We rinsed our hands and arms in a bucket of water and walked back to Jonas’s main family compound, where his other wife, Rebecca, was preparing dinner. She was an older woman of spherical build who, over the course of my three-day visit, appeared in a permanent state of bending over a fire. Until I came back to the village for a Sunday church service, during which she danced like Aretha Franklin, I don’t recall ever seeing her fully upright. Despite what must have been a life of backbreaking toil, Rebecca was cheerful to the point of disbelief. “You are welcome!” she said with a wide smile that revealed several missing teeth.
Then there was Jonas’s younger sister, Charity, perhaps in her thirties, tall and beautiful with the sultry pout of a 1930s blues singer. It was unclear to me if she had a husband, and I could not tell how many of the children in the compound were her own, but her primary job in life appeared to be serving as Jonas’s scullery maid, fetching him water for washing, and serving the meals that Rebecca had cooked.
Several men of the village had gathered around the Burro truck and were looking curiously at the GPS receiver on the dashboard. “Is it a compass?” asked one.
“Well, it can work like a compass,” I said, “but it does much more. There are twenty-four satellites in space, and they talk to this machine. They can tell you exactly where you are, anywhere in the world.”
“Satellites!” said another man knowingly, and they all nodded. I zoomed out the screen to show all of Africa, then zoomed back in to their village (which I had already labeled with a waypoint) and they gasped and pointed. “Africa! Otareso!”
Another man, older and animated, said something in Ewe. Jonas translated: “He says that’s why we call white men trickster dogs.”
It was now five-thirty on the day after the summer solstice. Back home in Maine it would be light until well after nine o’clock tonight, but here it was already getting dark, and quickly. I told Jonas I needed to pitch my tent while I could still see. “Okay, you have a choice,” he said. “You can set up here or at my cottage. Here you may find it noisy at night because I sell alcohol from the store, and the men come around.”
“I’ll take the cottage,” I said. We walked back down the path to his cottage compound, and I spotted a nice location under a mango tree on the perimeter of the courtyard. But Jonas insisted, “No no, you set up here, next to my house, under the roof.” There was indeed a small protective eave, and I had been worried how my twenty-dollar Walmart tent would hold up in a monsoon downpour. So against my first instinct to put some space between us, I relented and pitched under his eave.
2. My Favorite Food
Although I was looking forward to a big family meal, Jonas had decided that he and I would eat separately from the rest of the group, which was clearly meant to convey that we were two important men, discussing the affairs of the world, and not to be bothered by mere women and children. He issued an order in Ewe, and Charity sashayed over with a small wooden table. Children arranged our plastic chairs on either side; we sat down and awaited the repast.
Then he told me the story of his two wives. “Rebecca is first wife,” he said. “After many years she could bear me no children, so with her permission I also married Gifty. So I have old wife and I have young wife, who has given me four children.” I later learned from Charlie that Jonas’s church, while nominally Christian, is devoted to the Old Testament. “They are very tolerant of polygamy,” said Charlie, “because you have the biblical story of Abraham and his wives.”
Jonas’s kids range in age from thirteen to three. “My children live here with old wife,” he said (I didn’t need to ask which wife he slept with), which seemed strange since their real mother, “young wife,” lived a five-minute stroll down the path in an identical hut. But it didn’t take long to realize that the main purpose of these children, at least for now, was taking care of Jonas and helping prepare the family meals. Perhaps to demonstrate how it worked, Jonas removed his farm boots and yelled in Ewe. Within seconds, a boy of about six who had been sweeping the dirt compound (on Rebecca’s orders) dropped his broom and rushed to his father’s side. He took away the farm boots, went into the hut, and returned with sandals, carefully placing them, left and right, at his father’s bare feet.
