The rain dampened the dust and cleared the view from our second-floor terrace of the twin fifteen-hundred-foot hills that rose, like the humps of a Bactrian camel, a mile southeast of downtown Koforidua. They are known as the Obuotabiri Mountains, and tradition says they are the home of the local gods as well as mysterious dwarves. That legend is somewhat trivialized by the mountains’ current status as a broadcasting relay station—eight blinking antennae sprout from the highest peak. But just as modern African village chiefs enjoy listening to soccer on the radio, so perhaps do the gods of this noisy merchant town find it expedient to keep abreast of the mortals through the evening news.
Thanks to the broadcast towers, a rutted dirt track to the summit is sporadically maintained and negotiable by truck seasonally and by foot always, affording a fine view of town and a refreshing breeze. Yet despite this relatively reliable access to a pleasant vantage and clime, human habitation ends about a third of the way up; from there, houses give way to slopes dense with tall grass and banana palms, above which tower eighty-foot-tall silk cotton trees with wide, smooth gray trunks and umbrella tops. Below this verdant crown the dirt brown city, much of which we could take in from our terrace, sprawls chaotically, and watching the passage of humanity through this maze was an endless source of entertainment. On any given day there were parades of youth groups running through the streets carrying school banners and led by frantic drummers; groaning livery trucks unloading dozens of market-bound farmers from the outlands, who hefted coffin-sized sacks of cassava root; rattletrap tro-tros bound for the town of Suhum and heralded by the throaty “Su-Su-Su!” call of the driver’s mate; and men and women carrying loads on their heads that defied physics. I distinctly recall one man, who in America could find good work in the rings of Barnum & Bailey, balancing a full sheet of plywood on his head while riding a bicycle.
Yet as far as some of the locals were concerned, the real show was up on the veranda where the obrunis lived. We were out there all the time—it functioned as our living room—and since no other white people lived in the city center, our highly public existence was, for them, a spectacle worthy of footlights. From morning until late at night we endured the interminable cries of “white man!” and “obruni!” from strangers who mostly just wanted us to wave. Nothing wrong with that, of course—except that by the tenth or eleventh wave it got a little old, and it was still morning. By the end of the day, it could actually be anxiety-inducing. I realized with discomfort what it must be like to be a celebrity, and I suddenly felt sympathy as I never had before with the plight of the famous, who so defensively guard their privacy.
We weren’t famous, of course, just very different from most humans in their orbit, which I suppose made us rather nonhuman in their eyes. I don’t recall exactly when I began to feel like an animal on display, but I do recall a torpid night, just before dinner, when I turned to the assembled onlookers, some of them particularly strident in their catcalls, and yelled, “The zoo is closed, it’s feeding time,” before disappearing through the screen door.
One day out on the veranda, I was reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 2001 book The Shadow of the Sun, and I think I found my muse. Not the author—the late Polish journalist and New Yorker contributor who filed thoughtful, funny, and harrowing dispatches from Africa starting in 1958 (his first stop was newly independent Ghana)—but rather one of his subjects in the book, another journalist, named Felix Naggar.
In the early 1960s, Naggar was the Hemingway-esque East African bureau chief for Agence France Presse. He lived in a sumptuous villa in Nairobi’s exclusive Ridgeways neighborhood, which he apparently rarely left—gathering news over the phone and dictating stories to his staff of Indian copyboys, who sat at teleprinters and transmitted his reports to Paris. To hear Kapuscinski tell it, Naggar was a Mozart of the news dispatch: perfectly composed stories flowed effortlessly from his mouth, ready for the printed page. With no need to labor over his copy, he had plenty of time on his hands for a trifecta of more edifying pursuits, namely cigars, cuisine, and crime novels. “He was either supervising his cooks—he had the best kitchen in all of Africa,” writes Kapuscinski, “or sitting in front of the fireplace reading crime novels. In his mouth he held a cigar. He never removed it—unless it was just for a moment, in order to swallow a bite of baked lobster or taste a spoonful of pistachio sorbet.” The phone would ring, a source would reveal a tidbit of breaking news, and Naggar would dictate the breathless dispatch to his aides. At that point, says Kapuscinski, Naggar would “then return either to the kitchen, where he would stir something in the pots, or before the fireplace, to continue reading.”
This was a job I was cut out for. I was already the de facto chef at Burro world headquarters, where among my duties I had taken on the task of daily market shopping and dinner prep. (The alternative was eating in one of the town’s handful of vile restaurants, as Jan rarely had time to cook and Whit seemed incapable of making steam from boiling water.) I have enjoyed cooking since childhood, as much for the process as the food itself. I began, like so many cooks, at my mother’s side but soon moved on to cookbooks. As an adult, and after years cooking in restaurants, I graduated beyond the need for cookbooks except as they provided broad outlines for unfamiliar dishes or critical measurements for more technical creations. Over the years, in Europe, New York, and Los Angeles, I found myself drawn to the public green markets and food stalls, and I gained confidence in heading out to shop with no particular menu or ingredient list in mind but rather determined, like a Neanderthal to the hunt, to see what I could find and cook whatever followed.
