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.