“Better battery, half the price!” Whit recited into the microphone. “Get more power for less! Burro batteries! Get them from Benjamin the chemist in Supresso!” We drove on, finally reaching a village, called Asampanyie, that Burro had not yet opened up. As we scaled a rise into the village center, our speakers met their match: a circle of drummers under a mango tree were beating out a steady rhythm as dozens of people in dark robes and dresses shook their hips. It was a funeral, which in Ghana generally turns into a big party with lots of alcohol—the African version of an Irish wake. We pulled over and were instantly swarmed by tipsy mourners. Whit gave a spiel on the batteries and signed up a few new customers, who would be served by an agent in nearby Mangoase. I pictured them waking up sober on Monday morning and wondering where the hell they got these new green batteries.
Our fun with the sound system was short-lived. After just a few days of Ghana’s punishing roads, the cheesy die-cast U-brackets meant to hold the heavy speakers onto the truck’s roof bar had twisted and snapped. Whit called Dave, who said it sounded like we would need heavier brackets, as if the road conditions in Ghana were some surprise to him. Back we drove to Accra, back to Dave’s office, where two of his workers brought out a pair of new brackets. I could see they were indeed much heavier, but they were also obviously homemade, with amateur welds that looked weak. The black paint was still wet.
“I think these will break,” I said to Whit. He agreed.
“No good,” he told the workers.
They went back inside and brought out a pair of new factory brackets in packages, better and stronger than the original ones. But although these brackets were made by the same company that made the speakers, Whit and I could see that they didn’t quite fit. To attach them involved removing from the back of the speaker a gasketed metal ring that protected the magnet and all the circuitry from rain; the new bracket didn’t work with the old gasket ring, and there was no seal. “These will leak,” said Whit, pointing at the fit.
At this point the two guys ignored us and started assembling the brackets to the speakers. “What will keep the water out?” asked Whit, pressing on. One of the men started yelling at Whit in Ga, a language we understood even less than Twi. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Ga,” said Whit.
The man scowled. “Do you speak any Ghanaian languages?”
“Yes,” said Whit. “English.”
“They will not leak,” he said firmly.
“Okay,” said Whit, holding up the water sachet he was drinking. “Let’s pour water on them and see.” The man ignored Whit, who took out his cell phone and called Dave. “Tell your men to take it all out. The whole system.”
The worker’s cell phone rang. He spoke briefly to Dave in Ga, then hung up. “I have been a technician for ten years,” he said to us, seething. “I know what I am doing.” It took over an hour to remove the sound system, because the technician didn’t have a Phillips head screwdriver and had to use a penknife.
2. The Mad Men of Asylum Down
Our next meeting was just around the corner, at the Asylum Down office of MMRS Ogilvy, the Ghana branch of the global advertising firm. We had an appointment to meet with the business development director, a woman named Josephine Komeh, to discuss possible ways the company could help shape the Burro brand. Whit knew his business was (at least for now) insignificant to an agency that handled the Ghana accounts for giants like Nestlé and Unilever, but he also felt it would be good to make the introduction. So when Rose set up the meeting with a friend who worked there, Whit was happy to follow through.
We filed into a large conference room and shivered from the air-conditioning. There was a flat-screen projection system and a glass trophy case filled with Gold Gong-Gong trophies—shaped like cowbells—which I gathered were Ghanaian advertising awards like the American Clios. Whit unpacked his laptop and was connecting to the projector when a young man came in. “I’m very sorry,” he began, “but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Josephine is in another meeting and cannot make it, but I will be happy to listen to your presentation.” He seemed pretty low-level, and his English was only fair.
“Umm, okay,” said Whit, tentatively. “How much time do you have?”
“Five minutes.”
“Oh, then forget it,” he said, closing his laptop. “We can’t explain our company in five minutes. Thank you for your time.”
“One moment please,” the man said, leaving. A few minutes later he returned. “Can we do it next Monday?” he asked.
“No, I’m sorry,” said Whit. “We are based in Koforidua and we are very busy up there. It’s hard to find time to come down to Accra.”
“One moment.” He left again. This time he came back with the big shots: Josephine Komeh herself, plus the agency’s creative director, Kweku Popku. After pleasantries, apologies, and business cards had been exchanged, everyone sat down and Whit launched into his presentation.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he began, “I don’t think we’ll be able to afford you. But I’d like to introduce you to the company so you are aware of us, and as we grow, hopefully we might be able to work together. At Burro we believe passionately in the power of the brand we are building, and we know how serious your agency is about brand development.” He described his career and his previous time in Africa, then turned to the slide show. After a few introductory images came a slide titled “Burro Vision.” Next to a photo of Whit, Kevin, and Hayford riding triple on Hayford’s bicycle were four bullet points:
Profitably deliver affordable goods and services that empower very low-income consumers to do more with their lives
Leverage direct sales channel across multiple categories
Collaboratively craft a world-class company
Build a new kind of brand for the developing world
Whit explained the points, then clicked to the next slide, titled “The Burro Brand”:
“Burro”
Memorable and short
Easy to spell and pronounce
The Donkey
Cost-effective productivity enhancement
Trustworthy, hardworking companion
Tangible thing, simple, real presence
“Do More”
Aspirational promise—Burro does more
Proactive call to action—you should too
The next slide laid out the financial opportunity:
Consumers are currently spending $2 to $6 per month on throw-away batteries
Additional energy demand can be met with batteries
$2 to $4 per month on kerosene for lighting
$2 to $4 per month on cell phone charging
Substitute Burro battery service for these existing expenditures
Put the economics of rechargeables within reach of low-income households
Burro is better—and half the price
$50 million market opportunity for batteries in Ghana alone
There were twelve slides in all. At the end, Whit said, “Our most immediate need from you is a multilingual audio pitch to create an initial exposure to the Burro brand and to drive sales of Burro’s initial offerings. We need a signature sound, a music track, a drive-by pitch, and a stationary pitch for our vehicles, and we need all the creative and production. Are there any questions?”
