Meanwhile, just about every weekend for the last fifteen years, Celestine would hop on her motorcycle with her two digital cameras and travel to weddings, funerals, “any event,” she said. The five-by-eight prints she had made at a local lab cost her fifty pesewa each, and she sold them to her clients for twice that. She could also get larger prints laminated onto decorative panels for fifteen cedis, and her living room was cluttered with stacks of samples. But the profit margin was smaller on those, she said, as customers only seemed willing to pay about twenty cedis.
Celestine said she planned to retire from nursing in six years, at age sixty, at which point she would receive a small pension. “I have been saving,” she said. “I plan to open my own photo studio.”
“I have no doubt you will succeed,” I replied.
“I am always fighting,” she said, jabbing her fists like a boxer. “Struggle, struggle. You can’t rely on anybody, only God. As soon as you rely on another human being, that’s trouble for you. That’s my life. No boyfriend, no husband, they are very bad. God doesn’t like that. It’s a bad habit. It’s not godly.” I wondered about the no-account men who had passed through her life, breeding fatherless children and misandry, but I didn’t ask. “I praise God and thank Him every day for what I have,” she said. Then she took my picture.
4. Money Pit
If you want to get a sense of how the urban elite in Ghana shop, you go to the Accra Mall. The mall looks pretty much like malls in America. It’s clean and air-conditioned with lots of free parking, a well-designed multiplex, and a large anchor tenant on each end—Shoprite, a South African grocery chain, and Game, a South African version of Target. In between are trendy clothing and accessories boutiques that look vaguely familiar until you realize they are mostly South African knockoffs of popular Western chains. There’s a Pottery Barn lookalike called La Maison, for example. Walking through the Accra Mall is sort of like being in a parallel shopping universe, or a Star Trek episode about a planet where everything is sort of like home, but tweaked in some weird way. There is even an “iShop,” which sells Apple products but is not a real Apple store.
I’m not much of a mall rat even in America, and when I spend lots of time in a country where daily shopping is done in chaotic public markets and along trash-strewn boulevards lined with shacks and lean-tos, I tend to forget all about things like Pottery Barn and Cinnabon. I just never wake up in Koforidua thinking, “Damn, I wish I could go browse wrought-iron candlestick holders.” (Actually, come to think of it, you can get some pretty cool hand-forged iron stuff in the Koforidua public market.) I get used to not having that stuff around, and then I forget about it, which makes seeing it all the more shocking.
All of which is to say that while entering the Accra Mall would fail to dazzle back home, in Ghana it’s like walking through the main gate of the Emerald City.
With gemlike prices, I might add. Stuff in that mall is just mind-bogglingly expensive—far more than in the United States for the same merchandise. I don’t know if it’s the lack of competition, the inability of Africans to buy mail order on the Web, stiff import taxes, or all of the above, but if you want the good life in Ghana, you will pay dearly. Even the food in the grocery store is out of reach of most Ghanaians, but there too the merchandise is obviously geared to an elite crowd looking for prime steaks, Parmesan cheese, and vintage wines. Naturally, the crowd at the mall is relatively upscale, and you see plenty of obrunis from the diplomatic corps and the NGOs. Still, not everyone is as high-toned as you might expect. Whit maintains that the guards shoo away people who look “too bush”—radically indigent farmers with tattered clothing and matted hair. But there are plenty of very poor urbanites with a clean pair of jeans who stroll through the mall window shopping—aspiring to be modern consumers, as it were. I often found myself silently rooting for these apprentice materialists: “C’mon, you can get that blender if you work hard and save! Think of the mango smoothies!” Maybe someday, when you have electricity.
From the mall parking lot you can get on Ghana’s only expressway, which runs from there to the port of Tema. It was built under Nkrumah and was supposed to go all the way to Kumasi, the inland capital of Ashanti Region and Ghana’s second city. But Nkrumah was deposed before it could be finished. Under former President Kufuor, the government awarded a contract to a Chinese company to install streetlights along the busy tollway. The lights were substandard, made of cheap fiberglass and aluminum, and many have twisted and broken in the wind. Now they dangle limply over the roadway. “They were never hooked up anyway,” said Charlie.
