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.