“It’s Italian for butter.”
“Huh?” Whit, behind the wheel of the Tata, glared at me, then swerved to avoid a woman balancing a two-foot-high pyramid of loose eggs, stacked like cannonballs at a Civil War monument, on a tray over her head.
“Burro,” I said. “It means ‘butter’ in Italian. That could be confusing in Italy.”
“We’re not doing business in Italy, asshole. It’s not a developing country.”
“But what happens when you expand into francophone West Africa? Do we call it Buerre?”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously, don’t you think it’s a little weird that you’re starting a business with a Spanish name on a continent where virtually no one speaks Spanish? I mean, the Spaniards were smart; they stayed away from this miasmic hell-pit except to pick up slaves. They had experience. They knew what relentless heat can do to the human soul. There’s like one country the size of Rhode Island that speaks Spanish here.”
“Are you finished?”
“Just watch the road. You can get the death penalty for hitting a pedestrian here, especially if you knock eggs off her head.”
We were headed down the coast from Accra to Axim, a 150-mile stretch of surf to the lagoon border with Ivory Coast. It was a working holiday with Harper. We had planned a rolling tour of the slave forts, while scouting expansion locations for Burro, plotting back roads on our GPS and following the power lines—mostly to see where they end and where the battery-powered villages begin. It didn’t take long to figure out that the existence of power lines did not mean a village was electrified. Often the main three-phase lines would run right over a large settlement—with no step-down.
“There’s no money to bring power down to these villages,” said Whit.
“And they have to stare at those power lines every day. Must be like dying of thirst on the ocean.”
“Of course that’s assuming the power is actually running. You never know.”
We pulled into the seaside town of Beyin and parked next to Fort Apollonia, a decrepit British outpost from 1770. By far the largest and most successful capitalist venture in the history of Africa was slavery. No other natural resource—not diamonds or gold, not copper or bauxite or oil—has shaped modern Africa, and the mind-set of Africans, like slavery. The slave trade literally wiped out generations of Africans; the latest scholarly assessments, using sophisticated computer models, suggest that more than eleven million sub-Saharan Africans simply disappeared (think Nazi Holocaust times two), mostly young men. But as Americans know from our own history, a centuries-long conflagration like slavery doesn’t simply end when it ends. In Africa the long-term effects of slavery, still being felt, include the rise of militaristic native governments (armies were needed both to protect against rival slave raids and to gather slaves for trade); tribal and ethnic distrust; an obsession among leaders with opulent trappings of power at the expense of normal citizens (the slave trade enriched African rulers and desensitized them to the plight of the poor); primitivism (consider that the height of the slave trade was during the Age of Enlightenment); and pervasive poverty that breeds desperate acts of violence. Anyone doing business in modern Africa must contend with the legacy of the continent’s dark capitalist history, which did not begin with the Europeans.
Today we tend to think of Africa as a place of teeming masses—and in fact, modern African cities are hives of sweating, coughing, chaotic humanity. But the larger story of Africa is the story of underpopulation. Poor soils, extreme climates, and a host of natural diseases and predators kept the African people in check for millennia. Simply put, there were not enough bodies to do all the work. As a result, the medieval kingdoms of Africa were constantly at war for the express purpose of collecting slaves. In West Africa, along the humid Atlantic tropical belt, slaves made it possible to clear the rain forest and establish agricultural settlements. These communities grew to become the cities and capitals of modern nations, including Ghana. In fact, when the Portuguese slavers first arrived at what is now Ghana, the local tribes were not sellers but buyers: between 1500 and 1535, the Akan tribes, from whom most modern Ghanaians descend, bought between ten thousand and twelve thousand slaves with local gold. (The slaves came from what are now Benin and Nigeria to the east.)
Taken as a whole and looking back over thousands of years, the scale of pre-colonial slavery on the African continent cannot be explained away as opportunistic capture on the battlefield. Clearly, indigenous African slavery was a stand-alone business, and a large one.
And yet—what the Africans themselves started and the Portuguese refined, the British took up with organizational zeal. They turned the Gold Coast into the center of the West African slave trade, and Cape Coast Castle was their corporate headquarters. At the height of the trade, in the eighteenth century, it is estimated that about six million West Africans were shipped into slavery, mostly to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Scholars now believe that between 1720 and 1780, 5 to 10 percent of the Gold Coast’s entire population was enslaved. As William St. Clair points out in The Grand Slave Emporium, while the slave trade did not exactly drive the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural commodities (like cotton) that slaves produced in the New World contributed hugely to the success of British manufacturing in the nineteenth century—well after 1807, when England abolished slave trafficking. This is not a fine point. It means that England and other European countries continued to profit indirectly from slavery long after they had formally washed their hands of it.
And perversely, abolition encouraged a second wave of indigenous slavery in nineteenth-century Africa, since the vast business infrastructure of the slave trade didn’t just disappear overnight. As Europeans shifted to legitimate trade in African agriculture and other resources, slaves were needed to tend the fields and extract the minerals. In some parts of Africa, such as Mauritania, slavery still exists openly.
