“White man! You want filet?”
Of course the white man wants filet. White men always want filet.
The abattoir had no refrigeration, and the ninety-degree slabs of meat dripped grease slicks across the floor, so you didn’t so much walk as skate along the aisles.
“White man! I have fresh cow!”
Beef was called cow, mutton was simply sheep (lamb was nonexistent), and then there was goat. In deference to the large Muslim population, there was no pork.
“White man! Goat is very good today!”
The flies certainly thought so. I removed my glasses and used my T-shirt to smear the grease around the lenses, then examined the animal more closely. As far as I could tell there were never any tender cuts like steaks, which I assumed went to buyers from the hotel restaurants before the abattoir opened. What was left for the lumpenprol were the heavily muscled and gristly undercarriages—cuts that are delicious enough but require grinding or long stewing to become palatable. Also on display, and wildly popular with the locals, were the so-called variety meats—kilometers of coiled intestines, bushels of spleens and livers, bowls brimming with dark hearts and kidneys, plus brains on the half shell, so to speak.
Adapting to the ingredients at hand, I bought a manual meat grinder to make hamburgers on our little charcoal brazier. Unfortunately, buns were impossible to find and it was far too hot in the flat to bake our own, so we used the spongy “tea bread”—a Ghanaian staple, sort of a baguette-shaped Wonder bread laced with sugar—sold in the market. With all the avocados, guacamole became a daily treat—but with no corn chips, we had to substitute the fried plantain chips sold by ladies (from huge bowls balanced on their heads) in the traffic circles. We bought a blender and made mango smoothies every day until the blender motor burned out, filling our tiny kitchen with acrid electrical smoke. (Jan later had it fixed for a few cedis; nothing ever gets thrown away in Africa, and there is always someone who can fix something.) On my second trip to Ghana I actually brought over several pounds of Parmesan cheese, along with a few small plants to start an herb garden on our terrace. (Rosemary, basil, parsley, oregano, and sage were nonexistent in the markets.) Whit thought I was nuts, but I noticed he ate everything.
Cooking for my brother every day made me feel a little bit like his wife, especially as he was the guy running the business. I grew weary of hearing “Hi, honey, I’m home! What’s for dinner?” But I was good at it, and it made me feel like I was doing my part. “What would you eat if I weren’t here?” I asked him once.
“Cereal.”
“No, I mean for dinner.”
“Cereal. With bananas.”
“Who would slice your bananas?”
“Very funny. I would hire someone.”
Our clan does not excel at self-reflection; we are generally much better at reflecting on the deficiencies of others. Yet one night over dinner, I recalled a time when we were kids and Whit gave me a spiral-bound Betty Crocker cookbook for my birthday. I must have been fourteen or fifteen, making Whit just ten or eleven. It was an enormously thoughtful gift for a small boy, reflecting his understanding of his older brother’s love of the kitchen. But when I unwrapped the gift, in front of all my friends at the party, I was embarrassed; at that time my cooking was a closet affair. In a misguided effort to save face with my peers, I sniffed at the gift and replied cruelly, “A cookbook? What would I ever want with this?” Little Whit’s face collapsed at that moment, and I immediately hated myself.
When I retold the story that night in Ghana, Whit said he had no memory of it. I found it amazing that an incident that had haunted me for decades was unremarkable in his own eyes, but such are the vagaries of human memory.
“Well, I’m glad it didn’t ruin you for life,” I said. “But I always regretted it, and it was really the first time I ever learned not to be ashamed of who I am. So I can thank you for that.”
After dinner we called our mother, slowly fading in a nursing home in Chicago. It was her eighty-first birthday. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “Guess where we are?”
“Where?”
“Africa.”
There was a long pause while she processed the information. “That’s nice.”
2. Anything to Call Their Own
Jan was in many ways my opposite—one of those keenly scientific people for whom every problem in life was simple once you knew the equation—and we complemented each other. Logic was in essence her profession. She had majored in math, naturally, at Washington State University. “I loved math, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she told me one night. “I didn’t want to be an actuary. Then I took a three-hundred-level course in operations research, and I loved it.”