We were driving, Charlie and I, on a weekend trip to Volta Region. Charlie generously offered to be my tour guide in what is one of Ghana’s most rugged and beautiful areas, so I picked him up on a Saturday morning at his house in a suburb of Accra called Adenta. His neighborhood was laid out in a loose grid of dusty and unnamed dirt roads, each block enclosing several sprawling one-story homes whose tile roofs were barely visible behind high walls. It reminded me of Phoenix, or possibly Phoenix when they completely run out of money for road maintenance. Although you couldn’t see much from the street, most of the homes appeared to be comfortable but not ostentatious. Some, however, aspired to considerably more grandeur; bougainvillea and bird-of-paradise cascaded over ornate gates scanned by remote cameras. Some had walls bunted with razor wire, or a row of electrified strands, or with menacing shards of glass cemented into the crown, reflecting the determination of the African elite to hold on to that which they have gained, and their lack of faith in the rule of law. In Western societies, the middle class functions as a buffer between the haves and the have-nots, providing a path for advancement without resort to guns and machetes. In Africa, the buffer is a wall.
Charlie’s property had a wall, a gate, and barking dogs but was otherwise undefended—partly because he wasn’t rich enough or elite enough to require further emplacements, and partly because the whole concept of residential fortification struck him as overkill, despite his readiness to believe Ghanaians capable of almost any contravention. “What are they so afraid of?” he asked me once.
His youngest son, ten-year-old Kosi, met me at the gate and led me inside. Charlie and Afi have five children—one older daughter, two sons who are away at boarding school, another daughter in junior high school, and Kosi—and their home is suitably capacious yet clearly built for function, not frills. Charlie designed and built it about fifteen years ago, and he claims his newer homes are much nicer. Still, it’s pretty nice—breezy and casual in layout, with hand-carved hardwood doors, four bedrooms (all with attached bathrooms), and a large, open living and dining area. It would be a perfectly nice home in America (it even had an attached garage), but some features, or lack of them, would seem strange in, say, Denver. Despite the amazing amount of good food that comes out of Afi’s kitchen, the cooking area is small; one reason is that Afi and her daughters still do much of their cooking on an outdoor brazier, village-style. There is no dishwasher, which would strike any African as superfluous when you have five children. And there is no washing machine or dryer—again, not counting the children, who do all the family laundry by hand. The children also sweep and mop the terrazzo floors throughout the house every day. To do all these chores they must first haul water, because Charlie’s well isn’t working. It seems a neighbor drilled a well that tapped into Charlie’s aquifer, draining his own supply. During my visit, Charlie was in the process of getting a new well drilled, but these things take time in Ghana.
As a contractor Charlie mostly works in the field, but he also maintains a comfortable home office with well-stocked bookshelves, a late-model computer with Internet service, and a CD player. Charlie loves American soul music, especially Motown, and books about American history. On his desk was a copy of Bill Clinton’s autobiography. I picked it up. “Have you read it?” he asked me.
I confessed I had not.
“It’s good,” he said. “I liked him. He was very respected in Africa.
”
One of Charlie’s daughters had made us omelets, but for Charlie the repast was fatally compromised by the absence of his fresh daily bread, which had not been delivered that morning. Saying he would eat some bananas on the road, he left me to my breakfast and went to load his bag into the truck. Soon we were on the road, the smog and traffic of Accra disappearing behind us. After a couple of hours we crossed a steel arch span over the Volta River south of the Akosambo Dam and headed north and east. Overhead, high-tension power lines hummed. Charlie said that for years after the dam was built in the early 1960s, Volta Region was still being powered by creaking British generators left over from colonial times. “All the power from the dam was sold to Togo and Ivory Coast, to line the pockets of the politicians in Accra,” he said. That changed in the 1980s under the military rule of Rawlings, who is Ewe.
