It was after midnight when Jonas clicked off the reggae music. Two hours later, the rooster started crowing right outside my tent, which I soon realized had been pitched in the middle of the chicken yard. Still, there were no downshifting trucks, no horns, no shouting tro-tro drivers or whining scooters, and I finally dozed off.
At five-thirty I woke to the rumble of distant thunder. A moaning wind beat against my tent, and I heard the sound of footsteps around the dirt yard. I stuck my head outside, under a charcoal gray sky, and saw palm trees arcing in a gale. Chickens scurried for cover and Gifty was quickly taking laundry off the line, which whipped in the wind. “Mister Maxwell!” said Jonas, emerging barefoot from his hut. “I think it’s going to rain—now!”
“I believe you could be right,” I said, leaping from my tent.
“Quick, come inside!” I ducked into his hut just as the monsoon hit. It was the hardest rain I had ever seen in my life, an epochal torrent so loud that we had to shout to be heard.
Jonas’s one-room hut was about ten by fifteen feet in size, with a concrete floor, plastered walls, and a corrugated metal roof supported by tree limbs. On the long side facing the courtyard was a simple plank door with a padlock. The door swung in; on the outside, a handmade paneled half screen door allowed mosquito-free ventilation and a view of the compound. The only other light inside came from a small window, eighteen inches square, on the opposite long side of the hut. This window also had a screen, which hinged inward; on the outside, a wooden shutter could be closed for privacy. Next to the door, a simple worktable, about three feet long, held Gifty’s manual sewing machine and a pile of fabrics. Under the window, a smaller, low table stored an assortment of nested aluminum cookware and plastic buckets. On one end of the hut, farthest from the door, a double-sized foam mattress was laid out on the floor. Above the mattress ran several rope lines, which sagged under clothes. On the floor, a few plastic laundry baskets held more clothes. There were three molded plastic lawn chairs, two adult-sized and one miniature child’s version. The only wall decoration was a calendar from the Apostles Revelation Society. If Jonas were to have cataloged his household goods for an insurance company, that would have been the long and short of it.
We sat in the chairs for half an hour, looking at the rain through the screen door and watching rivers of red mud branch and course like lava through the compound. Gifty had disappeared earlier, perhaps to the kitchen hut. Jonas said that while the rain in general was good, he worried that these gale-force soakers would knock down his corn stalks. “But I mostly worry about hail,” he said. “Hail is very bad.” And then the rain stopped and the sun came out. “Now we must pay our respects to the elders,” said Jonas.
“To thank them for the rain?”
“No no. Because you are an honored guest in our village.”
“Oh, that.”
We walked up the path, now slippery with mud, to the hut of Francis Ahorli, a tall gray-haired man with fine features and the distinguished countenance of an economics professor. From a shady calabash tree in his courtyard hung round gourds the size of basketballs, the type used to make bowls and scoops. “Life here is quiet, but isolated,” Francis said. “Now farming is good; we have the rain,” and he looked up at the sky. “But I have been around long enough to remember the times of no food. The politicians care about the people in the cities; they can organize and make trouble. Out here, we do not get heard. We need good leaders in our country who will keep us from hunger.”
Francis joined us for the short stroll to the home of the village’s most important elder, Kofi Adri. We sat on a wooden bench on his porch and were joined by Joshua Asinyo, the village linguist. (In a formal meeting, it is considered disrespectful to speak directly to a chief or elder; instead, you speak to the linguist, who then speaks to the chief. As the chief is sitting right there and can obviously hear you, it feels a bit forced, but that’s the tradition.) Joshua was a middle-aged man severely afflicted with late-stage yaws, the disfiguring African disease related to syphilis but not transmitted sexually (it generally attacks children). Of all the developing-world ailments, yaws is especially tragic because in its early, highly contagious stage it can be cured with a single dose of penicillin. Without that simple treatment, however, it advances to an incurable scourge. The result could be seen on Joshua, whose entire body, including his face, had been transformed into an unrecognizable mass of giant wartlike welts. It was frankly hideous—if he were a monster in a horror movie you would jump out of your seat—but the bigger surprise was how utterly cheerful and content he was, despite his unsightly plague. Like most Ghanaians he was deeply religious (also a member of Jonas’s church), and he had obviously found some transcendent inner peace that was enviable.