“Operations research?”
“Yeah. It’s like, okay, you have to visit twelve cities in one week to do business; what’s the most efficient way to do it? I loved it because it was applied math. After the three-hundred-level course, I had one more semester in my senior year. I purposely left myself one credit short of graduating so I could take the four-hundred-and five-hundred-level course classes in my second senior year, during which time I decided on graduate school.”
Which ended up being the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a master’s in industrial engineering. Before joining Whit at Cranium, Jan had spent twelve years at a management consulting firm, earning a partnership. After Cranium she worked at Microsoft but longed for something more entrepreneurial, even adventurous. Rejoining Whit, she gave up a “safe” career in return for an equity stake in Burro and the chance to do something very different.
Jan loved the Ghanaians, but one significant aspect of Ghanaian culture failed to soften her: the country’s hyperventilating version of Christianity. Several evangelical churches operated within a few blocks of Burro, and they all had raucous services lasting late into the night on various staggered evenings. The meetings were characterized by mindlessly out-of-tune gospel singing accompanied by drums and brass amplified to distortion levels, alternating with hysterical sermons in Twi, delivered at jet-turbine decibels. These Nuremberg rallies often went on until long after midnight and were impervious to earplugs, prayer, or agnosticism. Suffice it to say the Christian soldiers weren’t winning many converts on our side of the road.
“An agent asked me to go to church today,” Jan said one night, raising her voice enough to be heard over the din of a particularly discordant hymn from across the street.
“And you agreed?” I asked.
“As if! When I said no, he said, ‘Don’t you believe in Christ?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter to me.’ He said, ‘Then you will go to hell.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe in hell.’”
“Wow,” I said. “Now you’re definitely going to hell.”
“I told him, ‘You learned about hell from some white missionaries who came here two hundred years ago, and now you’re trying to tell it to me! Do you think all those thousands of generations of Africans before the missionaries are burning in hell?’”
“Score one for you,” I said, “but I do think religion has in many ways been a force for good here. It certainly gives people a sense of community, and the churches have encouraged democracy and social progress.”
“Well, they had all that before, in their own communities and with their native religions,” Jan replied. “It just got translated into Christianity.”
She had a point, adding on further thought that religion had also encouraged a culture of passivity; when everything will happen “by God’s will,” why bother trying to be on time for a meeting, or even trying hard to sell more batteries?
This blithe acceptance of fate was not, however, a universal Ghanaian belief. In fact, Whit noted that in recent years even the collective benefits of organized religion in Ghana had been sacrificed at the altar of “personal empowerment.” The late Reverend Ike, who drove Rolls-Royces around Harlem, used to preach, “If it’s that difficult for a rich man to get into heaven, think how terr
ible it must be for a poor man to get in. He doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.” Even without a punch line that would resonate in a graft-ridden African society, that sentiment pretty well describes the spiritual imperative in modern Ghana. Like their telegenic cousins in the West, the most popular Ghanaian preachers today promise an answer to the question “What can God do for me?”
Of course not all churches in Ghana have taken the us out of Jesus. One Sunday morning I ventured out to Jonas Avademe’s village for the service at his Apostles’ Revelation Society. “It is the special Children’s Day program,” said Jonas over his cell phone when he called to invite me a few days earlier. “You will like it.” I had a new soccer ball I wanted to deliver to the kids in the village, so it seemed like good timing.
The church was actually in a nearby village that was closer to the main road and thus had electricity. I pulled up a few minutes early in front of a long, neat rectangular building. A set of wide double doors had been thrown open, as were the shutters of several large windows, and the congregation was taking seats in rows of wooden benches. Jonas met me at the door and instructed me to remove my shoes, as in a mosque. Inside, above a concrete floor, rough-hewn wooden trusses supported a raked and corrugated metal roof, which, in its own modest way, lent the feeling of a vaulted basilica. Behind a lectern, Jonas was adjusting the dials on a public address system. Fluorescent shop lights buzzed overhead.
