Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  It would not be far-fetched to make a connection between African hooting and traditional African drumming, which was also a form of communication in motion. In the slave-trade era, British soldiers at Cape Coast were amazed at how quickly news traveled between the Fante villages. The arrival of a Portuguese ship at a fort several days’ march away would be known to the natives within hours, long before the Brits had a clue.

  It was the drums. Talking drums, some more than eight feet tall, with the tonal register of an earthquake, used animal hides tensioned with a series of wooden pegs that could be adjusted to vary the pitch. In this way, drummers wielding carved sticks could actually mimic the local tongues, which were more tonally complex than the written languages of Europe and thus lent themselves to percussive interpretation.* Of course this required a great deal of skill; communications were relayed by drummers positioned every few miles, and the musicians needed to be able to comprehend the message as it was received, then pass it along faithfully. It required virtually perfect pitch and an unerring rhythmic sense. Talking drums have been compared to Morse code, but that’s inaccurate. Drummers did not use a semaphore, or an algorithm of the language. They were actually drumming the language. It was more like amplification. Like a horn.

  African languages really do sound like they evolved to be spoken in motion—they literally roll off the tongue—a trait with practical advantages in modern Ghana, where road conditions make it difficult to converse while driving, at least in the precise diction of Western tongues. People who have never been to Africa cannot fully appreciate the exquisite torture of the road surfaces. Dirt roads are universally creased with washboard ruts that make you feel like your eyeballs are vibrating out of your head. These roads go on for hundreds of miles and connect major settlements; it’s not like you can avoid them. Now, any country boy knows that washboards can be planed over by driving at a “sweet spot” speed, typically around forty miles an hour; only city slickers lunk along at jogging speed. Unfortunately, in Ghana, the dirt roads are also sluiced with washouts, craters, and deep sand pits, making speed impossible. All you can do is creep forward as your tires feel their way through every rut like a blind man looking for the curb. You might think the paved roads provide some relief, but they don’t. For one thing, in Ghana even major paved highways sooner or later become dirt roads, often without warning. Second, the pavement is generally mined with bathtub-sized potholes that could possibly be negotiated by some form of military transport but not vehicles designed to carry unarmored passengers on welded steel frames suspended over bald tires. That doesn’t slow down Ghanaian taxi and tro-tro drivers, who simply swerve like pinballs around the holes. As a result, the highways have the feel of test tracks; there are not so much “lanes” as paths through the obstacle course, and cars are constantly weaving and dodging at high speed within inches of each other.

  Sometimes, of course, cars and trucks moving at 150 kilometers per hour will misjudge a pothole’s depth or location. When the front tire hits one of these black holes at high speed, all is lost. In Africa you need to throw out every preconception that you have about road construction and maintenance. You need to understand that even a very bad road in America would qualify as above average in Africa.

  Conversing over these road conditions is like speaking into a vibrato synthesizer. One day on our coast trip, winding along a rutted track past fishing villages along the beach near Axim, I tried engaging Whit in a discussion about seasonal income and how it applies, if at all, to Ghanaian fishermen. It might have been a fascinating exploration of emerging-market microeconomics—the kind of conversation I pictured myself having with Bono and Bill Gates at a Davos cocktail party—but instead it sounded like a couple of fifth-graders making burp-talk on the playground. I was getting heartburn.

  By contrast, the two Ghanaian peasant women in the backseat—one of them pregnant, both wearing wraparound shifts printed in bright patterns of banana leaves and flowers—were chattering away like weaver birds. At least to my ear, their native dialect spilled effortlessly off their tongues, completely uninhibited by the lurch and sway of our truck.

  The back of our truck was rarely empty, because we stopped constantly to pick up pedestrians—usually women on their way to the local market, their heads balancing giant enamelware bowls and plastic laundry baskets of cassava root, rice, bananas, oranges, peanuts, yams, smoked fish, and rolls of colorful fabric. It is not unusual for women to walk ten miles every day under such loads. In the evening, many also haul water in twenty-liter jugs, which weigh forty-four pounds full. You want to admire their grace and stamina, but health experts say that over a lifetime these loads cause crippling spinal deformations in women across the developing world. And while physical violence is not a major concern in Ghana, women in many poor countries are vulnerable to sexual attacks while on the road.

  So we picked up women, and men, everywhere we went, and they beamed over their good fortune to be on the right road at the right time when the white men in the truck came by. They would set their loads in the bed of the pickup and climb into the cab thanking us, sometimes in English, and when the cab was full of passengers, they climbed into the bed, which always seemed to have room for one more dusty traveler. I often wondered what these poor Ghanaians, who are extremely respectful to family members, made of the two bickering obruni brothers in the front seat.

  3. Where Electricity Comes From

  “Listen to this,” said Whit, spinning the dial on his MP3 player, which was plugged into the truck’s stereo.

