Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  As curious villagers wandered up to the corner, Jan started explaining the offer as Charlie translated into Twi (which was then retranslated into Krobo by other villagers for the people who couldn’t speak Twi). This all took a long time; Jan was careful to explain that with any payment plan the customer chose, the Burro batteries would cost less than Tiger Heads, and she wanted them to understand exactly how much cheaper they were. I held my breath when she got to the part about the deposit (which in Ghana is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: DEH-posit), expecting a litany of complaints.

  Except there were none. Nobody seemed to have an issue with the DEH-posit.

  At that point the chief walked up, a handsome man in his forties named Victor. He was a bead maker and, it turns out, one of four chiefs in the village. Apparently Bomase had some sort of governance dispute at one time, and the village broke into four separate chiefdoms. The bad feelings had been long since resolved, but the village retained its four-part structure. As the entire village appeared to consist of three huts and a cassava grinder, I asked Charlie if there were any braves, so to speak, for all these chiefs to rule.

  “Victor says the village is very spread out, all along these paths,” Charlie replied, pointing off into the jungle. “It is much bigger than it looks—five hundred voters, according to the census, he says.”

  Several residents had wandered off to get their radios and flashlights, anxious to verify that the Burro batteries would in fact work in their devices. This was common whenever we first went into a new village, and it seemed like a strange compulsion—but we were dealing with people who had never seen anything but a Tiger Head D battery in their lives and rarely had the opportunity to make any kind of consumer choice; the concept that another product might be able to do the same job for less money had perhaps never occurred to them, and naturally required prudent investigation.

  More people arrived, and soon we had a mob of potential customers, all of them trying to explain the deal to one another loudly while exhibiting Burro and Tiger Head batteries like actors in a TV commercial. A man walked up holding his baby daughter, who took one look at me and burst into tears. “She has never seen a white man,” explained the father apologetically. Charlie decided it would be hilarious to sneak up behind the little girl and make a monster face, which caused her to wail like a shrew. “You see, the black man is even scarier than the white man!” he said, guaranteeing years of therapy for the girl.

  Finally the crowd ebbed, and the chief stood up and addressed Charlie.

  “What did he say?” asked Jan.

  “He says, ‘How soon can we get these batteries?’”

  1. Everything God Does Is Good

  When I told my African friends that I wanted to spend time living and farming in the remote, off-grid villages where Burro was doing business, they responded with polite laughter. When I convinced them I was serious, they reacted as if I were proposing missionary work in a leper colony.

  “That is a very hard place to live,” cautioned Kevin. “No toilet facilities, no water, the food is very different from what you see in town; you will surely get sick. And the work is very hard. I am not sure you will like it.”

  “It isn’t really about liking it,” I replied, sensing a bit of projection on his part. Kevin is in a small minority of Ghanaian men who might be called husky—not grossly obese, but a long way from six-pack abs; it would be hard to picture him scampering up a coconut tree with a machete. “It’s more of a learning process,” I added.

  It was the summer of 2009; Whit was still in China talking to manufacturers. The new pay-as-you-go deposit system was proving a big hit in the new Krobo territories. Jan, Kevin, Rose, and Adam could barely keep up with growth. More batteries were on order. With Whit returning in a month, it seemed like a good time for me to get out of the stifling city and learn more about village life than you could glean in a one-hour gong-gong.

  “In the rainy season?” said Charlie. “What you will learn is the meaning of a nightmare!” He went on to stress that—in the right season, of course—he too would love to get back to his “roots” with a village stay. It would be difficult to imagine Charlie thriving without the restaurants and international shops of Accra, or the fresh-baked bread delivered daily to his home. But put him in a small African village of mud huts and cook fires and he waxed as pastoral as a Hudson River School painter. “Ah, you can really breathe out here!” he would say whenever we traveled to a Burro village. “And the people are so real, so friendly. This is surely the life for me.”