I didn’t think about any of this before coming to Ghana, but soon after I arrived it became clear that my hunter-gatherer abilities were about to take on new significance. With nothing even remotely resembling a Western grocery store in Koforidua, food shopping was a daily scavenger hunt, and improvisation a survival skill. Most of our shopping was done in the town’s sprawling and odiferous public market, a maze of wooden stalls wedged into narrow walkways bisected by open drain channels clogged with vegetable trimmings in various states of compost. Here, every day of the week, anyone with a few cedi notes in his pocket could choose from hundreds of neatly constructed pyramids of tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, ginger, cabbage, cucumbers, avocados (charmingly known as “butter pears”), limes, lettuce (“salad leaves”), mangoes, papayas, pineapples, plantains, bananas, coconuts, rice, peanuts, eggs with anemic pale yellow yolks (precisely why I don’t know), green beans, dried beans, yams, eggplants (“garden eggs”), dried and smoked fish and shellfish of every size, and (in the rainy season) wild mushrooms and live snails as large as a baseball. In other sections of the market you could find bolts of fabric, handmade leather shoes, hair weaves, charcoal, cookware, and stiff switches with which to beat your child.
Considering that many African countries regularly contend with drought and famine (as did Ghana in 1982), the availability of so much cheap food was an unqualified blessing. And yet (to qualify anyway) this relative cornucopia was aggravated by two factors. The first was a numbing lack of diversity within each category (except when it came to dried fish); every stall with tomatoes, for example, proffered the exact same type of tomato, at the same price. While arguably fresh, sun-ripened, and juicy, they were all the same, everywhere and every day. It was as if every farmer in the country had sworn allegiance to the One Tomato; likewise every other species of vegetable and fruit. At first this lack of innovation puzzled me; why wouldn’t an enterprising farmer grow something different—an exotic tomato, a striped eggplant, a wax bean—and corner the market? Instead, with no distinguishing product, sellers resorted to a curious form of competitive begging:
“White man! Please buy from me!”
“White man! I have what you need!”
“White man! Come and see!”
I tried to spread the wealth and buy from different sellers every day, a strategy, I began to learn, that makes friends of no one. Bargaining was fruitless, as it were, although I never ceased enjoying the effort. Whit and I had developed a sort of vaudeville routine that shamelessly milked humor from the recent currency devaluation, in which one new cedi replaced ten thousand old cedis. I would give a mock shudder at the stated price, then say, “Old cedis, right?”
Usually that drew a laugh. “Oh no! New Ghana cedis!”
“Wow! Is that obruni price?”
“Not obruni price! Everybody price!” I rated the whole routine mildly amusing, but Ghanaians regularly doubled over in laughter at the exchange.
“Okay, but I want a gift.” A “gift” was the traditional extra tomato or two thrown in, as gratitude for your business. Most sellers kept a special pile of less-than-perfect or overly ripe produce just for these gifts. Otherwise, it was exactly the same as the regular produce.
Everywhere I went in Ghana, I kept an eye out for that unusual tomato or strange eggplant, but it didn’t exist. Over time and through our own business dealings, I began to understand how poverty depresses innovation and entrepreneurship, even on the level of the produce market. Although times are relatively good right now, Ghanaian farmers live constantly on the edge of disaster. A crop destroyed by pests, or one that simply doesn’t sell, can ruin lives. There is no margin for error. Risk is simply too risky.
So the proven tomato, the one that does well in the local soil and sells well in the local market, is the one whose seeds get saved and replanted. In the long term, of course, that practice promotes a dangerous lack of biodiversity; sooner or later a new pest will come along that positively adores the Ghanaian tomato, and then there will be none. This is what happened in Ireland during the potato famine of the nineteenth century. But then as now, a farmer living on a pittance will always focus on his family’s needs today, not a theoretical caterpillar of tomorrow.
(This hand-to-mouth lifestyle had clear implications for Burro. In the first battery offering, the monthly subscription price was too much money for most customers, even though it saved money in the long run. And for a lot of customers under the new, pay-as-you-go system, the one-cedi deposit was a big hurdle, again despite the savings.)
The second problem with food shopping in Koforidua was the long list of staples that were completely unavailable—like coffee, except for instant Nescafé, which is synonymous with “coffee” in Ghana. Or dairy. The country simply has no dairy culture, and gold bullion could not buy you a drop of fresh milk or cream in Koforidua, although a couple of stores sold boxed milk. Butter could be found at great expense (imported from France and quite good; how it found its way to our Anglophone banlieue I have no clue), but cheese might as well have been moon rocks. Nor was there yogurt, except in presweetened and artificially flavored children’s drinks. Olive oil was considered medicine, like castor oil, and had to be bought from the pharmacist. All of these exotic alimentations could be bought, expensively, at the Western-style supermarket in Accra, but that was a full day or overnight trip.
