Matt's Missives

I think that if I were looking at this blog as an outsider, someone who may or may not know me, I would not have my romantic notions of Africa dispelled in any way. The goal of this little segment of writing in the blog was to dispel some stereotypes about Africa. I may or may not have succeeded in doing this, but I have continued, I think, to perpetuate a kind of romantic mystique that surrounds "Africa" (whatever the hell that means, other than a series of arbitrary borders crisscrossing yet another continent still reeling from the effects of a long and brutal colonial occupation. Is this the only defining feature of Africa? I've read some that would say yes).

And while life here is cool, and wonderful, and mostly new, well it's probably also a lot more average in many ways than I'm making it out to be. I do work in an office, I work at a computer. My days are as filled with computer chess as they are with work (I have a relatively reasonable timetable for project completion). But still, the basics always apply. My days involve work, forming and maintaining meaningful relationships, eating, partying, reading. A thousand tiny and novel ways of entertaining myself in the hours of waiting that are Ghana. I think they have developed waiting into an art form here. Time is . . . relative.

My days may be hot and dusty but I find them endlessly fascinating, or something to just pull on through. Much like my days at home, only in a different setting, with a different language and a little more imperative on staying healthy, staying safe, staying cool.

Is it romantic to travel? Of course. Am I indulging certain romantic tendencies when describing this place? For sure, they're what makes good stories, after all. And in all reality, these events I write about really are the most tangible, if perhaps not the most frequent, events that occur. They're what gives me insight into this place, and hopefully a little more into myself. But still, they are not an accurate account of my daily life, and I just need to make that clear. The question is: is life a series of mundane moments punctuated by exciting moments? I tend to think not. Like any good adventure, with life you just have to learn to be patient between key moments.

Posted by matt at 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of the last three evenings have been spent curled face down in a bucket or toilet, doing my best to aim what's getting expelled from my body at what seems inhuman velocity. I think I ate some bad chicken. And I thought to myself, "yeah it's cold . . . but I eat here all the time and it tastes fine." Ah the dangers of varying routine. It is a fine balance. As my friend Dan put it last night, "It's not E. Coli unless it's coming out both ends."

Toilet functions are a pretty big topic of conversation here among expats. Comparing notes, diseases. Making sure that sickness isn't too out of hand, learning what to expect. Ah yes, sharp stabbing pains. That means diarrhea, maybe punctuated with vomiting, maybe not. The sharper the stabbing the less . . . control you'll have. Always carry toilet paper. Always. Oh how we poor privileged suffer.

Posted by matt at 02:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

He had a face like a donkey. I’m not trying to say he was ugly or anything. He didn’t have a long, flat nose, or big teeth. It was more in his expression. His slightly sad, deliberate, searching eyes. The sort of pensive set of the lips that showed he was thinking about what he was doing. Each move was carefully plotted, not rashly done. He would not act out of anger, hastily. He had the patience of a donkey, and it shone through his face. His was the sort of expression you hope for from a driver.

The greatest danger to safety in this country doesn’t come from disease or politics, weather or crime. It’s all about the roads. And as I pulled out of Bolga on the trotro this morning I said a little prayer to arrive safely. I don’t think I’ve prayed since I was about ten, but the beginning of a trip is definitely an appropriate time to pray. The road to Tamale is pretty good; it’s paved, there are no major curves or huge hills. It’s about the safest place to drive, I suppose. But with the trucks bombing back and forth from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Accra in the south, with the trotro roofs sometimes stacked as high as the vehicles themselves, crammed full of people, animals, luggage, the roads are something to reckon with. There was only one overturned truck on the road out this morning, and the usual dozen or so broken down on the 2 hour trip. It’s the charred skeletons of buses and trotros that really freak me out. I have seen them before, being worked over for scrap hopefully long enough after the incident not to upset any ghosts.

He had a face I trusted. And I arrived safe.

Posted by matt at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The best part of my day, consistently, is my ride to work. I know that sounds strange, mostly cause I’m going to work. But there’s a reason. I get on my bike at quarter to eight, and ride through Zaare, which means “welcome” in Gurune, up the hill to the main road, and then along the sidewalk to the Social Security building where the CENSUDI annex is. The ride along the main road is downhill, and in the morning, before nine am, is about the best time of day. The air is cool and the breeze blows just enough to give you a sense of weather that’s not just heat. The dust is low, usually, when the night’s wind is calm. And I ride into town, and in the distance lie the Tongo hills.

