The Gulf of Guinea

From the university to Nkrumah Circle a tro tro costs 60 pesawas, about 45 cents. A tro tro is just an oversized, boxy van full of seats—though they don't feel oversized once you are inside. A few years ago a law was passed that every passenger must have a seat, so I haven't experienced a tro tro as those in years past would have. But a van will have a driver and a money collector (who doesn't need a seat) and about 11 paying passengers. On the other hand, I read (and saw the accompanying picture) in the paper today of a taxi with driver plus four in the front, six in the back, and two in the trunk (with the hood open). So a tro tro may actually be a luxurious way of traveling. Tro tros are used for travel all over the country, not just within the greater Accra region.

A tro tro plus baggage

The tro tro depot for Volta Region, near Makola market

Nkrumah Circle is north of Makola market, and the closest I can get to the ocean without changing tro tros; it is, essentially, the end of the line. Changing tro tro would be an additional challenge. Tro tro stops are like a bus stop in Canada, but without routes and schedules marked. A stream of tro tros pull up, the money collector jumps out on the fly and starts yelling the destination in heavily accented English, while gesturing wildly. The gesture for Nkrumah Circle is fairly easy to tell; it involves waving an arm, or more subtly, just a hand, rapidly in a circular motion. Even once I have detected the right gesture often I still cannot detect the word 'circle' in the accompanying vocals. And of course seating is limited and people are jumping in and out of the vehicles while I am trying to determine the destination.

It's about a 40 minute walk from the drop off to the ocean, which takes me back through Makola market and down to the Ussher Castle. From here I will have to weave a bit, and finding a break through the last row of buildings to the beach turns out to be a bit more difficult than you might think. The coast is not lined with beach houses and public walks. The beach is a factory, the buildings face away from it, toward the vibrant city, and there seems to be no public access.

Selling computer cables

My route also took me past the Cocoa House. This is the central government office for the Ghana Cocoa Board, charged with the management of the nation's largest export (think the Canadian Wheat Board). All cocoa is bought by the government, which negotiates prices on the world market. Ghana is currently the largest exporter of cocoa, a title usually held by Côte d’Ivore (and Cadbury is the single largest buyer). There is a gap between the price paid to farmers and the market price, which is a source of income for the government. That the price of cocoa has shot up in the last year ought to have increased the wealth of both the farmers and the government, but there are no observable signs of this.

After several unsuccessful attempts to break through the row housing to the beach, I am spotted by Evans, a local, looking to pick up some tour guide Cedis on his day off. I've learned in James Town money is never discussed, but the friendly locals are always friendly for multiple reasons. A quick introduction, including a round of “where are you from?”, and he immediately takes me around a corner and down a path to a spectacular view overlooking the Gulf of Guinea.

It turns out Evans’ day job is supervising the garbage clean up on this stretch of the beach. He knows everyone, is related to half of them, and understands what job everyone is engaged in. This is Saturday, but it is not a day off. The beach is busy, with people mending nets, repairing and building boats, selling and buying tackle, doing laundry, even making concrete blocks.

The boats are quite fascinating, for they are a combination of dugout and planks. The bottom is carved from wawa (triplochiton scleroxylon), a huge tropical tree that is a perfect choice for an ocean going boat. The tree can grow to a height of 45 metres with a diameter of about two metres. In addition, the first branches may not start until about 30 metres off the ground. This leaves a vast stretch of straight grained wood with a sizable width. 

As you can see, on top of the dugout the sides are built up in a carvel style, creating a seaworthy vessel with good storage for a catch of fish. The dugout will last about 50 years, while the sides need replacing every half dozen years or so. Notably, the iron spikes in the sidewalls rust out. The boats here are about 10 metres long; the one being worked on is new while the other two are rebuilds using the original dugout.

Even smaller boats are built with this construction. This boat, about five metres long, when on the water, is fitted with three masts in this rectangular slot, one vertical and two angling to port and starboard.

The pier is completely covered with nets, floats, people working, playing, and just hanging out. There is a little group of young men kicking a football around on the sand and another group in swimming.