Today eleven of Ghana’s coastal slave fortifications are UNESCO World Heritage Sites and international tourist attractions. African Americans come to find their roots, and they stay in hotels and eat in restaurants and take pictures under the Door of No Return and buy handicrafts from the locals. For the diaspora tourists it is a bittersweet journey. It is not uncommon for African American visitors, upon seeing firsthand the reality of modern Africa, to express perverse gratitude that their ancestors were among the enslaved. (The descendants of Haitian slaves are presumably less buoyant about their fate.) There is no doubt: chained and beaten, raped and ruined, wherever they landed the slaves were surely the unluckiest of all humanity. But Africa, it turns out, is the last unlucky place.
Through the terminally gridlocked traffic in Accra, narrowly escaping from Nkrumah Circle and its armies of prostitutes and panhandling children of Tuareg nomads from the southern Sahara (sent out by their parents to beg in traffic all day and making the universal hand-to-mouth sign of hunger), we passed a large hand-painted billboard for a skin ointment with the query: SUFFERING FROM BUMPS AND KELOID? followed by detailed illustrations of various worms and festering skin ailments.
“They don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?” I said.
“Oh that’s nothing,” said Whit. “Wait till you see the signs for diarrhea meds.”
To the catalog of African miseries, add a modern plague: driving. It is possible to imagine a more dangerous contact sport than driving in Africa, but if so, it has managed to fly under the radar of even the most ratings-desperate television networks. Numbers are sketchy since even serious accidents often go unreported in the developing world, but Africa easily boasts the highest traffic mortality rate on the planet. A 2004 study by the World Health Organization found that of every hundred thousand Africans, 28.3 will die in car accidents, compared to just eleven in Europe. Children are particularly at risk, as pedestrians: in Ghana, about 20 percent of the nearly two thousand annual traffic deaths are children walking to and from school or playing in roads; most are boys, under age ten.
Along the road between Cape Coast and Accra were several billboards that said OVERSPEEDING KILLS! This is presumably opposed to regular speeding, which is generally accepted. Beneath that loud warning was a grim tally of traffic deaths at that particular intersection. The first sign said: OVER 12 PERSONS DIED HERE. And the next one, a few miles down the road: OVER 70 PERSONS DIED HERE. You see these signs all over Ghana, always with an inexact body count that suggests the authorities simply got tired of tallying up the limbs and settled for a guesstimate.
Reasons for the carnage include the previously mentioned penchant for mindless passing; spectacularly overloaded and unsafe vehicles (trucks piled two stories high with cargo, devoid of tire treads and listing like drunken sailors); scarce medical facilities with limited training in trauma care; low to zero enforcement of speed limits (the Ghana national police, uniformed in blue camouflage and shouldering Kalashnikov rifles, seem to exist all too frequently to shake down drivers for bribes at roadblocks); roads cratered with chassis-twisting potholes; deep, open concrete roadside sewers that leave no shoulder and no room for error (“pulling over” to avoid an accident could be more disastrous than the collision itself); for the same reason, no place for pedestrians except in the roadway; an obstacle course of countless rusting hulks of previous accidents that never get towed away, causing new accidents (the African traffic nightmare has been called “the hidden epidemic,” but in fact you can see the pathology along any ten-kilometer stretch of road); and, at night, a lack of streetlights or reflective roadway markings combined with the inescapable logic that the less often headlights are used, the longer they will last.
These are just the material causes. Whit speculates that the real, underlying problem is the African’s innate fatalism: “When it’s my turn to go, it’s my turn to go” is a common sentiment. It’s in the hands of God, so why not pass a double tractor-trailer over a hill in a rainstorm? This is not a private spiritual matter. Trucks, cars, buses, and taxis throughout Ghana are adorned with Christian aphorisms surrendering their drivers to a celestial traffic code. I don’t mean discreet bumper stickers; I’m talking about large-scale decals that cover the entire rear window (which, come to think of it, could be another cause of accidents). “It Is God’s Will” might be the motto plastered across a seventeen-foot-high banana truck with six bald tires. “In Thy Name Alone” christens many a speeding taxi. “God Is In Control” is another favorite—no need to steer those cars. One day, we got stuck behind a massive cargo truck that featured a professionally hand-painted message laid out in twelve-inch-high circus font across the back: RELIGIOUS CONFUSION. Below, the left mud flap said MASTER and the right said JESUS. Often the message is in Twi, the most common phrase being Gye Nyame, which means “Except for God” and is meant to suggest His omnipotence. On the road in Ghana you put the pedal to the metal, but the real power hovers somewhere above the hood, so it’s okay. Not to worry. Gye Nyame.
