“This sucks.” Whit was talking as usual and driving, or rather braking, in a typical Accra traffic jam. In 1971 Nadine Gordimer described Accra’s “vast chatter and surge of the streets, the sense not of people on their way through the streets but of life being lived there.” I’m not sure if she was writing about the traffic per se, but as far as I was concerned I had already lived nine lives on the streets of Accra and was now entering the gates of hell. It was late morning and the sun was pounding like a railroad sledge on the roof of our defenseless Kia, which had no air-conditioning and was fast approaching the temperature required to fire porcelain. Outside, a river of street hawkers flowed around the stalled cars. In an effort to stave off ennui and Whit’s endless prattle, I took out my notebook and started recording the merchandise as it moved past our car. This was my list:
Steering wheel covers, baby dolls (Caucasian) in strollers, Jesus wall clocks, chocolate bars, Ghana flags, yams (whole, extra large), full-length mirrors, reading glasses (assorted powers), sunglasses (fastened to a large sheet of plywood), belts, blue jeans, Sylvester Stallone DVDs, English dictionary, shoes, sandals, socks, button shirts, oversized foam alphabet blocks, plantain chips, Obama DVDs, neckties, cuff links (Ghana flag design), Michael Jackson DVDs, shorts, boxers, briefs, briefcases, ginger snaps, bracelets (brass), Sprite, Coke, toothpicks, newspapers (headline: “YOU’RE A BEAST,” JUDGE TELLS RAPIST), cashews, single book (Everywoman: A Gynecological Guide for Life), soccer balls, car-washing chamois (Shell Oil logo), toilet paper (Chinese brand), child’s spinning top (demonstrated by salesman on dashboard of car, through open window, uninvited), air fresheners (Liverpool Football Club logo), plastic coat hangers, plastic clothespins, onions, toenail clippers, power adapter plugs, carved wooden masks, Swiss Army knives, screwdrivers, Tummy Trimmer girdle (as seen on TV), Ping-Pong paddles with ball, watches, puppies (two, cute), Salif Keita CDs, crucifix (framed), caps, pillows, limes, tiger nuts, boiled peanuts, windshield wipers (assorted), doughnut holes, end tables, Super Glue, hair brushes.
I gave up at that point, partly because of heat exhaustion and partly because if you accidentally allowed your eyes to cast more than the merest peripheral glance at any particular ware, its seller would take you for a potential customer and hound you like an auctioneer until traffic moved again, which was to say a long time. And while some of the items had a clear marketing logic in the inferno of an Accra traffic jam—cold beverages, a snack—and others, like key chains or pocketknives, could be understood as impulse purchases, most seemed like a stretch. Who buys reading glasses in traffic? Or bedroom furniture?
“Look, nightstands! Just like I’ve been wanting, and the price is right!”
“Sorry I’m late, traffic was nuts and I bought a really cute puppy.”*
Still other items reflected the desperation of poverty. Who but the hungriest would spend all day in shadeless ninety-degree heat, breathing car exhaust, in the hope that somewhere in that river of traffic was a driver looking for an outdated gynecological textbook? There is an optimism to indigence that is both admirable and sad.
“I’m sorry, were you saying something, Whit?”
“I was saying how pointless this traffic jam is.”
“I meant, were you saying something insightful?”
“What I mean is, even without doing some kind of sophisticated computer tracking system, they could just get the existing traffic cops who are sitting around doing jack to really do their jobs. Put them at every corner, and teach them how to direct traffic, which right now almost none of them seem to know how to do.” He slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the tro-tro that was crawling three feet in front of us, spewing black smoke.
If solutions to Accra’s traffic nightmare seem painfully evident to a Westerner, the causes of individual tie-ups can be pointedly African. One morning a busy quarter of the city was brought to its knees after a man trying to harvest honey from a beehive high in an acacia tree decided to simply burn the tree down. It crashed onto the main Ring Road and blocked traffic for hours. “The tree was said to have fallen at dawn,” a newspaper reported, “however as of 10 am, the road had not been cleared, and there was no sign of the Ghana Highway Authority or the Parks and Gardens whose responsibility it is to evacuate the road. Some of the commuters who could not endure the searing morning heat … were continuing the rest of their journeys on foot.”
Walking started to sound like a good idea. We were running late, as usual, this time for a meeting in Osu. Whit had an appointment at a Nigerian-based company called Camelot that specialized in security printing—gift certificates, lottery tickets, the sort of things you wouldn’t want copied or counterfeited, like Burro’s battery exchange coupons.
Camelot’s facility, off a busy main road along Accra’s tattered urban beachfront, certainly seemed imposing. A large mechanized gate swung open and we entered, under the stern gaze of a guard, past signs warning NO MOBILE PHONES OR CAMERAS and ALL CARS WILL BE SEARCHED. Our dull and dented Kia limped rather pathetically past a fleet of shiny, tinted-glass SUVs belonging to other customers who, at least in my imagination, possessed an acute need for security printing and security everything else.
The offices were mercifully air-conditioned, and we were ushered into a small room and greeted by a pleasant enough representative named Bernard, who got right down to business. “These are some samples of what we can do for you,” he said. “I regret that you cannot take any of these with you, as they are actual jobs we are doing for clients, but you are free to examine them here.”
