Matt's Missives

I have just come back from a twelve day trip through Mali, a final taste of West Africa before flying home friday. Mali was amazing. Mali was the name of an ancient empire that ranged across West Africa after which the country was named; the country was also seat of the famed Manding empire, and has been a hub of cross-cultural trade, flourishing art and high culture for as long as anyone can remember. In the south the people speak Bambara, which is quickly becoming the lingua franca of the country, and much of French-speaking West Africa. Most people also speak french in the big cities, which is nice, because there are so many ethnic groups that collide all over the place that it would be tough to know which language to speak even if I had bothered learning more than a few words of each. From the desert nomads, the Tuareg, to the north, to the pastoral Peule, or Fulani people, who range from Mali to Nigeria, to the Dogon agriculturalists, to the Bozo fishers, to the Bambara speakers of the south, Mali is amazingly ethnically and linguistically diverse. It still doesn’t rival Ghana, home to 79 distinct languages (not including dialects), but it’s pretty amazing. And each one is steeped in a history deeper than I can understand. Even on the surface this ethnic diversity gives a sense of how ridiculous the colonial project of dividing up countries using arbitrary lines is.

I left Tamale with my friend Kat at 5am heading to Ouagadougou. We hopped a trotro to Bolga, then a shared taxi from Bolga to the border town of Paga, crossed the border into Burkina Faso, then hopped another shared taxi to just barely make our ten o’clock bus from Po to Ouaga. In Ouaga we got our Malian visas and enjoyed the baguettes, commenting again that the French had managed to do one or two things right by instilling a love of good coffee and bread in their colonies. The British seem to have had remarkably little concern for good food.

The next morning we were up early again, catching a bus from Ougadougou to the northern city of Ouhigouya (wa-yi-gou-ya) where we met a guide, James, who would take us through Dogon country. We crossed the border at Thiou, and enterd Mali at Koro, where we spent the first of many nights sleeping on a mattress outside. The days in Mali are hot right now, but the nights are beautiful and cool. Many Malians asked me if the moon was really as beautiful in other places as there, and some had a hard time believing it was. I met several people who swore Mali was the only country where you could really see the stars. Or maybe it was just the only place they figured people bother looking at them.

The next morning we caught another trotro from Koro to Kanikomboli, on the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment. From the we started our walk, four days, three nights, along the escarpment and up its side onto the spectacular plateau. We stopped in villages at midday, resting three or four hours in the withering heat of noon. The temperatures often climbed above 45 degrees, and there was really nothing to do during the midday heat but eat, drink beer and sleep. The villages along the bottom of the escarpment are mud brick buildings, with wood stuck through near roof level to support the mud that form the roof. The bricks are a sort of sand, clay, straw mix, much like cob (with probably slightly less concern for proportions), formed and dried in the sun. They are then cemented together using a clayish mortar, and plastered over. This area of Mali is renowned for its Sahel mosques, and every village we passed through, despite being a remarkable feat of traditional architecture, had a beautiful, awe-inspiring mosque in it. And these were only the babies of the one we later saw in Djenne.

The best thing about the bottom of the escarpment, though, is the ancient villages. Although the Dogon have now moved onto the plains, their ancient villages are still tucked into grottos on the edge of the escarpment, quite a trek up from the ground (especially when you think of carrying water or grain). When the Dogon arrived at the escarpment, about six hundred years ago, fleeing the rise of Islam in the Manding empire and seeking to retain their traditional animistic practices, they followed the star Sigui (Sirius) along the Niger River, then headed south to the escarpment. When they arrived, the land around was populated by two groups of people, the Tellem and the pygmies. The pygmies inhabited the forest around the escarpment, which was at that time lush and plentiful. The Tellem lived in the cliffs like the Dogon eventually did, only they built their structures higher. Some Dogon believe the Tellem could fly, because even thinking about accessing those places now would require someone with some pretty serious climbing skills. As our guide explained, though, in the days of the Tellem there was enough vegetation around that they would climb vines and trees up the cliff face to store their goods. He also explained that they didn’t actually sleep in the structures, they just stored their food and goods there.

The Tellem structures obviously provided the inspiration for the more complex Dogon buildings: the Tellem built small mud structures around the caves and grottos in the cliff face. While we were wandering in one of the ancient villages I saw dozens of little mud spider homes, all empty, built onto the rock. It struck me as obvious where the Tellem had learned to build their dwellings. They lived as spiders do in the cliff walls. When the Dogon came along, driving the Tellem out and cutting down trees to start agriculture, they still built their dwellings into the cliffs for protection from animals, but they adapted the building idea, using the mud brick technology they had imported from southern Mali.

On our second day we climbed up the escarpment through an anachronistically green and cool canyon. We got the top of escarpment and stayed the night at a village calleed Begnemoto. Looking out over the plains below, from the top of the escarpment, probably about 200 metres up, it’s difficult to understand how anyone can live there. The soil is quickly turning to sand as it is used intensively, and though animals are kept and their waste carefully returned to the soil, it is not enough. Every year there is less soil, more desert. Although I have read that colonial practices, the emphasis of cash crops over subsistence agriculture, had a serious impact on desertification, destroying traditional checks and balances that kept the Sahara at bay, I have no idea whether this holds true for the Dogon people. This is a group of people, after all, that cut down all the trees to make way for agriculture. The rising population here means that this land can’t not be farmed. People need every ounce of food they get from this place, even if that means destroying it in the process. It’s a funny, fucked up cycle.

The houses on top of the escarpment are stone, adapting tradition to available material, and equally beautiful. We spent two nights on the plateau, and eventually descended back to the plains through a village called Dorou, where we left our guide, who was great, if a little too into partying (but then his job is to walk around a beautiful place and spend the nights with friends, so who wouldn’t be party-focused?) and caught a ride down to Bandiagara.

From there we went to Mopti, where, finding our intended hotel full, were led by a guide to a god-awful little Fisheries Ministry guest house. We were too tired to argue and the room had a fan so we shrugged and paid the $10 for it (Mali is not as cheap as Ghana). It was a concrete box so ridiculous after the beautiful stone and mud structures of Dogon Country, that just cooked when the fan wasn’t on. Of course there were much better places in town, but we were too tired to go looking. We wandered around Mopti a bit sat and had a beer that afternoon in a little restaurant and planned our trip to Djenne. Mopti is at the confluence of the Beni and Niger rivers, and although the town itself isn’t much, is full of trade from Bamako to Tombouktou.

The next day we headed to Djenne, down the Beni river (which was basically dry near Djenne) to see the famous mud mosque. This mosque is the largest mud-constructed building in the world, and is a truly remarkable building in a truly remarkable city. Djenne itself is ancient, founded by the same group of people who founded Tombouktou, and populated by families who have been there since the dawn of time. As one American guy we met said, if your family hasn’t been in Djenne for two thousand years, you’re not really from there. The whole city is constructed with mud, beautiful architecture that doesn’t rival the mosque, but complements it. We wandered around tiny alleys, and little courtyards, really feeling like we’d stepped back about a thousand years. While the tourist strip down the middle of Djenne is a little obnoxious, since everyone’s asking you for something, we found that stepping out of that people were incredibly friendly and interested in us.

We stayed in Djenne two nights and returned to Mopti to do a trip on a riverboat up the Niger river for a night. We visited the ancient village of Mopti, on the opposite bank of the Beni as the city, and then spent a night on the bank of the Niger, sleeping in the sand. We ate Capitaine (also known as Nile perch) from the river and drank wine and stared at the stars. It was only waking up the next morning, looking around, that I realized what I was looking at.