  With his worldly wisecracks and flirtatious humor, Charlie was an exotic urban sophisticate to these simple villagers. But at least he was Ghanaian. I, on the other hand, was a space alien. “We can receive you,” was the stiff reply from an agent for the village of Adenya named Ebenezer Yirenkyi Kissiedu—a former civil servant turned farmer. “But we are human.”

  I think he meant human in the Paleolithic sense—Homo sapiens at his most essential. “We have no light,” he continued grimly, “and in the night there are small ants which will bite you and leave black spots all over your body. Then the mosquitoes will come, and you will get malaria.” His use of the nonconditional tense suggested this was an inarguable certainty, like a biblical plague on the pharaoh.

  To all of these concerns I was tempted to reply, “No worries, I’ve been camping lots of times.” But equating their given lot of grinding survival to an enchanting frolic in a national park seemed to trivialize their very existence, and I couldn’t find the words. What would you say? “Yes, when I grow exhausted from a week of staring at my computer screen, and the Red Sox are playing some shitty National League team and there are no good movies and the restaurants are crawling with tourists, I love to get away from it all and recharge with a weekend in the mountains. This should be cracking good fun! Lawn darts, anyone?”

  Instead I fell back on a more estimable chapter of my biography: “I used to have a farm in America.”

  Ebenezer looked at me like I was a pair of Siamese twins. “It must have been a mechanized farm, no?”—spitting out mechanized like an epithet.

  “No. I worked it by hand,” I replied, forgetting for the moment that once a year I did hire a local guy to come over with his tractor and till my larger plots. But mostly it was backbreaking hand labor. Still, I didn’t add that it was a “hobby farm” and my survival never depended on it.

  “You have boots and a cutlass?” he asked, using the local term for a machete.

  “I do.”

  He seemed a bit more convinced that I might survive a brief sojourn in the bush, but you couldn’t say he was anxious to secure the arrangements.

  Jonas Avademe, on the other hand, was practically falling over himself to arrange my visit to his village. So it was that I found myself one afternoon behind the wheel of the Tata, dodging craters on a washed-out dirt track to the distant village of Otareso, population 144 according to the recent census. (In Ghana, census data only counts adults of voting age; Jonas said that children probably brought the total number up to about 200.)

  The sole written historical record for Otareso is penned in Jonas’s hand on a sheet of ruled school notebook paper, which he keeps in his mud-walled hut. It reads:

  Otareso is a village located in the Akuapim-North District. It is said to have been established in the 1930s. The name of this village was named after a stream called “Otare.”

  The origin of the people in this village are said to have come from Abiriw-Akuapem, led by Mr. Kwabena Botswe. Later, Mr. Christian Mensa Tugbenyo from Agorvee in the Volta Region, led a group of Ewes who also settled in the village.

  Their main purpose of settlement was to tap palm wine and to distilled [sic] into alcohol as well as farming activities.

  And not much has changed since then. “I am very proud in my village,” said Jonas in his pidgin English after I had transcribed the history into my notes. Whether he meant he was proud of his village or that his village is proud
of him I cannot say, but both are plainly true. At forty-one (broad-faced, fair-skinned, medium build, with thin mustache and goatee) Jonas is hardly an elder—there are many older men and women in the village, including his own parents—but he is a respected leader and a diligent promoter of his community. He is also a lay leader in his local church, a parish of the Apostles’ Revelation Society—a seventy-year-old Ghanaian institution with its roots in the Ewe tribal region of Lake Volta. This is the same faith in which Charlie’s father preached.