Jonas spoke to Joshua in Ewe, and Joshua then repeated to the elder. I had brought along the traditional offering of a bottle of schnapps, and it was ceremoniously presented to him. He thanked me for my interest in his village and, through Joshua, ordered a gong-gong meeting for the next morning to discuss the use of Burro batteries. After receiving his permission to leave, we shook hands and walked back to Jonas’s main compound for breakfast. Jonas’s children served us steaming cups of tea sweetened with Milo (the Nestlé malted chocolate drink) followed by delicious omelet sandwiches in sweet tea bread. At the window of Jonas’s shop stall, several men were getting fortified for their morning farming with a shot of apio. I thought of rural France, where I had often seen men knocking back “eye openers” of pastis before heading to the vineyards.
Soon Joshua returned to announce tomorrow’s gong-gong. He was also the village gong-gong man, a job he had redefined with modern technology. Instead of the typical cowbell, Joshua’s “gong-gong” was a battery-powered megaphone—the sort that might be used by the fire marshal in a small-town Fourth of July parade. While Jonas sharpened my machete on a flat rock next to his shop, Joshua turned on his megaphone and marched up and down the dirt track, announcing tomorrow’s meeting through the tinny, crackling loudspeaker.
Moments later Jonas’s children, who had evidently bathed after preparing our breakfast, emerged from their huts in crisply pressed school uniforms. They grabbed their knapsacks and headed off, on foot and bicycle, to secondary schools in the outlying market towns and larger villages. Otareso has its own informal elementary school (there is no building), but its status is in limbo. Jonas introduced me to Georgina, the young woman who is the teacher for the village. “When does school start?” I asked her.
“We don’t start,” she said. “I expelled the students last week because the parents don’t pay me.” She said this without anger or malice, simply as a fact. “And when we have a PTA meeting, they don’t come. It’s very painful, but I have to feed and clothe myself. Until the parents come up with something reasonable …” She shrugged.
4. White Man Swings a Blade
It was time for work. Jonas and I slipped on our boots, grabbed our machetes, and walked to the fields. The morning job was planting cassava cuttings—inch-thick stalks that take root in the rainy season. To use his land most efficiently, Jonas interplanted cassava between the corn stalks, which were perhaps a month away from harvest. By the time the slow-growing cassava was ready to harvest early next year, the corn would be long gone. So by timing his interplanting, Jonas was able to grow two crops on the same plot at once.
Along the path, Jonas marshaled two women to join us, speaking in Ewe. We arrived at a field that had grown cassava last year and was now fallow. A few days earlier, Jonas had gathered two large bundles of five-foot-long stalks and tied them with strips of palm frond. “The women will carry these to our field,” he said.
“What do we carry?” I asked.
“Our machetes.”
I shook my head. “What if we made four bundles and we helped? Then the women would not have to carry so much.”
“In our African culture,” he replied in a tone that brooked no argument, “women carry.” Chivalrous African men like Jon
as, however, do make it a point to arrange the loads properly on the ladies’ heads. We hefted the giant bundles aloft and followed the women as they walked—erect, straight, and perfectly balanced—to the cornfield ten minutes away.
Jonas had a distracting habit of gesticulating wildly with his machete as he talked, and I was careful to keep some space between us on the trail. Finally we reached the corn, about knee-high, and he ordered the women to drop the bundles. They left, and our work began. Jonas showed me how to bore a shallow hole in the soil with the tip of the machete, push the cassava stalk in at a slight angle, and deftly whack off the stalk about a foot from the ground. Then he moved to the next space between the corn, dug another hole, pushed in the stalk, and whacked it off as well. It took practice to make a neat slice of the stalk in one cut; even though my machete was razor-sharp thanks to Jonas (I jokingly tried shaving with it, and it worked), I was too timid in my attack. The result was a mangled stalk. I also had to practice not making the hole too deep, which Jonas said would cause the cassava root (which is the edible part) to grow too far under the surface. On my own, I recognized the additional importance of avoiding my feet on the downstroke; my rubber boots were not steel-toed. But after about an hour I was almost keeping up with Jonas’s steady rhythm of dig, poke, whack … dig, poke, whack.
