Election Day draws near

Wow, I really let this blog go for a while.  Sorry about that!  I'll try to post more regularly in the future. 

Ghana’s presidential and parliamentary elections, which both occur every four years, are just two days away.  The excitement has been both palpable and audible; an intermittent, hours-long procession of opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters marched, rode and drove through my neighborhood today, blowing vuvuzelas, whistles, and trumpets and shouting slogans.  Supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) had a similar march in another part of town.  Both parties were marking the last day of campaigning, which I will explain below.

When voting begins at 7 am this Friday, many voters will have already been waiting in line outside polling places for two hours or more so that they can cast their votes early and then get on with their days.  One neighbor mentioned to me that he always votes around 4 pm, an hour before polls close, because by then there are no lines at most polling places.  The same neighbor told me that the people who get there in the early morning usually wake up that early anyways for work, (in this country, many people’s schedules are dictated by the sun.) 

Elections tend not to be completely free of violence or voter fraud here, but as many Ghanaians are quick to point out, Ghana's elections are more peaceful and transparent than those of most other African countries.  This year, though, people seem genuinely committed to peace.  The collective desire is stronger now, they tell me, than it was in previous elections.  The government has also designed a more sophisticated security apparatus this year.  One neighbor even told me that he recently saw a friend of his, a muscular police commander, jogging with all his toughest officers in the Brong (originally Bono) Ahafo Region.  The man said he couldn't remember the last time he had seen cops run.  The Electoral Commission, the public office responsible for conducting elections, has also introduced a new rule prohibiting loitering and motorbikes within a certain distance of polling places, making it harder to steal ballot boxes and intimidate voters.  Finally, today was designated the last day of campaigning, giving people a couple of days to calm down so that passions are not too inflamed when polls open.

These kinds of reports are very encouraging.  However, for many Ghanaians, the concern is not only who wins and how many voters get hurt but also the way that people conduct themselves.  An array of prominent Ghanaian political actors have in so many words called this election a pivotal point in Ghana's history.  The country has come a long way in recent times, and since the passage of the 1992 Constitution of the Fourth Republic, which established Ghana as a democracy, the nation held five presidential elections and weathered two transitions of power between parties.  None of these was ultimately disrupted by violence.  A few months ago, when the president died and the vice president assumed his position, I didn't hear a single report of violence even though both of these events were unprecedented in Ghana's history. 

The consensus is that if Ghanaians can hold this election without a major incident, they will have solidly arrived in a new era of political stability.  This would hopefully accelerate development by making the nation appear less risky to lenders.  Many public figures have also remarked that the whole world, especially Africa, will be watching Ghana to see what kind of example it sets with this election. 

Some Ghanaians can argue all day about which of the two major parties is better.  Most of the time, they end up talking past each other like so many Americans do. Still, I get the sense from people on both sides of the aisle, (an expression that is not current here,) that in spite of the incessant political bickering, they hope and believe that new ground will be broken in this election.

Last week, the presidential candidates met in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region and Ghana's second largest city, where they signed a non-binding pledge to strive for electoral peace and transparency and to punish anyone in their ranks that violates the agreement.  The event was held with much fanfare and featured speeches by the Fourth Republic's two living ex-presidents and many of the presidential candidates.  Opposition NPP presidential candidate Nana Akufo-Addo took the occasion to make reference to his opponent’s party’s bad track record on electoral violence.  He was widely criticized for the move, which members of the governing NDC said was a gesture of bad faith.  However, his complaint also highlighted a concern that has since been echoed by members of both parties: it’s good and well to make nice in front of the cameras, but it all really comes down to how people actually behave on Election Day.

Interestingly, both parties have hoards of members and associates who flood the airwaves and party-affiliated newspapers with insults and vitriol directed at political rivals.  Even on the day of the peace declaration, these people continued trading allegations that the other side had been secretly plotting electoral violence. 

Overall, people seem optimistic that this election will be peaceful, but few are completely sure of it.  They are apprehensive because when tensions are high, disorder can spread easily.  Reports of violence against supporters of one party in one place can incite thugs loyal to that party to stir up trouble elsewhere.  And of course this year's contest is no ordinary election, it’s a potential watershed moment in the nation's history. 

Some of the people I’ve talked to say they are absolutely convinced that there will be violence and fraud.  At the other end of the spectrum, I have a coworker who, when another colleague raised the issue of reporting on electoral violence, asked us not to talk about it, not to even humor the possibility that violence could break out.  I didn’t ask him why, but I suspect that he reacted that way because he knows that a report of violence, true or false, is likely to spur more violence.  I think he finds the prospect of being a part of that process distressing. 