The daily scavenger hunt for groceries really became an adventure when it came to buying meat. Poultry was relatively simple: both chickens and turkeys could be bought live in the market (you could always find someone to butcher them) or dressed and frozen rock hard from one of several “cold stores”—modest but busy shops with a few chest freezers and a scale. Cold stores also sold frozen fresh fish, as opposed to the dried fish in the market, and, oddly enough, factory-made hot dogs, rather optimistically labeled “sausages.” Red meat beyond processed frankfurters, however, necessitated a visit to the abattoir, a windowless octagonal house of horrors within the public market. Under this squalid dome lay a tableau that might have been shot by Brady at Antietam. Counters lined in bloodstained vinyl sagged under the hacked carcasses of large mammals, hooves akimbo, skulls cleaved and bellies ripped open. Shirtless butchers in stained aprons wielded machetes over these dishonored corpses, sending bits of bone and flesh flying.
“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.”
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 terrible 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 notably 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.”
Jan regularly hauled back suitcases of stuff from the States, much of it donated by friends, for her Kof-town kids, everything from books to shoes and backpacks to pencil sharpeners that weren’t made by Gillette. Tired of being called obruni (“That’s not my name!”), she made sure the kids knew our names, to which they invariably added the prefix “Uncle” or “Auntie.” That made it easy to tell which kids didn’t go to school and thus had virtually no English: they were the ones who shouted “Auntie Max” and “Uncle Jan.”
Jan held school of her own after dinner most evenings. Several kids would come up to do homework and get a little extra practice in English, the lack of which would pretty much guarantee a life of penury in Ghana, despite the obvious cultural importance of their native tongues. They would spread their workbooks around the dining room table and use the Burro whiteboard as a blackboard. One night, as the younger kids played a round of Memory, a preschool game with cards and symbols, I helped an older girl named Elizabeth with her composition homework.
The assignment page of her workbook dealt with the subject of “Homes.” First she had to write a sentence describing her home, based on one of several prompts: flat, bungalow, condominium, hut. “I live in a flat,” she wrote carefully, which seemed debatable considering the concrete bunker with no indoor plumbing or cooking facilities that she called home. Then again, it wasn’t exactly a hut, bungalow sounded far too charming, and it certainly wasn’t a condo. The next section dealt with describing the rooms in the home, with prompts like living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, and terrace. Elizabeth’s home had no kitchen, dining room, or terrace; even the concept of a living room seemed a stretch; Ghanaians live outside. “Why don’t you write a sentence describing how many people sleep in your bedroom?” I suggested.
She held up her fingers and counted: “Sister … sister … sister … brother … grandma … me. Six.” She wrote: “Six people sleep in my bedroom.”
The last section was called “Near the Home,” with a list that included market, park, MRT station, and “hawking centre.” There were no parks (except for the cracked concrete expanse that hosted the Thursday bead market and various school and church pageants), and all of Koforidua was one giant hawking centre. On her own, Elizabeth came up with “bank,” several of which stood nearby. She wrote “Our house is near the …” and then she slowly penned B and A. “What’s next?” she asked. “R?”
I made the N sound.
“N! What’s next?”
I made the K sound.
“K?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m going to urinate.” And with that, she set down her pencil and repaired to the relative luxury of our indoor facilities.
Mena was the old deaf lady who lived behind the courtyard and hand-washed our laundry when we got tired of doing it ourselves—meaning after about two weeks into January. I didn’t know her real name; Mena is a contraction of the Twi words me ene, or “my mother,” and is typically used as an honorific for any older woman—like we would call an old woman generically “Grandma,” although Mena was in fact Precious and Pamela’s real grandmother. She was bent over with arthritis and had just a few teeth, but taking in laundry was one of the only ways she had to earn money—not that she would have starved without our cash, as she was surrounded by supportive family, but every cedi counted. There was no set price; we gave her a bag of laundry, it came back clean and folded the next day, or the day after (delivered by one of the children in the courtyard, who expected a coin or a banana), and we paid what we wished, generally around ten cedis, which was a lot of money for an old lady in Koforidua. Whenever we returned from a stay in the United States, Mena knelt at our feet and made a prayer sign, in gratitude that her benefactors were back, dirty laundry soon to follow.
Communicating with Mena was always a challenge because she talked mainly with her hands—not formal sign language but her own invention of wild gesticulations, accompanied by guttural vocal sounds. She seemed to be a naturally animated person, so that even the most routine communications were delivered as if she were directing firemen to a burning orphanage. Quite how I’m unsure, but the children in the courtyard were able to comprehend her; mostly what they comprehended was Mena’s generalized desire to beat the tar out of any child within arm’s reach, so they kept their distance—especially Kwabena, the ten-year-old who did not go to school, spoke no English, and was the punching bag of every adult in the courtyard. Whenever Mena passed Kwabena, she would give him a slap just on general principle.
