Afghanistan and Obama

Rory Stewart (he who walked across Afghanistan on foot, wrote a book about it, then became governor of an Iraqi province, then wrote a book about that) has an interesting piece in the London Review of Books arguing that the high flung rhetoric used in discussing Afghanistan by the Obama and Brown administrations presupposes both an over simplistic moral view (and sense of mission) of the place.

He notes that the rhetoric regarding Afghanistan is:

...suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy.

Most importantly, Stewart makes light of the problems of the economic development vision of Afghanistan, arguing that is is far more likely to begin to resemble one of its neighbors than to develop into the Western Style democracy the rhetoric of the Western countries currently mired in Afghanistan belies.

To wit:

But Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan present a bewildering variety of states: an Islamist theocracy, a surreal mock-tribal autocracy, a repressive secular dictatorship, a country trembling on the edge of civil war, a military dictatorship cum democracy. And it will be many years before Afghanistan’s economy or its institutions draw level with those of its neighbours.

I think Stewart makes some excellent points across his essay. The greatest problem with the essay is that it fails to address the issue of poppy production; which when taken with the porousness of the Afghan borders continue to dictate Afghanistan's future as a so-called "narco state". This problem strikes me as being open to attenuation by providing a frame-work through which Afghans can grow poppies (easily their most valuable and most easily produced potential cash crop) legally. This taken with international morphine shortages, should, as The Economist and other publications long noted. should serve as a means for producing both a legal venue for poppy production in Afhganistan, and could see the opening of a technology industry were the morphine manufacturing plants to be built in Afghanistan; and operated by Afghans. This is just a thought, but one that appears to continue to elude international drug policymakers and the Western governments that continue to push empty rhetoric in Afghanistan.

Obama in Ghana

Barrack Obama is currently in Ghana, this New York Times editorial argues that Obama's selection of Ghana was as a result of Ghana's exception status, noting:

"From one end of the continent to the other, the sort of peaceful, transparent election that Ghana held last December is still an exception rather than the norm, analysts said. The same is true for the country’s comparatively well-managed economy."

This strikes me as in some ways being a little Africa-phobic in that it paints a lot of the problems with the Western perception of Africa as a whole. There are plenty of perfectly stable African countries or countries, that like Ghana, have recovered from a history of dictatorship.

Liberia for example, would have made for a more obvious choice by the article author's logic in that it has successfully begun to recover from a horrible civil war, has elected Africa's first woman president in Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (transcending barriers in a way similar to Obama) and Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf has thus far done much to begin transforming her country.

It strikes me that Liberia's status for some time as an American pseudo-colony, which in principal would have made Liberia an obvious choice, has, as a result of many Americans not wanting to think about the idea of American colonialism and/or imperialism has in some way mitigated it as a choice. While Kenya, and thus East Africa was never a real option do to Obama’s Kenyan heritage, and thus simultaneously not wanting to demonstrate pro-Kenyan bias to the continent and simultaneously not wanting to snub Kenya by visiting one of its neighbors. Similarly the prosperous South and Northern parts of the continents are too dissimilar to what the Occidental world widely perceives as “Afirca” to be options.

All the same, there remain a huge number of stable, safe countries, including Togo, Burkina Faso and others within the region of West Africa that are comparable to Ghana in development and good governance.

I think Ghana was chosen for the visit because, yes it is stable, but equally importantly it is also Anglophone making it more accessible, semi-developed (though not too developed to be perceived as “un-African”) and has relatively minimal corruption (although as I left Ghana, a scandal appeared to be emerging involving President Atta-Mills, alleging that he may have illegally accepted some $3.5 million from Nigeria during the election campaign last year, channeled through the singular John Jerry Rawlings. These allegations have yet to be proven or disproven.) I think it is also Ghana’s widely being perceived as friendly (which in my experience it clearly is) that helped edge it towards selection.