The first sample, some sort of grocery-store contest certificate, was printed on a simple watermarked paper called CVS1, used mainly for checks. “This is our design but we import it, it’s not made in Ghana,” Bernard stressed. I hadn’t thought about it before, but his comment made me realize that paper provenance was important; if employees are going to be pilfering watermarked paper, you want the paper plant far away from where you do business.
Next came examples of various ways to imprint security systems on the paper. The first was called thermochromic: a small reddish dot appears to the eye, but when you apply slight heat—like from your finger—it magically disappears. “People don’t realize it,” said Bernard, “so when they copy it, the red dot doesn’t work on the copies. We can shape the thermochrome to match your logo.” That would mean a donkey head that disappeared when you rubbed it. Might be fun for kids, I thought, but as usual I kept my mouth shut.
Next came a special gold seal, called a foil print. Then he showed us a silver hologram, then a serial number that bled through to the other side of the paper and was hard to copy. Another option was ultraviolet printing, which requires a special UV light to see. Similarly, some inks can only be seen after rubbing with a reactor pen, or what we used to call a Dick Tracy decoder pen. Then there was microtexting, which involves printing lots of minuscule lines of text as background; every seventeenth or so line says something slightly different, which crooks are unlikely to notice when copying.
Finally there was a simple but fascinating process in which a company logo is “sculpted” in a different color using lines similar to a topographic map, creating a 3D illusion. When copied, the logo doesn’t “pop” in the same way as the original.
If it had been up to me, I would have ordered everything—a watermarked, invisible-ink, thermochromic gold-foil donkey hologram that says hee-haw! when hit with an ultraviolet strobe light. But it wasn’t my money.
“It’s all pretty amazing,” said Whit, reading my mind. “But I’ll be honest with you, Bernard, I suspect a lot of this stuff is out of our price range right now.” (This was becoming Whit’s standard refrain with vendors.) “I do like the idea of watermarked paper and possibly that sculpted logo, which I don’t imagine is too expensive, right?”
“That’s right, compared to the hologram and some of these other things,” said Bernard.
“And the more coupons we can get on a standard page, the cheaper each coupon will be, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you print a full page of coupons perforated to this size?” Whit took a postage stamp–sized Burro coupon out of his pocket and handed it to Bernard.
“Not that small,” he said. “We use a roll press and can only perforate to a minimum of three inches square.”
“Really?” said Whit, surprised. That would effectively make each coupon cost about twice as much. “In China I’ve seen this done with a hand machine where they can set the perfs as small as you want. The guy just puts each page in the cutting machine and presses it down.”
“We don’t have such a machine,” said Bernard flatly.
“I hear you,” said Whit. “But it’s actually not that complicated. The ones I saw in China were just made on the spot.”
Changing the subject, Bernard said he would consult with the company’s designers and put together an affordable proposal. We left amiably and agreed to stay in touch. No one searched our car.
Our next errand was replacing the Kia’s four worn tires, which meant another tedious slog through traffic, to Accra’s tire district—a multiblock stretch of shops along a busy artery. As one who has owned and maintained cars in New York City, I was fascinated to find a country that had downgraded tire buying to an even lower circle of hell than I thought possible. In Accra, all of the tire shops were on one side of the street, and all of the installation shops were on the other side. So after haggling for your tires on the first side, you needed to negotiate your car through six lanes of traffic to the other side for installation. As the road was bumper-to-bumper and divided by a median that eliminated all opportunities for U-turns, the drive across the street meant another half hour in traffic, circling the block. Meanwhile, an army of youths, all of them expecting a tip, were waiting to carry your new tires across the street for you. Whatever.
Accra’s tire business was run, if the verb’s meaning can be stretched, largely by the Kwahu, an Akan ethnic group from the Kwahu Plateau and the Afram Plains, north of Koforidua. Kwahu means “slave died,” and according to Akan mythology, the slave of a wandering tribe died on the plateau, fulfilling a prophecy and marking the place for the tribe to settle. It remains a strange and exotic corner of Ghana, pastoral and wide open like the American West, also home to the nomadic and sharp-featured herdsmen called the Fulani, whose women blacken their lips with henna. Whit and I ventured up the Kwahu Plateau one Saturday, encountering a group of Fulani and their emaciated livestock as we coaxed the Tata over a hillock of boulders. They spoke not a word of English (their language is called Pular) and seemed as surprised to see us as we them; the men wore tall conical straw hats that looked more Asian than African, and the women wore turbans and colorful beaded necklaces; all had long, hand-embroidered robes.
The Fulani and the Kwahu are constantly at odds—in part it’s the age-old conflict between herdsmen and farmers—and life on their remote highland is undoubtedly arduous. Still, it is difficult to imagine the Kwahu people descending from this mythic escarpment to adopt a life of haggling over steel-belted radials in Accra. The motivation, of course, is obvious: money, and the quest for a better standard of living. The Kwahu have a reputation for being excellent businesspeople—hardworking and innovative. Some of Ghana’s wealthier citizens are Kwahu, and many return to the plateau to build incongruously outlandish trophy homes with their Accra-earned wealth. “Every Ghanaian has aspirations to be better than what he is,” the Ogilvy man had told us. You can’t really argue with that, especially if you haven’t personally embraced the life of a highland hut dweller over indoor plumbing and electricity.