I couldn’t understand much of Mena’s sign language, but the basics were accessible enough. If she meant to say your laundry would be ready later that day, she would point to her wrist (not that she actually had a watch) and make several tight spirals with her finger—signifying hours. Laundry that would not be completed until the next day was indicated by a wrist point followed by a wide circle drawn in the sky—the passing of a day. Equally easy to understand was Mena’s opinion of your payment, which was theoretically voluntary but in practice subject to her stern regard. When you picked up your finished laundry and paid her, she would register happiness with your donation by kneeling in supplicant pose and bowing her head. Displeasure at the amount (for reasons that were never clear, perhaps a stubborn stain that required more work) was met with a scowl followed by finger wagging and grunting vowels, ending with the universal hunger gesture of hand to mouth. In this way we managed a crude business rapport over several months and many bags of laundry.
Jan and I invited the families around the courtyard to dinner one Sunday. Somehow over the course of the weekend it transpired that Pamela and her best friend Savannah would teach Jan and me how to make fufu. From this grew the addition of peanut soup, and once you make a pot of peanut soup in Ghana, you are setting yourself up for a big event. So that’s how it happened.
It began around three in the afternoon, when Jan and I took Savannah to the public market, quiet on Sunday but many stalls still open for business, with the shopping list she had written down. For the fufu we needed two simple ingredients: cassava and plantains, green and quite hard. Her list for the soup, spelled perfectly in English, read:
Groundnuts [peanut butter, made by hand and sold in thin plastic baggies knotted at the top]
Onions
Tinned tomatoes [what we would call tomato paste]
Ryco [a brand of bouillon cube]
Pepper [meaning ground dried chili peppers of an incendiary variety]
Chicken [bought hacked up and frozen from the cold store]
Back at the flat, Pamela joined us in the kitchen and we began to make the soup. First the girls peeled and chopped several onions, then tossed them into our enameled cast-iron pot along with the chicken pieces, the “tinned tomatoes” (maybe twice as large as an American can of tomato paste), and the bouillon cube. They added salt and copious handfuls of chili powder, covered the pot, and turned the heat on high.
Next we moved on to the fufu, which required peeling and cubing the cassava and plantains. This was being done outside in the courtyard, at the foot of our stairs; I was in the kitchen washing a few dishes when Jan came up and said, “Max, you’ve got to come down and see how they cut the cassava.”
I went down and noticed that Jan had been peeling the cassava root as I would—with a twin-bladed vegetable peeler. She had not made much progress. The girls, on the other hand, were almost through the whole basket of roots. Wielding massive long kitchen knives—almost machetes—in one hand and grasping a cassava root in the other, they deftly whacked the plant lengthwise, splitting the skin like bark off a log, then effortlessly tore the whole clean. A couple more whacks—again, holding both knife and plant in bare hands—and the roots were reduced to large chunks suitable for pounding. The plantains, of course, were simple to peel.
Into a pot of water went the washed plantain and cassava chunks, and onto the stove. “Uncle Max, please, we need a rubber for on top,” said Savannah. It took a minute for me to figure out they meant a plastic shopping bag which, laid over the boiling water and under the lid, helped to seal the steam.
By this time the chicken had steamed sufficiently in the other pot to add the liquid. Savannah and Pamela tore open the baggies of peanut butter and squeezed them into a large plastic bowl to which they had added water (from the tap, not completely safe; we generally cooked with purified water). Using their hands, they stirred the mixture and added more water until it reached the consistency of gravy, then poured it into the pot. We threw in a few snails for good measure, and let it all simmer. Although I did not have a cigar or a crime novel, around this point in the proceedings I truly felt like Felix Naggar over his Nairobi stove.
An hour later, the cassava and plantain chunks were cooked and ready for pounding. Back in the courtyard, the girls set up a station, assembling a bowl of water and another of the vegetable chunks. In the center of this operation was a carved hardwood mortar the size of a small stool, worn smooth from years of pounding, with a flat center and a wide lip. Joyce, who is Savannah’s aunt but also functions as her mother, sat on a bench and began to toss handfuls of plantain chunks into the mortar. Savannah stood above her, wielding the eight-foot-long pestle—nothing more than a straight tree trunk, roughly four inches in diameter. On the bottom of the pestle, the wood fibers had been pounded out into the shape of a mushroom cap, so that the surface greeting the vegetables was wide and smooth. As Savannah pounded in a steady rhythm, Joyce deftly added chunks of cassava and plantain along with a sprinkle of water; as the mixture solidified into a paste, she would then quickly flip and turn the whole mass, sort of like kneading bread, constantly repositioning the mound under the crushing pestle while slipping her hand away at the last split second.
This became hard to watch, because it was obvious that if Joyce and Savannah got their rhythm off, Joyce’s hand would be instantly mangled under the pile-driving action of the pestle. When I had been told earlier in the day that I would get a chance to pound fufu, I hadn’t realized that a woman’s hand would be at the mercy of my skill. “Just keep the same rhythm,” said Savannah when she handed me the pestle. “Let Joyce worry about her hand.”