Evans takes me down the beach, chatting, jibing, teasing the locals, all the while providing me with details about the activities and live on the gulf. A large boat can cost Cedi 50,000 - 60,000 (about three years salary for me) but will last 50 years with care and regular refitting. Slaves were brought down through tunnels or down grand staircases to the piers and out to the awaiting ships. His cousin does a good business selling tackle to the fleet. This friend, who is supposed to be painting boats, is using the boss's paint to detail his van.

Turning away from the beach, Evans and I start to walk back through James Town. But this time, through Evans' eyes, there is more to see and learn.

A few weeks ago, Veena, Ralf, and I sat in the jeep waiting for Fortune to return with the giant grouper. Without knowing it, we were parked kitty corner with the palace of the king of James Town. I didn't even know James Town had a king. It turns out all the original villages along the coast had and still have kings. Evans takes me to the palace, really just a big house, no different in style than the surrounding buildings. With one exception: colourful bas relief works of the king and court.

The wall on the outside of the palace (pictures permitted)

Photographing inside the palace is not permitted (yes, I learned the hard way). But I did meet, and apologize to, the king's linguist, who thought it was all very funny, especially my attempt at saying sorry in Ga, thanks to Evans' coaching. No one really considered it a big crime.

A linguist is the person who speaks for the king; essentially, the king will speak quietly to the linguist, who in turn, will belt it out for all to hear. It is a very important position, as you can imagine. More than a town crier, the linguist through his utterances enacts laws and judgements.

Behind the palace are the real streets of James Town. Here people live, work, and play. As we wind through them, Evans explains that in each kingdom everyone is given a specific name that is particular to that kingdom. So walking the cosmopolitan streets of modern Accra, if one local meets and asks the name of another, he will immediately know what neighbourhood (kingdom) his is from. This is to reveal, without stating, what neighbourhood you grew up in. (In my case, Valleyview.)

In addition to a palace, each kingdom also has two houses (for men and women). As near as I can tell, these function as a cross between a club house, a parliament, and a town hall. Photos are permitted; in fact, Evans was pretty proud of the elephant. Also several onlookers encouraged me to photograph their friend doing laundry. Click. Then much laughter as they explain to her in Ga what just happened.

Finally, with the top of my head nearly burnt from too long in the sun (I hadn't planned on such a thorough tour of the beach and James Town) I tell Evans I must head back to Legon. We shake hands on the street and I ask him if I may give him a little money for his time and expertise. A broad grin spreads across his face, "Of course."

A campus walkabout part III

Now in surround sound!!

There were birds a plenty at Bungalow No. One, but now that I am back at the Guest Centre I have a full jungle outside my window. Hence, I sleep with ear plugs jammed inside my head. Tossing around in the night one usually pops out, and at some point I will awaken to this. (Just a little something I assembled on my computer — with apologies to Mike, who will know that not all the bird sounds are indigenous to West Africa, but you get the idea.)

As I type this in my office mid-day there is a chorus of birds outside, singing joyously. I just turned around to my window to see if I could spot any of them, and realize it has become ominously dark out. This happens. Rain here is always preceded by ominous dark, and frequently by complete dark, as the power shuts off. I'm also surprised, given how hot it is and how strong the sun, that it takes a couple of days just for the ground to dry off — including pavement.

Speaking of rain and looking out my window, this is a typical scene following a typical downpour — a work crew cleaning the gutters (and the roads) of plastic, leaves and branches, and sand. That wheel barrel is full of sand that has been scraped off the road, a delta of red Ghanaian soil deposited as the waters abate.

 

 

After the first rain I experienced, now months ago, I was impressed with the sudden blooming of flowers, not just right up out of the ground and on bushes, but all over the trees. After each new rain there are still flowers that pop up, flowers that had yet to show themselves. And other things too. The front lawn of the bungalow recently sprouted a half dozen of these beasts. I suspect they are not edible, but what a meal they would be.