These hills aren’t big, and they’re only 15 or 20 km away, but they have started to mean something to me. I think there are two reasons. The first is that they’re landscape. I mean, rolling hills and trees are great, but in a flat savannah drama is important. Actually, I think almost anywhere drama is cool. It’s what makes for powerful landscape; it’s what makes for power centres. Hard and jagged, particularly when living in the soft and rolling, means power. The second reason is more personal. Every day, as I ride to work, I imagine, for one single moment, I am riding heading from the ferry back to Victoria, with the Olympics as my backdrop. Now, this is a personal fantasy, I will admit. But it’s a nice feeling, to see everything totally unfamiliar around you, and yet to find something that reminds you of home. It makes me feel a little more at home.

We went to the Tongo hills today. Vanessa, Bailey, Gideon and I hopped on bikes and rode out of town, towards these dust-shrouded hills, deciding that the best course of action would be to ride in the hottest, dirtiest, directest-sunlight time of day.

Gideon took us by his family home, in a village that only vaguely sounds like the English pronunciation Winkongo. In fact there are some crazy guttural/glottal sounds that I can’t even try to replicate speaking, let alone on paper. That’s the job of a linguist. We met his father, and his father’s wife, the senior brother of the family, Gideon’s half-brother (ie brother) and his half-dozen young cousins.

We then rode into the hills, towards a town called Tinzugu. There is a small tourist business in these hills, set up around the chief’s house and a shrine. Standing on a rock that once provided the overhang for Tinzugu’s school, we looked down on the maze that was the chief’s house. John told me a few weeks ago about this place (and exagerrated a little). This is the legendary 500-family house. Actually, it’s about 300 people, built around the chief’s eighteen wives and their children. It’s a twisting, turning knot of a compound that was quite an impressive feat of navigation for anyone passing through.

We continued on to the shrine, a small cave set into the rock hillside of one of the peaks. There are rules to entering the shrine. Clothing, above the waist and below the knee, is not allowed. Because of Tinzugu’s small but important tourist industry the shrine has allowed white women to enter the shrine wearing their bras, if they pay to sacrifice a guinea fowl. So both Bailey and Vanessa did. Originally the shrine played a role in bringing rain to this area, as the nearest water, the White Volta, is probably somewhere between five and ten kilometers away, over rocky harsh landscape. There is a borehole in town, now, so this is less of a concern. These days the shrine is used to solve problems. A big problem takes a donkey, a small one a goat or a fowl. The shrine itself was a circle of oil painted on the wall of the cave, a huge pile of guinea fowl feathers, and offerings left by visitors, some so old no one remembers who brought them, or what their significance might be.

And we climbed back down, and biked back out of the hills. Biking back I started to realize that although I was getting sunburned pretty badly, I wasn’t actually hot. One more moment of appreciating sweat. I’ve never noticed, before being here, how well it really does regulate body temperature. A thin film of water on the outside of the body and even the slightest breeze will keep you feeling cool and comfortable. The key is just keeping enough liquid in the body to sustain that constant output of water. So I drink about 4 litres of water a day.

I just barely made it back to town before a flat tire got me. I got it patched and went to get some sausages and beer (a 35km bike ride definitely made me feel like I deserved it) at a spot near my house, where I bumped into some other Canadians I know, and my friend Alex. I sat for a while, and after dark got on my bike back to Zaare, my other favourite part of the day. Coming down the hill off the main road into the village the air starts to cool, and as soon as I leave the pavement it’s drops significantly. The air in the village is noticeably cooler, and the stars more visible for the lack of streetlights. So under a skyful of stars and a slight breeze I return home.

Posted by matt at 06:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 29, 2006

A Family Dinner

I went to Gideon’s house for dinner tonight with Bailey. He introduced us to his mother, Rita, and his brother Calvin. We sat down and had amazing chicken, yam fries (real yams, not sweet potatoes called yams), rice, salad and Ghanaian tomato sauce. Gideon works with me at CENSUDI on the Education Improvement Project and is the first person I go to when I have questions about culture. How does a funeral work? What are the belief systems around this, why do people say that?