Having bought our new rubber and made the schlep across the street to the installer’s shop, Whit and I settled down—way down—into a flaccid sofa that leaned drunkenly, springs akimbo, alongside an outdoor shop floor of exquisite commotion. A platoon of grease-encrusted workers rolled tires back and forth, shouting in Twi, fighting over hand jacks, and sliding under cars that were pitched up on stands and listing like deck chairs on the Lusitania. More cars waiting their turn had been backed obliviously into the traffic lanes, so it was hard to tell which cars were being worked on and which were merely unfortunate enough to be stuck in traffic behind them. There was a lot of honking. It was a spectacle, choreographed in that particularly African sense of order that bears a distinct resemblance to chaos.
“That whole thing about the perforation cuts was interesting,” said Whit. He was still thinking about the meeting at Camelot.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the guy saying they couldn’t do it to my specs. The die-cutting machine I’ve seen in China must cost like three hundred dollars. The guy sets it up by hand; the dies are just pieces of metal with razor-sharp edges built on sheets of plywood. He sets it up any way you want and off he goes. There’s no bullshit answer like ‘the machine can’t do it.’ So yeah, you need a few guys to do some welding, so what? Workers in China are totally coachable. You tell a Chinese worker it’s not okay to have the label come below the edge of the adapter and you will never see it again. It will bring dishonor to his family.”
“How much do factory workers make in China?”
“About a dollar an hour; here maybe half that.”
Whit stared out at the gridlocked traffic. “The lost productivity in this country is just staggering. In Shanghai they’ve got this mag-lev bullet train that goes like two hundred and fifty miles an hour and whisks you from the airport to downtown in about fifteen minutes, for less than ten dollars. It’s almost as far as from here to Koforidua, which takes us almost three hours.”
“We’re not in Shanghai,” I said, trying as always to bring insights to my brother’s business plan. “Besides, here we get so much quality time in the car together.”
“Shut up.”
I think he said something else, but it was lost in a sudden chorus of shouting and even more honking than the default din. Although it seemed contrary to the laws of physics, somehow the traffic was parting. Into this void drove a loaded and impeccably detailed Range Rover, which creaked to a royal halt in front of the main tire bay. Out stepped a pair of shiv-pointed patent leather loafers, followed by a beige linen abacost of generous yardage.* Here was a Big Man of the Very Big variety, and his shaved pate was wrapped in thick black glasses. He barked something in Twi, and workers scurried. Moments later, four underlings returned, each hefting a massive tire and a chrome wheel with more facets than the Hope diamond. The Big Man grunted his approval and checked his gold watch impatiently. The “old” tires on his SUV still looked new—as new as the vehicle itself—but off they came.
Some things in Africa, such as labor and okra, are reliably cheap, but high-performance SUV tires and titanium alloy wheels are not among them. One of the shop guys told us the Big Man’s new tires cost nine hundred cedis each, the rims five hundred—a total rolling package of about four thousand dollars, or more than my brother’s entire car was worth.
“Your aid dollars at work,” Whit whispered my way.
“Looks like he works for the government,” I said, “but who knows.”
“That’s what I mean.”
When Africans aspire to a better life, they generally aspire to the urban life. There are exceptions, like my farmer friend Jonas who aspires to be a bigger and better farmer, but the massive and ongoing urbanization of the continent tells the larger tale. Across Africa, people come to the city because the city offers hope whereas the village will never change, as Rose said. Electricity is not “coming soon” to a village near you, despite what the politicians promise. And even if it were to come, who can afford the hookup?
Of course, the chances of becoming a Big Man (or a Big Woman) in the big city are virtually nil, but that’s not the point. Most urban migrants are happy if they can secure a small but steady income, possibly enough to support family back home in the village. It is understood in Ghana that when a “city cousin” comes back to the village for a visit, he will bring gifts—food, alcohol, a new Chinese radio, or just money. For many Ghanaians, including the ones who stay behind, city life connotes the good life.
But as with politicians everywhere who promise more than they can possibly deliver, there is not nearly enough good life in the big city to go around. As a result, the default condition in cities across Africa has become chaos and misery—vast, wheezing slums, crimes of breathtaking human indifference, coma-inducing traffic delays, and a whole new playbook of deadly contagions. Still they come.
While Burro’s initial business plan was targeted at the millions of Ghanaians who still live in the villages, there was a battery business to be built in cities too. A lot of Whit’s customers lived on the grid, in Koforidua and smaller electrified towns around it, but still used flashlights, such as when walking around at night (streetlights are virtually nonexistent in Ghanaian cities). Other urban battery uses presented themselves on the ground; nobody could have modeled them in a business plan from America. Like the wedding photographers.
Actually they photographed all sorts of social events, some of them quite specific to Ghanaian culture, like the party-all-day funerals and the so-called “outdooring” ceremonies, another big party that is sort of like a baptism for newborns. Documenting these milestones was a lucrative second income for Ghanaians who could make the investment in some basic digital camera equipment and had weekends free. Since even most urban Ghanaians do not own cameras, the market was robust. Dozens of photographers plied their trade in Koforidua alone. It didn’t take long for them to figure out how many more flashes they could get from Burro’s NiMH batteries than from the crappy competition, and they literally beat a path to our door.