“I am very impressed,” said Kweku. “I like the two-in-one pitch with the adapter, which makes your product very versatile. What I would still want to know is, what is the character of the brand in terms of tone of voice? Before we could do the music, we would need to know more about that. Clearly the voice must be Ghanaian, but what kind of Ghanaian? How old? The music could range from traditional highlife, which is rather dated and conservative, to contemporary hiplife. Do you see what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” said Whit, “and that’s an excellent question. Right now I would say our sweet spot for customers is in the thirty-to forty-year-old range, but I know that’s still a big demographic, and we have many younger and older clients. So w
e need to think about that.”
“Another thing I would add,” said Kweku, “is that every Ghanaian has aspirations to be better than what he is. Even the person in the gutter today dreams of doing better. So I would not focus too much on the poor as a concept.”
“I hear you,” said Whit. “This is really very helpful.”
It was getting late and Whit was exhausted—too many meetings, too many late nights in the battery room, too many decisions, and too much fucking heat. Rose was staying with her parents in Accra that night; I took the driver’s seat for the haul back to Kof-town. The lights of Accra were twinkling on as I pivoted the truck around the hairpin turns up the Akwapim Ridge and around the promontory of Kitase, where the presidential weekend retreat called the Peduase Lodge hovered in fog over the capital. The lodge, a sprawling modernist slab with its own theater, zoo, poultry farm, and cricket oval, was built by Nkrumah in 1959 as a place to house, entertain, and impress foreign dignitaries visiting the newly independent nation. Unlike Accra’s Osu Castle, the president’s primary residence and the seat of government, this new building would have no colonial references, no imperialist baggage, no slave history. It was sleek and modern—a new, updated look for the new “brand” of Africa.
At least that was the idea. To me it looked like an oversized Rat Pack playhouse—too ungainly and vulgar even for Sammy and Dino, but maybe perfect for, say, Jackie Gleason. Still, over the years it had gained a certain notoriety. In 1967 the lodge hosted the mediation talks between rival Nigerian factions that resulted in the ill-fated Aburi Accord. (Biafra seceded anyway, plunging Nigeria into civil war and mass starvation.) But by 2002, Peduase, like many of the slave castles, was abandoned and in ruins—terrazzo floors cracking, roofs leaking, giant termites feasting on the custom cabinetry, and curtains “reduced to rags,” according to a firsthand report in the Daily Graphic: “There is nothing to write home about the pantry and the once magnificent fountain.”
Peduase Lodge was renovated under President Kufuor and is now in use again. Unfortunately, the motorway out of town that provides the only access to Peduase—the same road to the university in Legon and on to Koforidua—is in a semipermanent state of rebuilding, and traffic crawls over dirt and around detours night and day. When President Obama and his family came in July 2009 (his first state visit to a sub-Saharan nation), they stayed at the airport Holiday Inn.
Whit was snoring by the time we passed Rita Marley’s gated recording studio, just up the road from Peduase Lodge, and I drove the last, dangerous hour in tense silence, straining to focus on gutters and goats along the twisting pitch-black road. It was nine o’clock when we rolled through the gate of Koforidua’s Mac-Dic Royal Plaza Hotel for a relatively expensive but welcoming dinner of grilled octopus and tough steak.
“I think Ogilvy will want twenty thousand cedis to do something for us,” Whit said, pouring a glass of wine. “But I’ll give them five thousand.”
“And how will you convince them to take that?”
“I just won’t do it. I’m ready to walk away. But they want to do it. It’s good for their company, good for employee morale, good for their image, good for recruiting. They’ll do it.”
3. It’s a Battery
Even if Whit wasn’t ready to paint Ghana green, he was dying to paint Burro headquarters green. It was a largely symbolic gesture, since Burro did relatively little walk-up business, but Whit’s lease was up for renegotiation, and in Ghana the landlord typically pays to paint the exterior, so the timing was right. We had seen a green tint on a building in the town of Aburi that looked just about right; I took a picture of the Burro truck in front of the green building, and you couldn’t tell the difference. I walked around to the courtyard and asked the owner what the paint was. “Green Apple,” he said, showing me the can with the brand. Back in Koforidua, I found it in a paint store.