He’s an extremely bright guy, and always has a well-though out answer. We sat, after dinner, and discussed American foreign policy, African and international literature (Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare), and the revolutionary philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah (and in fact the pan-African movement). He and his brother have obviously both read extensively, and both write: journals, poetry, plays. When Bailey asked if Ghana needed a visionary leader or someone capable of restructuring the system the brothers answered differently. Calvin thinks Ghana needs a visionary, someone who can put them on a new path that will reshape the nature of their developmental direction, while Gideon sees a visionary as someone malleable to the whims of a party, and argued that restructuring the system will really be the only way to allow for positive change. When I asked them if there could be another Nkrumah they both said no. Too far ahead of his time, too willing to sacrifice for the good of his people and uncompromising in his politics, they said, how can Ghana produce another Kwame Nkrumah when the education system downplays the importance of his philosophies, his attitude towards politics and culture. How, indeed, can the world produce revolutionaries in a climate that breeds conformity? And yet it does, as the very conformity enforced upon breeds dissent. And so it is. So it goes.

February 4, 2006

I had another Nkrumah conversation last night. Actually, it was more of a lecture. I was out with the girls and my flatmates Gborzor (pronounced, roughly, Gozo, emphasis on the second syllabel) and Samuel. After the girls left I started probing Gborzor on Ghanaian politics; Kufuor (the current president) and his stance on issues. The conversation quickly turned towards the iconic Nkrumah (I probed that way, curious to see if Gideon’s ideas hold true across a wider range of people).

Nkrumah was a visionary. Not a flawless one, but a visionary nonetheless, said Gborzor. This is not what Ghanaians have been taught, though. Gborzor grew up, in the seventies and eighties, learning that Nkrumah was a bad leader. That he squandered wealth. And in many circles this holds true.

But he had a vision; one that I can’t speak to fully, but can hopefully paraphrase. Nkrumah, as Ghanaians are so good at doing, played host. To the leaders of anti-colonial Africa, to the desire for change, to the notion of pan-Africanism. I don’t pretend to know the philosophies, or problems, associated with pan-Africanism. All I know is that Gborzor said Nkrumah saw the future of Ghana intrinsically linked with the future of Africa. So he invested in the future of Africa. Sometimes poorly, sometimes well.

But for his own country, he built three universities (when the nation was no more than seven million people); one for teachers, one to cover everything else and one for science and technology. The latter two are still the most reputable universities in the country; the former, unfortunately only hosts teachers, who lack the respect due to them, as they do in most parts of the world.

He built a dam and a nuclear reactor (environmentally problematic, yes, but an investment in the future of Ghana from where he was standing in the 1950s) and started down the road that led to the coup against him. Nkrumah’s problem was that he was anti-US. Funnily enough, this seems to have been a problem for many countries historically, and Ghana was no exception. There was an effort to take his life (failed, killing a schoolgirl) that led him institute a pre-emptive arrests act here in Ghana. He was, as a visionary morphed into a dictator. And he was overthrown (in a CIA sponsored coup by Kotoka, who the airport in Accra is now named after) and Ghana continued down the path of dictatorship.

And it was this shift that makes me wonder some things. Gideon confided in me the other day that he doesn’t believe democracy will change Ghana. Only benevolent dictatorship by someone like Nkrumah. But he also said, at one time, there can be no one like Nkrumah. And, I asked him when he told me this, would Nkrumah’s philosophies have been compromised because of his power? Were, perhaps, they already being compromised?

What, indeed, is the role of a leader? To spark revolution, and lay foundations for the future? To spark revolution and stand back? Or is leadership necessarily corrupt? Are the ideas of leadership and corruption necessarily conflated? I think not, but I am having a harder and harder time coming up with justification for this argument, other than obscure Taoist philosophy.

Economically, the situation that Nkrumah inherited with the country is one of its best. And then it nosedived. But it’s making a comeback now. Accra is on the way up. Kumasi is a hip town. The south is making huge progress, and the north will eventually follow. Everyone’s just wondering if there’s a leader fit for the challenge. I’m wondering if there’s a need for one.

Posted by matt at 06:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)