  Jonas’s local stature was enhanced in 2008 when he won the title Farmer of the Year for his district, competing against hundreds of other men in dozens of villages. The award is prestigious but also remunerative. This is what he won:

  five cutlasses

  two bars of soap

  one pair of rubber boots

  a polytank for storing water

  a knapsack

  a backpack pump sprayer

  some cloth

  a six-battery tape player and radio

  a bicycle

  a certificate

  The award was based on productivity per acre, and after spending a few days with Jonas it was easy to see why he was a good farmer. The man was almost artisanally obsessed with detail, attentive to the point of fussiness. As he sat around his family compound before a meal, his eyes never stopped moving. While speaking to me in English he would stop mid-sentence and issue a stern observation in Ewe that caused family members to scramble in response—rearranging a wooden table, moving a lantern, fetching a pan of water, sweeping the dirt floor—in short, keeping the jungle feng shui of Jonas in order. This is an unusual trait in Ghanaians, who generally take a relaxed approach to life even when they are working very hard.

  For his farm, Jonas maintained detailed rainfall records (“I have all the patterns,” he said). He worked with an adviser from the government agricultural station, who helped him learn green-manure techniques such as alternating soil-depleting crops like corn with nitrogen-fixing legumes like cowpeas. (Although green-manure practice is a cornerstone of organic farming, Jonas, like virtually all Ghanaian farmers, also used chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.) He laid out string lines and planted his corn in perfect three-foot rows for maximum production, as opposed to simply scattering the seeds. (Other Ghanaians plant in rows too, but Jonas was the first in his village.) And he shared his knowledge with the whole community in a small demonstration garden he planted to teach other farmers.

  On my arrival, Jonas led me on a tour of his land. We walked down a footpath through a plantain orchard, broad leaves bending in the breeze above thick green clusters of the large fruit, until the landscape opened to long, dramatic views across the corn to the distant heights of the Akwapim Ridge, ten miles away. There, high above the cultivated plots of the villages, sprawled the gated villas owned by the Big Men—the important government and business elites of Accra who kept weekend homes in the cool elevations. In the dry season of winter, the dust and haze obscured the ridge completely, but in summer the rains cleared the air and lifted the veil, and the poor farmers and the rich city men looked out on each other every day. Fast-moving thunderheads tacked like sailboats above the ridge, slicing shadows across the whitewashed mansions.

  Jonas, who had only an elementary school education, did not envy the ridge dwellers. “I am very happy,” he said. “If I had gone on to second cycle,” the term for post-elementary school, “I would not be in this village; I would be working in an office somewhere.” He paused, then added, “Everything God does is good.”

  Jonas’s father, a wiry little man with a crinkled brow, a silver Hitler mustache, and several missing fingers, emigrated from Benin; his mother is an Ewe from Ghana’s Volta Region. Jonas speaks Ewe first but also Twi, Ga, French, and English. “I can hear several more African languages,” he adds, meaning he can understand them but not speak in return. It turns out that many of the citizens of Otareso are from Benin and Togo—the pair of geographically narrow and politically fragile francophone countries east of Ghana—which explains why several residents (but not Jonas) smoked cigarettes, a distinctly foreign custom in Ghana.

  Jonas farmed eleven acres outside of town, land on which his grandparents once lived. Their family compound—two tiny one-room houses, a cooking hut, a storage hut, and a bamboo corn crib—now belonged to Jonas; he called this place his cottage, distinct from his home in the village center, a five-minute walk away. His grandparents were tenant farmers, paying forty cedis a year in rent to a landowner; after they died, the owner offered the land for sale, and Jonas bought it in the year 2000, for sixty cedis per acre. It was a smart move: today, said Jonas, farmland like this along a road—as opposed to far back in the bush, where transport is difficult—sells for five hundred cedis an acre, when you can even find it. “Many more people are farming today than when I started twenty years ago,” he said, in part because people like his neighbors have emigrated from Togo and Benin, lured by Ghana’s stronger economy and greater freedom.

  As we walked, Jonas identified trees and plants along the trail. There was odum, a hard red wood for making furniture, and ktsensen, a more common tree with white wood used for planks and scaffolding. Achampo is a medicinal herb that looks something like basil and is sold in bunches in the Koforidua market. “If you wound yourself with the cutlass,” said Jonas, “you rub the leaves in your hand with some water to make a paste, then you put it on the cut and tie it. It will heal more quickly.” We passed under a moringa, the wide, drought-resistant tree whose dime-sized leaves contain complete proteins and have saved Africans and their livestock from starvation when crops fail. “Also very good medicine,” said Jonas. “It cures ninety-nine diseases.”