Humans have been in West Africa for such a long time it’s impossible to imagine it without them. But that night on the river we didn’t have to hide our food, because no animal was coming to take it. We didn’t have no clear a space to sleep, because it was sand as far as the eye can see. The human footprint on this area, that we call the Sahel, is so heavy that there is nothing, except maybe fish and mosquitos, not there by human design. All over Mali, Burkina, even northern Ghana, people are adapting the landscape so completely to their uses that nothing that doesn’t fit into this scheme remains. Seems like we might have a parallel for . . . almost everywhere else in the world. But we can see the results here, the increased desertification, decreased soil productivity. By making the land what we think we need, we kill it. Another paradox of progress: the more we take for ourselves the less we have.

Posted by matt at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How's that for a bunch of wacky names? I'm in Mopti now just come from pays Dogon which is probably the capital of natural buiding anywhere. Ever. I mean there are cities that blend so well you can't tell, from a height, where they start and the mountain ends. The villages built into the escarpment, the falaise, are based on an older design, of the Tellem people, who probably copied the little mud-building spiders that inhabit the caves, cause their houses look the same. But who knows? Maybe the spiders copied the Tellem. Now I'm in Mopti, called the Venice of Mali, getting ready to head to Djenne, where the world's largest mud mosque is, the world's largest mud building. It's amazing and if I get any more excited I think I'll explode. Plus french keyboards are hard. Still, thinking of home and excited for my return.

Posted by matt at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am, I swear. I'm in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso right now, making my way top Mali to see Dogon country, do some hiking, see Mopti and the largest mud mosque in the world. I won't make it to Timbouktou, unfortunately, but maybe another trip. So many reasons to come back to West Africa. More of Mali, Niger, more time" in southern Ghana. Anyways i have updates from a while ago, but my phone line in Tazmale was down so I couldn't post them. I will when i get back from this trip, then it's basically only a few days till I'm back in Canada. This is such an amazing place.

Posted by matt at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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)

Said the gourd. Wrapped in a shaved goat hide, given a neck of something like bamboo and strung twice with sinew the instrument was talking to us through the man playing it.

Life is a market place
and when you have bought and sold
all that you need
it is time to go home.

Or words to that effect, given that it was in Gurune. I freely confess to taking license. The funeral dirge was translated by Emmanuel who led us through the day, from greetings to seeing the body, to drums and dancing, burial and the final respects to the elders.

Akah has gone home. He bought and sold everything he need and has probably gone to a better place. He worked as night watchman for the girls at one of the CUSO houses. Vanessa, Zuzanna, Bailey and a woman named Rosalinde employed him. And after letting the chickens out on thursday morning Akah died. He had been sick for a long time, there is some speculation that it was AIDS, but it’s tough to know. He never went to the hospital, despite entreaties from the girls and his sons. He was supposed to go the day he died.

So last night was his wake, and today was his funeral. When we arrived we heard the funeral dirge, followed by some serious drumming. As the players played people went up and stuck thousand cedi, five thousand cedi notes to their faces. Harvest songs they are called, pulling in funds for the funeral. And as they played people danced. We were escorted inside to see the body, sleeping almost foetus-like on his side he looked peaceful. There was beauty to the pose that is unlike anything you see in a funeral home, with its makeup and glossy attempts to mask death, make it more inviting. It somehow becomes harsher, more threatening.

So we left Akah sleeping and returned to our seats outside, seats that were specially designated for us, the white contingent. It is a funny thing, this, and I don’t know what to say about it yet. Maybe I will never know how to feel about being automatically special because I’m white. I know part of it is honouring guests, but . . . but.

As we sat and watched the drumming, the dancing, we saw a slaughter. First it was a chicken, neck wrung not five feet from me by one of Akah’s brothers. Then the kid. The baby goat’s neck was twisted until broken, and though it may seem cruel to us, was probably as humane a way to go as any being that is take by us for food. It didn’t last as long as a bleeding, and probably hurt only as much as anything that doesn’t cause immediate death. Still, a strange thing to see, this provocative killing at a funeral. Certainly not consistent with the way I feel I’ve been trained to understand death. Celebrating life at a funeral through sacrifice. I don’t know what was done with that meat, but I guess in my outsider’s way understand the show of respect it was.

And then came a procession, of boys, first, dressed only in shorts and carrying bows, then men. Drawing their strings and pretending to fire. I wish I knew what it represented, something to do with hunting or fighting I can only imagine, but I don’t know what. They went inside the compound, and after some time came out with the body. It was wrapped in a mat made of sticks that served as a coffin and a beautiful blanket to wrap the mat. He was paraded around the neighbourhood, with a procession of people and musicians behind him that kicked up enough dust to blind the dead and choke their ghosts.

And then he was put in the ground. Buried in the chieftancy’s graveyard, the royal family of Bolgatanga’s burial ground. He had some connection to them, was of royal blood. And he died alone with his radio in the garage of a CUSO house, isolated from his family in a way that seems so unlike this place, that leads to the speculation about AIDS. They wailed at his death, there was serious mourning happening. But he lived an isolated life that I only saw the very end of, and that raises questions. What was it that led him to the place where he died? Was it self-imposed exile, or stigmatization? These are questions that will never be answered, but should always be asked. And I wonder:

If life is a market place
does that make it a place for bargaining
the chance to see friends
and celebrate the people around you
before you go home?

Posted by matt at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poverty is not simply an issue of material wealth. Nor is it dealt with through opportunities provided, access to resources. I hesitate to say poverty is a mentality; I think that’s a dangerous place to go. But self-determination is powerful tool when it comes to battling poverty. Empowering people makes the difference between effective advocacy and paternalistic development. The mind matters.

I have become, I think, caught in a comfortable cycle of work, food, friends and home. I go to work, I hang out with friends who are more often Canadian than Ghanaian (though I do have Ghanaian friends), eat at places I feel comfortable and hang out at home. This bothers me. I may be comfortable, but there is something missing. I am making inroads into myself, I am doing the work laid out for me, but still. I’m not making the inroads into Bolga’s culture that I want to. Yes, I have some people that are showing me around, and I don’t feel totally outside things. But I have found a comfortable way of doing things, and this is now limiting my ability to stray from pattern, routine. I mean, I haven’t even explored the side roads around my house! I know the way from town to my home, and in my mind it’s one road. Maybe there are a thousand, but I have yet to venture down them. I am lacking initiative.

And I don’t think that it’s really been a big deal until now. I’ve been trying to find a comfortable existence here; now I have it. But that means it’s time to keep pushing. Keep looking for new frontiers. They don’t have to be big ones; something as small as finding a new place to eat, meeting a new friend, going out alone. These are the small challenges that face me, but ones that will probably help me better understand where I am. But it’s an easy thing to want to stay in routine. I have found a certain kind of comfort. It’s a level of living where I know I can survive. And now that I have some of level of comfort it seems easy to slip into a pattern, and repeat it. But this is not really what I want for myself here. I want safe places, certainly, but I also want to be challenged. I want to pushed outside my realm of normal existence, to taste something different, hear a new voice. Ride down one new dirt road every day.

And in my comfort I wonder, what makes poverty such a slippery subject? We have the wealth and resources to deal with, and fifty years of trying to “develop” countries (amidst coups, exploitation, and an incredibly unfair economic format). Is it a culture of wealth and privilege in the global North? A history of exploitation that continues today? Colonized cultures struggling to understand themselves in an internet world that still doesn’t really leave a whole lot of room for them to actually be wealthy? So many things come together create the levels of wealth and poverty we see today I couldn’t explain them in a PhD thesis. And being at the top of metaphorical privilege pile, I feel kind of uncomfortable speculating about what makes poverty, because obviously it’s so different from place to place. But I have some ideas to explore and this is one of my forums for that.