  “Whit, Daddio here.” It was our father’s cracking voice, desiccated by old age as if speaking through a Lintophone wireless, captured on Whit’s voice mail. He had died a year earlier after a long bout with Alzheimer’s that left him unable to manage his finances. After he lost thousands of dollars entering bogus junk-mail sweepstakes, we took away his checkbook and put him on an allowance. But he lived in Michigan and we didn’t, and even though he had plenty of cash and the comfort of caregivers, his mind was unable to do the math, as they say. So he would call constantly, imagining himself broke and launching paranoid voice-mail rants against the nursing agency, his bank, and finally us. It was sad.

  But to be perfectly honest, it was also funny. One time he called Whit and said he was tired of getting all these small bills that don’t buy anything: “I need some sixties and some eighties, man,” he insisted.

  Our dad was capable of great kindness and generosity. But he could also be emotionally cruel, especially when he drank. He was what Lenny Bruce called the white-collar drunk—buffed nails, bespoke suit, bombed out of his mind. Unlike working-class drinkers (such as our maternal grandfather, a Slovak immigrant who painted Chryslers for forty years), Jim Alexander, the successful advertising man, never raised a hand against his children. That could get messy, and Alex, as his friends called him, was a meticulously tidy man. Today he would probably be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in his era he was simply a clean freak. One inviolable hygienic rule in our family was that the limes he squeezed into his gin-and-tonics had to be scrubbed with a brush under hot soapy water. Limes were the only things green and fresh he was ever known to eat, and he went through crates of them. In hindsight his frenzied scrubbing was perhaps sensible, given the current hysteria over food-borne illnesses. But his concern was not strictly biological, as he had full faith in the power of corporate America and chemicals to deliver safe food to the local grocery store. Rather, his agricultural anxiety was ethnically motivated. Approximately once a week he would remind us that “some Mexican picked his nose and then picked that lime.” It was one of his favorite lines, especially once he became aware of how much we hated it.

  Averse to the persuasive power of the belt, Dad’s brand of retribution was discourse and humiliation. After a flight of gin-and-tonics he would bait us into arguments about his favorite bêtes noires, namely bedwetting liberals, ecology, and creeping socialism. One night he got me to take the bait on energy c
onservation, which as far as he was concerned was invented by Karl Marx as part of his unified proletarian enslavement theory. Our dad tried to leave every light in his house turned on all night, just to thumb his nose at the bedwetters, the hippies, and Karl Marx.

  “Dad, do you know where your electricity comes from?” I asked.

  “Of course I do. It comes from Consumers Power Company.”

  “Okay, but do you know where they get it?”

  “They own it.”

  “Fair enough, but how do they generate it? Kite strings?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, and I don’t care.”

  “Well then you might be surprised to know that they make it by burning coal. Every time you turn on a light you burn a piece of coal.”

  “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

  After the Alzheimer’s kicked in, Dad forgot to drink and became a sort of benign version of his old aggressive, ranting self.

  The phone message continued. “I think you were out yesterday,” Dad said into the machine, “as many people were. I said something about six bucks a month from the crazy people with the money? Forget it, uh, what I need—what I’m gonna need, is like a hundred dollars a month, every month. And you sure got that kind of money. That’s money I made way way way back when I was makin’ big-big-big-big money. So give me a call when you can, I may be out on a brief errand or something like that, but give me a ring because I’m in touch with Palmore [his broker] and we got some things to talk about here, so I’d like to hear from you, okay? Bye.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror at the two Ghanaian women, who had stopped chatting. I wondered if they understood enough English to comprehend my dad, and if so what they could possibly be thinking.

  Dad again, next message: “Yeah, Whit. I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on down there, but I’m getting very very upset. This goddamned buncha nitwits that sent these girls [his caregivers]. The girls are terrific, but then the company steals this, they steal that, they steal everything within sight, it looks—it appears that way. Anyway I find out, I find out—heh heh—when I call the company—what the hell? What’s all this business? Blah blah blah. It’s Whit and Max. And it’s pay! pay! pay! pay! PAY! PAY! PAY! Jesus Christ! I spent a lifetime, a fucking lifetime of my life puttin’ bing-bing-bing-bing together for you and your brother!”

  I checked the women in the back. No reaction. Ghanaians are familiar with all the major English curse words, but they are considered shockingly rude and almost never uttered, even by men.

  “And what the hell?” Dad carried on. “And then whaddya doin’ with the money? You’re sendin’ it to Palmore! Boy, he needs money like—heh heh—like a cop needs a cigarette. Jesus Christ! I’ve gotta go out for another hour here in a minute. Gimme a call, and I wanna know what’s gonna happen here. If you guys wanna be in my will you better make a change in your lifes [sic] right now, you and Max, okay? Good-bye.”

  “Like a cop needs a cigarette,” I repeated, musing on the analogy. One fortunate aspect of life in Ghana is that almost no one smokes, perhaps because they inhale enough smoke preparing their food. Outside, along the side of the road, a man was holding up a rat for sale—a real rat, not grasscutter. It had been dried and smoked and stretched over a rack of twigs, ready to eat.

  “I wonder what Dad would think of us now,” I said.