On its website for travel advisories, the U.S. State Department summarizes driving conditions in every country in the world. Here are some insights they provide for travelers to Ghana:
The road from Accra to the central region tourist area of Cape Coast continues to be the site of many accidents. Travel in darkness, particularly outside the major cities, is extremely hazardous, due to poor street lighting and the unpredictable behavior of pedestrians, bicyclists and farm animals, particularly goats and sheep. Aggressive drivers, poorly maintained vehicles and overloaded vehicles pose serious threats to road safety. The safety standards of the small private buses that transit roads and highways are uncertain.
Very few Africans own cars—in Ghana about one in two hundred people. As a result, “nobody knows how to drive here,” says Whit, “especially the people who drive.” But that doesn’t mean a lack of cars. With very little infrastructure of public transportation—the few trains stopped running reliably years ago, intercity buses don’t cover the deep countryside where so many Ghanaians live, and even Accra (population two million) has no mass transit of any kind—getting around Ghana has devolved into a freewheeling circus of enterprising shared taxis and their downscale stepcousins, the battered private passenger minivans alluded to in the State Department brief, known as tro-tros. (The name derives from the Twi slang for the small coins once used to pay for passage.) The nomadic and wild-eyed drivers of these vehicles will take you from one end of the nation to another, and anywhere in between; you see them bouncing along dirt tracks dozens of kilometers from anywhere, groaning under rooftop baggage loads, their unbelted passengers practically spilling out the windows and the open sliding doors. Neither taxis nor tro-tros have meters; the fares are highly competitive and based on destination, which means profit is a factor of three inputs: extreme speed, maximum passenger load, and as little money wasted on maintenance as possible. Maybe you could add speed again.
The result is chaos. Car accidents pose a far greater threat to visitors than any of the country’s myriad tropical diseases, flesh-eating parasites, and venom-spitting reptiles. Guidebooks and websites warn visitors not to even consider getting behind the wheel, even in broad daylight; driving at night is considered evidence of criminal insanity. Hertz of Ghana will not rent its vehicles without a hired driver, and local agencies are nearly as insistent. Of course this adds considerably to the expense of tourism—at least for those unwilling to ride cheek-to-shoulder with the perspiring masses in tro-tros—as the driver must not only be paid but also fed and housed along the road. It’s oddly colonial, and disjointing in a modern tourist context. There is something Kipling-esque about the well-heeled German sightseeing couple nosing around the slave dungeons of Cape Coast Castle as their African driver waits in the blinding sun of the whitewashed courtyard, jangling keys and speaking Twi into his cell phone.
But we are not tourists, and our business in Ghana requires driving—lots of driving. So we drive. Everywhere. Sometimes even at night. Driving here is not fun, even if, like me, you love to drive. It is exhausting because African driving requires constant vigilance; take your eyes off the road for one second and you miss the darting child, the stubborn goat, the open sewer an inch from your tire, the oncoming tro-tro in your lane. Death waits around every curve and over every hill, and there is simply too much life happening in too little space. On the road in Ghana, mistakes are unforgiven, and physics can provide a harsh and messy lesson.
Here is what happens, all too often: In February 2009, a bus carrying thirty-three passengers along the road between the northern towns of Tamale and Bolgatanga was passing two larger buses at high speed when it collided head-on with an onion truck. Everyone on the bus and the truck was killed, and dozens more in other vehicles were injured. In the gritty, repulsive-attractive style of African journalism, the Ghanaian Chronicle reported: “Most of the victims had their skulls broken, while others had disfigured faces and mutilated bodies. The accident was so horrendous that one could easily describe those with broken legs and arms as having minor injuries.”
One month later, a gasoline truck circling a busy roundabout in Winneba, along the main Accra–Cape Coast highway, blew a tire. The driver lost control and careened into an Opel sedan. The tanker exploded into the proverbial ball of fire, incinerating more than a dozen people on the spot, including an entire family, and sending three dozen more to the hospital with severe burns. Most of them would die later. “Almost all of them came in with their whole body burnt, both the frontal part and posterior part, including the head,” a doctor at the local hospital, which quickly ran out of bandages, told a reporter. “For most of the kids it also involved their private parts…. We are beginning to lose them one by one. It is quite hard.”
The same day, in Eastern Region near Whit’s home in Koforidua, at least four people died when a bus collided with a truck carrying acid. Responding to all these accidents, a Ghanaian editorialist wrote:
We are dying on our roads like flies. It is as if some wicked gods have decided to exact retribution for some national sin we have committed and decided that our roads are the best place to exact the sacrifice. If this was happening in the old days in a village with responsible leaders, they would go on “abusa” [asking a deity for an explanation] to find out what has upset the gods.
As always in Ghana, it’s in the hands of the gods. But spend enough time behind the wheel and you start to see rational patterns in the chaos, clues to the seemingly random behavior. You get better at it, although with practice comes the danger of complacency. The Maine woodsman who taught me how to cut down trees warned me that most chainsaw accidents happen to people who’ve been using them for years; they stop fearing the blade, and they get careless. The same could apply to driving in Africa.