Which is how I met Celestine Galley, a Ghanaian woman of singular charm. She rang the bell one day and came in clutching a handful of batteries. She was middle-aged, a large, gap-toothed woman with a big mop of curly permed hair, a cavernous voice, and a motorcycle. A nurse in the outpatient department at the local hospital, Celestine worked as a photographer on weekends; she had zipped over on lunch break from the hospital, on her bike in her starched white uniform, to exchange batteries. “They are the best for my camera,” she said. “Four batteries give me one hundred pictures. You people are so good to me!”
“Well, we appreciate your business,” said Whit. “Tell your friends.”
We chatted while Celestine waited for her new batteries. “How are things at the hospital?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s very bad,” she said, waving an arm in disgust. “We have so much sickness. The young girls, they pull up their dress and then you fuck and you get AIDS.” She illustrated her point with the universal finger-in-the-hole gesture. Here it should be noted that even Ghanaian men rarely drop F-bombs; for women the word is considered unspeakable. As for the obscene hand gesture—no matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t recall a time in my life when I saw any woman making that, and I worked in rowdy bars for years.
Somehow I felt Celestine’s biker-chick conversational style required a suitably salty repast, but all I could come up with was “No worries for me, I’m happily married.”
“Well, pray to God you control yourself,” she said with evident suspicion.
Celestine lived a short walk from Burro, in the ground-floor flat of a tidy apartment block, across the street from a popular watering hole called the Bula Spot. One day after work I called her up and arranged to come and visit. Her Yamaha 250, quite a beefy bike by Ghanaian standards, was parked in the courtyard. “You are welcome!” she said, motioning me inside. Remembering her frat-house vocabulary in the Burro office, I half expected to see empty schnapps bottles all over the floor and velvet paintings of dogs playing poker. But it was nothing like that. Her apartment was certainly crammed with stuff—cookware, stacks of plastic storage bins, fake floral arrangements, and shelves overflowing with enough Christian curios to open a votive shrine. But even with all the bric-a-brac, the place felt roomy under high ceilings. She had two bedrooms; a living room; a small kitchen with a sink, a four-burner cooktop, and a fridge; and a bathroom with toilet and shower. The floors were terrazzo. It was, all things considered, a very comfortable home—bigger than the apartment in Brooklyn where Sarah and I lived for ten years.
We sat in the living room, where a small TV with grainy reception was playing an American soap opera. Celestine told me she was fifty-four years old and had been a nurse for thirty years. She was Ewe, from a village in Volta Region. She ended up in Koforidua because that’s where the job was. Her parents had long ago made the urban migration to Accra. Although never married, Celestine had two boys—a seventeen-year-old who attended boarding school in Begoro, about an hour north, and a thirty-five-year-old who was getting his master’s in finance at Towson University in Maryland. “He wants to stay in the U.S.,” she said. “If he gets a green card, I will go to visit him.”
Meanwhile, just about every weekend for the last fifteen years, Celestine would hop on her motorcycle with her two digital cameras and travel to weddings, funerals, “any event,” she said. The five-by-eight prints she had made at a local lab cost her fifty pesewa each, and she sold them to her clients for twice that. She could also get larger prints laminated onto decorative panels for fifteen cedis, and her living room was cluttered with stacks of samples. But the profit margin was smaller on those, she said, as customers only seemed willing to pay about twenty cedis.
Celestine said she planned to retire from nursing in six years, at age sixty, at which point she would receive a small pension. “I have been saving,” she said. “I plan to open my own photo studio.”
“I have no doubt you will succeed,” I replied.
“I am always fighting,” she said, jabbing her fists like a boxer. “Struggle, struggle. You can’t rely on anybody, only God. As soon as you rely on another human being, that’s trouble for you. That’s my life. No boyfriend, no husband, they are very bad. God doesn’t like that. It’s a bad habit. It’s not godly.” I wondered about the no-account men who had passed through her life, breeding fatherless children and misandry, but I didn’t ask. “I praise God and thank Him every day for what I have,” she said. Then she took my picture.
If you want to get a sense of how the urban elite in Ghana shop, you go to the Accra Mall. The mall looks pretty much like malls in America. It’s clean and air-conditioned with lots of free parking, a well-designed multiplex, and a large anchor tenant on each end—Shoprite, a South African grocery chain, and Game, a South African version of Target. In between are trendy clothing and accessories boutiques that look vaguely familiar until you realize they are mostly South African knockoffs of popular Western chains. There’s a Pottery Barn lookalike called La Maison, for example. Walking through the Accra Mall is sort of like being in a parallel shopping universe, or a Star Trek episode about a planet where everything is sort of like home, but tweaked in some weird way. There is even an “iShop,” which sells Apple products but is not a real Apple store.
I’m not much of a mall rat even in America, and when I spend lots of time in a country where daily shopping is done in chaotic public markets and along trash-strewn boulevards lined with shacks and lean-tos, I tend to forget all about things like Pottery Barn and Cinnabon. I just never wake up in Koforidua thinking, “Damn, I wish I could go browse wrought-iron candlestick holders.” (Actually, come to think of it, you can get some pretty cool hand-forged iron stuff in the Koforidua public market.) I get used to not having that stuff around, and then I forget about it, which makes seeing it all the more shocking.