Work at my media job will begin by 5 or 6 am on Friday, when I’ll be visiting polling places around my neighborhood in search of interviews and human-interest stories.  By 10 am, I'll be working out of the office.  Today they told us that we'll work until the results are declared, which will hopefully happen no more than 48 hours after polls first open.  A friend at the company advised me to bring a change of clothes, but I luckily live five minutes from the office.

NB: While in power, both of the two main parties have presided over rampant systematic corruption and administrative ineptitude.  However, both have also brought development and other kinds of progress, such as the expansion of civil liberties.  The NDC claims to be more socialist leaning and the NPP more capitalist, but this election season, NPP presidential candidate Akufo-Addo ran principally on the promise to make senior high school (i.e. the last two years of high school) free.  In fact, both campaigns have promised free handouts and proposed public-private partnerships to boost the economy and catalyze development.  And unlike the two major political parties in the United States, no social issues divide the NDC and NPP.  More often than not, voting patterns follow ethnic lines. 

Most Ghanaians see a world of difference between the two parties and are shocked when they learn that I can't.  I’ve found that some Ghanaians, especially those fiercely loyal to one party, they think they can determine the slant of almost any news story.  Many of these people would surely believe that I am an NDC supporter because earlier in this post, I shared an unflattering anecdote about Akufo-Addo but did not follow up with a criticism of his opponent, sitting president John Mahama.  I'm sure you can believe me when I tell you all that I have no preference for or affiliation with any Ghanaian political party.  

Nkawkaw

Nkawkaw from above

Since I got to Ghana, I've been so busy trying to established myself in Accra and get settled into my new job that I hadn't even left the city until very recently.  Finally, last weekend, I went up to Nkawkaw to visit a friend who lives up there and works as the chief engineer at a radio station called Obuoba FM.  We met before over the net when I applied to his station without realizing that it was in the Eastern Region, a 3 or 4 hour drive north of Accra.   When I came to Ghana, he provided me with contact after contact at the radio stations around Accra until I got hired.  He even came down to help me in person once.

I got to Nkawkaw by bus, and as soon as I arrived my friend took me directly to his radio station to show me around and introduce me to his coworkers.  He explained that the transmitter is located on top of a tall local mountain (the Eastern Region is one of Ghana's most mountainous) and that Obuoba consequently has the widest broadcasting radius on Ghana.  The Obuoba signal can be picked up in 7 of Ghana's 10 regions.

The next day, we went up to the top of the mountain where I got to look at the transmitter and the broadcasting tower.  The mountain has also become famous as a launching site for paragliders, who come mostly from abroad during the city's Easter Festival to jump off one of its ledges and float above the city, eventually landing in the soccer stadium.  On top of the mountain, we met a sightseeing couple from the Brong Ahafo region on the mountain who had come in a car, so we joined forces and for most of the morning and part of the afternoon and drove around the mountain towns together.

I found the scenery around Nkawkaw and the neighboring towns incredibly striking, especially in contrast to Accra's urban and often crowded aesthetic.  I've included a couple of my favorite pictures from our trip below.

A side view of the cliff face that overlooks Nkawkaw

Shrouded in the morning mist a little before 9 am, this is the mountain that houses Obuoba's transmitter.  It's also the mountain from which the first two pictures were taken.  I took this shot from the opposite side, in a town called Obomeng.  The concrete blocks in the yard are for sale and will most likely be used to build houses.

The Obuoba FM tower.  This picture was taken too close to the tower's base and doesn't give the viewer a proper sense of the tower's height.

The Obuoba transmitter

Up close

A cluster of telecom and broadcasting towers elsewhere on the mountain

The Butuase Waterfall in the mountains around Nkawkaw

A rock ledge at the falls

Waste Not Want Not

The waste not want not doctrine is observed closely in Accra: used goods of every kind are available so long as you know where to find them, and most people are very sensitive about wasting food.

For example, it's common for people eating chicken to eat the bones and cartilage.  In the US, the only person I've ever seen eat chicken bones is my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, and she only eats the marrow.

Many also put their leftovers to good use.  The other day, my neighbor prepared a meal for his uncle and I that consisted of banku (a fermented mixture of ground cassava and corn with a texture somewhere in between tamales and mashed potatoes) with smoked fish and "pepper," a salsa fresca-like sauce made out of chilies, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger, all fresh.  When the three of us had eaten our fill, there was still quite a bit of pepper and some fish bones left at the bottom of the communal bowl.  For dinner that night, the nephew simmered the mixture in oil, transforming it from fresh pepper into tomato stew, another popular local recipe that essentially consists of the same ingredients.