“It’s all about the horn,” said Whit as we threaded through afternoon traffic in Cape Coast. “You gotta get the horn thing down,” demonstrating with a short blast while swinging wide around a man on a wobbly bicycle balancing a large piece of lumber on his head.
“You know, to a bicyclist there’s nothing worse than jerks who honk when they pass,” I said. “You think a guy on a bike doesn’t know a car is coming?”
“Not the point. It’s a conversation,” he said, flipping his thumbs across the horn buttons in a staccato rhythm.
The conversation. It has been observed that in Africa the car horn takes the place of the brake, but I think it is more than that. The horn is more like the muse of the African driver. Honking, which Ghanaians call hooting, in the British manner, constitutes a tribal language of its own, with grammatical rules. In a Ghanaian traffic dispute, “But I hooted!” is a perfectly legitimate defense. Likewise, “Why didn’t you hoot?” is not a rhetorical question but a serious level of inquiry. It is not considered rude to hoot; in fact hooting is often an expression of gratitude. When someone has courteously allowed your car into the traffic lane, you give them a civilized hoot. When a Ghanaian driver wants to pass another car, he hoots to signal his intent. The driver of the forward car will then hoot back in acknowledgment, hopefully communicating some important traffic information from his vantage point. A quick, light hoot (more of a toot) means “all clear to pass.” A long, forceful hoot (here the word honk makes more sense) means “not a good time to be in the oncoming traffic lane.” As the rear car swings around to pass, both cars will re-hoot in recognition of a job well done. This orchestra is accompanied by a dance of arm waving and hand signaling out the windows of both cars. Meanwhile, one potential source of confusion for Westerners is the practice, also common in Latin America, of using turn indicators to communicate to other drivers what they should be doing, rather than what the driver who signaled intends to do next.
All of it—the hoots, the waves, the high fives, the brush-offs, and the finger snaps that keep cars moving in Ghana—would be impossible in air-conditioned vehicles hermetically sealed from the outside world. Driving here is an intimate ritual, as hands-on as haggling over slabs of goat meat in the public market.
Hooting reaches its apex in Ghana’s ubiquitous and traffic-clogged roundabouts, which are considerably more freewheeling than their Western counterparts. In theory, the Ghanaian rotary follows the usual international rules: traffic already in the circle has the right-of-way. In practice, however, it’s more like a bumper-car ride at the state fair: no matter where you are or which way you turn, someone else is bearing down on you illogically, and the worst possible thing you can do is nothing. In this situation the call-and-response of the hooting breaks down into gibberish, but it could be my lack of fluency.
It would not be far-fetched to make a connection between African hooting and traditional African drumming, which was also a form of communication in motion. In the slave-trade era, British soldiers at Cape Coast were amazed at how quickly news traveled between the Fante villages. The arrival of a Portuguese ship at a fort several days’ march away would be known to the natives within hours, long before the Brits had a clue.
It was the drums. Talking drums, some more than eight feet tall, with the tonal register of an earthquake, used animal hides tensioned with a series of wooden pegs that could be adjusted to vary the pitch. In this way, drummers wielding carved sticks could actually mimic the local tongues, which were more tonally complex than the written languages of Europe and thus lent themselves to percussive interpretation.* Of course this required a great deal of skill; communications were relayed by drummers positioned every few miles, and the musicians needed to be able to comprehend the message as it was received, then pass it along faithfully. It required virtually perfect pitch and an unerring rhythmic sense. Talking drums have been compared to Morse code, but that’s inaccurate. Drummers did not use a semaphore, or an algorithm of the language. They were actually drumming the language. It was more like amplification. Like a horn.
African languages really do sound like they evolved to be spoken in motion—they literally roll off the tongue—a trait with practical advantages in modern Ghana, where road conditions make it difficult to converse while driving, at least in the precise diction of Western tongues. People who have never been to Africa cannot fully appreciate the exquisite torture of the road surfaces. Dirt roads are universally creased with washboard ruts that make you feel like your eyeballs are vibrating out of your head. These roads go on for hundreds of miles and connect major settlements; it’s not like you can avoid them. Now, any country boy knows that washboards can be planed over by driving at a “sweet spot” speed, typically around forty miles an hour; only city slickers lunk along at jogging speed. Unfortunately, in Ghana, the dirt roads are also sluiced with washouts, craters, and deep sand pits, making speed impossible. All you can do is creep forward as your tires feel their way through every rut like a blind man looking for the curb. You might think the paved roads provide some relief, but they don’t. For one thing, in Ghana even major paved highways sooner or later become dirt roads, often without warning. Second, the pavement is generally mined with bathtub-sized potholes that could possibly be negotiated by some form of military transport but not vehicles designed to carry unarmored passengers on welded steel frames suspended over bald tires. That doesn’t slow down Ghanaian taxi and tro-tro drivers, who simply swerve like pinballs around the holes. As a result, the highways have the feel of test tracks; there are not so much “lanes” as paths through the obstacle course, and cars are constantly weaving and dodging at high speed within inches of each other.