All of which is to say that while entering the Accra Mall would fail to dazzle back home, in Ghana it’s like walking through the main gate of the Emerald City.
With gemlike prices, I might add. Stuff in that mall is just mind-bogglingly expensive—far more than in the United States for the same merchandise. I don’t know if it’s the lack of competition, the inability of Africans to buy mail order on the Web, stiff import taxes, or all of the above, but if you want the good life in Ghana, you will pay dearly. Even the food in the grocery store is out of reach of most Ghanaians, but there too the merchandise is obviously geared to an elite crowd looking for prime steaks, Parmesan cheese, and vintage wines. Naturally, the crowd at the mall is relatively upscale, and you see plenty of obrunis from the diplomatic corps and the NGOs. Still, not everyone is as high-toned as you might expect. Whit maintains that the guards shoo away people who look “too bush”—radically indigent farmers with tattered clothing and matted hair. But there are plenty of very poor urbanites with a clean pair of jeans who stroll through the mall window shopping—aspiring to be modern consumers, as it were. I often found myself silently rooting for these apprentice materialists: “C’mon, you can get that blender if you work hard and save! Think of the mango smoothies!” Maybe someday, when you have electricity.
From the mall parking lot you can get on Ghana’s only expressway, which runs from there to the port of Tema. It was built under Nkrumah and was supposed to go all the way to Kumasi, the inland capital of Ashanti Region and Ghana’s second city. But Nkrumah was deposed before it could be finished. Under former President Kufuor, the government awarded a contract to a Chinese company to install streetlights along the busy tollway. The lights were substandard, made of cheap fiberglass and aluminum, and many have twisted and broken in the wind. Now they dangle limply over the roadway. “They were never hooked up anyway,” said Charlie.
We were driving, Charlie and I, on a weekend trip to Volta Region. Charlie generously offered to be my tour guide in what is one of Ghana’s most rugged and beautiful areas, so I picked him up on a Saturday morning at his house in a suburb of Accra called Adenta. His neighborhood was laid out in a loose grid of dusty and unnamed dirt roads, each block enclosing several sprawling one-story homes whose tile roofs were barely visible behind high walls. It reminded me of Phoenix, or possibly Phoenix when they completely run out of money for road maintenance. Although you couldn’t see much from the street, most of the homes appeared to be comfortable but not ostentatious. Some, however, aspired to considerably more grandeur; bougainvillea and bird-of-paradise cascaded over ornate gates scanned by remote cameras. Some had walls bunted with razor wire, or a row of electrified strands, or with menacing shards of glass cemented into the crown, reflecting the determination of the African elite to hold on to that which they have gained, and their lack of faith in the rule of law. In Western societies, the middle class functions as a buffer between the haves and the have-nots, providing a path for advancement without resort to guns and machetes. In Africa, the buffer is a wall.
Charlie’s property had a wall, a gate, and barking dogs but was otherwise undefended—partly because he wasn’t rich enough or elite enough to require further emplacements, and partly because the whole concept of residential fortification struck him as overkill, despite his readiness to believe Ghanaians capable of almost any contravention. “What are they so afraid of?” he asked me once.
His youngest son, ten-year-old Kosi, met me at the gate and led me inside. Charlie and Afi have five children—one older daughter, two sons who are away at boarding school, another daughter in junior high school, and Kosi—and their home is suitably capacious yet clearly built for function, not frills. Charlie designed and built it about fifteen years ago, and he claims his newer homes are much nicer. Still, it’s pretty nice—breezy and casual in layout, with hand-carved hardwood doors, four bedrooms (all with attached bathrooms), and a large, open living and dining area. It would be a perfectly nice home in America (it even had an attached garage), but some features, or lack of them, would seem strange in, say, Denver. Despite the amazing amount of good food that comes out of Afi’s kitchen, the cooking area is small; one reason is that Afi and her daughters still do much of their cooking on an outdoor brazier, village-style. There is no dishwasher, which would strike any African as superfluous when you have five children. And there is no washing machine or dryer—again, not counting the children, who do all the family laundry by hand. The children also sweep and mop the terrazzo floors throughout the house every day. To do all these chores they must first haul water, because Charlie’s well isn’t working. It seems a neighbor drilled a well that tapped into Charlie’s aquifer, draining his own supply. During my visit, Charlie was in the process of getting a new well drilled, but these things take time in Ghana.
As a contractor Charlie mostly works in the field, but he also maintains a comfortable home office with well-stocked bookshelves, a late-model computer with Internet service, and a CD player. Charlie loves American soul music, especially Motown, and books about American history. On his desk was a copy of Bill Clinton’s autobiography. I picked it up. “Have you read it?” he asked me.
I confessed I had not.
“It’s good,” he said. “I liked him. He was very respected in Africa.”
One of Charlie’s daughters had made us omelets, but for Charlie the repast was fatally compromised by the absence of his fresh daily bread, which had not been delivered that morning. Saying he would eat some bananas on the road, he left me to my breakfast and went to load his bag into the truck. Soon we were on the road, the smog and traffic of Accra disappearing behind us. After a couple of hours we crossed a steel arch span over the Volta River south of the Akosambo Dam and headed north and east. Overhead, high-tension power lines hummed. Charlie said that for years after the dam was built in the early 1960s, Volta Region was still being powered by creaking British generators left over from colonial times. “All the power from the dam was sold to Togo and Ivory Coast, to line the pockets of the politicians in Accra,” he said. That changed in the 1980s under the military rule of Rawlings, who is Ewe.
