfect example of why diarrhea is endemic to children in Africa.
At the rear of the courtyard, a double flight of red-painted concrete steps led up to my brother’s flat. The door opened to a long perpendicular hallway off which two main rooms faced a colonnaded veranda, accessed through French doors, above the street. In the first room, makeshift wooden tables were covered with batteries, chargers, and extension cords, over which an industrial-sized metal fan throbbed loudly in a vain effort to keep the electronics cool. The other main room, larger, had a dining room table and chairs, and walls plastered with regional maps and whiteboards listing agent names and rental volumes. At either end of the hallway was a pair of smaller rooms, one front and one back. The back room on the west side was Whit’s bedroom; the street-facing room adjoining it was the Burro office, with two desks, bookshelves, and a massive built-in safe with a keyed lock that no one could open and contents, if any, that remained a tantalizing mystery. The office could be accessed from Whit’s room or the veranda. Over on the opposite side, the rear bedroom was occupied by Jan, and the front room, also accessible from either Jan’s room or the veranda, was to be Harper’s and mine. Behind Jan’s bedroom, forming a sort of ell, was the small kitchen (sink, narrow fridge, Lilliputian four-burner gas stove) and a shower room, toilet cabin (with a commercial jet–siphon flushing action that I came to appreciate after a few meals at the local dives), and separate bathroom sink.
These cooking and ablution facilities, while Spartan by North American standards, were in fact pharaonic according to the dim expectations of Africa—particularly the keg-sized hot water heater above the shower, which apparently had no temperature setting cooler than scald. (Months later, Whit found the thermostat.) By contrast the kitchen sink provided only cold water, so dishwashing was accomplished by transferring a bucket of hot shower spray into the kitchen sink. Having running water at all was a minor engineering miracle: the murky public supply ran only twice a week, so at great expense Whit had installed a pair of 1,800-liter plastic tanks on the roof, creating a 950-gallon reservoir. In theory these backup tanks would fill when the utility gods deigned to open the communal spigots; after the town water went dry, we would subsist on this bacterial oasis cleverly cached on our roof. (Less fortunate residents of the block got by on dry days by hauling water from a large communal cistern located in another courtyard behind ours. When that ran dry, they had to buy water, per bucket, from a vendor across the street.) In practice, however, with a full house including one American teenager who showered twice a day, we ran out of water often, so the normally routine act of turning on a faucet was freighted with suspense; you never knew if you would get water (or what color it would be), a blast of pressurized air, or a pathetic burp followed by nothing.
I had to commend my brother for putting up with these inconveniences; I can’t picture a lot of multimillionaire middle-aged American businessmen voluntarily living this way, particularly those happily married with a family eight thousand miles away. I regarded it as testament to his entrepreneurial commitment. In fact, he admitted, he would have gladly put up with even more straitened arrangements had he not been worried that Jan, who made no demands but also lived comfortably in the Northwest, might run out of enthusiasm for cold bucket showers. At any rate, the place was actually rather charming and comfortable in a rakish, retro way. It was clearly built at a time when the Brits were doing things right, with high ceilings, lots of cross ventilation, and hand-carved mahogany doors and transom windows. The building had originally been the regional office of the British American Tobacco Company; later it was the office of the state labor department, and it was still known to locals as “Old Labor.”
When Whit came into town looking for digs, the real estate agent drove him around to look at villas on the outskirts, down dark rutted roads and behind high walls. But that would never work for a business that was going to need a visible presence in the city. “I was like, ‘Dude, you don’t get it,’” Whit told me. “‘We want to be in town—right in town.’ The agent said, ‘Oh, there is no place suitable for obrunis in town.’ I said, ‘Try me.’”
The place was cheap—two hundred cedis a month, payable in advance for two years (typical for Ghana), which came to about three thousand dollars. But it wasn’t exactly in move-in condition. “Oh man, this place was three inches thick in dust when we first saw it,” said Whit. “The kitchen had no appliances, no counters or cabinets—just a sink hanging in midair from pipes. The toilet was there, I just had to replace the seat.”
“What was wrong with the existing seat?”
“It was there.”
Some problems ran deeper. Above the coffered plywood ceiling was a corrugated metal roof dulled by rust and thus incapable of reflecting the relentless tropical sun. With no insulation of any kind, the roof was a heat sink. So, despite ceiling fans in every room and huge louvered-glass jalousie windows, the flat was transformed into a living hell roughly fifteen minutes after sunrise every day. Closing windows was unthinkable; in that stifling cloister, the slightest breeze was greeted like an apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As a result, the flat was so noisy—horns, roosters, music, screaming children, and motorcycles—that you had to stick a finger in your ear to talk on a cell phone. This was indoors. Out on the veranda, otherwise a lovely vantage point above the street commerce—young men splitting coconuts with machetes, women selling sliced papaya snacks in front of plywood stalls hawking used brassieres (something about the coconuts and the brassieres suggested a small-time burlesque routine)—conversation transpired at a yell. Although we could and often did cook our own dinners from provisions gathered at the town’s huge outdoor market, at the end of many days all we wanted was to go somewhere that had not been baking under a tin roof since six in the morning. Usually, that was the Linda Dor restaurant.
