Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  “There’s no money to bring power down to these villages,” said Whit.

  “And they have to stare at those power lines every day. Must be like dying of thirst on the ocean.”

  “Of course that’s assuming the power is actually running. You never know.”

  We pulled into the seaside town of Beyin and parked next to Fort Apollonia, a decrepit British outpost from 1770. By far the largest and most successful capitalist venture in the history of Africa was slavery. No other natural resource—not diamonds or gold, not copper or bauxite or oil—has shaped modern Africa, and the mind-set of Africans, like slavery. The slave trade literally wiped out generations of Africans; the latest scholarly assessments, using sophisticated computer models, suggest that more than eleven million sub-Saharan Africans simply disappeared (think Nazi Holocaust times two), mostly young men. But as Americans know from our own history, a centuries-long conflagration like slavery doesn’t simply end when it ends. In Africa the long-term effects of slavery, still being felt, include the rise of militaristic native governments (armies were needed both to protect against rival slave raids and to gather slaves for trade); tribal and ethnic distrust; an obsession among leaders with opulent trappings of power at the expense of normal citizens (the slave trade enriched African rulers and desensitized them to the plight of the poor); primitivism (consider that the height of the slave trade was during the Age of Enlightenment); and pervasive poverty that breeds desperate acts of violence. Anyone doing business in modern Africa must contend with the legacy of the continent’s dark capitalist history, which did not begin with the Europeans.

  Today we tend to think of Africa as a place of teeming masses—and in fact, modern African cities are hives of sweating, coughing, chaotic humanity. But the larger story of Africa is the story of underpopulation. Poor soils, extreme climates, and a host of natural diseases and predators kept the African people in check for millennia. Simply put, there were not enough bodies to do all the work. As a result, the medieval kingdoms of Africa were constantly at war for the express purpose of collecting slaves. In West Africa, along the humid Atlantic tropical belt, slaves made it possible to clear the rain forest and establish agricultural settlements. These communities grew to become the cities and capitals of modern nations, including Ghana. In fact, when the Portuguese slavers first arrived at what is now Ghana, the local tribes were not sellers but buyers: between 1500 and 1535, the Akan tribes, from whom most modern Ghanaians descend, bought between ten thousand and twelve thousand slaves with local gold. (The slaves came from what are now Benin and Nigeria to the east.)

  Taken as a whole and looking back over thousands of years, the scale of pre-colonial slavery on the African continent cannot be explained away as opportunistic capture on the battlefield. Clearly, indigenous African slavery was a stand-alone business, and a large one.

  And yet—what the Africans themselves started and the Portuguese refined, the British took up with organizational zeal. They turned the Gold Coast into the center of the West African slave trade, and Cape Coast Castle was their corporate headquarters. At the height of the trade, in the eighteenth century, it is estimated that about six million West Africans were shipped into slavery, mostly to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Scholars now believe that between 1720 and 1780, 5 to 10 percent of the Gold Coast’s entire population was enslaved. As William St. Clair points out in The Grand Slave Emporium, while the slave trade did not exactly drive the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural commodities (like cotton) that slaves produced in the New World contributed hugely to the success of British manufacturing in the nineteenth century—well after 1807, when England abolished slave trafficking. This is not a fine point. It means that England and other European countries continued to profit indirectly from slavery long after they had formally washed their hands of it.

  And perversely, abolition encouraged a second wave of indigenous slavery in nineteenth-century Africa, since the vast business infrastructure of the slave trade didn’t just disappear overnight. As Europeans shifted to legitimate trade in African agriculture and other resources, slaves were needed to tend the fields and extract the minerals. In some parts of Africa, such as Mauritania, slavery still exists openly.

  Today eleven of Ghana’s coastal slave fortifications are UNESCO World Heritage Sites and international tourist attractions. African Americans come to find their roots, and they stay in hotels and eat in restaurants and take pictures under the Door of No Return and buy handicrafts from the locals. For the diaspora tourists it is a bittersweet journey. It is not uncommon for African American visitors, upon seeing firsthand the reality of modern Africa, to express perverse gratitude that their ancestors were among the enslaved. (The descendants of Haitian slaves are presumably less buoyant about their fate.) There is no doubt: chained and beaten, raped and ruined, wherever they landed the slaves were surely the unluckiest of all humanity. But Africa, it turns out, is the last unlucky place.