Jan arranged with a local crew to do the painting, but the landlord felt their price was too high and strongly suggested they consult his cousin Seth, also a painter by trade, for a “competitive” quote. Seth came over and met with Jan. “Do you have equipment?” she asked.
“Yes, I have all the equipment,” he said.
He got the job, but when he showed up to paint the façade of a building half the length of a city block, he had just one small putty knife, a couple of ratty paintbrushes, and a roller caked in dried paint. He had no drop cloths, no large scrapers, no masking tape, no cleaning supplies. He had no ladder.
“I will rent the ladder from the fire department,” he told Jan, for two cedis per day, and off he went to secure what was apparently the only ladder in town; fortunately the city’s cinder-block buildings rarely catch fire, but it does happen, given the haphazard electrical wiring that appears to be standard in Ghana. The few fires I had noticed over the course of a year all smelled electrical and blotted the sky with foul black smoke.
Meanwhile, Seth’s assistant showed up and introduced himself as a pastor.
“A pastor?” said Jan.
“Actually I’m a prophet,” he replied. Jan raised her eyebrows. “A minor prophet,” he clarified.
“We were hoping for a painter.”
He ignored her and went to work, perhaps already deep in revelation.
As the job progressed, it became clear that neither painter had received much divine inspiration with the brush. Both were slopping paint all over the veranda floor. Jan came out and noticed Seth was painting the spaces inside the decorative cinder-block balustrade, which were caked with years of urban grime.
“You can’t paint the dirt,” she told him. “You have to scrub off the dirt with a brush and water.”
“I don’t have any water,” he replied. Jan brought him a bucket and a brush.
“If I wash it, I will have to wait for it to dry, and that will slow me down,” he said.
“I don’t care,” said Jan. “The paint won’t stick to the dirt.” And she took his scraper and showed him how the paint he had applied slid right off.
“Oh, I get you,” he said. But the next time she came out, he was still painting over the dirt.
By the end of the weekend they thought they were done and returned the ladder, but when Jan came back from Accra on Monday she noticed lots of missed spots and mistakes. Seth went back to the fire department to reclaim the ladder, but it was in high demand and someone else had rented it. Eventually the work got done; the total cost was seven hundred and three cedis, including paint. To no one’s surprise, the new green-and-black building attracted a wave of walk-in business. More important, it established the brand in downtown Koforidua. One day Precious pointed at the façade and said, “Auntie Jan, it’s a battery!”
1. In Camelot
“This sucks.” Whit was talking as usual and driving, or rather braking, in a typical Accra traffic jam. In 1971 Nadine Gordimer described Accra’s “vast chatter and surge of the streets, the sense not of people on their way through the streets but of life being lived there.” I’m not sure if she was writing about the traffic per se, but as far as I was concerned I had already lived nine lives on the streets of Accra and was now entering the gates of hell. It was late morning and the sun was pounding like a railroad sledge on the roof of our defenseless Kia, which had no air-conditioning and was fast approaching the temperature required to fire porcelain. Outside, a river of street hawkers flowed around the stalled cars. In an effort to stave off ennui and Whit’s endless prattle, I took out my notebook and started recording the merchandise as it moved past our car. This was my list:
Steering wheel covers, baby dolls (Caucasian) in strollers, Jesus wall clocks, chocolate bars, Ghana flags, yams (whole, extra large), full-length mirrors, reading glasses (assorted powers), sunglasses (fastened to a large sheet of plywood), belts, blue jeans, Sylvester Stallone DVDs, English dictionary, shoes, sandals, socks, button shirts, oversized foam alphabet blocks, plantain chips, Obama DVDs, neckties, cuff links (Ghana flag design), Michael Jackson DVDs, shorts, boxers, briefs,
briefcases, ginger snaps, bracelets (brass), Sprite, Coke, toothpicks, newspapers (headline: “YOU’RE A BEAST,” JUDGE TELLS RAPIST), cashews, single book (Everywoman: A Gynecological Guide for Life), soccer balls, car-washing chamois (Shell Oil logo), toilet paper (Chinese brand), child’s spinning top (demonstrated by salesman on dashboard of car, through open window, uninvited), air fresheners (Liverpool Football Club logo), plastic coat hangers, plastic clothespins, onions, toenail clippers, power adapter plugs, carved wooden masks, Swiss Army knives, screwdrivers, Tummy Trimmer girdle (as seen on TV), Ping-Pong paddles with ball, watches, puppies (two, cute), Salif Keita CDs, crucifix (framed), caps, pillows, limes, tiger nuts, boiled peanuts, windshield wipers (assorted), doughnut holes, end tables, Super Glue, hair brushes.
I gave up at that point, partly because of heat exhaustion and partly because if you accidentally allowed your eyes to cast more than the merest peripheral glance at any particular ware, its seller would take you for a potential customer and hound you like an auctioneer until traffic moved again, which was to say a long time. And while some of the items had a clear marketing logic in the inferno of an Accra traffic jam—cold beverages, a snack—and others, like key chains or pocketknives, could be understood as impulse purchases, most seemed like a stretch. Who buys reading glasses in traffic? Or bedroom furniture?
Max Alexander Page 27