Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  “Literally?”

  “Literally.”

  But along the Togo-Volta border—a line drawn in Europe in the nineteenth century—the differences between the two countries become insignificant. The people on both sides are simply Ewe. Although we passed several official border crossings (all closed on Sunday), dozens of dirt tracks wandered into the bush, back and forth across the border. At places, our main road actually veered into Togo. “We are in Togo now,” said Charlie as we cruised along.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Believe me.”

  I pulled over next to a woman carrying a sack of charcoal on her head. “Bonjour, madame.”

  “Bonjour, monsieur.” She smiled broadly and waved, balancing the sack on her head.

  “S’il vous plaît, est-ce qu’on est proche au Togo?”

  “Ici Togo,” and she pointed at her feet.

  “I told you,” said Charlie, laughing as we drove off.

  “My first African dictatorship,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to have a visa.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re back in Ghana again.”

  Charlie needed to go to Keta to pay the electric and water bill on his house there. “You can’t send checks?” I asked.

  “They won’t take checks from a bank in Accra.”

  “Really?” I was surprised because while credit cards are rarely accepted in Ghana (and often subject to fraud), checks are pretty standard; Whit paid his employees with checks, and he wrote checks for business supplies at several Accra merchants. “What is your bank?” I asked.

  “Barclays.”

  “They won’t take a Barclays check for your utility bills?”

  “Not in Keta from an Accra branch,” he said. Apparently there was no reliable financial infrastructure to verify interbank checks, at least not on the level of personal accounts. Like the traffic jams, the information jams ate up huge productivity bandwidth, forcing businesspeople like Charlie to drive hours to pay simple bills.

  “It’s a lot of work, owning houses here,” I said. Charlie had another place up on the Akwapim Ridge, near the president’s Peduase Lodge.

  “You know, in Ghana, houses are like retirement accounts,” he replied. “If you have money, it’s where you put it. Saving in a bank is risky because the cedi is so unstable. I used to keep money in a London bank, but that’s also risky, because you have currency fluctuations. Real estate is much safer.”

  “It’s real.”

  “Exactly. As long as you are careful what you buy, it will always be there.”

  “What do you mean, careful?”

  “Private land sales are not always honored,” he said. “You can buy land and before you know it, someone else is building a house there. Then you must litigate. It’s a big mess.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “It’s best to buy land from the government. Also if you are smart, you will start building right away.”

  “So that’s why I see so many half-built houses in the middle of nowhere.”

  “They are asserting their claim. You put up something, whatever you can afford.”

  In many ways Ghana seems like a modern capitalist society, but dig a little beneath the surface and you find all sorts of weird idiosyncrasies, like the lack of basic, reliable title laws. Indeed the whole concept of private property, a relatively recent idea even in the West, is still highly ambiguous in Ghana and many other African countries, where the ancient notion of the commons is often still respected. Much like the European nobility of the Middle Ages, chiefs in Ghana are typically stewards of common land in their communities, with the power to decide how it is used, and by whom. (Chiefs are not, however, part of the government; in fact they are barred from participating in politics.) Friction occurs where the modern world of private land intersects with the traditional world of common land. It’s not unusual for a Ghanaian to purchase property and find out later that another family claims use rights, based on long-held chieftaincy grants. The nebulous world of land use is another reminder that Africa can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated to do business.

  Around a corner, at another checkpoint, a cop waved us over with his rifle. I groaned and rolled down my window. “Please, I would like a ride to my barracks,” he said, motioning down the road.

  “A ride?” said Charlie. “Where is your car?” He was being a wise guy: Ghanaian police almost never have cars.

  “I have no car,” said the cop, who looked to be maybe twenty and probably didn’t know how to drive.

  “Are you smart or stupid?” asked Charlie.

  “Please?”

  “We only let smart people in this car.”

  “Oh, I am smart,” said the young man, straightening visibly.

  “Okay,” said Charlie. “You may get in, but we will see how smart you are. If not, you will walk.”