  2. What Has Upset the Gods?

  Through the terminally gridlocked traffic in Accra, narrowly escaping from Nkrumah Circle and its armies of prostitutes and panhandling children of Tuareg nomads from the southern Sahara (sent out by their parents to beg in traffic all day and making the universal hand-to-mouth sign of hunger), we passed a large hand-painted billboard for a skin ointment with the query: SUFFERING FROM BUMPS AND KELOID? followed by detailed illustrations of various worms and festering skin ailments.

  “They don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?” I said.

  “Oh that’s nothing,” said Whit. “Wait till you see the signs for diarrhea meds.”

  To the catalog of African miseries, add a modern plague: driving. It is possible to imagine a more dangerous contact sport than driving in Africa, but if so, it has managed to fly under the radar of even the most ratings-desperate television networks. Numbers are sketchy since even serious accidents often go unreported in the developing world, but Africa easily boasts the highest traffic mortality rate on the planet. A 2004 study by the World Health Organization found that of every hundred thousand Africans, 28.3 will die in car accidents, compared to just eleven in Europe. Children are particularly at risk, as pedestrians: in Ghana, about 20 percent of the nearly two thousand annual traffic deaths are children walking to and from school or playing in roads; most are boys, under age ten.

  Along the road between Cape Coast and Accra were several billboards that said OVERSPEEDING KILLS! This is presumably opposed to regular speeding, which is generally accepted. Beneath that loud warning was a grim tally of traffic deaths at that particular intersection. The first sign said: OVER 12 PERSONS DIED HERE. And the next one, a few miles down the road: OVER 70 PERSONS DIED HERE. You see these signs all over Ghana, always with an inexact body count that suggests the authorities simply got tired of tallying up the limbs and settled for a guesstimate.

  Reasons for the carnage include the previously mentioned penchant for mindless passing; spectacularly overloaded and unsafe vehicles (trucks piled two stories high with cargo, devoid of tire treads and listing like drunken sailors); scarce medical facilities with limited training in trauma care; low to zero enforcement of speed limits (the Ghana national police, uniformed in blue camouflage and shouldering Kalashnikov rifles, seem to exist all too frequently to shake down drivers for bribes at roadblocks); roads cratered with chassis-twisting potholes; deep, open concrete roadside sewers that leave no shoulder and no room for error (“pulling over” to avoid an accident could be more disastrous than the collision itself); for the same reason, no place for pedestrians except in the roadway; an obstacle course of countless rusting hulks of previous accidents that never get towed away, causing new accidents (the African traffic nightmare has been called “the hidden epidemic,” but in fact you can see the pathology along any ten-kilometer stretch of road); and, at night, a lack of streetlights or reflective roadway markings combined with the inescapable logic that the less often headlights are used, the longer they will last.


  These are just the material causes. Whit speculates that the real, underlying problem is the African’s innate fatalism: “When it’s my turn to go, it’s my turn to go” is a common sentiment. It’s in the hands of God, so why not pass a double tractor-trailer over a hill in a rainstorm? This is not a private spiritual matter. Trucks, cars, buses, and taxis throughout Ghana are adorned with Christian aphorisms surrendering their drivers to a celestial traffic code. I don’t mean discreet bumper stickers; I’m talking about large-scale decals that cover the entire rear window (which, come to think of it, could be another cause of accidents). “It Is God’s Will” might be the motto plastered across a seventeen-foot-high banana truck with six bald tires. “In Thy Name Alone” christens many a speeding taxi. “God Is In Control” is another favorite—no need to steer those cars. One day, we got stuck behind a massive cargo truck that featured a professionally hand-painted message laid out in twelve-inch-high circus font across the back: RELIGIOUS CONFUSION. Below, the left mud flap said MASTER and the right said JESUS. Often the message is in Twi, the most common phrase being Gye Nyame, which means “Except for God” and is meant to suggest His omnipotence. On the road in Ghana you put the pedal to the metal, but the real power hovers somewhere above the hood, so it’s okay. Not to worry. Gye Nyame.