3. The Gold Coast
As Whit had predicted, Harper was down for the count by sunset; while he slept off his Red Bull bender, Whit and I ambled out for dinner at the Linda Dor, a few blocks down Hospital Road. “Watch every step you take, and don’t ever stop watching,” he said as we shuffled down the dark road, jumping over open sewers and dodging the jagged metal stumps of former signposts. “There is no concept of liability in Africa, and no one to blame if you fall into something. Also, I can pretty much guarantee that your medevac coverage won’t airlift you to Germany for a twenty-inch gash in your leg; you’ll be stuck with the local clinic, followed by a very unpleasant ride home on that shitty Delta plane. Or you could fork over four grand for a first-class seat.”
Like our living quarters, the Linda Dor possessed a faded colonial charm. It had certainly seen better days, and its dingy décor and dark recesses suggested that there was much concerning this establishment that you really didn’t want to know about, at least not before dinner.
We sat near the door and I opened the
menu warily. Much to my surprise, laid out across its greasy pages was the promise of an intercontinental repast without equal. Steak frites, pasta Bolognese, boeuf Bourguignon, and Chinese stir-fry, not to mention African delights like peanut stew and the ubiquitous fufu, were all possible. Years of living in New York had trained me to be suspicious of restaurants that “specialize” in more than one ethnic approach; purveyors boasting simultaneous expertise in Korean and Mexican were not likely to create edible versions of either. But the menu at Linda Dor took multicultural cuisine into bold new territory. Clearly, behind the stove of this unassuming chow house reigned a polyglot chef of global ambition, a Baedeker of the broiler.
“What do you recommend?” I asked Whit.
“Nothing. But don’t worry, they won’t actually have any of this stuff—well, maybe one Chinese dish, but it won’t be anything like Chinese food you’ve ever seen. I’d stick with the Jolof rice.”
Rube that I was, I had not yet learned that in Ghana, restaurant menus are merely aspirational. Any given establishment, no matter how remote, may boast on its menu anything from Castilian tapas, Lebanese mezze, Auvergnian biftek, and Venetian fritto misto, none of which has ever been prepared within two thousand miles of the place, even if the ingredients were available. A request for any of these exotic belt-stretchers is invariably met with the response “It’s finished.”
Looking over the pages devoted to reliably available local fare, I saw something even more curious. “What’s grasscutter?” I asked Whit.
“Rat. Well, a ratlike rodent. They eat regular rats here too, but grasscutter is big—bigger than a rabbit but with a ratlike tail. Maybe like a muskrat. Lives in the tall grass. It’s a delicacy. Men hunt them with shotguns and sell them by the side of the road for extra cash.”
It turns out that the grasscutter market is the subject of ecological controversy because hunters typically flush out the animals by setting grasslands on fire, contributing to the alarming deforestation of West Africa. Reckoning that one sample of the tender viand (in the interest of journalism) was unlikely to raze the African savannah, I pressed ahead bravely: “I’ll have the grasscutter stew with fufu, please.”
“Fufu is finished,” the waitress replied meekly. “We have banku.”
Whit explained that banku is a fermented version of fufu. I consented. He ordered the Jolof rice.
“Is the food better in the former French colonies?” I asked Whit.
“Considerably.”
“So why are we here?”
He shot me a weary look. “Well as much as I like good food, there were some other considerations, some of them obvious, others not. Before last summer I had never been to Ghana, although I came close on New Year’s Eve of 1981. I was in a bush taxi at the border in Burkina Faso, which was still called Upper Volta. That was the night of the second, and successful, J. J. Rawlings coup, when they sealed the borders.”
“Whit, you were in the CIA. You let a closed border stop you?”
“Only that one time, and only because I left my decoder pen and shoe phone at the hotel. So I always felt kinda ripped off, like my Ghana trip had been taken away from me somehow. For years I toted around my unused Ghana visa as a shameful badge of travel curtailed. But since then, Ghana has gone through a pretty phenomenal evolution. There’s a very free press; in fact the press is rated freer than in some of the Eastern European countries. There are very strong democratic institutions, albeit still fragile at times, as we are learning in the election just finished. But the country has now had five presidential elections, at least the latter three of which were widely acclaimed as substantially free, fair, and transparent. The first one, when Rawlings won in ’92, was rigged, but the second one, in ’96, was much more fair, and they have been since then.”
My stew arrived, bony chunks of skin-on grasscutter in a thick brown slurry. On the side were two softball-sized gray dumplings—the banku. Whit explained that traditionally one eats the banku (or fufu) by hand, small pieces dipped in the soup like a doughnut in coffee. It is also considered rude to actually chew it, which, upon tasting the gelatinous paste, did not seem much of a sacrifice. “Go ahead and eat,” said Whit a bit too forcefully, as if addressing a reluctant child staring at his vegetables. “There’s no telling when mine will come. Ghana has no traditional restaurant culture; they just bring food out whenever it’s ready.” I nodded and tucked in to my rat, which, as I had hoped, tasted much like rabbit.