That same day, these two also introduced me to a local drink called chibuku or shake-shake.  Chibuku is the lightly alcoholic juice (around 3.5% by volume, they tell me) that brewers squeeze out of malt that they have already used to brew beer.  The chibuku that we bought was produced by the brewers of Club, the most widely-sold beer in Ghana.  The drink is slightly carbonated (that's why the closed carton looks inflated in the first picture,) mildly sweet and full of a fine sediment that mixes with the liquid when you shake the carton or swirl your glass, hence the name.  I found it pleasant and refreshing enough, especially with food (although most Ghanaians won't drink anything until 30 minutes after eating) but I'd be surprised to see it become popular in the states.  It costs about $.75 a liter whereas Club usually costs between $1.50 and $1.75 for a 22 ounce bottle.  If shake-shake really is 3.5% alcohol by volume, then a carton of it has about 7.5% more alcohol than a large bottle of Club.

And that's what struck me most about chibuku: it's so clearly a product of the ingenuity that Ghanaians apply in building their consumer habits around the hard scrabble realities of life in the global South.  It's tasty, relatively cheap (albeit not compared to certain locally produced hard liquors), and most importantly, made from readily available resources.

To my neighbors and other Ghanaians, of course, the drink is more a treat than a sign of relative poverty.  The nephew, a devout Christian, recently told me that while many Ghanaians recognize that their diets are defined by their purchasing power, they give thanks for all their meals, bountiful and meager, and are not bothered by the lack of variety in the food they eat.  The message seemed to be that pleasure is fleeting but life is precious.

Lights Off

Lights Off is Ghanaian English for a blackout.  It's a term that I learned after only a short time here.  Right now, we're in the middle of a weeks-long series of power outages because the West African Gas Pipeline, which carries fuel from Nigeria to other West African states, was damaged by a boat (a pirate boat, I heard,) that crashed into it while fleeing the Togolese navy.  Although Ghana recently discovered oil off its southwest coast and relies on certain other sources of power like hydroelectric dams, this pipeline supplies most of the energy destined for public consumption.  Official estimates on the repair time so far have ranged from early October to late November and may very well continue to change as time goes on. [Update: officials now estimate that this round of blackouts may very well continue through the end of 2012.]

During the energy shortage, blackouts have occurred at least every few days.  At first, they were more or less regular, coming once every three nights, and fortunately for me, these nighttime blackouts last only four hours in my neighborhood.  Elsewhere, power normally goes down from 6 pm to 6 am.  Recently, the blackouts have begun coming more often, with my neighborhood seeing an additional 12 or 13 hour daytime outage every three days or so.  It took a few days for the ECG (Electric Company of Ghana, a public agency) to acknowledge this increase, and since then blackouts have become even more frequent. 

Tonight I'm optimistic that I'll be able to cook my dinner with the aid of an electric element because the lights went off last night and blackouts tend not to occur on consecutive days or consecutive nights. 

A lot of people sleep early when they go off around 6 pm because many Ghanaians routinely rise with or before the sun.  I usually stay up so that I get an extra hour or two to iron clothes, check emails, and so on.

Here are a couple of long exposure pictures that I took after sundown during last night's blackout.  You can see the grid line beyond which the lights stayed on, and there are some headlights, flashlights, and generator powered bulbs in the foreground.

Mocking the Serious

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor was telling me that Ghanaians often joke about things that happen during the somber pre-burial rites typical of funerals, a ceremony that marks the time when the people closest to the deceased say their final goodbyes.  He told me about a boy's funeral he had gone to some time back.  When it was the father's turn to speak, the man couldn't contain his grief so he stuffed his already saturated handkerchief into his mouth to stifle his sobs.  An appropriate time later, when the father and a group of his friends were relaxing together, one of the friends teased him about the handkerchief and everybody laughed about it. 

More recently, my boss was very upset about a mistake that had been made in my department, and while he was reprimanding us he kept repeating the words "shame on you."  When he stepped out, it took only a couple of minutes for one of my coworkers to start parodying the mantra.  A day or two later, a couple of my coworkers even teased the boss about it and shamed him back in front of the rest of the department.  I was surprised to see that he took it in good humor. 

These kinds of one liners and offhand insults do not summon the full seriousness of the original event.  Instead, by making humor out of a painful or uncomfortable moment, people put distance between that moment and the present.  As best I can tell, the mockery signals that the group has moved on or is at least capable of doing so.