  On its website for travel advisories, the U.S. State Department summarizes driving conditions in every country in the world. Here are some insights they provide for travelers to Ghana:

  The road from Accra to the central region tourist area of Cape Coast continues to be the site of many accidents. Travel in darkness, particularly outside the major cities, is extremely hazardous, due to poor street lighting and the unpredictable behavior of pedestrians, bicyclists and farm animals, particularly goats and sheep. Aggressive drivers, poorly maintained vehicles and overloaded vehicles pose serious threats to road safety. The safety standards of the small private buses that transit roads and highways are uncertain.

  Very few Africans own cars—in Ghana about one in two hundred people. As a result, “nobody knows how to drive here,” says Whit, “especially the people who drive.” But that doesn’t mean a lack of cars. With very little infrastructure of public transportation—the few trains stopped running reliably years ago, intercity buses don’t cover the deep countryside where so many Ghanaians live, and even Accra (population two million) has no mass transit of any kind—getting around Ghana has devolved into a freewheeling circus of enterprising shared taxis and their downscale stepcousins, the battered private passenger minivans alluded to in the State Department brief, known as tro-tros. (The name derives from the Twi slang for the small coins once used to pay for passage.) The nomadic and wild-eyed drivers of these vehicles will take you from one end of the nation to another, and anywhere in between; you see them bouncing along dirt tracks dozens of kilometers from anywhere, groaning under rooftop baggage loads, their unbelted passengers practically spilling out the windows and the open sliding doors. Neither taxis nor tro-tros have meters; the fares are highly competitive and based on destination, which means profit is a factor of three inputs: extreme speed, maximum passenger load, and as little money wasted on maintenance as possible. Maybe you could add speed again.

  The result is chaos. Car accidents pose a far greater threat to visitors than any of the country’s myriad tropical diseases, flesh-eating parasites, and venom-spitting reptiles. Guidebooks and websites warn visitors not to even consider getting behind the wheel, even in broad daylight; driving at night is considered evidence of criminal insanity. Hertz of Ghana will not rent its vehicles without a hired driver, and local agencies are nearly as insistent. Of course this adds considerably to the expense of tourism—at least for those unwilling to ride cheek-to-shoulder with the perspiring masses in tro-tros—as the driver must not only be paid but also fed and housed along the road. It’s oddly colonial, and disjointing in a modern tourist context. There is something Kipling-esque about the well-heeled German sightseeing couple nosing around the slave dungeons of Cape Coast Castle as their African driver waits in the blinding sun of the whitewashed courtyard, jangling keys and speaking Twi into his cell phone.

  But we are not tourists, and our business in Ghana requires driving—lots of driving. So we drive. Everywhere. Sometimes even at night. Driving here is not fun, even if, like me, you love to drive. It is exhausting because African driving requires constant vigilance; take your eyes off the road for one second and you miss the darting child, the stubborn goat, the open sewer an inch from your tire, the oncoming tro-tro in your lane. Death waits around every curve and over every hill, and there is simply too much life happening in too little space. On the road in Ghana, mistakes are unforgiven, and physics can provide a harsh and messy lesson.

  Here is what happens, all too often: In February 2009, a bus carrying thirty-three passengers along the road between the northern towns of Tamale and Bolgatanga was passing two larger buses at high speed when it collided head-on with an onion truck. Everyone on the bus and the truck was killed, and dozens more in other vehicles were injured. In the gritty, repulsive-attractive style of African journalism, the Ghanaian Chronicle reported: “Most of the victims had their skulls broken, while others had disfigured faces and mutilated bodies. The accident was so horrendous that one could easily describe those with broken legs and arms as having minor injuries.”

