After posting pictures of my palatial house, I was surprised by the number of inquiries about the tiny servant's quarters. But, because several people asked, here are some pictures of what I previously called the servant's house. I have since been corrected on the name. It is the room for the house boy. This is the more Ghanaian phenomenon.
I think in a previous post I've explained the National Service Students. Instead of military service graduates do a year of service to the nation. You can request a placement, and a place can request you by name, but otherwise you can get posted anywhere in the country, doing just about anything. The Philosophy Department has two NSS who are philosophy graduates. One of them, Mawuli, had a grandfather who was a writer and wrote a book about his childhood. Which is pretty cool. Mawuli has a literary account of grandfather's childhood and of his great and great-great grandparents.
In reading the book, set in the 1930s, I learned that it was common practice to send a male child away in their early teens to work in another household, as a house boy. This was considered part of their education. They would still go to school, but would do chores in their new household. In turn, the parents may take in the son of someone else. So when the University of Ghana was being constructed, including my bungalow, there was a culture of having a live-in house boy.
As you can see, this is a modest affair. Though, in the 1930s, Mawuli's father did not get a separate room or bath at all. He slept on a mat on the porch of the house he worked in. There is no exterior door; in the entrance way is a sink, and beyond that two rooms with doors.
Directly ahead is a room with toilet and shower (the shower head is behind the door). We encountered this design throughout South East Asia. In using the shower you soak the toilet. The only dry sit down is the first one in the morning and the last one in the evening. Unless, as I frequently do here, you shower twice a day. The one in the evening is just to wash the sweat off me and cool me down for bed.
The main room of the house is about nine square metres (big enough for a bed, dresser, and chair), with windows on two sides so you get a cross breeze. The house boy house is conveniently located just outside the kitchen, in a separate little courtyard, which also houses our water tank.
Applications are now being accepted. Base pay is 5 Ghana Cedi per week.
— the Management
3 comments:
And why shouldn't you, a visiting scholar, have a house boy? Someone to act as tea wallah, and brush off your academic gown for you, and generally see that you don't look quite the scruffy absent-minded professor?
Or rent it to Darrell as a base camp to check on iron smelting in Burkina Faso, which is apparently quite the hotbed of smelting country.
anti-v
I think Darrell's already been thinking of setting up a base camp. But I should point out that Burkina Faso is about a two day drive from here, as the traffic crawls.
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