Sometimes, of course, cars and trucks moving at 150 kilometers per hour will misjudge a pothole’s depth or location. When the front tire hits one of these black holes at high speed, all is lost. In Africa you need to throw out every preconception that you have about road construction and maintenance. You need to understand that even a very bad road in America would qualify as above average in Africa.
Conversing over these road conditions is like speaking into a vibrato synthesizer. One day on our coast trip, winding along a rutted track past fishing villages along the beach near Axim, I tried engaging Whit in a discussion about seasonal income and how it applies, if at all, to Ghanaian fishermen. It might have been a fascinating exploration of emerging-market microeconomics—the kind of conversation I pictured myself having with Bono and Bill Gates at a Davos cocktail party—but instead it sounded like a couple of fifth-graders making burp-talk on the playground. I was getting heartburn.
By contrast, the two Ghanaian peasant women in the backseat—one of them pregnant, both wearing wraparound shifts printed in bright patterns of banana leaves and flowers—were chattering away like weaver birds. At least to my ear, their native dialect spilled effortlessly off their tongues, completely uninhibited by the lurch and sway of our truck.
The back of our truck was rarely empty, because we stopped constantly to pick up pedestrians—usually women on their way to the local market, their heads balancing giant enamelware bowls and plastic laundry baskets of cassava root, rice, bananas, oranges, peanuts, yams, smoked fish, and rolls of colorful fabric. It is not unusual for women to walk ten miles every day under such loads. In the evening, many also haul water in twenty-liter jugs, which weigh forty-four pounds full. You want to admire their grace and stamina, but health experts say that over a lifetime these loads cause crippling spinal deformations in women across the developing world. And while physical violence is not a major concern in Ghana, women in many poor countries are vulnerable to sexual attacks while on the road.
So we picked up women, and men, everywhere we went, and they beamed over their good fortune to be on the right road at the right time when the white men in the truck came by. They would set their loads in the bed of the pickup and climb into the cab thanking us, sometimes in English, and when the cab was full of passengers, they climbed into the bed, which always seemed to have room for one more dusty traveler. I often wondered what these poor Ghanaians, who are extremely respectful to family members, made of the two bickering obruni brothers in the front seat.
“Listen to this,” said Whit, spinning the dial on his MP3 player, which was plugged into the truck’s stereo.
“Whit, Daddio here.” It was our father’s cracking voice, desiccated by old age as if speaking through a Lintophone wireless, captured on Whit’s voice mail. He had died a year earlier after a long bout with Alzheimer’s that left him unable to manage his finances. After he lost thousands of dollars entering bogus junk-mail sweepstakes, we took away his checkbook and put him on an allowance. But he lived in Michigan and we didn’t, and even though he had plenty of cash and the comfort of caregivers, his mind was unable to do the math, as they say. So he would call constantly, imagining himself broke and launching paranoid voice-mail rants against the nursing agency, his bank, and finally us. It was sad.
But to be perfectly honest, it was also funny. One time he called Whit and said he was tired of getting all these small bills that don’t buy anything: “I need some sixties and some eighties, man,” he insisted.
Our dad was capable of great kindness and generosity. But he could also be emotionally cruel, especially when he drank. He was what Lenny Bruce called the white-collar drunk—buffed nails, bespoke suit, bombed out of his mind. Unlike working-class drinkers (such as our maternal grandfather, a Slovak immigrant who painted Chryslers for forty years), Jim Alexander, the successful advertising man, never raised a hand against his children. That could get messy, and Alex, as his friends called him, was a meticulously tidy man. Today he would probably be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in his era he was simply a clean freak. One inviolable hygienic rule in our family was that the limes he squeezed into his gin-and-tonics had to be scrubbed with a brush under hot soapy water. Limes were the only things green and fresh he was ever known to eat, and he went through crates of them. In hindsight his frenzied scrubbing was perhaps sensible, given the current hysteria over food-borne illnesses. But his concern was not strictly biological, as he had full faith in the power of corporate America and chemicals to deliver safe food to the local grocery store. Rather, his agricultural anxiety was ethnically motivated. Approximately once a week he would remind us that “some Mexican picked his nose and then picked that lime.” It was one of his favorite lines, especially once he became aware of how much we hated it.
Averse to the persuasive power of the belt, Dad’s brand of retribution was discourse and humiliation. After a flight of gin-and-tonics he would bait us into arguments about his favorite bêtes noires, namely bedwetting liberals, ecology, and creeping socialism. One night he got me to take the bait on energy conservation, which as far as he was concerned was invented by Karl Marx as part of his unified proletarian enslavement theory. Our dad tried to leave every light in his house turned on all night, just to thumb his nose at the bedwetters, the hippies, and Karl Marx.
“Dad, do you know where your electricity comes from?” I asked.
“Of course I do. It comes from Consumers Power Company.”
“Okay, but do you know where they get it?”
“They own it.”
