Yes, I love rice, wow!

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Ghana is another world. A land of paved roads, billboards lit with bright lights, trimmed grass, totally foreign from Benin yet eerily familiar--Accra feels far more like a small American city than Cotonou 6 hours away. Most people dress in western clothes and many throw their trash in boxes or in the occasional actual trash can(!?!?!?!). Reggae oozes out of small bars and passing vehicles. You can buy fried rice in a styrofoam box (cringe) with fried chicken and cole slaw (drool). Their are relatively few motorcycles, and vehicles tend to stay in their lanes and obey traffic laws (applause).

Unaware of the cheaper, easier, more comfortable metro bus, my road-dog and I took a trotro (ubiquitous minibus taxi) to a parking lot where we sat in another trotro in the rain for four hours waiting for our little van to fill for the trip to Cape Coast. Sounds boring, but I assure you, we had a plenty of entertainment in the form of ambulant vendors. A steady stream of people passed the open door and windows hawking the wares on their heads in style.

“Did she just say ‘Yes, I love rice, wow!’ ?“ “I think its Jolof rice”.."oh”…
“Yeeeeeees, biscuits”…”Yeeeeeees yogurt..yeeeeeeeees boiled eggs..perfume, wow..umbrella, umbrella, wow…yeeeees toffee... We ate a five course meal in that ill-fated trotro, and I cracked up at every less and less enthusiastic "wow" .

Cape Coast is the old capital of Ghana, the country formerly known as the Gold Coast. An impressive castle was built there around 500 years ago and the city gradually expanded around it. Originally built by the Swedes (if my memory doesn't fail me) as a secure trading post, it passed through a few countries' hands and soon became the seat of government and a dungeon where slaves were held to wait to be loaded onto boats.

The building and nearby coast are very beautiful (pics to follow…), even if heinous barbarism was practiced there for centuries. I’ll spare you the details--most of us already realize the human potential for cruelty and indifference to suffering, here institutionalized for profit. I learned that of around 60 million captured people, only 20 million made it to the auction block abroad, many dying during the long walk to the coast, many during a 3-9 month wait in the dungeon, and many more during the actual passage. A full 1/3 went to Brazil, 1/3 to the Caribbean islands, and 1/3 to the rest of the Americas. A few went to Europe I suppose, too. Not a pleasant thing to think about, but it's a story that needs to be told, and those who suffered deserve to be remembered.

At a touristy beachside backpacker haven we were lucky to catch a goofy three-man acrobatics show starring a young boy who was quite good at being flung, a contortionist tumbler, and a man who stood on a stool on another stool on 4 upright beer bottles on a table and spun a large bowl on his finger while I nervously cringed, grimaced and flinched .

The canopy walk in nearby Kakum National Park was beautiful even if a single butterfly was the only “animal” I saw (you have to go just after sunrise to be lucky enough to see a far-off monkey swinging from tree to tree.) The highlight at Kakum, though, was the “nature walk” , a 30-minute stroll during which our charming guide shared some of the secrets of the forest.

He showed us a root which, if you cut it with a machete and utter the right words, blood flows out and you can kill a man by speaking his name. He warned us not to try it in the afternoon, though, because if your shadow falls on the root, you yourself will die. Placing a leaf of the same plant on the floor of someone’s room, if they step on it before they see it, you will know their secrets.

He pointed out large ebony trees--which are great to scratch your back on, if you happen to be an elephant—trees which make great boats but crappy furniture, trees which make great furniture but crappy boats, trees with great, flat, upright roots like walls which people bang on to communicate over kilometers (loud, i tell you). Even today, he said, women get lost in the forest collecting snails, and they bang till someone comes to find them . One tree had been sliced with a knife and rubber blood was dripping from the wound (cool, a rubber tree). It was nice just to be in a jungly rainforest, at least closer to my initial expectation of the African bush.

Other highlights of the trip include termite mounds made of dirt towering at ten or twelve feet tall (unfortunately, seen only from the bus), a thorough disorienting venture into an air-conditioned, full of yovos, American-style sports bar for mediocre burritos and margaritas (hey, we'll take what we can get…) where we watched two pretty young ghanaian prostitutes start flirting with some older, fat American guys and go sit with them (what in the world do they have to talk about?), 48 hours of learning drumming, gyll (W. African xylophone), and dance, and making quick friends with the wonderful people at the Dagara Cultural Center outside of Accra (I’ll DEFINITELY be back…)

It was fun finding common points with food and language that after a year in Benin feel like our own. Much easier, though, was pointing out the differences, all too often marveling how Ghana is cleaner, safer, more orderly, more sane. That said, even if there are aspects of Ghana that are enviable from a Beninese perspective, the truth is that were Benin to develop in those ways, they would pay a certain cultural price as more global influence would inevitably eclipse and bury certain stuff that makes Benin "Benin". A ubiquitous trade-off that needs to be carefully negotiated. Good night, and good luck.