Along the road, under shade trees, we passed displays of wooden djembes and peg drums for sale. “This is the land of the Peki,” said Charlie. “They are an Ewe tribe known for their drums, and for starting wars.” I wondered if the two were related, but Charlie wasn’t sure. He told me that an incident in a tribal war against this group is how his family got its name. “My great-grandfather was fighting the Peki,” he said, “and a bullet was deflected off his machete in a scabbard at his side. It would have killed him. Our name means ‘metal trap or ‘money trap.’”
“‘Money trap’?” I said.
“Well, metal and money were typically the same thing.”
“Of course. So you could say your family is a money trap.”
“Possibly even a money pit,” he said, alluding to his several homes and kids in private schools.
We drove on, the landscape providing Charlie with a running commentary on the catalog of his entrepreneurial ventures. Here was a cattle ranch; Charlie had tried that once. There was a teak plantation; Charlie knew all about that. “The teak forests in Volta are the best in the country because the rain pattern is ideal,” Charlie said. “You get lots of rain, but interspersed with dry periods, which makes the grain very tight,” and he balled up his large fist to demonstrate. “In other parts of the country where it is too wet, the grain is not so tight. The Volta teak is as good as Burmese teak and can even be sold as such if it is shipped through Asia.”
It seemed obvious to me that Charlie had made the right decision when he gave up his studies in medicine. Not that his career has followed a linear path—he’s been a serial entrepreneur, with plenty of ups and downs—but the consistent thread has been a willingness to try just about anything new, from mechanized salt farming to building a better cement block. His business career actually started in college, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where he wrote his master’s thesis on a technique he developed to inoculate a local plant with palm wine to create a substitute for hops (which don’t grow in Ghana) and thus brew a genuinely local beer. “I decided I didn’t want to go into the business of making people intoxicated,” he said. (Charlie enjoys an occasional beer or cognac, but he swears allegiance mostly to coffee.) And so he moved on to the next idea, and the next, in the process employing a lot of his countrymen, which he still does on his construction crews.
Although he grew up in Accra, like most Ewe Charlie maintains strong ties to Volta Region. He and Afi have a house in Keta, a windswept barrier island of fishermen and salt farmers hard by the Togo border, and relatives throughout the region. On a trip that spanned several hundred miles over two long days (I did all the driving), Charlie knew the location of every single speed bump and police checkpoint, most of which he complained about. The speed bumps that really got him going were the homemade ones built out of mud and stone by local communities. “They are much too high, they ruin cars,” he said. I wasn’t sure how speed bumps could be any worse for cars than the sinkholes all over the roads in Ghana. As for the police—well, how much time do you have?
“It used to be hard to become a policeman here,” Charlie said after a cop at one barricade glared at us with more than the usual suspicion. “They had to pass exams and physicals; now it’s just who you know. Many of them today don’t even speak English. Sometimes when I get pulled over, I pretend I don’t speak the local language, only English. They get confused and just let me go!” He laughed solidly at the thought.
No, Charlie wasn’t too intimidated by the police, despite their stern roadside queries and loaded Kalashnikovs. One time he scolded a cop soliciting a bribe from Whit. “This man comes over here to try and make a business, to provide jobs for Ghanaians, and you give him trouble!” he said to the officer. “How do you expect this country to grow?”
