A Long Road
I am southbound, rolling very slowly, down a road from Kumasi to the coast. There are potholes everywhere, and the hill to my left is stripped while gold is being pulled out of the ground. To my right the illegal itinerant gold miners are crouched on company land picking through rocks to find gold. This is Obuasi, and we pass through Tarkwa a few hours later, another mining town. When we finally reach the coast, we have reached the end of a trade route that has been in place for 2500 years, at least.
The coast, at least from Cape Coast to Accra, is Fante land. They are coastal people, so they fish, but also controlled trade with the British when their ships arrived. The gold fields, further north, are in Ashante land, a powerful, though relatively recent, empire that had immense power over the trade route, since they had gold, and were able to resist the British for a long time.
As we roll through towns and cities, passing taxis, trotros, private cars and donkey carts, it’s easy to imagine that all this movement is new. And to some extent it is: paved roads and fossil fuel, larger populations and a wider range of goods, this is new. But the idea is not. The goods and people that rolled back and forth over the Sahara, from the Mediterranean to the southern coast of the West African bulge may have changed, but the traffic is something as old as anything else we’ve bothered to remember. It may not be written down, but it’s in the actions and ideas of everything happening here, written into the culture of visiting, trade and gift-giving, in the way that the rooftops of trotros are piled as high as the vehicles themselves with food and gifts travelling with people as they return home or leave it. You can tell the distance a trotro travels by the height of the goods on its roof.
And it’s this traffic itself, the application of new technology to old traditions, that makes me think back on some of the things I’ve seen in my short time here in Africa. I have this vision from Tanzania, passing through a town just east of the Great Rift Escarpment, of a woman walking down the street in the evening, baby tied to her back, with a hoe in her right hand and a cell phone in her left. Though this might seem incongruous in Europe or North America, somehow it fits here, doesn’t seem at odds with anything else. I think for too long I’ve held on to this idea of culture as static, set in stone or lost in time. Ahistorical. But it’s not like that, is it? It’s okay to ride a camel and talk on a cell phone, or email from the middle of nowhere. Or ride an age-old trade route in a Ford Truck. Or a donkey cart.
I met this Austrian fellow last week who was so much more impressed with Bolgatanga than the south of Ghana because it’s “more like the picture” of Africa he had. Not to say that I don’t love Bolga and Frafra people but the poverty here makes certain things more difficult, and it’s those things I like about the south. It fucks with my ideas of what Africa “should” be. It’s sophisticated and traditional at the same time, steeped in something old but doing its best to change.