“Fair enough, but how do they generate it? Kite strings?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, and I don’t care.”
“Well then you might be surprised to know that they make it by burning coal. Every time you turn on a light you burn a piece of coal.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
After the Alzheimer’s kicked in, Dad forgot to drink and became a sort of benign version of his old aggressive, ranting self.
The phone message continued. “I think you were out yesterday,” Dad said into the machine, “as many people were. I said something about six bucks a month from the crazy people with the money? Forget it, uh, what I need—what I’m gonna need, is like a hundred dollars a month, every month. And you sure got that kind of money. That’s money I made way way way back when I was makin’ big-big-big-big money. So give me a call when you can, I may be out on a brief errand or something like that, but give me a ring because I’m in touch with Palmore [his broker] and we got some things to talk about here, so I’d like to hear from you, okay? Bye.”
I looked in the rearview mirror at the two Ghanaian women, who had stopped chatting. I wondered if they understood enough English to comprehend my dad, and if so what they could possibly be thinking.
Dad again, next message: “Yeah, Whit. I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on down there, but I’m getting very very upset. This goddamned buncha nitwits that sent these girls [his caregivers]. The girls are terrific, but then the company steals this, they steal that, they steal everything within sight, it looks—it appears that way. Anyway I find out, I find out—heh heh—when I call the company—what the hell? What’s all this business? Blah blah blah. It’s Whit and Max. And it’s pay! pay! pay! pay! PAY! PAY! PAY! Jesus Christ! I spent a lifetime, a fucking lifetime of my life puttin’ bing-bing-bing-bing together for you and your brother!”
I checked the women in the back. No reaction. Ghanaians are familiar with all the major English curse words, but they are considered shockingly rude and almost never uttered, even by men.
“And what the hell?” Dad carried on. “And then whaddya doin’ with the money? You’re sendin’ it to Palmore! Boy, he needs money like—heh heh—like a cop needs a cigarette. Jesus Christ! I’ve gotta go out for another hour here in a minute. Gimme a call, and I wanna know what’s gonna happen here. If you guys wanna be in my will you better make a change in your lifes [sic] right now, you and Max, okay? Good-bye.”
“Like a cop needs a cigarette,” I repeated, musing on the analogy. One fortunate aspect of life in Ghana is that almost no one smokes, perhaps because they inhale enough smoke preparing their food. Outside, along the side of the road, a man was holding up a rat for sale—a real rat, not grasscutter. It had been dried and smoked and stretched over a rack of twigs, ready to eat.
“I wonder what Dad would think of us now,” I said.
“He would love it over here,” said Whit, unconvincingly. Our dad lived in the same Michigan town his entire life, had no patience for strange foreign countries like Canada, and never ate rodents. An exotic meal for him was Boston baked scrod. He was a businessman of the first world (American version), and he was not much a part of our own world as kids—checked out on booze or on the 5:39 to Chicago. He was absent, and come to think of it, now so were we.
The Ghanaian ladies indicated we had arrived at their corner, and we pulled over. “Thank you and God bless you,” the pregnant one said from the road. “Safe journey!” Apparently their English was pretty good, but who knows? “Safe journey” is a common farewell pleasantry in Ghana. But like “slave tourism,” “safe journey” has a disconnected ring to it. There are no safe journeys in Africa, and never have been.
“Why are we here, Whit?” Back on the main road toward the industrial port town of Takoradi, through a pinball course of roundabouts, the pavement had improved enough to make conversation possible.
“You mean, why are we on a road with post-colonial asphalt? Or here on Earth? Is your question navigational or existential?”
“I guess I mean, why batteries? How did this idea get started?”
“It all goes back to my childhood.”
“I was there. In fact, I remember when you came home from the hospital. It was a tragic mistake; we were supposed to get another perfect child, but Mom had been taking some new pain reliever and we got you.”
“Shut up. Batteries. It all goes back to my Major Matt Mason Space Station. From an early age I realized that the moon crawler never had enough battery power. I loved that moon crawler, and yet every time I would get near the base, the batteries would die. So I vowed from that day forward that someday I would have a battery that is fresh anytime you want. That was the origin of Burro batteries. And I named it after the Italian word for butter because I love butter and I love Italy.”
“So the Major Matt Mason Space Station was sort of like your Rosebud.”
“That’s it.”
“Wow, I remember that stupid toy, but I never knew it meant so much to you. I think Bob Zaroff and I set it on fire once. We wanted to watch the plastic melt.”
“Don’t go there.”
“I think you need to work on your backstory.”
“Okay, here goes. I didn’t start with batteries. I started with a broader idea. I actually started with the idea of the brand, of really focusing on a range of goods and services that would be affordable to low-income people and would improve their personal productivity. This all goes back to my first days as a student in Ivory Coast. I just felt there was so much economic opportunity. When I was working on aid projects I felt like, why don’t people come over here and start businesses? That always seemed to me the best way to make a sustainable difference—create a for-profit business that employs people. Of course I was very naïve—there are all sorts of barriers and difficulties—but the idea stuck with me. So when we sold Cranium to Hasbro, you know, I was forty-seven years old and I just thought to myself, if I don’t do this now, when am I ever gonna do it?
