The coming dust
I am standing on the Bontanga dam, about an hour before sunset. The lake stretches off to the south, an agriculture and fishing project of the Rawlings government, designed to get people growing rice in this area, and provide access to fish. Nobody grows rice here now, and there’s only one boat out fishing, piloted by two young men who seem to be doing more singing than fishing. To the north there is green, along the banks of what’s left of this stopped up river, marshes with cattails, women planting vegetables. There is actually an impressive amount of greeen all around us, even though it’s the dry season. The grass that dominates the landscape is dry and yellow, it’s true, but there is still that kind of tropical green in the leaves of the trees scattered around us. The teak grows in groups, planted but not exotic. There is shea nut, and cashew, and my personal favourite, the baobob. These bulbous-trunked trees are powerful members of the local landscape.
There is a dirt road under my feet and so people are passing by, on bicycle mostly, but also on motorbikes. A greeting is mandatory here, whether it’s a wave, the Degombe greeting, to which I respond “naa,” or the high-pitched, enthusiastic “hallos!” of children under the age of about twelve, who wave and shriek when they see me. I am definitely a novelty. It is quiet out here, more so than in town. My mother has brought me out here to show me this dam, to see some of the countryside outside Tamale. It is beautiful. As we drive home the day’s dust hangs in the air, kicked up from a thousand passing feet, and a thousand rolling wheels, kicked up by the harmattan wind, which brings the northern region’s two month cool season along with dust from the sahara, evenings that are perfect at a frigid 24 Celsius. And so the dust brings us a red sunset that bleeds into the horizon.
Tamale, named for the tama, or shea nut trees, is a small (half a million) city, especially in comparison to Kumasi or Accra, but there is a constant bustle. The mosques around us issue their call to prayer five times a day, trucks blast their horns, and the King David Inn, my neighbourhood outdoor bar, really gets kicking on the weekends. I went there for the first time on Friday night with a guy named Cuthbert, a colleague of my mother’s, who took me out drinking. As we sat at the King David at the beginning of the night one of his friends joked that they wanted me crawling home, and they very nearly succeeded. As the night progressed we headed over to his friend’s place downtown, where I was fed some awful strawberry liqueur, and whiskey shots, along with the local corn mash, called bangku and an okra stew. Bangku is a sort of gluey paste made from pounded corn. I think it is probably still stuck in my stomach. From there we went to a couple of discotheques, where they continued to buy me drinks and by about one am I was unable to process anything more than a desire for bed. So my first taste of Tamale’s kicking nightlife.
By this time next week, which is, I suppose, Christmas, though it hardly feels like it, I will be in Tanzania, on the Serengeti Plains wrestling lions.