The rudimentary accommodations were belied by the women of the church, who arrived turned out in the most arrestingly beautiful dresses (and matching head scarves) I have ever seen. Each was handmade from printed, woven, or embroidered fabrics in a constellation of African patterns—floral, spiral, checked, geometric, brocade, vine—and in colors from vermilion to indigo that vibrated with energy. Some of the men wore impressive traditional robes, but most arrived in Western dress shirts and ties. I was ushered, undeservedly, to an honored seat with the elders to the right of the altar. The service began with the beating of a gong-gong, hanging from a mango tree outside. As the gong-gong man sounded his call, the choir—five men and six women (including Jonas’s sister Charity, stunning in a white linen dress embroidered with lavender and silver threads) circled the outside of the church, ringing bells and shaking a tambourine. They entered and took seats, the men behind large peg drums. On cue from the pastor, a dour-looking man in a dark robe, the choir began to sing a buoyant Ewe hymn, accompanied by the drums and tambourine, as a procession of several dozen children entered and took seats in front. The children, roughly age five to sixteen, were as vibrantly attired as their parents, with one more amazing addition: every child’s face, neck, and bare arms were “tattooed” with circles transferred by dipping the rim of a drinking glass in cream-colored makeup. Jonas later told me that this striking decoration had been traced to Nigeria, where the Ewe originated in ancient times (they are related to the Nigerian Yoruba ethnic group) before migrating west to Benin, Togo, and Ghana. He could not say what it meant other than to describe it as “a cultural design for the body.” Nor could anyone one else in his village elaborate.
The service itself was in Ewe, but in deference to my presence the gong-gong man translated. Speaking to the children, the pastor stressed the importance of fealty to elders: “If you always obey your parents, you will grow old and you will grow wise,” he said. “You will not die prematurely.”
There was more singing, followed by an unusual offertory. Instead of passing the basket, church members formed a conga line and, without a trace of the stilted self-consciousness that would mark a Caucasian dance on Sunday morning, shimmied their way to the front, dropping coins in a box, as the choir sang and the drummers pounded.
What followed was even less conventional. Small groups of children performed a series of skits and songs whose words I could not understand (the translator thankfully did not interrupt the drama) but which seemed to be demonstrations of correct child behavior—namely obeying orders, fetching water, and doing homework. But here was the really odd thing: during these performances, the adults signified their approval by tossing coins at the youngsters. Mostly the coins skittled across the floor, but because many were lobbed from quite far back in the assembly, the trajectories were often such that the missiles struck the children about the head and shoulders. This hail of metal did not dim the young actors’ enthusiasm, as the performers were free to collect the coins at the end of their skits. But I found myself flinching on their behalf every time a piece of currency arced across the nave, and in my mind I could hear my mother saying, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”
More singing and drumming ensued, punctuated by a crack of thunder and the dull hammer of rain on the metal roof. The lights blinked and went out, and the rain pelted down harder. It did not stop, nor did the choir. When I left after two hours, it was still raining, and they were still singing.
Jan, who had no kids of her own, became a surrogate mother, big sister, and teacher to the children who shared our courtyard. On most mornings she would have her coffee (which we hoarded from our shopping trips to Accra) out on the top step to our flat, surrounded by several kids before they left for school. She would read to them, or share songs on her iPod, or sing camp songs. I suspect these meetings exposed the youngsters to far more English vocabulary than they got in school, and in return Jan learned about the singular dynamics of Ghanaian family life.
“As the children and I sat on the step,” she wrote on her blog (from a speech she gave back in her hometown of Wenatchee, Washington), “they would periodically call down to greet an adult, usually with the one syllable ‘Ma’ or ‘Da,’ then wave wildly when the adult looked up to see them with the obruni. Before long, I realized that the same child might yell down ‘Ma’ at two or three different women at different times.”
