Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  “Look, nightstands! Just like I’ve been wanting, and the price is right!”

  “Sorry I’m late, traffic was nuts and I bought a really cute puppy.”*

  Still other items reflected the desperation of poverty. Who but the hungriest would spend all day in shadeless ninety-degree heat, breathing car exhaust, in the hope that somewhere in that river of traffic was a driver looking for an outdated gynecological textbook? There is an optimism to indigence that is both admirable and sad.

  “I’m sorry, were you saying something, Whit?”

  “I was saying how pointless this traffic jam is.”

  “I meant, were you saying something insightful?”

  “What I mean is, even without doing some kind of sophisticated computer tracking system, they could just get the existing traffic cops who are sitting around doing jack to really do their jobs. Put them at every corner, and teach them how to direct traffic, which right now almost none of them seem to know how to do.” He slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the tro-tro that was crawling three feet in front of us, spewing black smoke.

  If solutions to Accra’s traffic nightmare seem painfully evident to a Westerner, the causes of individual tie-ups can be pointedly African. One morning a busy quarter of the city was brought to its knees after a man trying to harvest honey from a beehive high in an acacia tree decided to simply burn the tree down. It crashed onto the main Ring Road and blocked traffic for hours. “The tree was said to have fallen at dawn,” a newspaper reported, “however as of 10 am, the road had not been cleared, and there was no sign of the Ghana Highway Authority or the Parks and Gardens whose responsibility it is to evacuate the road. Some of the commuters who could not endure the searing morning heat … were continuing the rest of their journeys on foot.”

  Walking started to sound like a good idea. We were running late, as usual, this time for a meeting in Osu. Whit had an appointment at a Nigerian-based company called Camelot that specialized in security printing—gift certificates, lottery tickets, the sort of things you wouldn’t want copied or counterfeited, like Burro’s battery exchange coupons.

  Camelot’s facility, off a busy main road along Accra’s tattered urban beachfront, certainly seemed imposing. A large mechanized gate swung open and we entered, under the stern gaze of a guard, past signs warning NO MOBILE PHONES OR CAMERAS and ALL CARS WILL BE SEARCHED. Our dull and dented Kia limped rather pathetically past a fleet of shiny, tinted-glass SUVs belonging to other customers who, at least in my imagination, possessed an acute need for security printing and security everything else.

  The offices were mercifully air-conditioned, and we were ushered into a small room and greeted by a pleasant enough representative named Bernard, who got right down to business. “These are some samples of what we can do for you,” he said. “I regret that you cannot take any of these with you, as they are actual jobs we are doing for clients, but you are free to examine them here.”

  The first sample, some sort of grocery-store contest certificate, was printed on a simple watermarked paper called CVS1, used mainly for checks. “This is our design but we import it, it’s not made in Ghana,” Bernard stressed. I hadn’t thought about it before, but his comment made me realize that paper provenance was important; if employees are going to be pilfering watermarked paper, you want the paper plant far away from where you do business.

  Next came examples of various ways to imprint security systems on the paper. The first was called thermochromic: a small reddish dot appears to the eye, but when you apply slight heat—like from your finger—it magically disappears. “People don’t realize it,” said Bernard, “so when they copy it, the red dot doesn’t work on the copies. We can shape the thermochrome to match your logo.” That would mean a donkey head that disappeared when you rubbed it. Might be fun for kids, I thought, but as usual I kept my mouth shut.

  Next came a special gold seal, called a foil print. Then he showed us a silver hologram, then a serial number that bled through to the other side of the paper and was hard to copy. Another option was ultraviolet printing, which requires a special UV light to see. Similarly, some inks can only be seen after rubbing with a reactor pen, or what we used to call a Dick Tracy decoder pen. Then there was microtexting, which involves printing lots of minuscule lines of text as background; every seventeenth or so line says something slightly different, which crooks are unlikely to notice when copying.

  Finally there was a simple but fascinating process in which a company logo is “sculpted” in a different color using lines similar to a topographic map, creating a 3D illusion. When copied, the logo doesn’t “pop” in the same way as the original.