Along the road, under shade trees, we passed displays of wooden djembes and peg drums for sale. “This is the land of the Peki,” said Charlie. “They are an Ewe tribe known for their drums, and for starting wars.” I wondered if the two were related, but Charlie wasn’t sure. He told me that an incident in a tribal war against this group is how his family got its name. “My great-grandfather was fighting the Peki,” he said, “and a bullet was deflected off his machete in a scabbard at his side. It would have killed him. Our name means ‘metal trap or ‘money trap.’”
“‘Money trap’?” I said.
“Well, metal and money were typically the same thing.”
“Of course. So you could say your family is a money trap.”
“Possibly even a money pit,” he said, alluding to his several homes and kids in private schools.
We drove on, the landscape providing Charlie with a running commentary on the catalog of his entrepreneurial ventures. Here was a cattle ranch; Charlie had tried that once. There was a teak plantation; Charlie knew all about that. “The teak forests in Volta are the best in the country because the rain pattern is ideal,” Charlie said. “You get lots of rain, but interspersed with dry periods, which makes the grain very tight,” and he balled up his large fist to demonstrate. “In other parts of the country where it is too wet, the grain is not so tight. The Volta teak is as good as Burmese teak and can even be sold as such if it is shipped through Asia.”
It seemed obvious to me that Charlie had made the right decision when he gave up his studies in medicine. Not that his career has followed a linear path—he’s been a serial entrepreneur, with plenty of ups and downs—but the consistent thread has been a willingness to try just about anything new, from mechanized salt farming to building a better cement block. His business career actually started in college, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where he wrote his master’s thesis on a technique he developed to inoculate a local plant with palm wine to create a substitute for hops (which don’t grow in Ghana) and thus brew a genuinely local beer. “I decided I didn’t want to go into the business of making people intoxicated,” he said. (Charlie enjoys an occasional beer or cognac, but he swears allegiance mostly to coffee.) And so he moved on to the next idea, and the next, in the process employing a lot of his countrymen, which he still does on his construction crews.
Although he grew up in Accra, like most Ewe Charlie maintains strong ties to Volta Region. He and Afi have a house in Keta, a windswept barrier island of fishermen and salt farmers hard by the Togo border, and relatives throughout the region. On a trip that spanned several hundred miles over two long days (I did all the driving), Charlie knew the location of every single speed bump and police checkpoint, most of which he complained about. The speed bumps that really got him going were the homemade ones built out of mud and stone by local communities. “They are much too high, they ruin cars,” he said. I wasn’t sure how speed bumps could be any worse for cars than the sinkholes all over the roads in Ghana. As for the police—well, how much time do you have?
“It used to be hard to become a policeman here,” Charlie said after a cop at one barricade glared at us with more than the usual suspicion. “They had to pass exams and physicals; now it’s just who you know. Many of them today don’t even speak English. Sometimes when I get pulled over, I pretend I don’t speak the local language, only English. They get confused and just let me go!” He laughed solidly at the thought.
No, Charlie wasn’t too intimidated by the police, despite their stern roadside queries and loaded Kalashnikovs. One time he scolded a cop soliciting a bribe from Whit. “This man comes over here to try and make a business, to provide jobs for Ghanaians, and you give him trouble!” he said to the officer. “How do you expect this country to grow?”
As we advanced north, the landscape narrowed to a twenty-mile sliver of land between the giant lake on the west and the mountains along the Togo border due east. We stopped for a lunch of street food—goat meat kebobs, bananas and coconut shards—in Kpando, a chaotic market town on the lake. Along the breezy shore, fishermen in dugout canoes raised sails sewn of flour sacks and scudded out over the waves with their long nets. There was supposed to be a ferry from Kpando to Donkorkrom, ten miles across the lake, but lately it had not been running. We continued north to the city of Hohoe, where Charlie had an uncle he wanted to visit. His uncle, an herbal healer, or medicine man, of royal ancestry, lived in a dark stuccoed hut off a courtyard in the center of town. He was at least in his seventies and quite small, especially standing next to Charlie, who had to stoop as we entered the small home. We sat in plastic chairs and shared water from a cup. The pair spoke in Ewe for about twenty minutes. Charlie apologized to me for the perceived rudeness, explaining that his uncle’s English was poor. I didn’t mind; after a long drive, the singsong rhythm of their conversation was soothing in a musical way. Soon we got up to leave, and Charlie gave his uncle fifteen cedis. Back in the car, he said the old man complained that the country was going to hell and the younger generation had forgotten the traditional ways. Old people are pretty much the same everywhere.
Charlie told me that despite his uncle’s humble trappings, the man was sitting on a gold mine—literally. Apparently he possessed a box stuffed full of ancestral gold jewelry that his family had collected over centuries of royal service in Ewe villages around Volta Region. Rather than sell the stash, which would clearly have artistic value well beyond its metallic worth, he made money by renting out the finery to chiefs for their festive gatherings called durbars—sort of like Harry Winston loaning gems to starlets on Oscar night. Not all Ghanaians are as poor as they look, Charlie reminded me, and his uncle was certainly proof. And yet it was still expected that Charlie, the big-city nephew, would slip him some bills during a brief visit.