Charity then served dinner, arranging two small covered casserole pans on the table. Before we started, she placed a pan of rainwater and a container of liquid hand soap on the table. (The village has a drilled well with drinkable water about a quarter mile down the road, but carrying water is hard work, so in the rainy season everyone collects rainwater in round clay cisterns fed by elaborate split-bamboo gutter systems around their roofs.) I held my right hand over the pan and she squirted a dollop of soap into my palm. Ghanaians generally eat with their hand, and always the right hand—the left being reserved for what one local guidebook calls “the filthy activities.” So after some one-hand scrubbing, I rinsed in the pan as Charity poured water over my hand from a cup. I felt like a Roman emperor; it was mildly embarrassing. I wondered if she realized that I was just being a polite guest and would never, in my own world, ask a woman to wash my hands—even one of them—before a meal.
Jonas removed the two lids from our dinner service. One pan held the usual brown peanut-based soup (which we would share), laced with spicy peppers and a few bits of bony chicken; the other contained two familiar starchy beige blobs. “Akple!” said Jonas, salivating almost audibly.
“Akple?”
“An Ewe specialty. My favorite food.”
It looked conspicuously like fufu, my least favorite African food, but Jonas explained that unlike fufu it was made with the addition of corn, and it did seem somewhat more palatable than the all-cassava goo I had come to know around Koforidua. “It’s all stomach filler,” said Jan later when I described it to her, which is true—a cheap gluten blast for people who do extreme physical labor, can rarely obtain meat, and have no oven in which to bake their carbs into crusty loaves. Fufu, akple, whatever, is in fact cooked; the cassava, plantains, corn, and other ingredients are boiled before being pulverized into mush. But to my palate it still managed to taste like raw bread dough.
In modern Africa, fufu and its relatives are both a required and an acquired taste. What I mean is, fufu is survival food in these subsistence villages, but even elite Ghanaians with access to pizza love their fufu—although, like Charlie’s family, they buy the just-add-water version from the grocery store. “We don’t pound,” Charlie told me dismissively. “All the neighbors will hear you,” suggesting a stigma attached to the labor-intensive pounding process.
All of this is not to say I dislike African cuisine. Charlie’s wife Afi is one of the finest home cooks I have ever met, in any culture; her versions of the classic Ghanaian dishes—peanut soups, tilapia stew, fried plantains (kiliwili), spicy rice and beans—are bright-tasting, deceptively simple, and stunning on the plate, like the best Mediterranean food. “Okay, now I get it” is about all you say after an all-day feast from her small home kitchen. Like all good African cooks, Afi knows how to extract deep flavor from one-pot meals that do not involve browning, traditionally a prerequisite of Western stews and braises. As with Indian cuisine, which also does not generally start with browning, Africans get flavor from spices and aromatics (dried chilies, onions, garlic) and from long, slow cooking, not from the carbonization that enhances Western meals. This stems from necessity: when you cook over an open wood fire, you are limited in the sauté arts. Also making up for the lack of browning is the earthy flavor of peanuts and the raw taste of bright-red palm oil, the primary cooking fat of Ghana. Palm oil production is a primitive and ancient village industry; all along back roads in southern Ghana, women tend giant boiling vats over charcoal fires, rendering the oil from the fresh crimson palm nuts, a fruit similar to olives that grows in tight clusters the size of beach balls. (What Americans think of as palm oil is what Ghanaians call palm-kernel oil, a clear and more refined product mechanically pressed from the pit, or kernel.)
Fertilizer, seventy-seven cedis
Pesticide spray, eighty-eight cedis
Water delivery in drums for pesticide spraying, ten and a half cedis
Herbicide (which he calls “weedicide”), ninety cedis
Other expenses include market transportation: the bush taxis charge twenty pesewa for driving his sister to market—plus twenty more pesewa for each bag of cassava that she stuffs into the trunk. (Virtually no farmers in Ghana own cars. Jonas has a Chinese motorcycle that he rides only on back roads around his village because he cannot afford the twenty-cedi registration fee and can’t risk the fifty-cedi fine if he’s caught by police on main roads.)