The Illegal Lottery

Sometimes it seems like there's no end to the ways that Ghanaians express their lack of faith in the state.  One of my favorites is the illegal lottery, which I like to think of as an underground lottery. 

These lotteries are bankrolled by a boss who never gets directly involved with the business on the ground.  He employs agents who roam neighborhoods and collect numbers and wagers from customers.  Underground lottos pay out according to the numbers selected by the official lottery, and customers with winning tickets redeem them with the agents for cash.

Of course, there is always the risk that if you buy a winning ticket, the agent will dodge you and you won't get paid, so people who play these lotteries stick with agents that they have known for a long time.  On the other hand, winnings are available immediately, not after a long wait, and agents don't deduct taxes. 

Corruption and Accountability

Corruption is a major impediment to development in Ghana.  Often, though not always, officials engage in corruption by misspending pubic funds.  I just wrote an article for work that sheds some light on the problem of accountability in government:

Albert Kan-Dapaah, chairman of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), has expressed disappointment in the limits on his agency’s ability to ensure accountability in the expenditure of public funds. 

During his Thursday interview on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show, he mentioned his desire for more civil society interest and involvement in matters of public accountability.  He commended public policy think tank IMANI for the attention it has paid the PAC’s activities but said that the committee could be much more effective if more groups get involved.

Kan-Dapaah also lamented flaws in several checks and balances that he considers crucial to securing accountability in the public budget. 

First, he said, when an annual budget comes before parliament, the legislature should engage in a bipartisan debate to vet the budget and see that it serves the nation’s interest to the highest possible degree.  The reality, he reported, is that the debate takes place along strict partisan lines and that political interests tend to overshadow national ones, effectively neutralizing this important check. 

Second, he said, ministers are responsible for issuing annual reports that account for all ministry spending, but for years most ministers have failed to produce comprehensive reports.  He did not offer a concrete explanation for why this is the case.

Finally, he explained that once all these reports are submitted, an independent auditor general reviews them and produces a report that he submits to the PAC.  The PAC examines this report, paying special attention to any accounting irregularities, and issues its own report that goes to Parliament for debate. 

Parliament sends its findings to the Audit Report Implementation Committee, tasked with pursuing legal action against those accused of fiscal wrongdoing in the reports.  Much to Kan-Dapaah’s chagrin, its members include the key figures in ministries that stand accused of wrongdoing.

Kan-Dapaah alluded to efforts to establish a parliamentary committee to take over this responsibility and eliminate the conflict of interest, but in the meantime he says that ministers suspected of fiscal malfeasance rarely take themselves to court. 

Sounds of the City

Sound clashes are common in Accra.  If you walk far enough, sometimes not very far at all, you can pass two restaurants next door to one another both blasting hip hop or dance music out of big PAs at full volume, heavily distorted, with the two electronic beats coming in and out of phase with one another.  The sound can be a little disorienting if you're standing out on the street, but inside one of these small cafes the sound overwhelms the neighboring establishment's PA.  I made this recording from my balcony a little after midnight one Friday night.  You can hear a bar's sound system playing pop music and a late night service from a nearby church.  Just before I managed to get the tape rolling,  a preacher preaching out of a different church's PA was also competing with these sounds.

Hugh Masekela

I have to share this one: a coworker of mine just came back from interviewing Hugh Masekela, who will play in Accra this Saturday.  When he came into the office, he was glowing, telling us how many amazing stories and insights are just swimming around in the old man's head.  His favorite among them was Masekela's observation that globally, Black women spend over $100 billion a year on hair that does not belong to them. 

Libations

Here in Ghana, there is a custom of pouring libations, but unlike the West, where we pour libations  in the memory of someone who has passed on, the act celebrates living people.  More specifically, it brings good luck to the person who bought the drink for the person pouring it out.  It's a mutually beneficial relationship; the drinker pours out some portion of the drink, (or one of the drinks if more than one were given,) praises the giver as he or she does so, then drinks the rest.  In some cases, the drinker will ask that the giver receive some specific good fortune.  If the giver is going on a journey, the drinker will ask for the giver's safe return.  Another interpretation of the way libations work, which doesn't really conflict with the one above, is that each drink given adds a year to the life of the giver. 

The pouring of libations is especially the custom among Ga people, whose indigenous lands include Accra, but people of many different ethnic groups do it here.  I first heard about it from the landlord and eldest, i.e. "senior brother" of the family compound where I'm living, who is also the go to guy for all my apartment related issues.  On his way out last Sunday, he asked me why I hadn't bought him a libation yet.  I've yet to see him again, bet when I do I'll be buying him a drink. 