All the same, pleasant trip to Mr. Obama. Ghana is a lovely country and I think decidedly a good candidate for the president's first Africa visit on its own terms, rather than simply because it has been somehow held up as a paean of virtue in a region seen, I would argue unfairly, as utterly dysfunctional by the American media.

Mumford in Kajeitia part 2

An excellent point was made about the failure to provide context for the Mumford in Kejeitia post. My response to this is as follows:
Mumford's argument as to why Roman and Greek cities became great and survived in the first place is two fold:
(1) because they maintained something of an agricultural base and that some infrastructure existed, these cities were not able to be completely annihilated after being sacked by the Visigoths, etc – indeed at one point Mumford notes that as long as some semblance of infrastructure and urban core persist, cities can never be completely erased,
(2) because Greek and Roman cities got where they were through colonial exploitation of their neighbors and other cultures entirely, they were able to build incredibly vertical monuments and buildings. This vertical expansion is key to Mumford’s argument as he notes that pushing people’s aesthetic frame upwards, it distracted them from the squalor at their feet, hence why the over emphasis in Western culture on so-called classical society. Mumford is repeatedly condemnatory of Athens and Rome as engines of over-expansion, exploitation, vice-based culture, etc.
Many modern African, (and American cities too for that matter), have a similar problem in only that over reliance on affordable hydrocarbons has resulted in a similar over-expansion and over-extension of resources and food systems. African cities, indeed, still practice greater localized food production than many American cities giving them a certain advantage. However, like with the Agora in ancient Athens or Rome, the emphasis on commercialism seemingly at any cost, and the persistence of squalor seems to point to a strong “classical” Mediterranean continuity. Perhaps, with my well-documented discussions of Christianity and Islam in West Africa, it can best and most readily be compared to latter, Christianized, Rome - a period which Mumford argues began show marked societal improvements, while Edward Gibbon argues that it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

Mumford in Kajeitia

West African cities, especially their slum quarters tend to be grim affairs. Kumasi boasts two areas that seem to especially qualify; Kajeitia and Race Course. Race Course is the traditional African mega slum – mud roads, burning garbage and tin sheds packed tightly together without rhyme or reason. Kajeitia on the other hand is a squalid commercial district – resembling Lewis Mumford’s descriptions of the ancient Greek and Roman agoras. Indeed, Mumford makes some interest points in the city in history. In describing sanitation conditions within Greek cities, Mumford notes:

“The Hippocratic emphasis on air, water, soil, and situation did not gain an easy victory; for an ancient tradition of close building, a tolerance of filth and putrefaction, a greedy desire to use every bit of land available worked to transmit without improvement the medical and hygienic misdemeanors of the early builders of cities.” (Lewis Mumford, The City in History, first edition, pg. 142)

This description feels interchangeable with what is on display in Kejeitia, Race Course, or many other parts of Kumasi; (or Accra for that matter), with the addition of the corpses of old polythene bags that cover almost every inch of exposed ground as well. Automobiles whizzing by also introduce a potential for danger beyond traditional Mediterranean societies. Commercialism takes precedence over hygiene and people compartmentalize. Certain tendencies in urban development seem to be omnipresent, and self-reproducing throughout history. To get an idea of how ancient Greek and Roman cities operated, one need merely look to the West African cities of today.

Patronizing Glance

As I write this, the “Warrior Wives Prayer Ministry” of greater Kumasi parades past my window in a sea of gospel music. Angry traffic belches abuse at them through overused car horns. Nobody really notices car horns anymore in Ghana, they are so omnipresent that people have learned to simply tune them out. There is a strong warrior tradition in the Ashanti: hence the title. The symbol of the region, and of the old empire, is the porcupine - which grow to large size here; around 200 pounds; and are decidedly aggressive if trifled with. The police arrive and do their best to placate enraged motorists. This parade had been pre-arranged (unlike the weekly tumult of Jehovah’s Witnesses who take the to the streets every Sunday, creating a literal audible “crack” of dawn), not that there is any evidence of this. Perhaps it is the mere presence of police; who generally only appear to extract bribes and then promptly depart, that would indicate that they exist at all. Indeed, the local preference to take justice into their own hands, even if it is at times misdirected, seems to render the professional police force null and void. They exist as an arm of corruption; while God’s law, in its vulgar Old Testament sense, prevails.