“My first idea was that we actually would be based in a capital city and we would target products to urban elites, who often go back to their family villages. And there’s an expectation that you bring something back to the village when you come. Often that can just be a farm animal or alcohol, bread or money, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have like an African version of Home Depot that would be sort of like a Nike store—a retail destination that would really be kind of like a showroom, a proving ground almost, for all these different product ideas, and people would take these things back to the villages and generate demand for them.
“So I employed this recent University of Washington graduate, a really smart young guy named Ben Golden, to come over here. He spent about six or eight weeks in Ghana for me, traveling all through the country, and he interviewed all sorts of people about all these different wares.”
“What kind of wares?”
“Solar battery chargers, improved mosquito netting, battery-operated fans for your hut, water filters, improved pumps and irrigation systems, better cookstoves—all kinds of stuff that people typically mention when they talk about better products for people in the developing world. He came back and he said, ‘Yeah, everybody loves this stuff, but nobody’s got any money. There’s just so little discretionary income.’ And I said, ‘Well Ben, that’s what we’ve gotta figure out.’
“Eventually it dawned on me that we were kidding ourselves to think that we could come in with this broad line of products and all of a sudden create demand when there’s so little budget available. I mean, anything that would be perceived as a luxury or secondary would be hugely problematic if we’re trying to reach a mass audience. There are all kinds of things you could do with the elites—frankly I see tons of business opportunities in Ghana to better service the elites. But that’s not what I was interested in.
“So that’s what got me to think deeply about what it was really gonna take. And what I eventually came up with is that, first, what if our products directly enhanced income-earning capability? What if we stepped back one level and said that our business was really selling a business? What if we were actually trying to create these little—and I actually was naïve enough to think I had coined the phrase—micro-franchises? Then I thought, well great, how do we do that? I started to look at some of the models—you know, Amway, Avon.
“So that was the first thing—the realization that you’ve got a much greater chance of success if you’re setting people up in a business, and that your business is really creating success for them.
“And the second thing was, since you’re not gonna generate new spending, you need to find a product that would displace existing expenditure—the better mousetrap. So I needed to find out where poor people are already spending money and come up with a better alternative that either saves them money or gives them better value for the same money.
“So those became my two critical criteria. And I started combing through Ben’s reports and looking more at the literature, and I really just asked myself, what are people in Ghana spending money on? And batteries kept coming up. The data aren’t great, but there are a few ways to back into it, and pretty much every estimate starts to converge around the typical African family spending somewhere between two and five dollars a month on throwaway batteries.
“Now I had recently converted our family over to rechargeable batteries, and we were saving a ton with them. I did a little research online and discovered that rechargeables deliver ten to thirty times more energy than throwaways, per dollar spent. And I thought, wow, here’s something: a better battery.
“But then you gotta ask yourself, if they’re so great, how come no one in Africa is adopting them? Why don’t you see them? Well it makes sense when you realize that the primary thing people are after here is minimizing current out-of-pocket expenditure. There’s so little cash flow that people are watching every penny. And even though rechargeables save you money in the long haul, they are tremendously more expensive initially. The batteries themselves cost more, and you have to invest in a charger. And then, most significantly for rural Africans off the grid, you’ve gotta have a way to power the charger.
“So that’s when I started to ask myself, well how do you get over these hurdles? What are other businesses where you’ve got a very high initial capital cost that you want to spread out over the lifetime of the goods, so it’s affordable? There are all kinds of models for this in the first world, from tool rentals to video stores. So it became clear that renting was a way to spread out the capital costs and allow a consumer with less upfront money to still take advantage of the long-term savings of rechargeables. But it was also clear that to make a rental model work over here, you had to have a first-person direct-selling system, like the Avon lady or the Tupperware party. The salesperson has to actually know the renter, and be able to get the batteries back if the person decides to stop renting. And I knew we’d need that direct, personal relationship to be able to adequately explain new offerings like Burro’s batteries to prospective clients.
“That’s when everything started to fit together: the rental model opened up the economy of rechargeable batteries to a much wider audience, and improved the productivity of poor people because of these greater economies. It required a model where our business would be setting up these little businesses—these independent agents—who would be carrying Burro wares into their own villages. So it was right on brand for us. A great place to start.”
Traffic slowed in front of a roadblock. On the left, a trooper from the Ghana National Police, in stiff blue camo and matching visored cap, glanced at the insurance and registration stickers in the windows of slowly passing cars, occasionally motioning one over to the side of the road, where two other police holding Kalashnikovs performed their shakedown on the unlucky driver. As we approached the head of the line, I thought I saw the cop signal Whit to pull over. “Aren’t you gonna stop?”