Easier said than done. Try as I might to focus on my rhythm, I couldn’t stop worrying about Joyce’s hand—which of course caused me to lose my rhythm, which of course was the worst possible thing from Joyce’s standpoint.
The pounding proceeded without incident, however, and soon dinner was served. We had invited about twenty guests, and double that showed up—quite a party. Someone handed Mena a glass of wine with the warning, “Drink it slowly.” She sniffed it, took a sip, and sagely pronounced, “Beer!” It was also the only word of English I’d ever heard her pronounce.
The snails went quickly as they are a Ghanaian delicacy, on par with lobster in America, and were fished out of the stew by fast-moving children. For dessert Jan had made an apple crisp (South African apples, quite expensive, were generally available in the market) that the children thought strange; they much preferred the strawberry ice cream we had sent Savannah out for.
As bowls and plates were cleared, scraps of bones got tossed outside to the courtyard’s resident cur, a bitch named Future. This benign mongrel seemed generally better fed than the average slab-sided African pariah dog, perhaps because her agreeability encouraged human sympathy. Future’s charms were evidently not lost on the local canine studs, as she appeared to be constantly suckling new broods. Sometimes late at night I would wake to the terrible clamor of a dogfight somewhere out on the street; there are few alarms more piercing than the sadistic skirmish of a feral turf war, and I often wondered if Future was part of the fray, and if the next morning there would be, so to speak, no Future. But there she always was.
In the summer of 2010, Jan told me that Future had disappeared. Apparently there was a new shop in town that sold dog meat, according to Mary, who was Precious and Pamela’s mother, and dogs were disappearing left and right. They planned to get another dog.
Personal health required constant vigilance, given all the ways one could get sick, possibly very sick, in Ghana. Many of the serious diseases raging in the country, including cerebrospinal meningitis and polio, could be prevented with vaccines, and like all sensible Westerners (and most elite Africans) I had a full round of shots and boosters before traveling. But other afflictions were not so easily prevented. Cholera and dysentery—different bacterial infections of the intestine which begin with the foulest bodily eliminations imaginable and progress, if untreated, to death—coursed through the water of Ghana and lived on feces and food. Many of the insect-borne ailments had no vaccination, such as trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”), the fatal disease carried by the tsetse fly. Fortunately, tsetse flies are rare in southern Ghana, and even the ones in the north of the country are now said to be the noncarrying variety. Not so mosquitoes, which carry the parasites causing malaria and the viruses of yellow and dengue fever.
Malaria was the biggest concern because there is no vaccine, only a series of prophylactic drugs that may or may not prevent infection. Although most strains of malaria are not fatal in otherwise healthy adults, at least one is—and even the nonfatal versions might make you wish you were dead as you lie in bed, wracked with fever and night sweats. Meanwhile, the drugs all have various side effects. Lariam, the standard brand name for Mefloquine, is a synthetic analog of quinine developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s.* Among its side effects are vivid, hallucinogenic-like dreams or nightmares, depending on your point of view.
Malarone, the brand name for a cocktail of atovaquone and proguanil, is considerably more benign except for one major side effect: severe strain on the wallet. A daily dose costs more than three dollars when ordered online from Canada, and more than twice that at a U.S. pharmacy. Since most American health insurance policies won’t pay for malaria prevention at all, and virtually none will pay for more than thirty days of prophylaxis, a Malarone course adds up quickly over a long stay.
Finally there’s doxycycline, a tetracycline-type antibiotic that can cause stomach upset and, for some people, extreme sensitivity to sunlight—a notable side effect in a tropical clime. And you need to take it for a month after returning. On the other hand, doxy is dirt cheap and may provide the side benefit of inoculating against at least some bacterial bad guys.*
Sorting through all these options was only the beginning. Once you decided on your malaria drug of choice there was a daily debate over how to avoid side effects: Should I take it before bed and risk nightmares or sleeplessness? Or should I wait until morning and chance nausea? With dairy, or without? Before a meal, or after? These decisions sapped huge amounts of mental bandwidth. Meanwhile, we all carried stashes of ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic used to treat dysentery, and arguments raged about the proper timing of a cipro course. Whit’s Seattle doctor told him not to panic at the first sign of diarrhea, which was most likely garden variety and not a serious infection; why risk building immunity to the antibiotic over nothing? My doctor in Maine, on the other hand, said, in effect, bullshit—if you get the runs in Africa, start the cipro, pronto. Since my doctor had actually worked for several years in Uganda, I tended to believe him. At any rate, we spent more time discussing our medications than a roomful of nursing home residents.