And I think I may have a kind of . . . metaphor . . . to understand what has stopped previous delopment initiatives from dealing effectively with poverty. One of the ideas I keep running up against in my research and writing is the idea of welfare-level development (that is providing pure welfare-level resources to women or underprivileged communities or people with disabilties or whatever). And it just doesn’t work. Providing resources to people, the model of paternalistic “development” that has been in place since this whole crazy post-WWII idea of development replaced colonialism is empty without allowing them to make decisions. Only by making people a part of the process do they have any stake in “development” (such a problematic term, I know, but I use it, for lack of another word, to encompass poverty-reduction, advocacy work, environmental work, etc. and I think it has as much a place at home, in developing better ways of organizing ourselves to deal with problems, as it does anywhere). Otherwise they are stuck in a kind of subsistence living that, if not comfortable, is at least manageable and familiar.

Its an orthodoxy of survival. Obviously my experiences in Bolga are the experiences of a privileged outsider trying to make sense of an experience. But in the culture shock that comes with a new place comes a kind of struggle to survive, mostly in an emotional, but also in a physical-comfort sense. Food, water, company. These are, actually, the things that occupy my mind most of the day. I have the wealth to procure them, but considering how to do it always remains an issue. And so I think I can, from a very outside perspective, try to understand a little bit why poverty is a problem that can’t be dealt with by throwing money at it. Because it’s about having control of your own destiny as much as it is having enough to eat, shelter and water. These are the prerequisites to control, certainly. But poverty does not end there. It ends somewhere else, and I wish I knew where.

Posted by matt at 04:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve been talking about God a lot lately. I’ve learned to pray, on a packed trotro belting down the highway it’s the only sane thing to do. I’ve started to articulate some of my beliefs. I’m learning what’s been culturally drilled into me, what I’ve accepted, haven’t even thought about. Things that are not only foreign to people here, but might actually be foreign to me as well. My assumptions about religion are being called into question and it seems like it’s coming from every direction.

I’ll start with Bailey. She’s the new intern at CENSUDI (yes, there are now five Canadians). She goes to Guelph, does women’s studies and international development and believes in Christ. She’s a waking me up to my own biases about Christianity. I’ve always been an opponent of Christianity, mostly because it’s been such a damaging cultural force in many ways, and the institutions are such a pillar of what I don’t agree with in our culture, but I’m being forced to examine my complete rejection of these institutions. Yes, the evangelical right is vocal and I have serious problems not only with their politics, but the belief structure that underlies their politics. But they’ve appropriated something not entirely theirs to appropriate: they’ve become the voice for Christianity. Like the violent Catholic institutions that have dominated Christianity for the last 1700 years or so, the Christian right is attempting to voice Christianity as the only way. The one path to salvation. And Bailey is reminding me that there’s more to Christianity than the angry Bible thumpers in the south. That, funnily enough, institutions have appropriated a philosophy that is the opposite of what they’re trying to institute. And they have twisted it. I think I knew that once, but it’s an easy thing, most days, to forget.

Then last night I was talking to my neighbour Alex about Pentacostalism. Alex told me about speaking in tongues. It was 1996 and he was a strong part of his church. He was at a Pentecostal gathering where the minister told that those who couldn’t speak in tongues they should come up to the front. He did. He was told to pray in his first language, and as he did so he lost track. Of words. He lost track of language. He spoke in tongues, and he explained it to me this way: it was like English was coming out, only it was too fast, and held more meaning. He felt like he was going to vomit, and when he held his head over to do so his ‘words’ only came out faster. And he knew he was saying something. Nobody had to understand it, noone had to know his words, but he knew meant something. And he reminded me that religion is more than just a sermon and hellfire. Religion is about magic. It’s about believing in something that moves beyond the eye, in the realm of the heart and the earth. It’s about placing ourselves, in whatever way best works, in a vast, sometimes indifferent, universe.

Today, at the office, Happy (the receptionist) asked me if I was Christian. I said I was baptized, but that I don’t go to church. She was completely dismayed, and asked me why. I told her that I worship in my own way, that I find community outside church. I don’t think my explanation held a lot of water for her. But every time I talk to a Catholic, every time I say I was baptized there is this look of relief in their eyes, and they say something like “Well your faith is still there.”

And maybe they’re right, though not in the way they think. But Happy reminded me that religion’s about community, too. It’s about coming together with people, to tell stories together. To bond over faith and love and pain. The formulate a cultural narrative that helps not only the individual make sense of the world, but society at large. For all its divisiveness, religion is ultimately supposed to bring us together. It’s an easy thing, most days, to forget.

Many of us are trained, in my part of the world, not to believe in things that can’t be explained. We are trained from childhood to abhor ritual, superstition, belief. We are taught not to believe. I mean, I’m conditioned into not believing in Christianity, Islam, anything that could be construed as dogmatic. Buddhism and Hinduism are okay, cause they’re hip. Or at least polytheistic, but only from a distance. Only casually. But sometimes life just doesn’t make sense, no matter how much you apply your powers of reasoning to it. And sometimes you need to worship to feel like you’re making sense of it.

I’m starting to remember how people, individuals and cultures function (how’s that for a generalization?): if something doesn’t make sense, an explanation is created with the best available information and some imagination. Telling stories makes sense to me, explaining things with the mind, if not always with empirical evidence. Stories become belief, and sometimes belief becomes reality, a worldview. Traditions are born, and traditions change, and traditions die. And yes, the Catholic Church is still implicated in huge historical bloodsheds. But there’s also a history of Catholic social justice workers. And yes, fundamentalists don’t believe in abortion, but that’s a matter of ignorance veiled in religion, not necessarily the core of the religion itself. As Brother Fowles says in the Poisonwood Bible: “There are Christians and then there are Christians.” And I’m not going to be a regular church attendee ever in my life (though I will probably go to a couple of services while I’m here), but I remember why people do attend church. And most importantly, I am starting to give voice to the personal framework I’ve been developing for most of my life. A framework that draws on many spiritual traditions, but conforms to none. A personal mythos.

I have experienced change. I know that its constancy is real. I have felt, at times in my life, the path I am walking on spiritually more surely than the ground beneath my feet. And from what I have seen and felt I have come to understand what I believe. I believe we all walk a path, across many lives, and as we walk, we learn many lessons. I believe that we stand in a universe that looks chaotic and place our sense of order upon it. And we do it through bifurcation. I believe that our first act of consciousness was, like Genesis tells us, the recognition of good and evil. I believe in the constant, dynamic play of two sometimes complementary, sometimes oppositional forces. Sometimes that’s called heaven and hell, sometimes male and female, sometimes black and white, sometimes self, sometimes other. I like to think of it as heaven and earth, deified through a god and goddess. Principles that infuse everything. These are things that make sense to me, intellectually. I see them, when blessed, in the world around me. Sometimes I forget. And I know that this is story I tell myself, intellectually, to make sense of things beyond the intellect. It is the believing that makes it real. I think that, like many people I know, part of me believes and part of me struggles with faith. And it’s that struggle that lets me accept the beliefs of others, that keeps me from the rigid certainty of zealotry, and it’s that struggle that keeps my own framework changing. So this much lets me know that all I know is wrong. Or at least up for criticism.