I was also foaming with sweat like a draft horse. My clothes, the latest in high-tech “wicking” fabrics from REI, were as soaked as if I had stood out in the morning monsoon, the memory of which had now long faded. The sun attacked without mercy; I felt we were on some other planet, several million miles closer to the fiery ball in the sky. As I bent over my machete, perspiration dripped like steam from my brow, stinging my eyes and fogging my glasses. I had a small digital camera in my shirt pocket, which was now soaked through; I tried to find a dry pocket, but there was none anywhere on my body. There was no shade within sight. It was still early morning.
“Are you hot?” asked Jonas.
“Just a bit,” I allowed, between panting breaths. “How about you?”
“No.” Jonas was wearing corduroy pants and a pilled polyester golf shirt under a heavy wool gabardine top, buttoned at the cuffs. His brow was completely dry. “The rain has cooled the day nicely.”
Although I cannot back this up scientifically, I am certain that after three hours planting cassava, my machete had gained approximately ninety pounds, and I had lost perhaps half that in water weight. I did not protest when Jonas decided it was time for lunch. We had planted perhaps half an acre; only about ten more to go.
Lunch back at the compound (cooked by Rebecca and served as always by Charity) was banku and fish soup, deliciously spicy.
For our afternoon work, Jonas apparently took mercy on me and decided we would work in the shade of the nearby plantain grove. As we walked down the path, he unsheathed a slingshot from his back pocket and fired rocks into a mango tree, causing hundreds of weavers to scatter in a cloud so large it momentarily blotted out the sun. “Those birds, they spoil the plantains,” he said spitefully. I wasn’t sure if his slingshot attacks would do much to prevent them from nesting in his plantain trees, but they seemed to make him feel better. A few yards farther down the path, a goat was busy uprooting cassava stalks Jonas had planted last week. He loaded his slingshot and fired a rock into the goat’s hindquarters, which sent it braying across the field. You don’t mess with the man’s crops.
The plantain grove was spread out along the main road to the village. Here too, Jonas was attempting to use his land as efficiently as possible. “These are orange trees I have planted between the plantains,” he explained, pointing out the two-foot-high saplings with their shiny leaves. “We need to clear the brush around them”—a foot-high shag carpet of grass and woody clumps that grow like mildew in the relentless heat and sun of Ghana. He demonstrated how to use the machete like a scythe, swinging wide arcs parallel to the ground—ideally without lopping off the orange seedlings.
We got to work and I was soon dripping again, despite being in the shade. This time, however, our labors were highly public, as villagers passed in a steady flow of foot traffic along the road, carrying water jugs on their heads. As far as I can tell, few entertainments are as capable of sending Ghanaians into knee-slapping hysterics as the pantomime of a white man performing manual labor, and I endured several hours of exuberant laughter and catcalls. Sometimes people would simply stop and watch for several minutes, as though taking in a sporting event. This is understandable when you consider that the African’s relationship with the white man has long been one of servant and master, and I’m not even talking about slavery. During the colonial era, it was considered perfectly normal for Africans to carry the British around on throne-like hammocks. In his 1883 book To the Gold Coast for Gold, the British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton decried the incompetence of his Ghanaian porters, whom he felt were overpaid:
As bearers they are the worst I know, and the Gold Coast hammock is intended only for beach-travelling. The men are never sized, and they scorn to keep step, whilst the cross-pieces at either end of the pole rest upon the head and are ever slipping off it. Hence the jolting, stumbling movement and sensation of feeling every play of the porters’ muscles, which make the march one long displeasure. Yet the alternative, walking, means fever for a newcomer.
