Matt's Missives

Spent the oueekend in Ouagadougou and now I’m convinced that it’s far more fun to write the w sound ouith ou in honour of this fun city. It’s amazing how far Bolgatanga can seem from things sometimes, ouith Accra a 15 hour bus ride south. Potatoes are a rarity, coffee (except Nescafe) and cheese (except processed) nonexistent. So I spent the weekend there with a couple of friends, two Danish girls writing a report on the basket-oueaving industry in the Upper East for a fair trade project, and a Canadian ouoman. We gorged on cheese, coffee, strawberries and good bread (there are patisseries everywhere!), saw live music, and generally just got decadent. And it’s only three hours away! It seems so strange that you can pass from what one of my Ghanaian friends called a “hinterland” to a cente of culture and food in the space of a few hours.

The Burkinabe, as citizens of Burkina Faso are known, are reputed to be a very easygoing people, relaxed and open. While this was the case with some that we met, the vendors (definitely the most predominant aspect of the city for us white folks) were super-aggressive. Not that we had any bad experiences; often I found the people to be fun and friendly, just very forward. Still, they made Ghanaians look like quiet introspective people, who don’t often approach strangers, which is not something I would have ever thought to say.

Outside of Ouaga (as it’s commonly called) the poverty is intense. I have heard that the north is worse, that Sahel landscape, dotted with trees and the creeping sand of the Sahara. You can’t farm sand, and it reaches its fingers further south every year. The reality of desertification is apparent enough in parts of northern Ghana, so the situation is far more desperate in Burkina. I am curious about Mali, where I will be headed in April. I am bracing for the kind of poverty that comes when farming is impossible.

Posted by matt at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Posted by hilary at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I’ve just come back from a few days on the coast. I spent my days tasting the salty salty ocean, bodysurfing, burning my skin, eating seafood and reading. I saw a fort in a town called Axim. The whole coast is dotted with them, remnants of Portuguese, Danish and British colonialism. Centres of the slave trade, strongholds of foreign influence. The coastal people allied themselves with the British to stop the encroaching Ashante empire. The slaves were traded down from the north (there are slave camps in the Upper East you can visit now to learn about Ghana’s slave trade history). Some disgusting percentage of slaves traded across the Atlantic were traded out of modern Ghana.

The coast is all sand beaches and palm trees. The forest is thick and greener than anything I remember after having been in the north for two months (how quickly we forget!). It looks almost impassable from the roadside. Gold, rubber, cacao are the main resources you find down here, but my favourites are still coconut and fish. A little boy taught me to crack coconuts against the base of a tree to get them open. If I’m ever stuck on a desert island with coconuts, I am now armed with an important survival skill. Climbing the tree and getting them down not yet my forte. The cool 33 degrees was a welcome relief. True it’s more humid, sticky, down there, but the breeze of the water makes it really pleasant. And now I have returned to the searing 44 degrees of the north, where water evaporates so quickly that there’s no point in cleaning up a spill of water unless your toilet is overflowing. A kind of heat that makes your body think the low thirties is cool, and if it drops below 30 you think about a sweater.

Posted by matt at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by matt at 04:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)