Posted by matt at 04:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big Trouble in Little Bolga. Actually, it’s not really in Bolgatanga, but just outside, in a town that sounds something like Suween, but I’m not really sure how to spell. It goes a little something like this (at least according to the rumours about town):

Before Christmas some time rather large bets were being taken during a card game between two villages, Suween and its smaller neighbour, a village starting with B (which is what I’ll call it). Of course, these villages have a history of conflict with eachother. Things got heated as one side, B, accused the other, Suween, of cheating. Tensions were allayed, and apparently died out over Christmas, but were revived again the other night, Sunday. Somehow B decided it would be a good idea to mount an attack on S. This, in northern Ghana, generally involves sticks and stones (stones being the popular way of killing witches in the area as well). Some houses got burned, and a local cop, who actually works in Accra, but was home for a holiday, took it upon himself to do something. So he put on his uniform, climbed to the top of a tree and started shooting. Caught in the crossfire (though a lot of sources claim she was involved in stoning and perhaps even the torching of a house) was a 15 year-old girl. She’s dead now, shot by our friend the tree cop, and three men are in hospital. The real kicker is that now the army and cops have taken sides, against eachother. You’ve really got to wonder sometimes.

What pisses me off the most (other than yet another indiscriminate killing of a little girl by a cop) is that conflict like this affects people who want nothing to do with it. CENSUDI runs a program called EIP (education improvement project) which organizes scholarships for intelligent, underprivileged girls (25% of their scholarships go to boys). There’s a woman who has come into the office a couple of times since I started last week to do paperwork, talk to the CEO and Executive Director about funding for her daughter. She was assured some time ago that part of her daughter’s educational funding could be secured through EIP, but part would have to come from another source. Being a dutiful mother, and obviously desperate to get her daughter out of the poverty trap she herself is in, this mother has been saving desperately for some time. She managed to save 500000 Cedis (which is a fortune if you live in a village, and about $70 Canadian) to donate to her daughter’s education. That, coupled with the scholarship, would have seen her daughter through secondary education, which would secure her at least a low-level office job, if not some prospect of tertiary education (given continued saving and perhaps another scholarship from CENSUDI or elsewhere). Their house was burned in the conflict, and with it all her savings.

And what can you do? A common reaction here is “life is hard” a shrug of the shoulders and a continued struggle to eke out some kind of existence amongst the poverty. And you never, really, get used to it. Not without going blind, or shutting down, which, I guess, we all do at some point or another. But when you even try to look with your heart, just a little, God it makes you hurt.

And then there’s the anger. I just finished Graceland, by a Nigerian-American named Chris Abani, about a 16 year-old boy in a Lagos slum who rails against that shrug of the shoulders, that acceptance of life being naturally difficult, and searches for some way out, some response that makes sense. But how do you dispute it? Life is hard. And how do you fight it? When the governments and police are corrupt, when people elsewhere really don’t care. How?

And at these moments when I feel so disgusted by the situation here, elsewhere, in our own country, something clicks. There’s a flipside to the shrug of the shoulders. Life is hard, so you might as well enjoy what you can. That’s what music is for. That’s why every person here starts dancing at birth. There is something to measure against the violence. I’ve started volunteering at an orphanage, run by a small NGO called Afrikids. There are two boys there who impress me.

The first, whose name I can’t remember (I just met him last night), is deeply learning disabled. He’s about 8 and can’t grasp the alphabet, can’t pay attention in class, causes trouble in the house, bugs other kids. And yet. He knows every truck driver in town, and they’ll take him anywhere. He’s wholly self-sufficient, and used to bring in wages to feed his entire family, from a hard day’s work. He knows every individual tree, literally, by its name, and directs you where you want to go according to these names. When he goes to market and makes a little coin, through trade or begging, he, unlike the other kids, brings it straight home to Mama Ladi (who runs the place and is the definition of a saint). That he has the capability to survive, and even show kindness, in a hostile world amazes me.

The other’s name is E. A year ago E, probably about 9 or 10, was on the verge of suicide. Right now he’s the top student at the orphanage, doing very well in his class, helpful with the little ones, friendly and always has the biggest smile on his face. He is going somewhere, that much is apparent.

It astounds me, this strange blend violence and hope. I mean, how can grown men, with homes and some food and families wage war over cards, while an amazing woman grows hope from concrete and dust for the two-dozen kids she lives with? It just doesn’t make any sense. I am so completely baffled by this place I think I just need to stop trying to understand it. Maybe it’s only when you stop trying making sense of this place that it starts making any sense. That’s about the only approach that makes any sense right now.

Posted by matt at 03:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 14, 2006

It’s funny how much little things can affect you in a foreign environment. Moods swing randomly and sporadically from feeling comfortable to feeling totally out of place. Most of the time I’m pretty happy being here, doing my thing. Once in a while though the foreignness of everything overwhelms me and I just want to curl up. Which I usually do, for a little while. Then it passes, and I do something that makes me incredibly excited about being here, and this experience, and all the things I’m seeing. Finally, equilibrium sets in again and I feel, for the most part, comfortable in my environment.

My weekend has been packed, and I think keeping busy keeps me on the excited side of the emotional spectrum, allowing just enough downtime to recharge and fully engage with this place. Yesterday I got up early, showered, dressed and headed into town for a church picnic. A couple of people in my office are in the choir at the local Catholic Church (the Frafra in Bolga are Catholic) and invited some of us interns along. The other obroni (ie white people, in Tre, the Ashanti language), or solmena (ie white people in Gurundi, the Frafra language), in the office are all women, Vanessa, Zuzanna and Stefani. Vanessa and Zuzanna are CUSO cooperants, over on an exchange that is a requisite part of the international development program at U of T. Stefani is interning for six months here on a CIDA internship. We are all at CENSUDI, and, funnily enough, will be joined by another Canadian intern this week.

So we all arrived, on time (which in Ghana means about a half hour late) at the Catholic Service Centre, awaiting the arrival of Mabel (pronounced Maybelle) and Peter, who had invited us. Peter arrived at 9am, about a half hour after us. Mabel probably rolled up around 9:30 or 10am. Despite all the groaning about how we could have slept in (I had stayed in the night before, so wasn’t too unhappy about getting going early), sitting around until a trotro (picture a miniature bread van, jam-packed full of people) came to pick us up gave us the opportunity to learn some hymns.

While I am an avid cynic of organized religion at home, there is something about Ghanaian religion that makes it . . . different. People believe, not only in God, but in signs, speaking in tongues, and magic. Magic is real here. So religion, while distinctly Christian or Muslim, is different from what we would consider religion at home. And everything is spiritual. As we were loaded onto the trotro at 11:00am a prayer was said, asking for our safe journey. Every meeting, workshop, initiative or journey starts and ends with a prayer. Then people started singing. And I’m not talking about the staid, stiff hymns of euroamerican worship. These were real West African vocal jams. Lead singers, harmonies, and a celebratory sense of purpose. Mabel had prepared us with a couple of hymns (which she kindly wrote the words to) so we were able to join in a little. I never thought I’d have fun singing about serving the lord. I think the act of singing, as much as the words, is what people appreciate. It provides, even for an outsider, some sense of unity. Like we’re all in this together. Which I guess is the point of religion, really.

So we arrived (and prayed before getting out) at the dam, a beautiful body of water that irrigates many of the fields in this area, and, I think, provides water for Bolga. We spent the day eating, dancing (even more important, here, than singing for people, and something kids do almost before they walk), playing football and volleyball. It was probably the hippest church picnic I can imagine, as many people there were drunk by the end.

We hitched a ride back home on the back of a big old flatbed lorry, and headed home to change. Then last night dinner was sausages and chips (I miss potatoes constantly, I hadn’t realized how much I depend on them for my starch needs, I really think I’m addicted) at my local pub, New Lifeline, with Mabel, Vanessa, Zuzanna and Stephanie and their friends Aziz and Amy, and off to the Black Star Hotel, which runs a nightclub on Saturdays. A little dancing, a little dodging the overly-friendly police officer who wanted to find out where I live so he can come visit, and the night was over. All in all a good day.