Sexual Abuse and Violence

Sexual violence in Ghana is an issue that I've only begun to hear about recently, so this post will not offer anything close to a comprehensive overview of the topic, but speaking in the most general terms I can say rape and molestation are viewed with much less gravity in Ghana than in the U.S.  I want to pass this story along because given my American upbringing, I was personally shocked by it. 

In a recent news story, two teachers were accused of child molestation at a rural school. The local community was outraged when all the teachers at the school, including the alleged molesters, were transferred to other schools, leaving the school temporarily without instructors.  However, there has been a lot less said about the fact that the two teachers with histories of molestation will continue teaching and therefore have continued access to children.  When I asked one of my coworkers to explain this to me, he explained that many parents are not very concerned about molestation.  He even told me that a friend of his used to teach at a rural school where some nights, mothers would prepare elaborate meals, dress up their daughters, and have the girls deliver him the food in the hopes that they might entice him sexually.  This was presumably so that their daughters would have a chance to marry the teacher, who was probably relatively wealthy and prominent in the area. 

The same coworker then explained to me that in most rape cases, the family of the perpetrator typically pleads with the victim's family not to take legal action, and in most cases the victim and her family comply.   Especially in cases where the rapist is a wealthy or prominent man, he said that public opinion tends to weigh in favor of the rapist, and people tend to speak badly of the victim or her family for taking the case to court even if the victim is prepubescent.  Most of the rape cases that reach court are cases in which the rapist is poor, and it is primarily in these types of cases that public opinion favors the victim.  It seems to me to be one of many examples in Ghanaian society in which a person's value is assessed according to his or her net worth. 

I personally found a lot of this information confusing and I wish I were in a position to give a more thorough explanation of why, for example, people would criticize a 10 year old rape victim for seeking justice against a 50 year old rapist.  Hopefully I can shed more light on this in the future.  Finally, it would be irresponsible of me not clarify that these attitudes are not completely ubiquitous here in Ghana and that many people take rape and molestation very seriously.  Still, if a teacher accused of molestation is allowed to continue violating children, it says something about the overall attitude on sexual crimes. 

The Public Private Nexus

A couple weeks back I accompanied a coworker on a story at the headquarters of the Ghana Water Commission, the public agency charged with managing the nation's water resources.  Near the office, we saw signs for the Volta River Authority, which is manages the generation and distribution of the country's electrical energy for commercial and domestic use.  My coworker explained to me that both of these agencies raise some of their revenues through private enterprises like club houses and real estate rentals because the federal government does not have enough money in its budget to cover all the agencies' needs.  By contrast, in the US,  such public agencies tend to rely completely on the government for funding. 

I was reminded of this conversation recently while talking to a taxi driver about the police department, which like most public agencies here is underfunded and is therefore unable to pursue many criminal investigations.  I mentioned that in the US, many police departments fund themselves by collecting fines for things like traffic violations.  He said that this was not a feasible solution to their problems here because most traffic officers confronting a violator would rather collect a small fee for themselves than a large fine for the department, and drivers are obviously happy to pay the smaller amount. 

I'm curious to learn more about how public institutions finance themselves using private means if anyone has any information on this. 

Political Wranglings

The presidential election is coming up in Ghana, and the two major parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) are in full campaign mode.  Click here for an article that I wrote about the context surrounding this electoral contest. 

John Jerry Rawlings, ex-president and founder of the incumbent NDC party, is appearing at the NDC congress in Kumasi, essentially a nominating convention, which is going on right now.  Until very recently, it was not clear that Rawlings would attend the congress to offer his endorsement to NDC candidate and acting president John Mahama.  Rawlings had been critical of the administration of President John Evans Atta-Mills, who died about a month ago and was succeeded by Mahama, his VP.  Earlier in the election season, Rawlings's wife even challenged Mills in an NDC primary, though Mills drew 96% of the vote in that contest.  A coworker of mine is convinced that Rawlings is not appearing of his own volition but as the result of political pressure and underhanded tactics.  He explained it to me like this:

First, NDC General Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketiah publicly announced Rawlings's interest in attending the event to endorse Mahama.  The claim went unaddressed by Rawlings.  Yesterday, pollster Ben Ephson said in a radio interview that Mr. Rawlings wants to attend the convention but his wife is preventing him from doing so.  With these stories circulating in the major news outlets, skipping the conference would have been disastrous for the Rawlings family's public image.  For John Jerry's part, he would appear to be too easily bent by his wife's will and would lose credibility in the eyes of the Ghanaian people.  His wife would look bitter and vindictive and her reputation would suffer greatly. 