He pays two cedis per month in dues to his regional agricultural group (the organization that named him Farmer of the Year), called the Akuapem Award Winners Association.
A huge nonfarm expense is education; his three school-age children each cost about one hundred twenty cedis per year to attend private school, one in Accra (where she lives with another sister of Jonas’s) and two in Adawso, the market town ten miles away. Public school would cost slightly less, but the difference is not great because most private schools are church-subsidized, and even public education requires uniforms, books, and fees that parents must provide. The two boys who go to school at the Miracle Child Academy in Adawso ride their bikes to a junction and then take a bush taxi, which is yet another expense.
“The only good thing,” said Jonas, licking his fingers, “is I’m not buying foodstuffs,” which is not entirely true. To supplement his own corn and cassava, he buys a bit of dried fish in the market once a week for adding protein to soups, as well as tomatoes, which he does not have time to grow. (His own chickens, goats, and sheep provide occasional meat, although they are thin because all they get to eat is what they can forage; and he is fattening two wild grasscutters—with grass, of course—in a hutch.) Of course, he can’t grow his laundry soap, matches and other necessities.
In all, his family and farm expenses come to about seven hundred cedis per year, or five hundred dollars. In a good year, he said, he can make eight hundred cedis selling his produce in the market. In theory that leaves him with one hundred cedis in savings, which could be applied to expanding or improving his farm. But in practice, he said, “the rain can fail you at any time.” Last year it was dry, and he ended up losing money.
Jonas would like to improve his already productive farm. With a power tiller (three hundred fifty cedis) he could work more land. A palm-kernel press (one hundred eighty cedis) would let his family extract more oil, and thus profit, from their small palm plantation. But such investments were out of reach. He applied for a loan at the Akwapim Bank, where he saves a little of his profits, and the manager turned him down. In 2007, his agricultural association petitioned the government to provide low-cost loans for farm improvement projects. The 531 members were granted a total of five thousand cedis, or less than ten cedis each. “It wasn’t even worth doing the paperwork,” Jonas said.
While the government claims it does not have money for farm loans, or road improvement, or bringing electricity to these villages, in January 2009 it did find the cash to give outgoing President John Kufuor two fully furnished residences; six new vehicles, fully insured, fueled, and maintained, to be replaced every four years for the rest of his life; forty-five days’ all-expense-paid travel outside Ghana for him and his wife plus a staff of three, every year for the rest of his life; and the equivalent of twelve years’ presidential pay. Kufuor was president for eight years, the term limit, which means his pension will total more than he made on the job (at least officially). He left office voluntarily, which has been rare in post-colonial Africa. But after the payout was announced, critics wondered why anyone but a fool or an utter despot (and Kufuor was neither) would not go quietly given such a lucrative exit package. It could be argued that African leaders like Kufuor are, in effect, paid off to leave peacefully.
Jonas and Rebecca also made money from their store, a rickety wooden stall stocked with sundries and dry goods they bought in the Adawso or Koforidua markets and resold for a tiny profit. More remunerative was the nighttime business, when the store functioned as the village bar, selling only one libation: ten- or twenty-pesewa shots of Jonas’s home-brewed apio, a powerful moonshine distilled from palm wine, with a taste that resembled cheap tequila.
Then there is Burro, from which Jonas earned perhaps ten cedis per month in commission. He said he spent three or four hours a day servicing clients, but much of that time was multitasking—stopping by the huts of clients on his way to and from farming or while running other errands. Being the Burro agent for his village also clearly enhanced Jonas’s already high status. Now, besides being Farmer of the Year and local shopkeeper, he was the go-to guy for rechargeable batteries.
We had finished eating, or so I thought. As I rinsed my hand in the water bowl, signaling I was “satisfied,” as Ghanaians say, Jonas reached over and picked up one of my chicken bones, which I had stripped clean out of respect for the fact that meat is a special treat. He popped the joint into his mouth and crunched noisily. “The marrow is good, many calcium,” he explained. After extracting every digestible molecule from the bone, he spat the masticated shards onto the ground. His flinching dog, so thin you could almost see through him, stopped snapping at flies and rushed over to devour the bone fragments.