  “He would love it over here,” said Whit, unconvincingly. Our dad lived in the same Michigan town his entire life, had no patience for strange foreign countries like Canada, and never ate rodents. An exotic meal for him was Boston baked scrod. He was a businessman of the first world (American version), and he was not much a part of our own world as kids—checked out on booze or on the 5:39 to Chicago. He was absent, and come to think of it, now so were we.

  The Ghanaian ladies indicated we had arrived at their corner, and we pulled over. “Thank you and God bless you,” the pregnant one said from the road. “Safe journey!” Apparently their English was pretty good, but who knows? “Safe journey” is a common farewell pleasantry in Ghana. But like “slave tourism,” “safe journey” has a disconnected ring to it. There are no safe journeys in Africa, and never have been.

  “Why are we here, Whit?” Back on the main road toward the industrial port town of Takoradi, through a pinball course of roundabouts, the pavement had improved enough to make conversation possible.

  “You mean, why are we on a road with post-colonial asphalt? Or here on Earth? Is your question navigational or existential?”

  “I guess I mean, why batteries? How did this idea get started?”

  “It all goes back to my childhood.”

  “I was there. In fact, I remember when you came home from the hospital. It was a tragic mistake; we were supposed to get another perfect child, but Mom had been taking some new pain reliever and we got you.”

  “Shut up. Batteries. It all goes back to my Major Matt Mason Space Station. From an early age I realized that the moon crawler never had enough battery power. I loved that moon crawler, and yet every time I would get near the base, the batteries would die. So I vowed from that day forward that someday I would have a battery that is fresh anytime you want. That was the origin of Burro batteries. And I named it after the Italian word for butter because I love butter and I love Italy.”

  “So the Major Matt Mason Space Station was sort of like your Rosebud.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Wow, I remember that stupid toy, but I never knew it meant so much to you. I think Bob Zaroff and I set it on fire once. We wanted to watch the plastic melt.”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “I think you need to work on your backstory.”

  “Okay, here goes. I didn’t start with batteries. I started with a broader idea. I actually started with the idea of the brand, of really focusing on a range of goods and services that would be affordable to low-income people and would improve their personal productivity. This all goes back to my first days as a student in Ivory Coast. I just felt there was so much economic opportunity. When I was working on aid projects I felt like, why don’t people come over here and start businesses? That always seemed to me the best way to make a sustainable difference—create a for-profit business that employs people. Of course I was very naïve—there are all sorts of barriers and difficulties—but the idea stuck with me. So when we sold Cranium to Hasbro, you know, I was forty-seven years old and I just thought to myself, if I don’t do this now, when am I ever gonna do it?

  “My first idea was that we actually would be based in a capital city and we would target products to urban elites, who often go back to their family villages. And there’s an expectation that you bring something back to the village when you come. Often that can just be a farm animal or alcohol, bread or money, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have like an African version of Home Depot that would be sort of like a Nike store—a retail destination that would really be kind of like a showroom, a proving ground almost, for all these different product ideas, and people would take these things back to the villages and generate demand for them.

  “So I employed this recent University of Washington graduate, a really smart young guy named Ben Golden, to come over here. He spent about six or eight weeks in Ghana for me, traveling all through the country, and he interviewed all sorts of people about all these different wares.”

  “What kind of wares?”

  “Solar battery chargers, improved mosquito netting, battery-operated fans for your hut, water filters, improved pumps and irrigation systems, better cookstoves—all kinds of stuff that people typically mention when they talk about better products for people in the developing world. He came back and he said, ‘Yeah, everybody loves this stuff, but nobody’s got any money. There’s just so little discretionary income.’ And I said, ‘Well Ben, that’s what we’ve gotta figure out.’

  “Eventually it dawned on me that we were kidding ourselves to think that we could come in with this
broad line of products and all of a sudden create demand when there’s so little budget available. I mean, anything that would be perceived as a luxury or secondary would be hugely problematic if we’re trying to reach a mass audience. There are all kinds of things you could do with the elites—frankly I see tons of business opportunities in Ghana to better service the elites. But that’s not what I was interested in.

  “So that’s what got me to think deeply about what it was really gonna take. And what I eventually came up with is that, first, what if our products directly enhanced income-earning capability? What if we stepped back one level and said that our business was really selling a business? What if we were actually trying to create these little—and I actually was naïve enough to think I had coined the phrase—micro-franchises? Then I thought, well great, how do we do that? I started to look at some of the models—you know, Amway, Avon.

  “So that was the first thing—the realization that you’ve got a much greater chance of success if you’re setting people up in a business, and that your business is really creating success for them.

  “And the second thing was, since you’re not gonna generate new spending, you need to find a product that would displace existing expenditure—the better mousetrap. So I needed to find out where poor people are already spending money and come up with a better alternative that either saves them money or gives them better value for the same money.

  “So those became my two critical criteria. And I started combing through Ben’s reports and looking more at the literature, and I really just asked myself, what are people in Ghana spending money on? And batteries kept coming up. The data aren’t great, but there are a few ways to back into it, and pretty much every estimate starts to converge around the typical African family spending somewhere between two and five dollars a month on throwaway batteries.