As you might expect, neither Rawlings nor any other NDC member has addressed these circumstances publicly.   However, given that Rawlings only announced his intentions to attend the congress after Ephson's interview, it seems clear that he is attending the congress because he got played. 

Hooker Row

On my way to drop something off at the American Embassy a few nights I passed through a stretch of the embassy district in the Cantonment neighborhood that apparently turns into a red light district at night.  The only other place I've seen such a dense concentration of prostitutes has been at Circle, a major transportation hub in Accra.  I guess that's to be expected with all the foreign money in the neighborhoods surrounding the embassies. 

Money Money Money

Today's post is the first installment in what I expect to be an ongoing exploration of the connection between money and interpersonal relationships here in Ghana. 

This afternoon, my friend was trying to help me figure out where I could buy used highlife records in Accra.  He said that he had a friend who might be able to tell us where to look, so he called to ask.  He and the friend are both in their early 20's, and they used to spend time together almost daily in college.  Since graduating, they've drifted a bit.  They no longer speak or hang out as regularly, but my friend still feels close to the man.  However, when my friend called him, he refused to answer the question and told my friend that he would have to buy him some phone credit if he wanted the information.

In Ghana, most phones are on a pay-as-you-go plan.  To charge them with time, one buys a card from a street vendor that has serial number covered by scratch-off material.  The amount of minutes correlating to this serial number is based on the price of the card.  If a phone calls the serial number, those minutes are automatically added to that phone's plan.  Everybody needs minutes and seems to go through them quite quickly, so it is not uncommon for people to ask one another to buy phone credit and send the serial number over in a text message.  As a nearly universal commodity, minutes are a practical way for Ghanaians to exchange small sums of money. 

Getting back to the phone conversation, my friend's friend was worried that my friend no longer valued their relationship.  He suspected that my friend was not interested in him socially and was exploiting their history together as a way to get information.  He demanded minutes in order to reassure himself that this was not the case: the information was not worth the 2 cedis (roughly 1 USD) that my friend would have had to spend on the phone card.  If he was willing to pay, this would not reflect the value of the information but rather the value of the friendship.  It would be a small gesture, but one that would unambiguously demonstrate his commitment to his friend.  By demanding phone credit, the man was declaring that he felt slighted by the distance that had grown between himself and my friend, but by the same token he was offering my friend the chance to make amends.  The money stands in as an apology; the act of giving acknowledges that the recipient was wronged and that the giver wishes to put the insult behind them.

My friend declined to buy the credit and instead told the man that because today was his day off, he would swing by for a visit later in the evening.  I'm not exactly sure how to interpret this move.  From my friend's attitude about the whole situation, my guess is that he wanted to reassure his friend that nothing had changed between them.  However, he did not feel like he had done anything meriting a cash apology.  In other words, he was sending the message that he did not want any ill will to exist between the two of them but that the man was overreacting and needed to suck it up.  Still, I can't help but wonder if this response also had something to do with the Ghanaian penchant for haggling. 

One for the language nerds

I recently started learning Twi, the Ghanaian language most widely spoken in Accra (albeit in multiple dialects and with varying degrees of fluency.)  I've found that in some ways it's very different from English.  For instance, it is a tonal language (it has two tones) and when establishing a verb tense, one conjugates the subject (if it is a pronoun) and the verb.  In a lot of cases, though, the syntax is surprisingly similar to English.

Take this sentence, for example:

Sɛ me ka Twi a wo bɛ te,

where
sɛ = if
me = I
ka = say (present tense)
Twi = Twi
a = definite article, like "the"
wo = you
bɛ = will/ future tense modifier
te = hear/ understand,
making the translation, "If I speak (the) Twi, you will understand."

In this sentence, the only way the Twi syntax differed from the English was the placement of the article "a", which follows the noun rather than preceding it as it would in English.  Another example of the similarities you find between languages of entirely different origins.

Mourning Atta Mills in a global Christian nation

Please excuse my recent absence.  The death of a hard drive is a trying occasion in every man's life, but time heals all wounds and money most mechanical malfunctions. 

Anyways, this past Tuesday was the week anniversary of the president's death.  The seventh day after a person's death, which precedes the funeral, is apparently a major event in the grieving process here.  To express their sense of loss, people, particularly young adults, street vendors and taxi and bus drivers wore the funerary colors red and black.  Many tied red bands around their bodies or side view mirrors. 