January 15, 2006

Tap. Tap. Knock. Knock. Bang. Bang. “Uncle Mattew, Uncle Mattew!!” Please let them go away. “Uncle Mattew!!” Giggle. Knock. Bang. “Uncle Mattew!” Giggle. Tap. Quiet. They’re gone. Knock. Bang. . .

“Emmy, Uncle Mattew likes to go out drinking on weekends, stay out too late and sleep in. That means he doesn’t come answer your knocking at 7am on Sunday morning.”

I was polite and the girls received it well, and we actually hung out for about an hour before I got tired again and passed out again. It’s all about setting boundaries, I suppose, even when they’re six (or three). Today I went to Zuarungu, a village just outside Bolga, to see some natural building. Actually, we got there when they’d finished for the day, but saw some foundation work they’d done. Basically the same principle as cob, only no straw. And really far less necessity given that the structures are far smaller, and less permanent. There does not seem to be a philosophy of permanence here.

I was given a tour by John, who works next to me (and above me) in the office. He showed me the foundation, and described the building process. Basically, they make balls of clay/sand and slap them on the wall. Pretty simple, really, and they build 1.5 -2 feet a day. John then took me to his home, which is almost complete, and he’s sprayed with cement (it really does last longer that way, as the summer rains are heave and there’s no limestone here for a decent plaster). I met his uncles, who are the patriarchs of the compound. Apparently they’d done a ceremony the night before involving pito (the locally brewed millet beer, which is actually pretty good) to check in with the ancestors. All the uncles were doing the rounds today to insure that all was well, that the ancestors were appeased. They invited me back, and were all very sweet men, and I think I’d like to take them up on it.

So I saw the buildings, and John explained to me bricks (shaped in boxes, dried in the sun and then mortared together with mud) vs. hand building (much more like cob), showed me how layers are added, what the timeline is. It was all very interesting, but I’m starting to sense that mud building is less about knowledge of materials and more about cultural design. John explained to me how compounds work. Traditionally based upon a polygamous Ghanaian family structure, each wife is given a house (with a male house upon which it’s centred). The sons are then allowed to build off their mother’s house, while the daughters go where they’re married). Compounds are thus patriarchal in descent, and familial in terms of connection. John’s compound is 4 families (including his brother and two distant cousins, all descended from the same great grandfather). He then told me that there is a compound in Tongo (a village not too far from Bolga) that is 500 families!!! I’m amazed by this number, and at this point really excited to see a house, a building, a living structure that houses 500 families. Incredible. It has become my next Ghanaian goal (just wait till Dogon country!).

So John showed me around, and meeting his family was a special privilege. I then headed back into town, remarking on how Ghana really is a motorcycle country (Mike assured me of this before I left, and I believed him then, but moreso now that I’ve toured around on a bike). We went back to the office, and I bumped into Stef, who was waiting for John (who was stuck in the village as he had funeral arrangements to make, which is a really big deal here) to do some work. We had lunch and chatted, and I headed home.

Dinner this evening was with Tony Allthorp, who’s on a district capacity building project (DISCAP), and a very interesting guy. I met him in Accra when I first arrived, and spent my first day in Bolga with him. He wasn’t feeling too well, but we had palm nut soup with grasscutter, the local rodent (something like a cross between a large rat and a bunny). It was tasty. A surprising amount of meat on them. Tony keeps his fridge well-stocked with beer, which is always nice, but an evening with him always makes for a long next day, which is, I suppose, what tomorrow will be.

Posted by matt at 03:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or so it was explained to me by Kofi Nyame, one of the guys I live with. This is how you celebrate holidays (and, for that matter, days off) in Ghana. It was Salah today, one of the Muslim holidays, Eid al Fata (?). This involves slaughtering a goat and eating it, as far as I can tell.
Edward Said talked about how euroamerican culture has this tendency to shove everyone else into a box called other. It seems I am proving this true by constantly comparing my experiences in Asia (there you go, bulk categorizing again), with what I’m coming across here. But it seems inevitable when we experience what’s different to want to compare experiences, and note how they differ from what we do at home. And perhaps this leads to some vast generalizations in culture, which I think probably everyone in the world is guilty of, but it also leads to us somehow making sense of what we see when we go away from home.
On that note: I have these memories, from when I was fourteen in Bangladesh and this holiday was being celebrated. I remember leaving my house and smelling iron in the air, seeing blood in the gutters that run by the roadside. The streets were full of blood, as every household (at least most of them in the 90% Muslim country) slaughtered a goat or sheep in the gateway of the their house. The situation was imbued with the kind of seriousness that seemed to be the norm in a country that was, in most senses, desperately poor. The parallel here, with the holiday, was that it was an excuse to take a day off, see some friends, and go out. At least that was how we celebrated it. And seeing friends, family and kin seems to be about the most important activity in this country.
There is (or perhaps was, and is being adapted), a pretty rigid system of hierarchy, greeting, gifting, and often just simple hanging out that often takes hours to really get through. As my boss put it, it sometimes takes an hour to explain why you’re cancelling a meeting. While I can understand the local and foreign frustration with this system, I also appreciate the fact that you can’t go anywhere without saying “Hello. How are you?” A basic greeting, response and acknowledgement is the norm in any interaction you’re faced with. And while it may be time-consuming, I think it’s valuable. We have this tendency to steamroll people in our economic interactions. Our culture doesn’t value greeting as highly, so it’s easy to lose people in the rush of daily life.
I’m currently installed in a kind of row house, a series of self-contained rooms all in a row, lined up next to eachother. For the most part it’s full of what I’m starting to think of as the Telecom boys. Actually only three of them work for Ghana Telecom, doing IT and network stuff, but two more guys here do mobile phone repair, so they kind of fit into my category. They’re all educated and interesting, and like to party. Hence the holiday celebration today. I got up at 7am, and showered, read, ate some cereal. At around 8:30am, I left my room and hung out with Alex, Kofi and Gozo (the actual Telecom guys), who were getting ready to pound fufu, kill a guinea fowl and cook some goat. I hung out while this took place, watching Alex kill and gut the guinea fowl while Gozo and Kofi went to town to get booze (yes it was still morning). When they got back some other guys showed up, including the two mobile phone guys who live here, Bright and Samuel. We all hung out and drank the godawful strawberry stuff I’ve mentioned before, some Sangria, gin, and something that tasted vaguely like tequila. The worst thing was how everything just got mixed. Gin and sangria do not make a good mix. Trust me.
So we drank, and they started pounding fufu, which is boiled cassava (or yam, real yam, not orange sweet potato, which is what we call yam at home) and plantain. They’re put in a huge pestle, on the ground, and the mortar is about five feet tall, lifted overhead and smashed down into the bowl on the ground. Hard work. So we chopped. This is both a verb and a noun--to chop is to eat, and food. Then we slept all afternoon.
Throughout all this I also became a set of monkey bars, mostly for Emmy, but a little for Mavis. These are two girls who I think have adopted me. Their family also lives here in the complex, three or four doors down from me. Their father is in the hospital right now, since he got hit by a motorcycle last week. He is, apparently, responding to treatment, but will be a while in healing up. These are two younger sisters of what I think is a sibling group of five (but it’s hard to tell, the older girls are too shy to talk to me). They are both adorable, and enjoy hanging out in my room chatting at me. I understand about 40% of what they’re saying, but I’m learning lots from them. Apparently ‘obroni’ (the Frafra word for white man) like to cut the heads off little girls, and, in fact, black people in general. Sadly, it seems easy to laugh at this now, but it’s only a recent development. What seems like a funny urban legend is probably the truth about the majority of the contact that’s taken place between Africa and Europe.
But to end on a slightly more positive note: things are good. Bolga is an interesting town, quiet enough that it's not overwhelming, and totally bikeable. But still, there are nightclubs, and I think it'll be easy to find a good balance between Ghanaian friends, and other interns. Speaking of: I’ve met some Canadians in Bolga, three girls who work at CENSUDI, and a couple of Brits. My life is simple, since my room doesn't have a kitchen I eat out a lot, sometimes with pleasure, other times with a certain amount of trepidation. I have been taken under the wing of many different people here and my work looks interesting. Plus it’s not too damn hot yet. Rumour has it it’ll be 45 in March. Yikes.