 

There is no shortage of edible food on campus, though the selection is not very broad. Most serve Ghanaian food, and it's a limited palate. I'm working on a separate post on food that will be coming up soon. But one of my regular spots is the Farmer's Kitchen. The offerings here are no different from a host of other spots on campus, but I can get a large container of quite tasty fried rice for about $1.20. My hosts:

Not all my meals are fast food; I do actually cook at home on occasion. Though the move back to the Guest Centre has again limited my cooking options to cold food. But fresh mangoes and pineapples can be pretty satisfying in the tropical heat. Most days I start with granola, soy milk, and fresh fruit. At my office I crank on the AC and have two cups of coffee. But in addition to the night market where the fruit comes from, there is CitiVeg, which sells produce grown right behind the stand, a component of one of the agriculture departments (there are several departments). Available are garlic, onions, lettuce, spinach (though it tends to be bitter), carrots, cukes, corn, brown rice, and some spices. I took the picture at the end of the day; the selection is usually much grander.

The campus also has lots of little private fruit and snack sellers. Family businesses.

The down side of so much take away food is the garbage. And most Ghanaians seem oblivious to it. I joke that if there was a plastic ban in Ghana, about 90% of the population would starve to death. Everything comes in plastic, sometimes several layers of plastic. When I buy pineapple the ladies in the market want to put it in two bags. The nice thing about buying pineapple in the market is you pick out your fruit and then the seller tosses it in the air and flails around with a machete and you end up with a peeled and diced bag full of goodness. Which they then want to put in another bag. The chopping is convenient. It also eliminates fruit garbage at home, which in this climate quickly ferments. But I don't need two plastic bags to get my fruit home and in the fridge.

On the other hand, Ghanaians are very clean and well dressed. Everything is pressed. Before I came here I asked if my initial accommodations would be furnished, and if so, how completely. I was told I would need to buy a few necessities like a cook top, plates and cutlery. But at the top of the list was 'an iron'. Most of the rooms in the residence halls are multiples, from two (rare, really only for grad students) to twelve (four and six are most common). But with that many to a room, everyday is laundry day for someone.

I know I've posted a lot of pictures of buildings. I've explained I can't help myself, since my father was an architect, his father a carpenter, and I've spent a good part of my life building and renovating houses. It seems to be in my blood. So there is no easy way to put this. This is just wrong:

That scaffolding is not tied off. All I can think is you get nine guys hanging off the right side, while one guy gets up on top to do whatever repair is necessary. And you work quickly.

Finally, again because I like architecture, we don't see this at home:

Homage to Richard Tuttle

Representing four continents

Because I've been so busy the last few weeks (more on this later) this post has taken a long time to get finished. Veena left Ghana, returning to India, almost one month ago. But just before she left....

On Sunday, Ralf and his wife, Fortune, loaded Veena and me into the British Land Rover and headed for the Gulf of Guinea.

 
While Ralf is critical of his British vehicle — it pales beside good German engineering — it does the job, if in a somewhat spartan way. Veena rides shotgun, and I have to help her up into the cab after each stop. She can crawl up the truck all right, but the stopper on the door is broken, so it swings forward right up against the front fender. No one sitting inside could reach it and pull it back, but Veena needs both hands to climb in and can't spare one to hold the door near.

Off we go.

A laundromat that washes your clothes and keeps them; but you have visitation rights.

We are headed to a little resort in Jamestown, where most drink options are unavailable and the kitchen, though open, has just opened, and most menu items (surprisingly "Everything is available") will take 1-2 hours to prepare. We decide to enjoy our drinks and then go look for faster food.

The ocean is beautiful, the sky a soft blue, a salty breeze blows across us, white pounding surf crashes on rocky outcroppings, pale yellow sand glimmers below us, and the company is fine. Our little group represents four continents: North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

My friend, Dawn, is the editor of a photo-based newspaper in Kitchener-Waterloo and she has sent me with a copy of an issue, to photograph in exotic places. For two months I have either forgotten to bring it along on adventures or forgotten to take it out of my bag. But today it is tucked under my arm, and a small group of children in reindeer hats now pose in front of the Gulf of Guinea. 