As we advanced north, the landscape narrowed to a twenty-mile sliver of land between the giant lake on the west and the mountains along the Togo border due east. We stopped for a lunch of street food—goat meat kebobs, bananas and coconut shards—in Kpando, a chaotic market town on the lake. Along the breezy shore, fishermen in dugout canoes raised sails sewn of flour sacks and scudded out over the waves with their long nets. There was supposed to be a ferry from Kpando to Donkorkrom, ten miles across the lake, but lately it had not been running. We continued north to the city of Hohoe, where Charlie had an uncle he wanted to visit. His uncle, an herbal healer, or medicine man, of royal ancestry, lived in a dark stuccoed hut off a courtyard in the center of town. He was at least in his seventies and quite small, especially standing next to Charlie, who had to stoop as we entered the small home. We sat in plastic chairs and shared water from a cup. The pair spoke in Ewe for about twenty minutes. Charlie apologized to me for the perceived rudeness, explaining that his uncle’s English was poor. I didn’t mind; after a long drive, the singsong rhythm of their conversation was soothing in a musical way. Soon we got up to leave, and Charlie gave his uncle fifteen cedis. Back in the car, he said the old man complained that the country was going to hell and the younger generation had forgotten the traditional ways. Old people are pretty much the same everywhere.
Charlie told me that despite his uncle’s humble trappings, the man was sitting on a gold mine—literally. Apparently he possessed a box stuffed full of ancestral gold jewelry that his family had collected over centuries of royal service in Ewe villages around Volta Region. Rather than sell the stash, which would clearly have artistic value well beyond its metallic worth, he made money by renting out the finery to chiefs for their festive gatherings called durbars—sort of like Harry Winston loaning gems to starlets on Oscar night. Not all Ghanaians are as poor as they look, Charlie reminded me, and his uncle was certainly proof. And yet it was still expected that Charlie, the big-city nephew, would slip him some bills during a brief visit.
Getting out of Hohoe proved a significant order, as every road was blocked by several long funeral processions, a fact of life in Ghana on a Saturday afternoon. We sat in traffic and watched columns of marching mourners in black and red robes file past the car. It was a curious custom, the Ghanaian funeral party. In a country where, to put it mildly, discretionary income was at a premium, people spent copious sums on these extravagant send-offs—catering meals and alcohol for hundreds of people, hiring bands and sound systems, to say nothing of the elaborate handmade coffins and cemetery memorials. Guests too must pony up—traveling from far away and paying tailors to make custom robes out of fabric chosen by the next of kin. In her book The Imported Ghanaian, Alva K. Sumprim writes of a boy whose parents spent more on his funeral than they were willing to spend on the drugs and medical treatment that might have saved his life. It is commonly said in Ghana that you never know how many friends you have until you die.
“It never used to be this way,” said Charlie, munching on a banana as we waited. “The whole funeral thing really started in 1979 with the crackdowns related to the military coups. The curfews shut down the nightclubs in Accra, and it became dangerous to act wealthy or even middle class. If you had money, you didn’t want to show it. So no one had parties or went out. Instead, the funerals became the parties. Now it’s cra
zy.” Eventually the crowds thinned and we escaped Hohoe, bearing east toward the mountains along the Togo border, where jagged faces of exposed rock creased the horizon.
Togo, population around seven million, is in many ways very different from its larger western neighbor. The sliver-sized country has been ruled by the same autocratic family (father and now son) for more than forty years, and the economy has stagnated along with most pretense of representative government, despite recent controversial elections. By comparison Ghana is the land of opportunity, and many Togolese have migrated west. Some thrive in the food service industry: a former German and then French colony, Togo has a francophone culture that extends to its cuisine. Togolese chefs, schooled in the sauces of Escoffier, find steady work in Ghanaian hotels and the homes of the elite.
Lomé, the capital city, rises on the coast just east of Charlie’s home in Keta and only a hundred miles or so from Accra. It used to be a wild place, said Charlie, with hedonistic nightclubs and candlelit French restaurants. “The Togolese, they really knew how to have fun,” he said. “We would go over there just for dinner and dancing. Now it’s all gone to hell.” Poverty and desperation have spiked a dangerous crime wave in Lomé, with muggings and carjackings common. According to the U.S. State Department, the beaches and public markets are unsafe even by day.
“The last time I went to Lomé, I threw up,” said Charlie.
Max Alexander Page 29