She went on to describe the family of two of “my kids,” as she called them, six-year-old Precious and her thirteen-year-old sister, Pamela, whose father and older brother were living and working in London:
Pamela and Precious live in the compound behind us with their mother and grandmother, their mother’s brother and his wife and two children under five, and their father’s younger brother, who is also called their “Small Father.” They also call their mother’s brother Father, and his wife Mother. So, in the house they have two mothers and two fathers, only one of whom is their biological parent. Strange as it may seem to you and me, in a culture where the average income is less than two dollars per day, where people may have to travel to find work, and where there is no daycare, this is the way families work.
Today we would instantly recognize this dynamic as evidence of the overused cliché “It takes a village to raise a child.” But even clichés are based on fact, and community child-rearing in Africa has been noted by outsiders stretching back centuries. This custom is so imprinted in the African psyche that it has made the transition to urban life—where children today arguably face more external dangers than in remote villages. Our little courtyard functioned as a village within a city of one hundred thousand. Younger kids, who loved to follow us around and tug at our clothes, knew better than to leave the safety of the courtyard; when we crossed the street they dutifully stayed on their side, waving good-bye to us, even though no adult was present to “herd” them. They understood the boundaries of their community. Even little Patrick, a three-year-old whose nose disgorged an apparently limitless charge of snot (most of which ended up on my leg), knew enough to stay on his side of the street.
On the Republic Day holiday of the First of July, Jan and I decided to treat Precious, Pamela, and Pamela’s best friend Savannah to a picnic at Boti Falls in Krobo territory. Despite being just half an hour’s drive from Koforidua, this significant natural attraction, famous throughout the country, might as well have been the Isle of Capri. Only one of the girls had ever been there, and all were fairly breathless with excitement. Yet as soon as we pulled away from the street in front of Burro, little Precious grew notab
ly frightened. She was with her teenage sister and two obruni adults she knew well, but leaving the courtyard without an adult family member filled her with anxiety. Fortunately, she soon got over her fear and had a great day, although she seemed pretty happy to get home that evening.
Strong family and social ties are a matter of survival in poor cultures. But modern society assumes our children will do more than merely survive in the Darwinian sense and actually thrive—still a tall order in Ghana. “Despite all the adults around,” Jan continued on her blog, “there is very little adult interaction on day-to-day development—little help with homework, no extracurricular activities to speak of, no organized sports or music, and few youth organizations or clubs.”
This became clear to me the first time I saw grade-schoolers in the courtyard playing with the shards of a broken mirror—veritable crown jewels for kids who traded bottle caps with numismatic fervor. With no sports leagues and no money to buy balls or other legitimate toys, parents didn’t exactly fret about jagged glass playthings; in fact, these same children were supplied with old-fashioned double-edged razor blades to sharpen their school pencils.
Determined to improve the kids’ play area, Jan concocted a plan to build covers for the disgusting open sewer that ran through the courtyard. One Saturday, the two of us drove out to the timber market, where hulking bare-chested men used handsaws to cut inch-thick, foot-wide planks of mahogany and other incredibly dense woods. (There was a table saw in one of the mill buildings, but electricity was too sporadic to be relied on.) We filled the back of the truck with cut lumber and headed home, where an army of kids waited with one hammer and a handful of nails to fashion the platforms. This project was greeted with enthusiasm by the adults in the neighboring buildings, who quickly saw the gains in space, safety, and overall quality of life afforded by concealing this defilement.
One could argue that life was nominally better for these city kids than their country cousins, who had no electricity and not even occasional plumbing. But the urban version of African poverty, with its grime, indifference, anonymity, open sewers, and shattered mirrors, felt particularly Dickensian, and encouraged the moniker “urchins” when describing these unlucky youths. “My neighborhood children are hungry not only for food,” wrote Jan, “but for attention, education, and anything to call their own.”
Max Alexander Page 21