Of course there is a fine line between vigilance and paranoia, and awareness of the range of ailments tended to breed, if nothing else, a virulent strain of hypochondria. Every sneeze and cough raised the specter of tuberculosis. A muscle ache brought on worries of yellow fever. That skin rash could be nothing—or it could be a three-foot-long parasitic worm festering inside my thigh! One day I noticed, for the first time in my life, coarse hairs growing from the rim of my left ear. They were so stiff you could have scrubbed a pot with them, and there were none on my right ear. I panicked: What evil African flagellate causes boar bristles to grow from your left ear? I found nothing in the literature, but treatment seemed to involve careful application of a razor.
Africans themselves are no better; they pop more pills than the French, a habit facilitated by the easy procurement of powerful drugs from any pharmacist, without a prescription. Every time a Burro employee got a cold, he or she would race down to the chemist for a round of antibiotics. “It won’t help,” said Jan over and over again. “Colds are viruses; antibiotics won’t do anything.” She was preaching to a brick wall. Charlie and his family took deworming medication every three months, which actually seemed like a good idea—“especially if you eat a lot of fresh food,” said Charlie.
I finally did get genuinely sick in October. For some karmic reason that I cannot fathom, I am one of those chosen to experience regular episodes of kidney stones. Roughly every three years I am blessed with this exquisite form of torture, so I know the onset symptoms, and the treatment, only too well.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Whit asked as I lay groaning on my bed during the first, relatively easy round of spasms.
“No,” I said through gasps, imagining myself curled up in the fetal position on a wooden bench in some vast Conradian waiting room. “All they do at home is give me morphine, then send me home with Oxycodone. I bet you can get that shit at the pharmacy here.”
“Morphine?”
“No, Oxycodone. It’s a prescription synthetic opiate, but I bet you can walk in and get it here.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He returned half an hour later with a blister pack of Oxycodone tablets. “Wow, that was easy,” I said.
“The pharmacist definitely gave me the once-over,” said Whit. “He wanted to know what it was for, and it probably didn’t hurt that I’m an obruni.”
“Yes, because obrunis are never drug addicts. How much do I owe you?”
“Two cedis.”
“Jesus. This shit sells for like eighty bucks a pill on the street back home. It’s a wonder this whole country isn’t junked up.”
“Well, like I said, I don’t think they hand it out like candy.”
“Thanks.” I don’t remember much of the next two days. I floated off into opium dreams and stopped thinking about kidney stones or malaria pills or boar bristles on my ears or anything else that keeps mere mortals awake at night.
One night in the fall, Whit and I dragged Charlie and Afi to a musical performance at the National Theatre of Ghana. According to the full-page color ad in the Daily Graphic, The Black Star was a musical tribute to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s venerated first president and, as leader of the first post-colonial state in sub-Saharan Africa, the father of African independence. It was the centennial of his birth, and celebrations were planned around the country. Over the years, Nkrumah’s flame has burned both bright and dim for Africans. In the early 1960s, Ghana under Nkrumah became the center of a new back-to-Africa movement. Many black Americans, including Maya Angelou and W.E.B. DuBois, packed up and moved there. (DuBois became a Ghanaian citizen and died in Accra in 1963 at age ninety-five, the day before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He and his wife, the writer and activist Shirley DuBois, are buried at Accra’s Osu Castle, but you can’t visit their graves; the heavily guarded castle is the home of the president and closed to the public.) Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, and Malcolm X came to pay homage to the new leader.
But Nkrumah’s vision of a united Africa never came to pass. At home, his centralized, socialist economic reforms failed miserably, although he did improve the country’s infrastructure and educational system. Nkrumah himself was an ascetic, gnomelike man with a broad forehead and receding hairline that gave him the look of a black Mao Tse-tung—an unfortunate physical comparison in light of his increasingly oppressive policies. Facing dissent, he jailed opponents without trials, banned political parties, and clamped down on the press. Although he never sank to the sadistic brutality of so many later African leaders (and was apparently uninterested in personal enrichment), he was well on his way to dictator-for-life status when, while visiting Hanoi in 1966, he was deposed in a CIA-engineered coup, despite his avowed nonalignment. (“We face neither East nor West; we face forward,” he famously said.) Until his death in 1972 he lived in exile, a symbol of Africa’s lost opportunity. In Ghana he was essentially written out of the history.* By the late 1970s, however, Nkrumah’s legacy was getting a polish—perhaps because he seemed like Churchill compared to the despots who succeeded him across the continent. Today he is lionized all over Africa as one of the great statesmen of the post-colonial era, a galvanizing if imperfect visionary.
As it turned out, the advertisement for The Black Star was somewhat misleading. Far from being a musical celebration of Nkrumah, the performance was in fact a revival of a 1970s satire of the rise and fall of a fictional Nkrumah-like leader, set in a make-believe African country. The play was written by the Nigerian-born, Chicago-based dramatist and painter Uwa Hunwick (whose husband, John Hunwick, is a distinguished British scholar of Islamic Africa at Northwestern University) and first performed by the same Ghanaian acting company that was putting on this new version.