Posted by matt at 03:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have just finished King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, and I am appalled, but not surprised. During Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, during the late 19th and early 20th century, approximately 10 million people, about 50% of the population died. And we have forgotten it. We are taught about the Holocaust, and often Soviet Russia, but we have forgotten the horrors of rubber and ivory imposed not just by the Belgians but by the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Portuguese. We may have washed the blood from our hands, and hidden the bodies, let us only hope that some part of our conscience still whispers “Out, out damn spot.”

Posted by matt at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following is a summary of journal entries and thoughts accrued over the last nearly two weeks, as I left Tamale and went, via Accra and Nairobi, to Tanzania with my mother and brother. It’s divided, more or less chronologically, into sections that for the most part deal with different aspects of the trip so that they can be read seperately, since this is a fairly long entry.

24.12.05

Arriving in Accra two days ago I was impressed, after my brief stay in Tamale, over the sophistication of the city. There really is a marked difference in how people dress and act in the more cosmopolitan south. But Nairobi . . . that’s a real city. Tall buildings, green lawn, and a bunch of swank hotels, one of which we’re in.
After meeting Tony at the hotel last night we drove south through Kenya, and eventually crossed the border into Tanzania, stopping in Arusha and then continuing on to the first of several national parks we’ll be visiting, Tarangire. The land we came through, I’m told by our guide, Paul, belongs to a people called the MoArusha, ethnically and linguistically similar to the Maasai. In fact, we were all under the impression that this actually is Maasai territory, given what little I know about them. These people dress the same (the red and blue robes, which have in the last century replaced leather clothing), emphasize herding heavily, carry the trademark Maasai staffs, and have the same lanky figures that fit this landscape, which makes you feel you can walk forever. However, while they herd (sheep, goats, cattle and donkeys), they are primarily dependent upon agriculture, particularly corn and beans, for food. This is heavily resisted by Maasai culture.
Another major difference between this group and the Maasai are their structures. I have observed two types of structures, apparently adapted to different village types. In the larger, more commercially based villages structures are rectangular. Posts of wood (probably as thick as my calf around), probably acacia of some kind, are woven with smaller horizontal beams throughout to form the frame. This frame is then often stuffed with stones, which are abundant, and daubed over with mud. The rooves are thatch from the abundant grasslands around.
The second type of structure seems to dominate the more agriculturally-based villages employ round huts. The vertical posts are smaller, though probably also acacia (it being the only wood of any abundance other than baobobs in this area), and closely spaced (probably less than 6 inches), then daubed over. It seems to me these structures are somehow attached to agricultural practice itself (even as the structure becomes rectilinear in commercial areas); that lifestyle and economics inform design. I am curious to see the Maasai houses.
The agricultural villages themselves really differentiate from the dry grassland around us, they are green and lush. Although it’s easy to wonder whether these villages should really be green, given that it’s now the dry season, from what I can see they’re making maximum use of plants and shade. Palms and succulents are what really stand out in this place--plants that can make use of a heavy rainy season to survive a long dry season. It makes many of these towns little oases in what is currently a very dry place.
We pass Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s second tallest mountain (after the continent’s largest Kilimanjaro) outside of Arusha. Clouds trail off the mountain, offering a little respite from the heat, and up the slope the land greens, growing more emerald than yellow as it climbs into a highland forest. We arrive in Arusha at midday, when the sun is absolutely overhead. Just below the equator here the sun cuts a clear line east to west all year long, casting no shadows north or south.
Arusha is a small town well-placed as a base for the many nearby national parks; it’s a nice town, for a dusty dry place. But it’s more than just a tourist hub. I didn’t spend long here, but something struck me about Arusha as important. There is a heavy expatriate influence here, and a large Indian-Tanzanian population. The Maasai, the Chagas, the coastal traders, all meet here. The British used to use this as a base on their way from the Serengeti to Nairobi. It’s also a geographical midpoint: a stone in the centre of the city marks the halfway point from Cairo to Capetown. The heart of East Africa. Perhaps most striking, though, is it’s important role in East African politics. Originally playing host to an East African political alliance between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (doomed because of the complex and corrupt politics of the 70s and 80s), it now provides the meeting place for the new economic alliance being forged between those countries. More interesting to me, though, is that it’s also hosting the U.N. Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity in Rwanda. The trials, more than ten years after the genocide, are ongoing. Funny that the U.N., an organization responsible for abandoning the people of Rwanda, is now responsible for administering justice there. But, I suppose, what choice is there?

25.12.05

We entered Tarangire yesterday, a park famed for its baobab landscape and elephants. And elephants we have seen in droves. More than this, though, baboons, vultures, a thousand small, bright, beautiful birds that Paul names and I promptly forget, hyrax (the closest genetic relative to elephants that actually resembles a marmot), many antelope varieties from dik diks to gazelles to elands to waterbuck, zebras, giraffes, jackals, ostrich, warthogs, wildebeest, and lions. One young male and a four females, panting under a few trees, bellies full, the eyes of a thousand zebras and it seemed as many tourists on them. Birds of prey, Bataleur Eagles, African Fishing Eagles, Maribou storks with their strange backward knee joints, and many more. There is too much here to process. This is only the beginning.

26.12.05

We left Tarangire and head towards the Great Rift Escarpment. We arrive at a wall, I think more than two thousand feet high, created when Europe and Africa collided millions of years ago. This stretches from Ethiopia to Mozambique, and boasts the birthplace of proto-humans. We climb quickly up the escarpment, and arrive the top, looking out over a plateau, the rises slightly on its western and eastern sides, with farmlands stretching the dozens of kilometers between us and that western half. We drive across the land of maize and herds and reach the western escarpment, which rises to 7600 feet in the Ngorongoro highlands that look out over the Serengeti Plains. The land becomes a tropical rainforest as we climb above the dry lands that stretch below us to the east. We reach the top and pass the lip of the Ngorongoro crater, where we will go in a few days.
To our west the lands stretches off in to what seems like forever. I feel like I am standing on the edge of the world, at its top, staring into eternity when I see this place. It seems like everything, everywhere, ever, is stretched below me on this plain, or above me in this sky. And I wonder, what it must have been like, looking out over this world, from up here, for the first time, with human eyes. This was the beginning
We begin the descent into the Serengeti and past true Maasai villages and we glimpse them, their herds, here and there along the road. And everywhere are the wild herds: gazelle, zebra, wildebeest. Thousands upon thousand upon thousands dotting the landscape we can see. There is game everywhere. We drive through this endless grassland and I am overwhelmed by a kind of anxiety. All around me lies a place I do not understand. I mean, I can name some animals, a few plants, make a few guesses about what this place might look like across the seasons, but I think I am struck by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about this place. In fact, not just the Serengeti, but Africa itself. Maybe everywhere. I realize that maybe I have this feeling all the time, that it’s easy to ignore when I’m surrounded by people. When I’m in a new landscape, where people are culturally quite different the easiest thing to do is focus on bridging the culture gap. And whatever those gaps might be, there is still the knowledge that we share a basic mode of being. We perceive, process and communicate in what are basically the same ways, on an animal level (is that going to get me in trouble with the postmodernists?). But this . . . this is so radically different, so open that I am struck by my inability to create a narrative. I have no story for this place. I mean, how much do I even know about my own home?
Overwhelmed by this sensation of complete and utter alienation from the landscape surrounding me I start to wonder about the first people. The Oldupai Gorge is near here, this cradle of humanity, where proto-human fossils date back 3.6 million years. And I wonder what stories they told of this place. Were they born into it knowing it? Did they, by evolving here, simply develop a culture completely at ease with the dangers and beauty of this place? Or did they enter it, as I do, an alien? Did they wander it together, following the herds, which they say were then as they are today, naming, describing and creating the myths of land? And if they did, could this be considered an act of creation? Did they call on ancestors, and gods? Did they sit on the escarpment for weeks and study the land? Did they walk behind the herd and tell of the animals that shaped the land, of wildebeest and lion, of the ghost leopard that hunts from the trees? Did they keep walking into this eternal landscape, until it changed and became a new land? And when it changed, did they continue onward and so become a new people, telling a new story, and creating a new world with their words? I am simply left wondering.