Accra is a very international city, a fact that becomes evident after not much time walking or riding around.  You see the faces of people from other continents, from Chinese businesspeople to white NGO volunteers to Pakistani beggars.  You hear French, usually spoken by people from Côte d'Ivoire and Togo.  You see secondhand vans from Germany, Holland, Korea, and China used as buses and you read the proverbs and biblical references written on their back windows in creolized English and local languages.  There are billboards for local branches of universities from India.  One popular  street food is a soup-free version of ramen and another is the sliced hot dog kebab. 

Ghana is also a deeply Christian nation, and in spite of a Muslim minority, Christianity seems to appear in almost every area of life.  It often colors public discourse, not only in politics (like in the US) but in the news media as well.  Many nights you can hear all night prayer sessions in residential neighborhoods and preachers often stand in the aisles of the bigger buses to preach the gospel as commuters travel across town.  I had been wondering at the connection between Christianity and internationalism here since I arrived.  Of the people I've talked to, most Ghanaians with connections abroad have a family member who immigrated to another country, but the second most common avenue for an international connection has been through the church. 

When President Atta Mills died, I got to thinking about this more.  He had apparently promoted Christianity abroad, and not long before his death he had announced plans to visit Nigeria, a trip he never made whose purpose turned out to be a consultation with a spiritual adviser.  On TV last Tuesday, the major networks ran a number of programs dedicated to Atta-Mills's memory.  One featured a Korean pastor who through the former first lady had made a plan the day before Atta Mills's death to visit him and pray for him the next morning.  As best as I could tell, he was the last clergyman to pray with the late president.  It struck me then that religion is not just a window into the world for so many of the people I've met but for the president himself too.  Of course, commerce is the biggest driver of internationalism in Ghana, but religion more often seems to engender a sense of fraternity between Ghanaians and foreigners.  I hope to bring you all more insight into this connection as I learn more about Ghana. 

During his televised account of the president's final hours, Pastor Park Ok-Soo described the last moments that he spent with the man.  He said that he prayed with Atta Mills and counseled him to give himself along with his sins up to God.  When the pastor reported that the president promised to keep those words in his heart and then announced that he would go off to rest, the crowd burst into applause. 

John Evans Atta Mills

Today was an interesting day in Ghana to say the least.  President, John Evans Atta Mills, who was elected in 2009 and has been campaigning for reelection this December 7th, passed away unexpectedly this afternoon due to poor health.  Having been here for just over a week, I am in no way qualified to explore the ramifications of Atta Mills' death, but I can say that the people I spoke to were genuinely shocked.  There is a sense that within the party, his death was expected, and the media here have been reporting heavily on a doctor's visit he made in the US earlier this summer.  The VP was sworn in as president this evening and as his first act as president, he has declared a week of national mourning. 

Some people seem to be genuinely reeling from the news.  At the same time, I was surprised how little the course of daily life seemed interrupted by the news.  Street vendors continued selling food, people continued to catch buses, and a photography opening that I had been planning to visit seemed well attended.  I suppose this is all to be expected.  After all, people have to get home from work, have to eat, and have to make money.  The US has not experienced the death of a sitting president since just after Ghana won its independence, but having heard about the day Kennedy was assassinated, the sense of shock that comes with a leader's passing does not seem so foreign to me.  Still, I really wish I had already been here for long enough to have a real sense of what's going on, what people are thinking about.  I suspect that although I am present for this historical moment, I will never really understand it because I don't have enough context to make sense of the events and commentary surrounding this national tragedy. 

Ambolley

I saw this man play last night backed up by a 9 piece band of guys all young enough to be his sons.  Crucial listening.

You can hear a sample here:

We are all products of our environments

The other day, I was talking to a couple of my new Ghanaian friends, both about my age, and they told me that they cannot distinguish white people from Asian people.  You do see a few white and Asian people around on the street here, especially in more international neighborhoods like Osu and commercial centers like the central market, but most Ghanaians have little if any direct contact with them.  I thought it was funny because in the United States, we consider the difference so obvious.  However, since white and Asian people are both relatively fair skinned and because some white people have black hair, Ghanaian people who have had little exposure to members of either group have trouble telling them apart. 

A walk through my current neighborhood

The alley in Atico where my motel is

 The street nearest that alley

Saturday roadside sound system with heavy bass, Atico

 Graphic Road, a major thoroughfare, where the street pictured above intersects it, Odokor

Smog check on Graphic Road

 A radio tower viewed from the same vantage point

And another

NB: I want to upload higher resolution photos but with the internet speed here, that's not very practical.  My apologies...