Dinner was over.
3. I Think It’s Going to Rain
Jonas explained that Charity would now tend to my evening bath, at which point I confess my mind wandered. “Do you prefer hot or cold water?” she asked—twice, I believe, but possibly more. Appreciating that hot water would expend precious firewood, I finally vouched for cold, which also seemed wise in the event Charity’s responsibilities proved arduous. As things stood, it was a stuffy, humid evening—and after a big meal of steaming hot akple and soup, a cool bath sounded refreshing.
Although the idea of being sponged clean by a nubile Otaresan had its cultural appeal and could have been justified journalistically, it transpired that Charity’s sole task was delivering a bucket of water to my bathing stall. As in most Ghanaian villages, bathing took place in a simple enclosure of woven bamboo and grass walls while standing on a few flat stones. You dip a small bucket into the larger bucket of water and douse yourself. Then you soap up and rinse. As it was already well past dark, I did all this by the glow of a flashlight balanced on one of the walls.
Bathing accomplished and immensely refreshed in clean clothes, I returned to the compound and pulled a plastic chair up under the grass-roofed gazebo that defines the communal space of many African villages. Or rather, I allowed one of Jonas’s sons to fetch me the chair, which I then tried to move surreptitiously into position before he could see me and pounce to help. I have no idea if the Queen of England ever thinks about this, but sometimes I get a feeling that I’d just like to do a few things myself—a challenge when you are an honored obruni guest in an African village.
While Jonas bathed, villagers arrived from their own dinners, the dancing beams of their flashlights drawing closer. A table was pulled up under the gazebo, three kerosene lanterns came alive, and five children gathered to do homework from an arithmetic exercise book. The lantern light was dim and the music from Jonas’s Burro-powered radio (resting on two nails driven into the plaster wall of his house, left of the door) was loud, but life in Africa is naturally distracting and noisy, and I did not sense the children were at all disturbed. It was an average night.
A few men, some of them smoking cigarettes, sauntered up to the storefront and dug into their pockets. Rebecca
went behind the counter and carefully poured each man a measured shot of apio, then took their small coins. They drank quickly, in one gulp, then shuffled over to the dirt courtyard and began to dance in the dark among themselves as the radio blasted a Congolese soukous rhythm. Oddly, in a country where homosexuality is a criminal offense, Ghanaian men interact physically without inhibition. Grown men often hold hands in public—indeed, Jonas held my hand as we walked through his village—and dance together, much as women do in the West. They have a completely different code of male bonding that does not rate the insult as the highest expression of affection. This can lead to confusion when traveling with my brother.
Jonas returned from his bucket shower and took his place in the shop stall, portioning out liquor shots to the dancers. “I don’t take alcohol,” he said, “just a soft drink,” and he pointed to a bottle of Malta, the molasses-like carbonated beverage popular in Africa and the Caribbean.
We sat together under the gazebo and watched the dancers. The music changed to reggae, and Jonas sang along. At ten-thirty I signaled I was ready for bed, and we switched on our flashlights and walked down the path to his cottage. The sound of the radio slowly faded; crickets rose in chorus from the black jungle outside the narrow beam of our lights.
I said good night and crawled into my tent. The crickets were loud, but I didn’t mind because it was not the street noise of Koforidua. Alas, rapt appreciation of nature is not the Ghanaian way. In hindsight I might have guessed that Jonas had another Burro-powered radio in his cottage hut, and that the musical soundtrack that accompanies all life in Ghana (and for that matter death, when you consider the country’s raucous funerals) was not over just because it was bedtime. A night satellite image of Africa shows a dark and isolated continent. But if that photo could record sound waves—like the psychedelic blinking “light show speakers” I had in high school—Ghana would glow like a halo.
Max Alexander Page 12