An arduous journey, indeed. When you consider that Burton was in fact a seasoned adventurer and keen student of indigenous culture—he spoke many African and Asian languages and once visited Mecca in disguise as an Arab—you can imagine how a less dogged Western traveler would expect to be coddled by the Africans. No wonder the locals marvel when a white man swings a blade.
By the end of the day, I had earned my farm credentials. “You know,” said Jonas at one point in the afternoon, “I believe Americans are stronger than Europeans.”
“Yeah, those Europeans,” I said, looking up from my labors. “What a bunch of pussies!”
“Pussies! Ha!” said Jonas.
“To be honest,” I said, “my grandparents were European.”
“Really?” he said, as if I had suggested they were Uighur herdsmen.
“Yes, from Eastern Europe, like many immigrants to America. And it’s pretty unlikely the gene pool has evolved much over two generations to make me noticeably stronger. Besides, there are many strong Europeans. Look at Andre the Giant. He was French.”
“I don’t mean giants,” he said, “just regular people.”
The conversation segued into a discussion of the American melting pot. Jonas pointed out that Otareso is also a melting pot, being a haven for migrants from Benin and Togo. “That explains why we are so friendly,” he said. “We like foreigners because we are foreigners.”
Back at the compound, we peeled off our farm clothes and bathed before dinner. “You should not leave your boots in the bed of your truck like that,” Jonas told me as I combed my hair by the side-view mirror. “Someone could come by and take them.”
It struck me as an odd concern in a village of two hundred people who know one another like family. “Is there a bad man in this village?” I asked.
“Oh no, there is no bad man,” said Jonas. “But you never know.” (A few months later, someone broke into Jonas and Rebecca’s store in the middle of the night, on a looting rampage.)
Dinner was more starchy mounds, more brown soup. Again the women served us. A soccer game played on the radio, announced in Twi. I tried to strike up a conversation with a young village boy who had been eyeing me with curiosity. “He speaks no English,” said an older boy. “He doesn’t go to school.” The boy kept staring at me. I asked the older boy if he liked football, and he said he listened to the Phobia games; Phobia is the nickname for the Accra premier-league team. I asked if he liked to play football himself. “I would,” he said, “but the village has no ball.”
Five degrees above the equator, the sun does not linger at the horizon, and darkness descended quickly on Otareso. My energy faded with the light;
I was exhausted. As Jonas and I headed down the path, twirling our flashlights, I remarked on how the whole village seemed to just disappear into the sudden blackness of night. “We will get light soon,” he said. “It is coming to our village.”
Actually it isn’t, no matter what the politicians promise. Electricity will not come soon to these villages. But wherever I went in Ghana, that’s what people said: It is coming soon. We are next. Very soon.
Instead of light, they get stars. There was no moon and the night was clear, and the Milky Way split the sky in two. The stars faded along the southern horizon, where the glow from electrified Accra washed out the black sky. And along the western horizon, high up on the Akwapim Ridge, the lights were coming on in the houses where the Big Men live.
1. Cocoa Man
A week later I arranged a village stay in Sokwenya with Hayford Atteh Tetteh, one of Burro’s first agents and, at age sixty-four, the oldest. Hayford, a farmer, was a member of the Shai tribe, a subset of the Adangbe nationality, which is itself part of the larger Ga-Adangbe ethnic group. Although lumped together as descendants of ancient Nubian fishing people who settled in and around Accra, the Ga and the Adangbe now speak distinct languages—Ga and Dangbe—that are mutually unintelligible. However, as in Jonas’s village, Sokwenya was vibrantly multicultural; despite the presence of many Shai, the chief was Akwapim.
Sokwenya lies off a formerly paved, primary route that was now a virtually impassable dirt road several kilometers west of the market town of Adawso. The morning of my visit I met Hayford in Adawso, where he had been delivering batteries on his bicycle from a cheap zippered red shoulder bag emblazoned with the word FLORIDA; we loaded the bike into the back of the truck, shifted into four-wheel drive, and headed out of town.
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