“So you’ve got strong democratic institutions, and a strong civil society as well,” Whit continued. “There are a lot of professional organizations and associations and church groups that really push for a better society and are working in various ways to improve things. And it’s a relatively well-educated society. Ghana used to have the best education system in Africa; it’s probably suffered in the last twenty years. It’s also got a history of a monetized rural economy, so that was very important. You go to some countries, like Ethiopia, and the rural economy is very much at the subsistence level, maybe with some barter. Here there’s a long history of cash-cropping and monetization, so people are used to earning money in a wide variety of ways and living in a cash economy.”
This commercial bent seems ingrained in the Ghanaian culture, a legacy of the country’s rich gold mines—the region’s most valuable natural resource before the transatlantic slave trade, and still the second most important export after cocoa. The Brits of course called Ghana the Gold Coast; under their rule, Ashanti tribal leaders were groomed as business partners, a transformation that accelerated in the early twentieth century. In 1930 one of them, Kofi Sraha, described the situation in terms that would sound familiar to the most acquisitive baby boomer: “We turned ourselves from Warriors into Merchants, Traders, Christians and men of properties, [kept] moneys in the Banks under British Protection and began to build huge houses.” It was easy to see Whit’s Ghanaian partner Charlie as the modern descendant of this legacy.
A loud crack ricocheted inside my skull, and pain I had never felt outside of the dentist’s chair bored through a maxillary molar. I reached inside my mouth and extracted a mangled shotgun pellet. “Fuck, look at that.”
“Holy shit,” said Whit. “I knew there was a reason I never eat the grasscutter. Chew carefully.” Indeed; by the end of the meal I had extracted five pellets. (I later learned from Charlie that you want your grasscutter to have pellets. “That proves they were properly shot, and not killed with rat poison,” he said.) Whit’s rice arrived just as I was finishing up.
“Ghana is a beautiful country too,” Whit continued. “That’s also important because I’m trying to attract and retain American and other partners as we grow. And obviously the English language here helps with that as well. The business climate is also very friendly to foreign investment. There’s guaranteed repatriation of profits, albeit with an eight percent dividend tax. So you’ve got a very positive and improving business climate for outside investors. Put all those factors together and it just makes sense.”
It was late, still quite hot. Jet lag was winning. I paid the check, gathered up my shotgun pellets, and we left for home. “Let’s take the scenic route,” said Whit. “I’ll show you a bit of the town.”
We tramped down gloomy side streets, where African men leaned against sheds, sharpening machetes along smooth stones and eyeing us with curiosity. I briefly weighed the relative benefits of getting hacked up by a sharp versus a dull machete, deciding the difference would be largely esoteric in the moment. White people are a rare sight in Koforidua, and it felt strange to be such a visible minority. For the first time in my life I felt some visceral awareness of what it must be like to be black in a largely white society, to be stared at like a freak. I wasn’t sure if our route was prudent; these were not streets I would walk down at night in, say, Detroit. But we weren’t in Detroit, and it was fine. Whit said “Good evening!” to everyone we passed, and the sullen faces would suddenly beam. My dopey kid brother was at home here, and I was glad
to be with him.
1. The Last Unlucky Place
“It’s Italian for butter.”
“Huh?” Whit, behind the wheel of the Tata, glared at me, then swerved to avoid a woman balancing a two-foot-high pyramid of loose eggs, stacked like cannonballs at a Civil War monument, on a tray over her head.
“Burro,” I said. “It means ‘butter’ in Italian. That could be confusing in Italy.”
“We’re not doing business in Italy, asshole. It’s not a developing country.”
“But what happens when you expand into francophone West Africa? Do we call it Buerre?”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously, don’t you think it’s a little weird that you’re starting a business with a Spanish name on a continent where virtually no one speaks Spanish? I mean, the Spaniards were smart; they stayed away from this miasmic hell-pit except to pick up slaves. They had experience. They knew what relentless heat can do to the human soul. There’s like one country the size of Rhode Island that speaks Spanish here.”
“Are you finished?”
“Just watch the road. You can get the death penalty for hitting a pedestrian here, especially if you knock eggs off her head.”
We were headed down the coast from Accra to Axim, a 150-mile stretch of surf to the lagoon border with Ivory Coast. It was a working holiday with Harper. We had planned a rolling tour of the slave forts, while scouting expansion locations for Burro, plotting back roads on our GPS and following the power lines—mostly to see where they end and where the battery-powered villages begin. It didn’t take long to figure out that the existence of power lines did not mean a village was electrified. Often the main three-phase lines would run right over a large settlement—with no step-down.
Max Alexander Page 5