  The young man climbed in the back. He was a new recruit, he told us, from a tribe in the far north of Ghana; he did not speak Ewe and knew no one in this region. He and Charlie spoke briefly in Twi, but after a few miles we reached his barracks and let him out.

  “Don’t you think you were pressing your luck?” I asked Charlie.

  “I just like to make jokes,” he said. “If you just wear a frown all day, what’s the point?” I thought about the sad face I’d be wearing in a Ghanaian hoosegow, then realized there probably wouldn’t be any mirrors.

  “Good thing for us he seemed like a nice young man,” I said.

  “Maybe even smart,” said Charlie.

  Over dinner at our hotel in Ho (the large regional capital, not to be confused with smaller Hohoe), Charlie and I talked about Burro. “Do you think Whit will go for nonprofit status and try to get donations?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “He’s pretty committed to making this business stand on its own.”

  “It’s taking so long,” said Charlie. “I admire Whit for sticking with it, but I hope he doesn’t lose his money.”

  As for his own exposure, Charlie had no cash in the company; his deal was an equity stake in return for six months’ work getting the business off the ground—basically providing his local expertise and advice. That time frame had long since passed, and Charlie was pretty busy with his own construction business, but he remained actively involved in Burro. Whenever Whit needed a contact in Accra, or someone to speed a shipment through customs, or advice on how to deal with a personnel matter, Charlie was the man. Still, Whit and I sensed he was getting impatient. With scarce access to capital and sky-high interest rates, the concept of nurturing a start-up for several years was understandably foreign to Ghanaian entrepreneurs like Charlie.

  Our primary tourist destination for the weekend was Wli Falls, at two hundred sixty feet the highest waterfall in Ghana. Arriving at the turnoff for the Agumatsa Wildlife Sanctuary, we parked and walked a few yards, until the mighty cascade, still perhaps half a mile distant, came into view. Vultures circled high above where the water exploded from a deep fissure in the side of a red rock wall and tumbled down a sheer face lined with moss.

  “Now, that is really something, isn’t it?” said Charlie.

  “Indeed,” I said.

  We both stood and stared for a good long minute. Finally Charlie said, “It looks like a woman urinating.”

  “You know I hadn’t considered that,” I replied, “but now that you mention it, I can see your point.” For better or worse, it was now all I could think of.

  Accessing the dramatic lower pool of the falls entailed a forty-minute walk along a jungle trail that crossed the Agumatsa River in ten places, over rustic wooden bridges. In typical Ghanaian style you had to hire a local guide, for no reason other than to spend some money. As it turned out, however, our guide proved handy when, ten minutes into our walk, the heavens opened with a monsoon downpour. Samuel (that was his name) quickly located a large banana tree and proceeded to bite off the stems of two giant leaves to use as makeshift umbrellas. The leaves did nothing; th
e rain still soaked us. But it was funny to walk along holding banana leaves over our heads.

  The rain had stopped by the time we reached the giant pool at the base of the falls. It was an awesome sight: mist thrown off by the thundering cascade vaporized in a massive cloud, bending rainbows over the spray and drenching the treetops. On the rock cliffs surrounding the falls, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of giant fruit bats dangled like effigies over the abyss, waiting for their twilight wakeup call.

  All of this nature would have been quite enough to write home about, but there was more. This being a weekend, a gang of youths had hiked in with a generator and enough sound equipment to address the North Korean Workers’ Party. In fairness you needed a lot of wattage to compete against the roar of that waterfall, so the wall of speakers did not seem excessive in context, once you got past the very weird idea of a public-address system blasting Ghanaian rap music at the base of the country’s most spectacular natural attraction. Honestly, I don’t know how the bats managed to sleep. But it all made perfect sense to the busloads of city kids in the water, splashing, yelling, and dancing.