  If it had been up to me, I would have ordered everything—a watermarked, invisible-ink, thermochromic gold-foil donkey hologram that says hee-haw! when hit with an ultraviolet strobe light. But it wasn’t my money.

  “It’s all pretty amazing,” said Whit, reading my mind. “But I’ll be honest with you, Bernard, I suspect a lot of this stuff is out of our price range right now.” (This was becoming Whit’s standard refrain with vendors.) “I do like the idea of watermarked paper and possibly that sculpted logo, which I don’t imagine is too expensive, right?”

  “That’s right, compared to the hologram and some of these other things,” said Bernard.

  “And the more coupons we can get on a standard page, the cheaper each coupon will be, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you print a full page of coupons perforated to this size?” Whit took a postage stamp–sized Burro coupon out of his pocket and handed it to Bernard.

  “Not that small,” he said. “We use a roll press and can only perforate to a minimum of three inches square.”

  “Really?” said Whit, surprised. That would effectively make each coupon cost about twice as much. “In China I’ve seen this done with a hand machine where they can set the perfs as small as you want. The guy just puts each page in the cutting machine and presses it down.”

  “We don’t have such a machine,” said Bernard flatly.

  “I hear you,” said Whit. “But it’s actually not that complicated. The ones I saw in China were just made on the spot.”

  Changing the subject, Bernard said he would consult with the company’s designers and put together an affordable proposal. We left amiably and agreed to stay in touch. No one searched our car.

  2. We’re Not in Shanghai

  Our next errand was replacing the Kia’s four worn tires, which meant another tedious slog through traffic, to Accra’s tire district—a multiblock stretch of shops along a busy artery. As one who has owned and maintained cars in New York City, I was fascinated to find a country that had downgraded tire buying to an even lower circle of hell than I thought possible. In Accra, all of the tire shops were on one side of the street, and all of the installation shops were on the other side. So after haggling for your tires on the first side, you needed to negotiate your car through six lanes of traffic to the other side for installation. As the road was bumper-to-bumper and divided by a median that eliminated all opportunities for U-turns, the drive across the street meant another half hour in traffic, circling the block. Meanwhile, an army of youths, all of them expecting a tip, were waiting to carry your new tires across the street for you. Whatever.

  Accra’s tire business was run, if the verb’s meaning can be stretched, largely by the Kwahu, an Akan ethnic group from the Kwahu Plateau and the Afram Plains, north of Koforidua. Kwahu means “slave died,” and according to Akan mythology, the slave of a wandering tribe died on the plateau, fulfilling a prophecy and marking the place for the tribe to settle. It remains a strange and exotic corner of Ghana, pastoral and wide open like the American West, also home to the nomadic and sharp-featured herdsmen called the Fulani, whose women blacken their lips with henna. Whit and I ventured up the Kwahu Plateau one Saturday, encountering a group of Fulani and their emaciated livestock as we coaxed the Tata over a hillock of boulders. They spoke not a word
of English (their language is called Pular) and seemed as surprised to see us as we them; the men wore tall conical straw hats that looked more Asian than African, and the women wore turbans and colorful beaded necklaces; all had long, hand-embroidered robes.

  The Fulani and the Kwahu are constantly at odds—in part it’s the age-old conflict between herdsmen and farmers—and life on their remote highland is undoubtedly arduous. Still, it is difficult to imagine the Kwahu people descending from this mythic escarpment to adopt a life of haggling over steel-belted radials in Accra. The motivation, of course, is obvious: money, and the quest for a better standard of living. The Kwahu have a reputation for being excellent businesspeople—hardworking and innovative. Some of Ghana’s wealthier citizens are Kwahu, and many return to the plateau to build incongruously outlandish trophy homes with their Accra-earned wealth. “Every Ghanaian has aspirations to be better than what he is,” the Ogilvy man had told us. You can’t really argue with that, especially if you haven’t personally embraced the life of a highland hut dweller over indoor plumbing and electricity.