A Taste of Home

One of the main formats for food here in Accra is soup that contains some floating meat, typically goat or tilapia, and a mashed up, sticky starch mixture to dip in the liquid.  The most common kinds of starches are called fufu and banku.  The soup bases include okra and palmnut and often contain ground chiles and fish for seasoning.  The other day, I tried banku with okoro (i.e. okra) soup for the first time and was surprised how much the banku reminded me in its taste and texture of the tamal, which should be familiar to any lover of Mexican cuisine.  There are some differences, to be sure.  Although the baknu contains cornmeal, it typically consists in equal parts of cornmeal and cassava.  Rather than wrapping it in a corn husk and steaming it, people here ferment it and then mix it with hot water to form it into a sticky, cohesive mass.  As a result, it sticks to your hand and doesn't crumble, and it has a distinct sour dough flavor more akin to injera than tamal.  However, the cornmeal flavor is present as well, and the way its shape conforms to the plastic bags in which it is usually served is also reminiscent of tamales.  Of all the familiar foods that I expected to find over here, this was not high on the list. 

Banku as pictured on a restaurant's advertisement

Another funny parallel between Ghanaian and Mexican cuisine is the similarity between menudo and pepper soup.  Both are heavily spiced with ground chiles and given texture by oft-neglected cuts of meat: tripe in menudo and cow's feet as well as bony chunks of goat in pepper soup.  While menudo is given an extra burst of flavor with lime juice, pepper soup is heavy on the ginger.  Their most striking similarity is that both are considered hangover cures.

Development and Election Year Politics

As part of my quest for a job, I met earlier today with a man named Pastor Offer who has had a lot of experience working in radio.  We got to talking about politics around the world, especially back home and here in Ghana, and he gave me some very interesting insights into the Ghanaian system.  As both of our countries have elections coming up this winter, we talked a lot about campaigns and election year politics.  One of his anecdotes was too good not to share.

There was a Ghanaian politician who wanted to please his constituency in the lead up to an election.  In one of his districts, the residents had electricity but no street lights, so he decided to install a series of lights up and down some major avenues to bathe the area in a beautiful, warm glow.  When the election rolled around, he was shocked to discover that he had been defeated.  When some reporters went out to investigate the reason for the apparent upset, one resident explained that the people in that area live in very small, cramped concrete units that get uncomfortably hot at night.  To remedy the situation, the residents had taken to sleeping along the avenues, and the darkness that had once graced those streets provided them privacy in their more intimate moments.  That particular man claimed to have been conceived on those very streets, and added that rather than losing privacy in their sex lives, the residents might have preferred increased access to safe drinking water.  Apparently the out of touch politician is a global trope. 

My First Impressions of Ghanaian Hospitality

On my first full day in Ghana, I was absolutely blown away as I encountered the friendliness and generosity for which the Ghanaian people are known.  Although I only got my phone this morning, my contact list already has four entries.  The first was a man I met while waiting for an interview at a media company.  He himself worked in advertising, but as we got to talking he mentioned that he had some friends at a couple of newspapers and that he would be happy to talk to them on my behalf as well as look for a tutor to help me learn Twi.  As he left, he asked the man next to him to see to it that I was properly directed to Accra's central market where I wanted to pick up some interview-appropriate clothes.  That man in turn gave me a crash course in the phonology of Ghanaian languages, helping me pronounce a number of common consonants that are absent from English.  He sent me off in the right direction and told me where to catch a trotro (a big van that basically functions as a bus) that would take me towards the market.  On the trotro, I asked a fellow passenger where I should get off to get to the market.  As it turned out, the last stop was quite close to my destination, but instead of simply directing me there, he insisted on taking me around to buy every single item that I needed and even asked me to leave the haggling up to him.  After about half an hour or so, he left me in an office of the cellular/ internet company MTN where I waited to buy an internet modem, but only after recommending some radio stations and papers that I might apply to and taking my number with the promise that he would send me more information when he got the chance. 

As I was waiting for a trotro to take me back to my hotel in Odokor, a taxi headed the same direction filled up with people so I decided to take advantage of the diminished fare and jump in.  One of the other passengers in the taxi, a self-employed electrician named Sampson, became concerned about the price and comfort of my accommodations (pictured above), which are both adequate.  He insisted on leaving the cab before it reached his destination so that he could take me to another restaurant/ motel owned by a friend of his, which was a bit more expensive but also considerably nicer.  The owner was out of town but for about 20 minutes we talked to one of the employees who, at my new friend's insistence, said he would do all he could to give me the same rate that I'm currently paying.  Although I've yet to hear back from the motel, Sampson seemed quite confident that I would get the desired rate as a result of his adamancy and friendship with the owner. 

Although I had heard that people in Ghana tend to be very friendly and welcoming, I couldn’t help but be surprised by the profound kindness shown to me by so many complete strangers.