  The compulsion to improve the great outdoors with gasoline-powered amplification is not exclusively African. But as practiced in Ghana, it is almost certainly rooted in drumming traditions combined with the simple fact, which cannot be stated too many times, that here all life happens outdoors. Westerners tread reverently in the woods, but Ghanaians crash in with as many comforts as they can call home—slashing at snakes, waking up fruit bats, and rudely interrupting the great cascade, Mother Nature going about her business.

  1. Sorry

  Two nurses in white and one white brother leaned over my face, prone at the end of a narrow hospital gurney. “Sorry,” said the head nurse, an imposing woman of the type in Ghana who typically addresses a white man as “you, white man!” although on this particular day I can’t be sure if she actually said that. I do recall her chanting “sorry” like a mantra. And I vaguely recall other hospital employees around my legs and arms—comforting me with their touch, I thought at first, until I tried to bend my knee and could not resist the pressure of African arms, and then understood, through my haze of apprehension, that I was being pinned down in preparation for a “procedure” that did not involve anesthesia.

  “Sorry.”

  I had spent most of 2009 in Ghana, returning home in late fall. Shortly after Harper’s high school graduation in May 2010, I traveled back to Ghana. It felt good to be back—almost like home at that point—but contentment was short-lived. After enjoying all the comfort, privilege, and respect (however unearned) that accrue to a Westerner in the developing world, the day came when the Ghanaians stopped looking up to me as a fortunate obruni and instead stared down pathetically at the heap of my existence on a gurney. I hesitate to report how I got there, in the interest of sparing the reader not so much discomfort as disappointment. For although the Gothic catalog of pox, pestilence, and horror waiting to befall the traveler to sub-Saharan Africa is long and well documented—from malaria and ebola to AIDS and dengue fever, from car crashes to heatstroke, and from mammals (lions, mercenaries) to microbes—none of these plagues led me to Koforidua’s Eastern Regional Hospital. On the contrary, I must report that my day of infirmary was the result of a freak accident while sitting at a desk. It could have happened in Manhattan, or the Seventh Arrondissement, or downtown Dallas, but it happened in Burro’s Koforidua office on Hospital Road. Fortunately, as the street name suggests and as I have mentioned before, the hospital I never wanted to visit was nearby. Equally fortunate, on that morning the Burro office was swarming with roughly a dozen employees, interns and volunteers, all of them anxious to help me. Burro had come a long way by May of 2010.

  Whit’s company was still small and not yet making a profit, but it was no longer operating in a vacuum. Earlier in the year, my brother had met with product designers at Ideo in San Francisco; traveled to Utah to consult battery experts at a company called Power Stream; organized a Burro internship program with the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University; and partnered with Greenlight Planet, maker of an innovative solar lantern for the developing world, to produce a nonsolar (battery-operated) version for Burro. Word was getting out, and Whit was being asked to address organizations as diverse as the engineering department of Brown University and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), a Seattle-based nonprofit working in more than seventy countries to break cycles of poverty and disease.

  Yet just as interest in Burro grew, it became hard for Whit to commit to American speaking engagements, since business in Ghana was consuming more of his time. Four BYU interns were arriving in May, as well as an accounting consultant from Seattle and her twenty-two-year-old son, a QuickBooks savant, both of whom had volunteered to help Whit get his books in order in return for a free place to stay, a few tourist insights, and the occasional use of a vehicle (they had bought their own plane tickets). I had arrived in the middle of the month, and Jan would return in June. Whit was running out of room at the combination Burro office and residence; he needed a home of his own. Still not ready to buy property, he engaged a local real estate agent to secure a decent rental.

  In Ghana one finds not so much a home as a project to take over. Virtually no house available to rent is actually finished, at least not in the Western sense. With no mortgage market to speak of, people build homes (and for that matter commercial buildings) in stages, as they acquire the money.* And a key way to get the money is by finding a tenant, who is generally expected to pay at least two years’ rent in advance. The landlord then takes that cash and invests in the house, adding amenities and moving the project further down the line. In other words, tenancy is used to add incremental value to the property, not to generate income. In this way Whit secured a commodious but unfinished four-bedroom home on a rutted dirt road outside town, behind the Capital View Hotel where we often ate dinner.