  Having bought our new rubber and made the schlep across the street to the installer’s shop, Whit and I settled down—way down—into a flaccid sofa that leaned drunkenly, springs akimbo, alongside an outdoor shop floor of exquisite commotion. A platoon of grease-encrusted workers rolled tires back and forth, shouting in Twi, fighting over hand jacks, and sliding under cars that were pitched up on stands and listing like deck chairs on the Lusitania. More cars waiting their turn had been backed obliviously into the traffic lanes, so it was hard to tell which cars were being worked on and which were merely unfortunate enough to be stuck in traffic behind them. There was a lot of honking. It was a spectacle, choreographed in that particularly African sense of order that bears a distinct resemblance to chaos.

  “That whole thing about the perforation cuts was interesting,” said Whit. He was still thinking about the meeting at Camelot.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the guy saying they couldn’t do it to my specs. The die-cutting machine I’ve seen in China must cost like three hundred dollars. The guy sets it up by hand; the dies are just pieces of metal with razor-sharp edges built on sheets of plywood. He sets it up any way you want and off he goes. There’s no bullshit answer like ‘the machine can’t do it.’ So yeah, you need a few guys to do some welding, so what? Workers in China are totally coachable. You tell a Chinese worker it’s not okay to have the label come below the edge of the adapter and you will never see it again. It will bring dishonor to his family.”

  “How much do factory workers make in China?”

  “About a dollar an hour; here maybe half that.”

  Whit stared out at the gridlocked traffic. “The lost productivity in this country is just staggering. In Shanghai they’ve got this mag-lev bullet train that goes like two hundred and fifty miles an hour and whisks you from the airport to downtown in about fifteen minutes, for less than ten dollars. It’s almost as far as from here to Koforidua, which takes us almost three hours.”

  “We’re not in Shanghai,” I said, trying as always to bring insights to my brother’s business plan. “Besides, here we get so much quality time in the car together.”

  “Shut up.”

  I think he said something else, but it was lost in a sudden chorus of shouting and even more honking than the default din. Although it seemed contrary to the laws of physics, somehow the traffic was parting. Into this void drove a loaded and impeccably detailed Range Rover, which creaked to a royal halt in front of the main tire bay. Out stepped a pair of shiv-pointed patent leather loafers, followed by a beige linen abacost of generous yardage.* Here was a Big Man of the Very Big variety, and his shaved pate was wrapped in thick black glasses. He barked something in Twi, and workers scurried. Moments later, four underlings returned, each hefting a massive tire and a chrome wheel with more facets than the Hope diamond. The Big Man grunted his approval and checked his gold watch impatiently. The “old” tires on his SUV still looked new—as new as the vehicle itself—but off they came.

  Some things in Africa, such as labor and okra, are reliably cheap, but high-performance SUV tires and titanium alloy wheels are not among them. One of the shop guys told us the Big Man’s new tires cost nine hundred cedis each, the rims five hundred—a total rolling package of about four thousand dollars, or more than my brother’s entire car was worth.

  “Your aid dollars at work,” Whit whispered my way.

  “Looks like he works for the government,” I said, “but who knows.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  3. Control Yourself

  When Africans aspire to a better life, they generally aspire to the urban life. There are exceptions, like my farmer friend Jonas who aspires to be a bigger and better farmer, but the massive and ongoing urbanization of the continent tells the larger tale. Across Africa, people come to the city because the city offers hope whereas the village will never change, as Rose said. Electricity is not “coming soon” to a village near you, despite what the politicians promise. And even if it were to come, who can afford the hookup?

  Of course, the chances of becoming a Big Man (or a Big Woman) in the big city are virtually nil, but that’s not the point. Most urban migrants are happy if they can secure a small but steady income, possibly enough to support family back home in the village. It is understood in Ghana that when a “city cousin” comes back to the village for a visit, he will bring gifts—food, alcohol, a new Chinese radio, or just money. For many Ghanaians, including the ones who stay behind, city life connotes the good life.

  But as with politicians everywhere who promise more than they can possibly deliver, there is not nearly enough good life in the big city to go around. As a result, the default condition in cities across Africa has become chaos and misery—vast, wheezing slums, crimes of breathtaking human indifference, coma-inducing traffic delays, and a whole new playbook of deadly contagions. Still they come.