Surely one strikingly different aspect of the revival was its production in the ungainly National Theatre, an upside-down concrete soufflé built by the Chinese and opened in 1993. This ambitious folly of a building was commissioned under the Rawlings regime—one of those all-too-common African public works projects that are meant to demonstrate Big Ideas, but without nearly enough thought given to practicalities.
Indeed, as the anemic turnout that evening demonstrated, Accra nightlife, once a sprawling incandescent quilt of clubs, theaters, galleries, and intellectual dinner parties, from Osu to Asylum Down, was long past its bedtime, so to speak—a victim of austerity programs and the very real concern, under a variety of oppressive military leaders, not to flaunt wealth or social status. Oblivious to these dreary modern realities, the government ordered up a cultural palace so over-the-top that its operating expenses alone virtually guaranteed vacancy.
Inside, the theater was conceived in a style that might be called African Outerspace Modern: a vast, raked orchestra below two soaring, cantilevered mezzanines, apparently made of whipped meringue. The ceiling was almost high enough for indoor baseball, although David Ortiz would have to swing hard to hit the mezzanine rows from the stage. The designers of this cavernous pile did not seem to understand that balconies are supposed to allow for greater intimacy at higher elevations; starting the mezzanine rows at the very back of the orchestra, as opposed to stacking them over the stage, serves no functional purpose. On either side, private VIP boxes hovered like alien UFO pods, their tenants concealed behind tinted (and perhaps bulletproof) glass.
I am certain that the air-conditioning contractor could have bought an island nation with the proceeds from ducting this equatorial Caracalla. Not that any tenants, which currently include the National Symphony Orchestra, could actually afford to cool the place. On the night we attended, mosquitoes buzzed around the stage lights, and the theater was about as comfortable as a rain forest, which come to think of it is what much of Ghana is. But at that point in my African sojourn, air-conditioning had become like grated black truffles—a luxury you might be lucky enough to experience every now and then in life, but hardly anything you expected on a daily basis.
We arrived right on time for the seven-thirty performance, bought our general-admission tickets (twenty cedis each, about the cost of a movie), and strolled into a nearly empty auditorium. I counted forty-one people in a theater that I estimated could seat two thousand. Then I remembered we were in Ghana, where nothing starts on time. “The people are still coming,” said Charlie reassuringly. “The show will not start until at least eight, maybe half-eight.” And sure enough, by the time the curtain rose just after the hour, a couple of hundred more people had wandered in. Still, the auditorium was perhaps 80 percent empty.
The houselights didn’t dim until well into the first musical number, which is when the ushers finally decided to pass out programs. And the stage lights didn’t come up until after that, so the performers had to work in the dark for about ten minutes. I don’t think this was organized for dramatic effect; Ghana is just like that. It’s the same casual approach that guarantees no two diners at a restaurant table will receive their meal at the same time. In every restaurant in Ghana, you get the sense that you are the first customer the establishment has ever served and they are inventing the whole table-service thing on the spot. I suspect stage production is not too different.
Lighting glitches aside, the production began auspiciously enough, with an expressionistic dance of writhing bodies on the floor that aptly suggested the birth of African independence. The offstage orchestra was minimal—an electric keyboard, drums (both Western and African), guitar, and horn—but reasonably accomplished. (It would be a sad night indeed when you couldn’t muster some talented musicians in Ghana.) And the story itself had all the elements of good tragedy: a visionary leader who starts to believe his own hagiography, overreaches, alienates his people, and finally flees in disgrace. Along the way, he imprisons his brilliant and passionate treasury minister for speaking truth to power, unaware that the young man is his son. The son dies, and the nation is again enslaved—this time under a succession of native despots and generals.
Several of the musical numbers were memorable, others less so; I had hoped for less Broadway schmaltz and more African rhythm. The cast was all over the map; a few standout performers could easily have held their own on the New York stage, but others were more at the level of community theater. The most disappointing aspect of the evening was the stage production. The set design consisted of a few white columns meant to evoke palace architecture and a small map of Africa tacked to the rear wall. Costumes were equally uninspired—a true mystery considering the elaborate and beautiful handmade outfits I had seen in Jonas’s remote church. Three hanging microphones could barely pick up the actors; in such a vast auditorium I had to strain to hear, and we were in the sixth row. I told Whit that the whole production had the feel of a high school musical, but he said his kids’ high school had put on better musicals than this.
The two-and-a-half-hour play was performed without an intermission—another curiosity, given the existence of a beer stand in the lobby. Wouldn’t a troupe so obviously cash-strapped try to maximize revenue by pushing refreshments during an intermission? It was the sort of no-brainer Western business decision that just doesn’t come with the culture here. By the end of the night I felt sad that this was as good as professional theater in Ghana gets. I wanted the country to do better—just a better-funded production of The Black Star would be a good start. When you think about it, a lively urban cultural scene in one of Africa’s most democratic and prosperous countries would seem achievable. But in row six of the National Theatre on a Saturday night in September 2009, it felt about as likely as Nkrumah’s pipe dream of a united, prosperous Africa.