Snapped at the Gulf of Guinea

After our drinks and sitting in the sea breeze for several hours we head off in search of real food, getting distracted several times along the way.

Once up on the main street through Jamestown we are approached by several people who volunteer-for-a-fee to show us around. Most offers are rebuked. But when one guide offers to get us a good fish for a good price Ralf decides we should take him up on it. It is further decided that Fortune should go off alone in search of the fish. This will ensure a fair market price. Prices tend to go up dramatically as foreigners near. In this regard, Ralf, through Fortune, has a distinct edge over me.

The obruni (and Veena) wait at the jeep.

It takes Fortune quite a while to return, but she comes back with a monstrous grouper, which by now is prepped and sitting in their freezer, awaiting an encounter with a barbeque.

Finally, we are ready to resume our hunt for food. Fortune started it all, several hours ago, with a declaration she was hungry now. I guess being on the hunt for food in the form of a fish was temporarily satisfying.

We end up at a road side order window, much like the one pictured below, that sells bags of hot yam frites with salt and chili pepper sauce (everything in Ghana comes with pepper sauce and in this case it makes sense). There is a lady who runs a business out of a garage across the street from the philosophy department who gets my lunch money on a regular basis (lunch costs me about 30 cents).

I took this picture through the front window as we sat in the jeep and ate our fries, mostly for its misspelled "chiken tighs" and dropped "f" that makes it look like it is only selling "Freshish" fish.

And the customer with the yellow hat (I think he looks like a superhero):

Or he thinks he looks like a superhero.

I learn later our resort is located between Ussher Castle and Jamestown Castle, both built to protect the Europeans, for whom this was a major slave depot. Ussher castle was built in 1642 by the Dutch and changed hands several times as European nations gained and lost interest in the region and fought with each other. Fort James was built by the British in the 1660s, and both were eventually under British rule.

Neither castle is grand. They are utilitarian forts, with the armaments facing inland, not out to sea. Unlike along Europe's coasts, the enemies here were not technological equals in the form of European neighbours. Here the enemies were locals, resisting invasion and the slave trade. Frequently, though, the locals were armed with guns, even cannons, by absent European neighbours. 

This surf was the first body of water many forest people would have seen and heard in their lives, brought here to be loaded on ships that would take them across the Atlantic. Tunnels were dug from the cells above the rocks that rise from the sea down to the beach and the wharfs, where the ships waited. It must have been terrifying. And it wasn't about to get any better.

On the road again

Well, that was short.

I've moved back to the Guest Centre. And left behind my roommate from hell.

When the U asked if I would share accommodations with another new faculty member I agreed. When I told Anna-Marie she asked if I had even met him. My reply, the words I now eat: "How bad can he be?" And this I said in full knowledge that academics can be an odd lot.

But I was unprepared for the level of how bad they can be. The trail of filth I was prepared to suffer through for a few months. Even the odd behaviour. But cruelty (in part through a solopsistic insensitivity) had me begging to leave.

Things in Ghana can move very slowly, but this happened very fast.

I cried uncle on Friday and was moving on Tuesday, which was pretty amazing when you consider the person in charge was at a retreat on the Friday and in meetings all day Monday.

Ralf and I gathered a couple of the department's National Service students and loaded up his truck. I still don't have a lot, but I have acquired a fridge. Since they put me back in my old room in the Guest Centre (second floor, rear and has a small fridge), and I'm only here for six more weeks, I opted to put the fridge in my office. So my office now has, in addition to my small beer fridge, a giant beer fridge.

The first morning, waking in my old bed at the Centre, was like awakening from a bad dream.

By the way, it's a lovely fridge. 

Ralf insisted I should get a good German fridge (he's German): well-built and reliable. I was not sure I could budget for more than an inferior (at least in his view) Korean or Chinese fridge. But he drove me down to the Bosch store, where I quickly veered away from the Ghana Cedi 3000 (about $2000) fridges, to a more modest one in the corner, under the stairs (the Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree fridge).