  While Burro’s initial business plan was targeted at the millions of Ghanaians who still live in the villages, there was a battery business to be built in cities too. A lot of Whit’s customers lived on the grid, in Koforidua and smaller electrified towns around it, but still used flashlights, such as when walking around at night (streetlights are virtually nonexistent in Ghanaian cities). Other urban battery uses presented themselves on the ground; nobody could have modeled them in a business plan from America. Like the wedding photographers.

  Actually they photographed all sorts of social events, some of them quite specific to Ghanaian culture, like the party-all-day funerals and the so-called “outdooring” ceremonies, another big party that is sort of like a baptism for newborns. Documenting these milestones was a lucrative second income for Ghanaians who could make the investment in some basic digital camera equipment and had weekends free. Since even most urban Ghanaians do not own cameras, the market was robust. Dozens of photographers plied their trade in Koforidua alone. It didn’t take long for them to figure out how many more flashes they could get from Burro’s NiMH batteries than from the crappy competition, and they literally beat a path to our door.

  Which is how I met Celestine Galley, a Ghanaian woman of singular charm. She rang the bell one day and came in clutching a handful of batteries. She was middle-aged, a large, gap-toothed woman with a big mop of curly permed hair, a cavernous voice, and a motorcycle. A nurse in the outpatient department at the local hospital, Celestine worked as a photographer on weekends; she had zipped over on lunch break from the hospital, on her bike in her starched white uniform, to exchange batteries. “They are the best for my camera,” she said. “Four batteries give me one hundred pictures. You people are so good to me!”

  “Well, we appreciate your business,” said Whit. “Tell your friends.”

  We chatted while Celestine waited for her new batteries. “How are things at the hospital?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s very bad,” she said, waving an arm in disgus
t. “We have so much sickness. The young girls, they pull up their dress and then you fuck and you get AIDS.” She illustrated her point with the universal finger-in-the-hole gesture. Here it should be noted that even Ghanaian men rarely drop F-bombs; for women the word is considered unspeakable. As for the obscene hand gesture—no matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t recall a time in my life when I saw any woman making that, and I worked in rowdy bars for years.

  Somehow I felt Celestine’s biker-chick conversational style required a suitably salty repast, but all I could come up with was “No worries for me, I’m happily married.”

  “Well, pray to God you control yourself,” she said with evident suspicion.

  Celestine lived a short walk from Burro, in the ground-floor flat of a tidy apartment block, across the street from a popular watering hole called the Bula Spot. One day after work I called her up and arranged to come and visit. Her Yamaha 250, quite a beefy bike by Ghanaian standards, was parked in the courtyard. “You are welcome!” she said, motioning me inside. Remembering her frat-house vocabulary in the Burro office, I half expected to see empty schnapps bottles all over the floor and velvet paintings of dogs playing poker. But it was nothing like that. Her apartment was certainly crammed with stuff—cookware, stacks of plastic storage bins, fake floral arrangements, and shelves overflowing with enough Christian curios to open a votive shrine. But even with all the bric-a-brac, the place felt roomy under high ceilings. She had two bedrooms; a living room; a small kitchen with a sink, a four-burner cooktop, and a fridge; and a bathroom with toilet and shower. The floors were terrazzo. It was, all things considered, a very comfortable home—bigger than the apartment in Brooklyn where Sarah and I lived for ten years.

  We sat in the living room, where a small TV with grainy reception was playing an American soap opera. Celestine told me she was fifty-four years old and had been a nurse for thirty years. She was Ewe, from a village in Volta Region. She ended up in Koforidua because that’s where the job was. Her parents had long ago made the urban migration to Accra. Although never married, Celestine had two boys—a seventeen-year-old who attended boarding school in Begoro, about an hour north, and a thirty-five-year-old who was getting his master’s in finance at Towson University in Maryland. “He wants to stay in the U.S.,” she said. “If he gets a green card, I will go to visit him.”