Getting out of Hohoe proved a significant order, as every road was blocked by several long funeral processions, a fact of life in Ghana on a Saturday afternoon. We sat in traffic and watched columns of marching mourners in black and red robes file past the car. It was a curious custom, the Ghanaian funeral party. In a country where, to put it mildly, discretionary income was at a premium, people spent copious sums on these extravagant send-offs—catering meals and alcohol for hundreds of people, hiring bands and sound systems, to say nothing of the elaborate handmade coffins and cemetery memorials. Guests too must pony up—traveling from far away and paying tailors to make custom robes out of fabric chosen by the next of kin. In her book The Imported Ghanaian, Alva K. Sumprim writes of a boy whose parents spent more on his funeral than they were willing to spend on the drugs and medical treatment that might have saved his life. It is commonly said in Ghana that you never know how many friends you have until you die.
“It never used to be this way,” said Charlie, munching on a banana as we waited. “The whole funeral thing really started in 1979 with the crackdowns related to the military coups. The curfews shut down the nightclubs in Accra, and it became dangerous to act wealthy or even middle class. If you had money, you didn’t want to show it. So no one had parties or went out. Instead, the funerals became the parties. Now it’s crazy.” Eventually the crowds thinned and we escaped Hohoe, bearing east toward the mountains along the Togo border, where jagged faces of exposed rock creased the horizon.
Togo, population around seven million, is in many ways very different from its larger western neighbor. The sliver-sized country has been ruled by the same autocratic family (father and now son) for more than forty years, and the economy has stagnated along with most pretense of representative government, despite recent controversial elections. By comparison Ghana is the land of opportunity, and many Togolese have migrated west. Some thrive in the food service industry: a former German and then French colony, Togo has a francophone culture that extends to its cuisine. Togolese chefs, schooled in the sauces of Escoffier, find steady work in Ghanaian hotels and the homes of the elite.
Lomé, the capital city, rises on the coast just east of Charlie’s home in Keta and only a hundred miles or so from Accra. It used to be a wild place, said Charlie, with hedonistic nightclubs and candlelit French restaurants. “The Togolese, they really knew how to have fun,” he said. “We would go over there just for dinner and dancing. Now it’s all gone to hell.” Poverty and desperation have spiked a dangerous crime wave in Lomé, with muggings and carjackings common. According to the U.S. State Department, the beaches and public markets are unsafe even by day.
“The last time I went to Lomé, I threw up,” said Charlie.
“Literally?”
“Literally.”
But along the Togo-Volta border—a line drawn in Europe in the nineteenth century—the differences between the two countries become insignificant. The people on both sides are simply Ewe. Although we passed several official border crossings (all closed on Sunday), dozens of dirt tracks wandered into the bush, back and forth across the border. At places, our main road actually veered into Togo. “We are in Togo now,” said Charlie as we cruised along.
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me.”
I pulled over next to a woman carrying a sack of charcoal on her head. “Bonjour, madame.”
“Bonjour, monsieur.” She smiled broadly and waved, balancing the sack on her head.
“S’il vous plaît, est-ce qu’on est proche au Togo?”
“Ici Togo,” and she pointed at her feet.
“I told you,” said Charlie, laughing as we drove off.
“My first African dictatorship,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to have a visa.”
“Don’t worry, we’re back in Ghana again.”
Charlie needed to go to Keta to pay the electric and water bill on his house there. “You can’t send checks?” I asked.
“They won’t take checks from a bank in Accra.”
“Really?” I was surprised because while credit cards are rarely accepted in Ghana (and often subject to fraud), checks are pretty standard; Whit paid his employees with checks, and he wrote checks for business supplies at several Accra merchants. “What is your bank?” I asked.
“Barclays.”
“They won’t take a Barclays check for your utility bills?”
“Not in Keta from an Accra branch,” he said. Apparently there was no reliable financial infrastructure to verify interbank checks, at least not on the level of personal accounts. Like the traffic jams, the information jams ate up huge productivity bandwidth, forcing businesspeople like Charlie to drive hours to pay simple bills.
“It’s a lot of work, owning houses here,” I said. Charlie had another place up on the Akwapim Ridge, near the president’s Peduase Lodge.
“You know, in Ghana, houses are like retirement accounts,” he replied. “If you have money, it’s where you put it. Saving in a bank is risky because the cedi is so unstable. I used to keep money in a London bank, but that’s also risky, because you have currency fluctuations. Real estate is much safer.”
“It’s real.”
“Exactly. As long as you are careful what you buy, it will always be there.”
“What do you mean, careful?”
“Private land sales are not always honored,” he said. “You can buy land and before you know it, someone else is building a house there. Then you must litigate. It’s a big mess.”
“So what do you do?”
“It’s best to buy land from the government. Also if you are smart, you will start building right away.”
“So that’s why I see so many half-built houses in the middle of nowhere.”
“They are asserting their claim. You put up something, whatever you can afford.”