28.12.05

Another Serengeti day, this time based around the giant rocks called kopjes that dot the landscape, apparently spewed from the Ngorongoro crater when it erupted 3.6 million years ago. It blew these rocks over 150km, these giant rocks that give us vantage over this flat land. God, when that volcano blew it must have seemed like the world was ending.
Paul takes us to caves where the Maasai used to live, before their land was appropriated for a park. He wonders what the cost has been of our gains this last century. I think we all do.
Paul intrigues me. He’s one hell of a naturalist. He’s got a name for every bird we see (and that’s a pretty huge feat given the sheer number of birds that inhabit this place) and most of the plants, understands the body language of the huge beasts we see roaming this place, determines what is happening out there simply by listening to the noises, watching the signs. He can see more while driving at 50km/hour than I can staring out the window when we’re stopped. He knows the weather, and is concerned about how dry it is at this time of year. There should be small rains. He knows this place. He has a story.
He’s got strong opionions too, but he’s helpful to people. He knows this is a harsh place, and so does what he can to make sure people are okay when they break down, that no one who needs help is ignored. It’s good to see. He jokes about kids being leopard BBQ, which shouldn’t be funny (but somehow is) for its truth. A boy was killed by a leopard last year at one of the lodges in Tarangire.

29.12.05

I am sitting on the edge of what I’m told is the world’s largest uncollapsed crater, the Ngorongoro. From here to the other side is 21km, and it’s nearly a thousand meters high. Up here all is green, this tropical rainforest. There is yellow grass and green at the bottom of the crater, swamp and scattered trees. Small rises down there, and some lakes. But mostly it looks flat.
Again I feel like I’m looking down at a whole world. A whole world contained in a bowl. Maybe it’s like being in a fish bowl. I can’t really explain my feeling, but there is a gravity to this place. Like I’m compelled towards the centre. Compelled to roll all the way down this hill. Drawn down like water to a drain.
Saw a Maasai village today. The houses were made of dung, in a sort of kidney bean shape. They were cool and comfortable, but do all their cooking on open fires with no ventilation. This is affecting their health. They are in a fishbowl. Just one more set of animals for the tourists to gawk at.

30.12.05

Death at the bottom of the crater. We saw a buffalo killed today, huge beast, by lions. There were, at one point, eight lions on top of him. They would take him down, hanging off him, and he would keep rising. He must have fallen and stood at least four times before falling for good. I don’t think I have ever seen an animal fight so hard to live. Eight lions. It was interesting watching them work, slowly, so as to insure none of them were hurt by this driven buffalo and his massive horns. First they took down his back legs, then one went for this throat, slowly. Like a house cat batting a mouse. Then slowly more piled on his flanks. Then it was just a matter of time.
While this was sad to see, I didn’t feel disturbed by the death itself. What disturbed me was the 50 land rovers lined up to see it. Obviously I can’t blame people for wanting to see this, since I was there watching as well. Nor can I really blame the Tanzanian government for making the most of their tourist industry (though I think that there was a little too much traffic in the crater, for the most part all the parks seemed well managed, and the safaris minimally intrusive to the life of the animals and plants here). What disturbed me was the attitude of the tourists (I can feel a rant coming on).
While we stood there watching a buffalo die, and I think feeling lucky to witness this event (as such trying to be respectful), two carloads of tourists next to us shouted back and forth to eachother jokes about being lion meat, shrieking with laughter as an animal did battle with eight lions. This attitude seemed prevalent in many of the people we ran across during our trip. A comment in one of the guest books I flipped through in Serengeti summed up how most people felt about this place: “It’s like a giant zoo!” And so they act as if they’re at home, wandering around a zoo. Talking and shouting while animals hunt, showing little to no interest in any kind of Tanzanian culture or people, it quickly became apparent that, as my mother put it, this is the European equivalent of the Caribbean package tour for families.

01.01.06

New Year’s Day. We are back east of the Great Rift Escarpment. Yesterday we arrived at our hotel for lunch. It is a hotel run (though not owned) by the Maasai people here. I spent the afternoon walking to a waterfall with a guide and one of the guys who works at the hotel named Fadhil. He is about my age. Being out of the Land Rover for an afternoon was awesome, walking and talking to this guy, I finally felt like I was actually learning something about the country I was in. Fadhil is from Arusha and has been working at the hotel. He is one of the few non-Maasai employees and is saving for college. He wants to go into tourism, which seems to be the only sure thing around here these days, and has already taught himself both English and Spanish (French is next, on top of Maa, the Maasai language and Swahili). He told me about banana beer and African football teams, and some medicinal plants we saw around.
After dinner I stayed up talking (and drinking beer) with him and one of the Maasai guys who worked there named Moses, who was also in his twenties. Fadhil told me how when this area was created God made three people, and gave one a stick, one a hoe, and one a spear, to herd, to farm to hunt. These are the main lifestyles still practised here, though agriculture seems to be colonising the other modes of life. It has a way of doing that. The Maasai we’ve seen so far have not been particularly well off, their way of life being eroded by modernisation, economics and an increasingly agricultural economy. They are fighting hard to maintain their traditions, but I think it’s fair to say they’re probably not the culture they once were. Talking to Moses was inspiring in many ways. He told me how ridiculous he thought white people were for tourism. Despite (or perhaps because he’s) working in the hotel, he didn’t have many good things to say about tourism or tourists. I can’t say I blame him. Still, he was eager to share about the Maasai culture, the different stages of life and initiation rituals, their beliefs. He was open about many things, some fascinating, some repellent. The Maasai still practice female circumcision/genital mutilation. He was very straightforward about it being a necessary measure to insure women didn’t cheat when the men were away. I didn’t even know how to approach that one, how to begin crossing that gap, so I just nodded, not really able to express what I was thinking.
Despite the problems of the Maasai culture, though, I have a lot of respect for them. It’s increasingly difficult in our world to live a non-sedentary life. Pastoralism is dying everywhere, and the Maasai are fighting hard to keep their traditions alive. To see someone see the lifestyle we the privileged have, and decide they don’t want it, and fight to keep what they have inspires me. It gives me hope.

04.01.06

I am in Tamale, and the sky is hazy with dust. I begin work on Monday.

Posted by matt at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This morning I met with my boss, Franciska Issaka, founding director of Centre for Sustainable Development Initiatives (CENSUDI), to discuss my work in Bolgatonga, in the Upper East region of Ghana.