  One month later, a gasoline truck circling a busy roundabout in Winneba, along the main Accra–Cape Coast highway, blew a tire. The driver lost control and careened into an Opel sedan. The tanker exploded into the proverbial ball of fire, incinerating more than a dozen people on the spot, including an entire family, and sending three dozen more to the hospital with severe burns. Most of them would die later. “Almost all of them came in with their whole body burnt, both the frontal part and posterior part, including the head,” a doctor at the local hospital, which quickly ran out of bandages, told a reporter. “For most of the kids it also involved their private parts…. We are beginning to lose them one by one. It is quite hard.”

  The same day, in Eastern Region near Whit’s home in Koforidua, at least four people died when a bus collided with a truck carrying acid. Responding to all these accidents, a Ghanaian editorialist wrote:

  We are dying on our roads like flies. It is as if some wicked gods have decided to exact retribution for some national sin we have committed and decided that our roads are the best place to exact the sacrifice. If this was happening in the old days in a village with responsible leaders, they would go on “abusa” [asking a deity for an explanation] to find out what has upset the gods.

  As always in Ghana, it’s in the hands of the gods. But spend enough time behind the wheel and you start to see rational patterns in the chaos, clues to the seemingly random behavior. You get better at it, although with practice comes the danger of complacency. The Maine woodsman who taught me how to cut down trees warned me that most chainsaw accidents happen to people who’ve been using them for years; they stop fearing the blade, and they get careless. The same could apply to driving in Africa.

  “It’s all about the horn,” said Whit as we threaded through afternoon traffic in Cape Coast. “You gotta get the horn thing down,” demonstrating with a short blast while swinging wide around a man on a wobbly bicycle balancing a large piece of lumber on his head.

  “You know, to a bicyclist there’s nothing worse than jerks who honk when they pass,” I said. “You think a guy on a bike doesn’t know a car is coming?”

  “Not the point. It’s a conversation,” he said, flipping his thumbs across the horn buttons in a staccato rhythm.

  The conversation. It has been observed that in Africa the car horn takes the place of the brake, but I think it is more than that. The horn is more like the muse of the African driver. Honking, which Ghanaians call hooting, in the British manner, constitutes a tribal language of its own, with grammatical rules. In a Ghanaian traffic dispute, “But I hooted!” is a perfectly legitimate defense. Likewise, �
�Why didn’t you hoot?” is not a rhetorical question but a serious level of inquiry. It is not considered rude to hoot; in fact hooting is often an expression of gratitude. When someone has courteously allowed your car into the traffic lane, you give them a civilized hoot. When a Ghanaian driver wants to pass another car, he hoots to signal his intent. The driver of the forward car will then hoot back in acknowledgment, hopefully communicating some important traffic information from his vantage point. A quick, light hoot (more of a toot) means “all clear to pass.” A long, forceful hoot (here the word honk makes more sense) means “not a good time to be in the oncoming traffic lane.” As the rear car swings around to pass, both cars will re-hoot in recognition of a job well done. This orchestra is accompanied by a dance of arm waving and hand signaling out the windows of both cars. Meanwhile, one potential source of confusion for Westerners is the practice, also common in Latin America, of using turn indicators to communicate to other drivers what they should be doing, rather than what the driver who signaled intends to do next.

  All of it—the hoots, the waves, the high fives, the brush-offs, and the finger snaps that keep cars moving in Ghana—would be impossible in air-conditioned vehicles hermetically sealed from the outside world. Driving here is an intimate ritual, as hands-on as haggling over slabs of goat meat in the public market.

  Hooting reaches its apex in Ghana’s ubiquitous and traffic-clogged roundabouts, which are considerably more freewheeling than their Western counterparts. In theory, the Ghanaian rotary follows the usual international rules: traffic already in the circle has the right-of-way. In practice, however, it’s more like a bumper-car ride at the state fair: no matter where you are or which way you turn, someone else is bearing down on you illogically, and the worst possible thing you can do is nothing. In this situation the call-and-response of the hooting breaks down into gibberish, but it could be my lack of fluency.