In many ways Ghana seems like a modern capitalist society, but dig a little beneath the surface and you find all sorts of weird idiosyncrasies, like the lack of basic, reliable title laws. Indeed the whole concept of private property, a relatively recent idea even in the West, is still highly ambiguous in Ghana and many other African countries, where the ancient notion of the commons is often still respected. Much like the European nobility of the Middle Ages, chiefs in Ghana are typically stewards of common land in their communities, with the power to decide how it is used, and by whom. (Chiefs are not, however, part of the government; in fact they are barred from participating in politics.) Friction occurs where the modern world of private land intersects with the traditional world of common land. It’s not unusual for a Ghanaian to purchase property and find out later that another family claims use rights, based on long-held chieftaincy grants. The nebulous world of land use is another reminder that Africa can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated to do business.
Around a corner, at another checkpoint, a cop waved us over with his rifle. I groaned and rolled down my window. “Please, I would like a ride to my barracks,” he said, motioning down the road.
“A ride?” said Charlie. “Where is your car?” He was being a wise guy: Ghanaian police almost never have cars.
“I have no car,” said the cop, who looked to be maybe twenty and probably didn’t know how to drive.
“Are you smart or stupid?” asked Charlie.
“Please?”
“We only let smart people in this car.”
“Oh, I am smart,” said the young man, straightening visibly.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “You may get in, but we will see how smart you are. If not, you will walk.”
The young man climbed in the back. He was a new recruit, he told us, from a tribe in the far north of Ghana; he did not speak Ewe and knew no one in this region. He and Charlie spoke briefly in Twi, but after a few miles we reached his barracks and let him out.
“Don’t you think you were pressing your luck?” I asked Charlie.
“I just like to make jokes,” he said. “If you just wear a frown all day, what’s the point?” I thought about the sad face I’d be wearing in a Ghanaian hoosegow, then realized there probably wouldn’t be any mirrors.
“Good thing for us he seemed like a nice young man,” I said.
“Maybe even smart,” said Charlie.
Over dinner at our hotel in Ho (the large regional capital, not to be confused with smaller Hohoe), Charlie and I talked about Burro. “Do you think Whit will go for nonprofit status and try to get donations?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “He’s pretty committed to making this business stand on its own.”
“It’s taking so long,” said Charlie. “I admire Whit for sticking with it, but I hope he doesn’t lose his money.”
As for his own exposure, Charlie had no cash in the company; his deal was an equity stake in return for six months’ work getting the business off the ground—basically providing his local expertise and advice. That time frame had long since passed, and Charlie was pretty busy with his own construction business, but he remained actively involved in Burro. Whenever Whit needed a contact in Accra, or someone to speed a shipment through customs, or advice on how to deal with a personnel matter, Charlie was the man. Still, Whit and I sensed he was getting impatient. With scarce access to capital and sky-high interest rates, the concept of nurturing a start-up for several years was understandably foreign to Ghanaian entrepreneurs like Charlie.
Our primary tourist destination for the weekend was Wli Falls, at two hundred sixty feet the highest waterfall in Ghana. Arriving at the turnoff for the Agumatsa Wildlife Sanctuary, we parked and walked a few yards, until the mighty cascade, still perhaps half a mile distant, came into view. Vultures circled high above where the water exploded from a deep fissure in the side of a red rock wall and tumbled down a sheer face lined with moss.
“Now, that is really something, isn’t it?” said Charlie.
“Indeed,” I said.
We both stood and stared for a good long minute. Finally Charlie said, “It looks like a woman urinating.”
“You know I hadn’t considered that,” I replied, “but now that you mention it, I can see your point.” For better or worse, it was now all I could think of.
Accessing the dramatic lower pool of the falls entailed a forty-minute walk along a jungle trail that crossed the Agumatsa River in ten places, over rustic wooden bridges. In typical Ghanaian style you had to hire a local guide, for no reason other than to spend some money. As it turned out, however, our guide proved handy when, ten minutes into our walk, the heavens opened with a monsoon downpour. Samuel (that was his name) quickly located a large banana tree and proceeded to bite off the stems of two giant leaves to use as makeshift umbrellas. The leaves did nothing; the rain still soaked us. But it was funny to walk along holding banana leaves over our heads.
The rain had stopped by the time we reached the giant pool at the base of the falls. It was an awesome sight: mist thrown off by the thundering cascade vaporized in a massive cloud, bending rainbows over the spray and drenching the treetops. On the rock cliffs surrounding the falls, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of giant fruit bats dangled like effigies over the abyss, waiting for their twilight wakeup call.
All of this nature would have been quite enough to write home about, but there was more. This being a weekend, a gang of youths had hiked in with a generator and enough sound equipment to address the North Korean Workers’ Party. In fairness you needed a lot of wattage to compete against the roar of that waterfall, so the wall of speakers did not seem excessive in context, once you got past the very weird idea of a public-address system blasting Ghanaian rap music at the base of the country’s most spectacular natural attraction. Honestly, I don’t know how the bats managed to sleep. But it all made perfect sense to the busloads of city kids in the water, splashing, yelling, and dancing.
The compulsion to improve the great outdoors with gasoline-powered amplification is not exclusively African. But as practiced in Ghana, it is almost certainly rooted in drumming traditions combined with the simple fact, which cannot be stated too many times, that here all life happens outdoors. Westerners tread reverently in the woods, but Ghanaians crash in with as many comforts as they can call home—slashing at snakes, waking up fruit bats, and rudely interrupting the great cascade, Mother Nature going about her business.