Even this was not as cheap as the east Asian options, but Ralf and I tag-teemed the negotiating and did very well. At one point the sales clerk showed us the wholesale price from their books to assure us he could not go below that price. After twenty minutes and failing to reach my target price, we left the store. Only, as is so typical, to be called back with a counter offer, below the wholesale price.

The impossible low price was based on Ralf pointing out earlier we were from the university and there would be more purchases from us and our colleagues (on our recommendation) if things went well today. Negotiating is quite foreign to me, but I feel we did well. I went up 1 Cedi from my hoped for price and the store came down 250 Cedi.

Once I got it home and wrapped a blanket around its base, it perked right up. Actually, it is an excellent fridge, if somewhat unassuming.

Of course, now it will sit unplugged in my office until our return in August.

Summer

Well, that was short.

Yesterday afternoon the temperature started to rise again, and my room last night was its usual 30 degrees when I came in. By morning it was 28. The past two days it was down around 25 in the mornings. And now I'm sitting in my office with the air conditioner on at 8:30am, wiping the sweat off my brow. And getting up from my chair every now and then to peel my knickers off my bottom.

So summer is back. It's really hard to get a sense of what the weather is supposed to be doing. As I said yesterday, the changes in weather are subtle by Canadian standards. There has been a change since I arrived early January but the daily high has been consistently 32 and nighttime low around 27 — until Monday.

Even trying to figure out when the rainy seasons are is tricky. There are two, a major and a minor one. Before arriving, I had read the major was in April and May, the minor in August September. A typical conversation starts with me noting there are almost no mosquitoes (I didn't even see one for the first month I was here). The knowing reply is "Oh, when the rainy season comes you'll see them, all right." "When is that?" This is where things get complicated. Answers have included:

• April/May
• August
• June
• May/June
• September
• June to September

I think part of an explanation is people always think about when the rains come in their home region (though neither they nor I live there) and the rainy season does (I've read) vary from north to south, and along the coast.

I guess I need to ask when the rainy season will come to the University of Ghana, Legon campus.

For now, I know rain, mosquitoes, and malaria are in the future, and at present it is hot and humid here at the University.

 

Winter

Whew, I woke up cold this morning, struggling to pull the sheet over me. I've been using a rolled towel as a bolster and unfurled it to cover me. The room temp was only 25. And now just after 9 in my office I have the front and back windows open but haven't turned on the AC. It is overcast, there was a single clap of thunder around 7, and it spit on me on my way to school at 8. My weather widget predicts rain over the next 3-4 days (though it has done that before and been wrong).

Yesterday it got dark in the afternoon, but nothing came of it. But I do think at some point today we will get a big blast. Since I'm planning on scooting around later I hope I can avoid the weather. We get so little weather here (in the Canadian sense of "if you don't like it just wait five minutes"). It hasn't rained since I moved into the bungalow; it will be a shame to be inconvenienced by a once in a month event.

Well, I made it in and out of town without any 'weather.' There was a gentle sprinkle as I went to the bank this morning, and I still haven't turned the air conditioner on, but it did warm up in the afternoon; though it was still quite pleasant.

In general, the weather has changed since I first arrived. The first month was hot and hazy. I'm living almost on the equator, but have only worn sunscreen once, shortly after I arrived. I also gave up wearing a hat. In that first month, with my wanderings around campus I neither burned nor tanned.

In February, we had about one great rain a week. The first big storm blew away a lot of the dust in the air, so that the day after was hotter than usual because of the absence of haze. Within two days the haze was back. But it wasn't until March that I really started to get anything like a tan line. I have several now, one very sharp one around my neck from a long walk on Saturday with a well-fitted T-shirt. The line separates the white from the red. Throughout March the haze has diminished, but the temperature and humidity have also gone down a bit. That, and I've acclimatized to the conditions here. 

No rain today. But I'm optimistic we will get some this week. It just feels and smells like it. I have yet to be able to sit in the screened hallway of Bungalow No. 1 and watch, hear, and smell a tropical deluge dance on the flagstones of the courtyard.