CENSUDI is a local Ghanaian NGO that has been working with gender issues in Ghana for the last 11 years. They have five focuses in terms of gender: they encourage women in decision making (WODEM, including voter education and mobilization of women in politics), they have an education improvement programme (a scholarship for underpriviged women, though 25% of the scholarships also go to young men), poverty reduction (through microcredit schemes, a sustainable land tenure project and a comunity-based land management system), gender mainstreaming (capacity-building with institutions mainstreaming the idea of gender into their functions), and domestic violence and victim support work.

In each of these five areas CENSUDI has been organizing workshops and symposiums training other NGOs in gender procedures, helping them effectively incorporate gender considerations into their mandates. The problem right now is that despite their effectiveness in training other organizations they have no documentation or easily accessible training materials. Which is where I come in. My job, starting in January, is to collect their resources and organize them into straightforward, practical manuals for the gender issues CENSUDI and other NGOs deal with on a regular basis. The goal of this is threefold: primarily this will provide easy access to effective gender-training information to organizations working in this field. However, it will also provide documentation of the work done by CENSUDI in the last ten years in terms of their training capacities, and will hopefully also provide a basis for fundraising as the manuals are sold. So there you go, that’s what I’m doing in Ghana.

To quote the Constantines: “Soon enough work and love will make a man out of you.” Hah. Let’s hope not.

Posted by matt at 04:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by matt at 04:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We drove from Accra up country on Wednesday and Thursday, taking a stop in Kumasi, the second major urban centre in Ghana. The drive from Accra, despite the traffic, was quite beautiful. A sort of tropical semi-rural greenscape dotted with villages made mostly of small huts. Bananas trees and corn planted apparently haphazardly along the side of the road, interspersed with apparently wild vegetation. Like some kind of giant permaculture experiment. No patch of ground left brown for very long. The larger villages had structures made mostly of concrete, but the smaller clusters of houses on the side of the road were mud, and circular. Several huts generally form one housing structure, organized around a central courtyard where most of the household work is done. As I understand it, there is traditionally one hut for the kitchen, one for the man of the house, and then one hut constructed for each wife. the huts are connected by a wall, also earth, that encloses the compound. The rooves are thatch, but I'm not sure what plant they use. Some kind of grass.

As you drive from Accra, the land rises, and Kumasi, at least at this time of year, is not ridiculously hot. It rained heavily in the evening when we arrived: they are now experiencing the shorter of the two rainy seasons, that acts as a kind of buffer against drought in case the long rainy season does not provide. It's the reason things are so green there, and a luxury not afforded to northerners. We had dinner with a consultant from my mother's project, a man named Tony, who trained as a political scientist, and when prompted explained the history of politics here in Ghana. A brief overview:

Freedom came with Nkrumah, in 1957. He ruled until 1966, when I believe he was displaced by a military coup (I was assured and have no doubt that the CIA had their fingers in that one, as Nkrumah was a socialist, and a pan-Africanist). This leadership lasted until January 1972, when there was another coup, this time followed by a leadership that robbed the country of any of the wealth it had gained. There were two coups following this, in 1979 and 1982, both led by Jerry Rawlings. The first was supposed to transition into democracy, but when this sort of got botched, Rawlings overthrew the government again. This government, the PNDC, and later the NDC party, lasted, in one form or another, until 2000, when I am told Ghana experienced its first really free elections. The current reigning party is the NPP, with the NDC (Rawlings' old party) as official opposition, kind of backed by CPP (Nkrumah's remnants). So there you go, Ghanaian politics as I understand it.

The next day we ventured into the largest market in West Africa, where absolutely everything is available. Some of the most beautiful textiles, beads, homemade soaps, music, mechanical tools, recycled tools, herbal remedies, candies, toys, Thai-made clothing, and a huge variety of local food: cassava, yam, maize, ginger, and yes, snail on a stick, collected in the wet season, and dried so it can be eaten year round. I did not venture to try it. The market stretches over a huge area, which we really only explored a small section of (even with the help of our guide). But it was certainly fascinating.

We then continued up north, to Tamale and the Northern Region. As we moved north from Tamale, the land grew dustier and drier. Around the town itself it's basically savannah. In town there are teak trees, and occasionally mohogany, but mostly is grassland interspered with shrubs and small trees. Beautiful, but in a harsh, almost desertlike kind of way. Life here is harder for people than the south. The land is less forgiving. There are two major rivers, though, the Black and White Voltas, which connect further south, and flow, I believe, into Lake Volta.

While this is not where I'll actually be working, it is, more or less, where I'll be based. My mother has a nice house, and my room has about the biggest bed I've ever seen, which is nice. So far I have not done a whole lot--ventured around the market, but town itself is not that big. I got a bike yesterday, which means I'm mobile. It has a basket on the front, which is something I'm quite excited about. The goal of this week is to make some connections here in town. I am in touch with a friend of a friend who lives here, but spent the weekend in Accra, and I have a list of about 10 Canadians in their twenties who are working and living in Tamale. My mother also works with a number of young Ghanaian interns, whom I hope to get to know. Also, I have been invited to go see a well being drilled later this week, by a friend of my mother's who works on a water and sanitation project. This will be in one of the villages outlying Tamale, and should be quite interesting.

Posted by matt at 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a moment, in Fernwood during the summer, filled with crows. Emerson first drew it to my attention, and we have since taken to calling it crow time (original I know). It is that time of dusk, just before sundown, when the crows range through the valley at the bottom of the Fernwood hills, where Bay crosses FW. Sitting on the front porch of the Denman Street House, about a block from this intersection, you can hear them calling, and watch hundreds of black birds, flying, from roughly southwest to roughly east northeast. It takes minutes for them to pass overhead, and when they do you feel you've seen something special, some little insight on the natural world. Even when it happens every day.

I had my first moment like that yesterday, and it made me think of the crows. The driver for my mother's project, Elisha, had been showing me around Accra, and we were heading back to the hotel. It was four o'clock, which meant one and a half, maybe two hours until dark. As we drove along this tree lined boulevard (the trees, I later learned, are the 'magic' neem tree of permaculture fame--they grow everywhere here), I noticed this swarm of something in the air ahead of us. Bats. Big bats, too; not like our little western bats the size of sparrows. No, these bats had a wingspan of at least a foot. There were thousands and thousands of them, hanging from the tops of these neem trees, swarming the air, chasing eachother off branches, calling to eachother. Playing in preparation for the hunt. And they were beautiful.

This, apparently, happens every afternoon. They dance above the heads of hawkers and drivers. A kind of rush hour natural display, to entertain people stuck in traffic. Naturally there's much debate about how to get rid of them, because we can't stand the thought of sharing our space, but I thought they were incredible. And apparently they're considered a delicacy by some, so how bad can they really be?

Posted by matt at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's totally cliched to discuss Africa in terms of darkness--that Conradian metaphorical darkness of the soul, which of course corresponds to skin colour here. But flying over the Sahara last night, after a seven and a half hour lay over, and five and a half hours more delay at Heathrow, most of which was spent in the plane on the tarmac, it was the first thing I noticed. Darker than the Mediterranean, with its blinking boat lights, and my imagined moonlight reflection on the water. No the Sahara was lightless. In the three (at least) hours it took us to fly over I saw two small fires, literally a thousand miles from anything else in all directions, flickering in the night of the desert. Who were those people, sitting around a fire in the middle of the night in the largest desert in the world? What drew them to huddle close around the light? Was it the vast yawning darkness beyond, in this fathomless desert that they know but never understand? Or something else . . . Are we drawn toward light, or are we repelled by darkness?

Posted by matt at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

-the slowest keyboard ever (1 key = 3 seconds)

-$22 breakfast = crap

-the whole venga boys album

-stressing about gradschool docs

-one wired tired matt

Posted by matt at 01:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I