  We stopped to pick and eat large red berries from the asoa tree—“sweeter than sugar,” said Jonas, and he was right. He pointed out the four varieties of plantain trees on his land: apim, meaning “thousands,” yields a lot of plantains; sawmynsa produces three bunches; sawunu yields two very big bunches; and lowly pentu translates into “doesn’t give much.”

  Sometimes his meaning got lost in pronunciation. “This tree is called ofram,” he said. “We use the wood to make the stew.”

  “You make stew from wood?”

  “Yes, is very nice for that.”

  “It must be very soft wood.”

  “Soft? No! Is quite hard!”

  “You must have to cook it for a long time.”

  “Pardon?”

  “In the stew.”

  “Stools.”

  “Stools! You have hard stools from eating the wood. You should eat more mangoes.”

  “No, no! We don’t make the feces. We make the stool—how do you say?—throne for the village chief out of this wood.”

  And so it went, until we had returned to his cottage and he introduced his wife, Gifty, a shy and quiet younger woman who spoke neither English nor French, bent over sweeping the dirt courtyard with a whisk despite having lost her baby—and nearly her own life—a month earlier. Jan had told me that Jonas’s wife ran the village shop, so I inquired, through Jonas, how things were going at the store. “Oh no,” said Jonas, “my other wife runs the store.” My surprise must have been evident; polygamy is uncommon in the Christian parts of Ghana, although keeping a mistress is considered perfectly normal—what Ghanaians call tending the farm and the garden. “I will explain it all later,” said Jonas. “But now is time to help with building our neighbor’s house.”

  It was Monday, which is rest day in Otareso—meaning it is taboo to farm. Friday is also a rest day, and Sunday is reserved for church, so actual farming only happens on four days. The taboo against farming on rest day is taken seriously. “If you are caught farming against the taboo,” said Jonas grimly, “you must pay seven rams to the elders.” (Otareso has no chief.) Upon closer questioning he acknowledged that the ram tax is more tradition than modern reality, but he insisted that no one farms on Monday or Friday.

  That is not to say that res
t day means no work. People have to eat, which means the women still have to cook. And men devote their rest day to communal activities. Today’s job was building a new house for a recently arrived Beninois family. The house had been framed with lengths of dried bamboo, split in half with machetes and nailed crosswise in a grid pattern between thick timber corners and door posts. The walls were being raised in mud—plain, red mud from a pit dug behind the house and filled with water from buckets and rain. I pulled on my Italian-made rubber farm boots (twelve cedis in the Koforidua market)* and took my place inside one of the rooms, where workers had piled a small Kilimanjaro of mud and were scooping handfuls into the spaces between the bamboo cross members. “You take it and push down, like this, between the wood,” said the Beninois man next to me in French, ramming a slab of mud into the wall. “If you see an air space, take like this and throw it in, comme ça”—and he demonstrated by hurling a mud pie into a cavity at close range. This was work that any kindergartner would love, and the men—it was only men—were having a grand time, laughing and shouting while getting covered with muck and sliding around the floor like hockey players.

  Most of the men worked shirtless, and they all had biceps like steam-engine pistons, and chests that could have been carved out of onyx. Fourteen-year-old boys looked like young Cassius Clay. Here was an entire village of big musclemen who had never done any “exercise” in their lives.

  The last step of the day’s work was texturing the walls by running our fingertips all over the wet mud to make deep grooves. After the mud dried, the grooves would hold the plaster, which was the final step before painting. (Homes are generally plastered smooth, inside and out, then painted; lesser shelters like storage rooms and outdoor kitchens are left as mud.)