  Whit’s African version of the starter château, while unremarkable by the exuberantly vulgar standards of many upper-class Ghanaian homes, would strike most Americans as the fortress of a rapacious drug lord. A one-story contemporary complex finished in pebble-textured stucco, the house was defined largely by a series of arched porticos and a roof cornice ornamented (in contrasting tones of crushed pebble) with repetitions of the traditional Akan pictograph for Gye Nyame (“Except for God”). Not that you could see much of the house from what I hesitate to even dignify with the term road. Like most detached African homes above the level of village huts, Whit’s estate cowered behind an imposing concrete wall, albeit without razor wire.

  Inside the house, large rooms with terrazzo floors radiated from a wide central hallway designed to facilitate cooling breezes; there were three toilets, a large concrete shower stall, and, in the master bathroom, an actual soaking tub, which apparently sealed the deal for Whit.

  But it was hardly habitable. As with his renovations to the Burro office, Whit had to add external storage tanks to compensate for the sporadic public water supply, as well as a hot water heater, kitchen appliances, and cabinets. There was also a complete interior and exterior paint job to oversee and substantial upgrades to the wiring. This is the sort of work that in Ghana can take months to organize and execute, as the Ghanaian’s commitment to heart-stopping highway velocity does not translate to the building trades. Months, however, were precisely what Whit did not have. Specifically, he had a few weeks. As luck would have it, an incentive to alacrity materialized in the desperation of the landlady, a woman named Nancy.

  Whit and Nancy had agreed on a two-year lease of one hundred fifty cedis a month, all of it payable in advance. In return, Nancy would invest the bulk rent payment in the home—paying for electrical wiring and water hookup, among other basic necessities. But after a couple of weeks, Nancy contacted Whit and said the money was gone. “Please,” she said, “I beg you, I need more money to finish the work.”

  “So I agreed to give her more
money,” Whit said, “but I made a deal with her. I said, ‘I will pay for one more year, but I need to move in next week, and this is what needs to get done before then.’ We made a list. We divided up the work into inside and outside jobs, basically defined the scope of the work. I said, ‘This all needs to get done by next week; every week that it’s not done, I get one month extra free rent.’ She was three weeks late, so now I have three years and three months on my lease. And I got an explicit agreement that I can sublet.”

  Getting the jobs done was not the same as getting them done well, however. An electrician was engaged to install lights and ceiling fans, the latter of which were mounted so that the metal blades rotated about two inches below bare lightbulbs hanging from wires, which created two problems. The first was that at night the spinning fan blades created a stroboscopic effect as they whirled under the lightbulbs, lending the effect of a silent movie to our motions. This was amusing for about five minutes and then generally annoying, possibly even seizure-inducing. The second problem was that occasionally a gust of wind from the jalousie windows would cause a fan to wobble slightly—just enough for the blades to strike the compact fluorescent bulb (the only kind widely available in Ghana) hanging above it with explosive force that would send razors of glass and poisonous dust raining down on floors, beds, and occupants. As I said, these fans and bulbs were installed by a professional Ghanaian electrician, which perhaps adds context to the hurdles Whit faced in training his own employees.

  On that front, the first casualty was Kevin. Whit had fired him in the spring over a handful of issues, including absences with company vehicles and a reluctance to work as part of a team, that eroded confidence. “He seemed shocked,” said Whit, “but he took it like a man.” I knew I would miss Kevin, who had taught me so much about his country, but his sacking was a reminder that Whit was building a real business, not a charity. “It was like a giant exhale when he left,” said Whit. “Morale improved overnight. I started driving his route; you know how he used to drag himself back at seven o’clock looking like he’d been hit by a car? I’m finished every day at like four. I have no idea what the fuck he was doing out there.”