A final tragedy: to make room for the construction of the National Theatre, authorities razed the intimate and legendary Ghana Drama Studio, which had been founded in 1960 by the Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland. (A replica has been built on the campus of the University of Ghana, just outside Accra.) Over the years, under Sutherland’s guidance, the Drama Studio housed the Drama Studio Players; a full-time traveling company called Kusum Agromba; the Workers’ Brigade Drama Group; and a workshop for children’s literature writers. Those would have been the days.
Ghana’s freewheeling press is often described as “lively,” an unusual choice of word considering the country’s editorial fixation on death and depravity. Newsstands here carry dozens of local tabloids, many of which would not seem out of place in an American supermarket checkout lane. SATANIC LIZARD STALKS PASTOR POLITICIAN! was one of my favorite summer headlines. Even the more reality-based publications are nakedly partisan, with blistering allegations that one political party or another has unleashed violence and disorder on an otherwise pastoral land. They make Fox News seem—well, fair and balanced. Then there is the gore factor: spectacular car accidents and unspeakable crimes get major play, an obvious attempt to drive sales at the newsstand and in traffic jams, where street hawkers hustle the latest headlines to bored drivers. Despite the content, as a journalist I often found myself wishing the U.S. print media were as thriving as Ghana’s.
In early September, the press had a field day when Ghana Police arrested a sixty-five-year-old American man after he allegedly videotaped eight children, some as young as three, performing fellatio on him. Authorities believed the man, Patrick K. La Bash, was a major international child porn producer. On a website business directory, La Bash was listed as a Ghana-based business consultant with a PhD in English literature, as well as an author, acting teacher, motion picture producer (well, yes), and former Marine. The day after his arrest, the Daily Guide devoted most of its front page to the banner KIDS SUCK WHITE PENIS FOR FOOD, MOVIES. Above the headline were four graphic close-up photos pulled from the seized videos; other than black bars over the eyes of the children, nothing was left to the imagination. This charming cover was prominently displayed at newsstands all over the country. In America, of course, printing such images (to say nothing of displaying them in public) would constitute a crime in itself; there is no acceptable editorial context for reproducing child pornography. But this is Ghana, where journalistic standards, like so many aspects of the culture, are baffling. To its credit the Ghana Journalists Association later condemned the Daily Guide’s coverage: “The GJA is deeply saddened that three weeks after winning the Best Layout and Design Award at the 14th GJA Awards, the paper has tarnished its reputation with this unprofessional presentation.”
At any rate, police said La Bash lured the children into his home with the promise of “toffees” and DVDs, an allegation that shocked me by its familiarity. For Ghanaian children, simple pleasures like a piece of candy, or watching a Disney movie, are rare luxuries. The children in our courtyard literally jump in excitement when we give them a banana; a serving of ice cream might as well be Christmas. One Saturday afternoon, Jan and I set up a “screening” of Finding Nemo on my laptop (we had no TV), and our dining room was packed with eager kids. It became sadly easy for me to imagine a predator luring Ghanaian kids.
The wheels of justice can spin rapidly in Ghana. Just one month after his arrest, La Bash was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor—in effect the rest of his life. One imagines the catalog of fiction does not contain a living hell as grim as a Ghanaian prison labor camp, or an occupant more deserving of its charms.
In fact, the whole culture of child rearing in Ghana makes it easy for sexual predators to operate. Children are taught to respect and obey adults, no matter who they are. It is not uncommon to see people on the street blithely order a strange child to run an errand. Indeed Kevin would often do this, drafting some passing “small boy” (as the invocation invariably begins) to run off in search of this person or that thing in the course of Burro business. The fact that the child didn’t know Kevin from King Faisal hardly mattered: in Ghana, if a grown-up tells you to do something, you must do it. This rule extends to sanctioned forms of abuse like hitting children, which is also tolerated from strangers.
That year, an eight-year-old schoolgirl was caned to death by her teacher. The girl’s father told a newspaper, “The child was caned in the head, the back and the spinal cord so the brain was injured and blood from the brain ran down through the throat and to the chest, that is the cause of her death.” Ghanaian authorities arrested the teacher—pointing out that only “head teachers” are allowed to cane students.
The day after the American pedophile was arrested, I witnessed Joyce, the aunt of Savannah with whom we had made fufu, slap Kwabena across the face hard enough to send him sprawling. She is not related to him. Kwabena, who has a rebellious streak unusual for Ghanaian children, hit her back; he is learning to solve problems with his fists.
It is possible to condemn African domestic abuse and still appreciate African family values, just as Ghanaians might appreciate American democratic institutions but not the Central Intelligence Agency that toppled their first leader. It is possible to see Mena, who stoops over soapy buckets of laundry in deafness and old age but is surrounded by caring family, as having a better life than my own mother, who does nothing all day in a nursing home. It is possible, I decided, to appreciate Kwame Nkrumah as a brilliant catalyst for African independence despite his political failings. It is even possible, as Nkrumah said, to face neither East nor West, but forward.