“It’s not me, he’s going after the taxi behind me,” said Whit, eyeing the rearview mirror. “Don’t ever stop unless it’s completely clear they mean you. Don’t look them in the eye, don’t say hello. Just give them a little nod and keep moving.”
“How much do you have to pay if they pull you over?”
“Whatever is in your heart. That’s what they say.”
“And what’s typically in your heart?”
“A couple of cedis, but never offer it. Wait for them to demand it.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“Then you don’t get ‘arrested’ on some trumped-up charge.”
“No, then what happened with your battery idea?”
“Oh. Well, this was probably back in December of ’07. I was still in Seattle, just noodling on it more, thinking about names, starting to protect IP, researching batteries and chargers. But bear in mind this was all taking place against the backdrop of the Cranium sale to Hasbro, and then Dad died, so I didn’t have a lot of brain cycles to spend on Burro until maybe the end of January ’08. So then, once I had locked in to Ghana as the best place to launch, I started to realize I better get over there. That’s when I heard about the World Bank conference in Accra. I spent about three quarters of a week at the conference, met Charlie, then a good week and a half on the road conducting on-the-ground market studies.”
“How did you find people?”
“It was not as rigorous as you might want. We would just storm into a town or a village and find people who looked like they had time and might be potential clients. I had a driver, Asare, and we had Martin Aponsah, a translator; he’s the brother of Rachel and Cameron’s high school guidance counselor in Seattle who is actually a traditional Ghanaian chief. We went as far west as Takoradi and up to Koforidua, and then all along the coast road here. We interviewed people up and down the Akwapim Ridge. We stopped at places on the grid, off the grid, villages, cities, towns. We brought a bunch of batteries so we could show people what we were talking about. And then we interviewed people as potential agents as well as clients. We talked to probably seventy or ninety people around the country, and these were detailed, sit-down focus groups, albeit very informal.”
“And?”
“What we found was incredible receptivity to the idea. I was cautioned by someone at the conference, ‘Oh yeah, people will tell you they’re interested until you ask for money.’ But I know a little bit about market studies, and I could tell we were getting pretty straight answers from people. I mean, I think I came away feeling like there would be stronger demand than we’ve seen in urban areas, but I really underestimated the demand in off-grid rural areas. We’ve had trouble cultivating the urban demand, at least in Koforidua, but we’ve also had trouble getting good agents there. So I think the verdict is still out on the potential in urban areas. Obviously what we’ve learned is our sweet spot is the rural areas in general, and particularly off-grid areas.
“But the May trip confirmed that people were in fact spending between two and five bucks a month on throwaway batteries. Moreover, it suggested that many people were going through their batteries three or four times a month in any given device. That’s what we were most after, because that’s where they start to see the economies. Unless somebody is burning through batteries three or four times a month in a particular gizmo, they’re not gonna be a good customer for us. There’s no point in putting rechargeable batteries in a wall clock—at least not when you’re asking for a fixed fee per battery every month.
“And the other thing that became clear was people were having to carefully ration their device usage. For me, that was the tip-off that people are gonna respond to the all-you-can-eat promise we were making. Assuming we could make the economics work on our end, we would be able to keep people at about the same battery budget they were at now, but with comparatively unlimited energy potential.
“So on that first trip it all became pretty clear to me. Originally my objective was to find a Ghanaian partner and do a more detailed market study, maybe spend ten thousand dollars or something. But I came away from that trip feeling like a study was gonna be a waste of time and money, because I was just blown away by the response. It was so strong. I was like, okay, we’re just gonna roll the dice and roll this out. Can you drive for a while?”
We pulled over and switched seats, and I pushed the pedal down hard. The road was pretty good, only a few potholes, and we wanted to get back to Kof-town by dark. Tomorrow morning was the battery route, and we needed to drive it ourselves. Kevin was still learning how to drive (Whit was paying for his driver’s ed classes) and had not yet received his learner’s permit. I was amazed that Ghana even had such a formal process for driver training, but apparently attempts are being made to rein in the highway slaughter, and education (along with “overspeeding” signs) is one of them.
It was a big step up for Kevin, who was thirty-seven. He lived alone, in a studio apartment on the south side of Koforidua with a sink, shower, and cold running water twice a week—comfortable by local standards. When he saw I was interested in Ghanaian cuisine and willing to eat anything, he adopted me as a lunch partner. We would head into the market and his favorite lunch stands (Kevin had no stove in his apartment), where he introduced me to various offal-based delicacies like stewed pig intestines and goat kidneys. When he cooked at Whit’s place, he used lots of garlic and hot pepper. Originally from Kumasi, he was college educated and read the newspaper every day. He was worldly by Ghanaian standards, having once been to Nigeria, and he wanted to visit London, where his brother lived. He was engaged to an Ashanti woman who lived in Kumasi. Kevin was not a bachelor. He was a widower. In 2006, his wife and seven-year-old son were killed in a tro-tro accident. It happened on his thirty-fifth birthday. They had been visiting her family, and they were coming home to celebrate.