Which brings me to the nasty issue of patronage. Not to dwell too heavily in the negative; patronage systems abound in Ghana, as they do in most, if not all West African countries. While the patronage system is less pronounced, more compact, and overall, far less pernicious here in Ghana, than in say, Nigeria, but it remains intractable to every day life. Ghanaian society holds that who you know, what they can do for you, and what you can do for them in return matters a great deal when, at times, realizing the daily necessities of life can be at times difficult. While this can obviously at times, be the case in the West, though we don’t like to think of things that way – and people will always try to advance and/or protect their clan; and awareness of this is a necessity in Ghana.

I got to know this quite well as I began to interact regularly with the police. I needed some traffic statistics for a planning project I was working on*; it was a week of near daily treks to the central police station, in which, I spent a lot of time sitting around waiting, paying bribes, and not receiving information that the extent of the patronage system was really hammered home. Karmically, if I may put it that way, there was no reason to help me because I was a Westerner, an outsider, would likely be leaving the country, and patronage is less about leveraging immediate material advantage (although the police are happy to insist upon bribes – and most speeding tickets are resolved in fiery exchanges between drivers and officers, with threats of immediate prison brandished about, eventually to be resolved in a conciliatory handshake in which bills are almost certainly exchanged); but rather about forging long term patronage relationships.

So there I sat, watching Kumasi’s finest rip people off and get ripped off in equal measure. As the police seem to do very little in the way of actual policing, they tend to be regularly patronized by those that have acquired the instruments of “ancient oriental healing”. Thus, Western medicine and what are often very real scams – my favorite was a static electricity machine, with an electrode for reading “palm phenomena” in which through administering static electricity shocks and taking readings (indicated by a sound chip for a greeting card chirping away, what was quite clearly “Jingle Bell Rock”) everything from colon cancer to high blood pressure are diagnosed. While the readings are cheap, the suggested medications in the form of handily available from the “doctor” of palm phoneme, to avoid the diagnosed illnesses, come at far greater prices. The officers note that the medicine works “if you believe in it”, however I was not reassured when the “physician” pointed excitedly to, what appeared to be his kidneys while discussing colon cancer. Perhaps he was instead pointing to the organ that could potentially fail after protracted usage of many of these Chinese drugs and cures, the usage of which are now being viewed as a massive public health problem in West Africa. Indeed, it is the flooding of Africa with cheap (often fake or faulty) Chinese manufactured drugs and herbal remedies (some of which work, some of which don’t, and some of which cause horrible drug interactions with one another) is a problem my bribe dollars have now gone to promote.

And with this, one can see the true extent of patronage. One of the reasons China is making such in-roads in West Africa is that it is dumping many of these low-cost and “alternate” drugs on the West African market, often throwing in great stocks of them as deal sweeteners in International trade agreements. Price fixing of necessary medications on the part of Western pharmaceutical countries, and the belief in traditional medicines (like the Chinese herbs, sometimes work, sometimes don’t and sometimes cause other problems) are not helping the problem. Again, many people believe that as long as you believe in the medicine, it will work; which ties into an earlier post I write about Asante Occultism and all things seeming to be equally likely. It is funny that even when, a patronage system is delivering something that people know can be harmful to them, there remains the sense that, as long as you believe hard enough in it, it will work. In the end, that remains a funny thing about Ghana. People seem to want some reason to believe; and as long as you are willing to play ball, no matter how crazy what you have on offer, as long as future returns are in any way plausible, acceptance into the patronage system will be granted.

As for me, I eventually got something that vaguely resembles the traffic statistics I wanted by agreeing to try to help track down additional breathalyzer machines (which the police constable was shocked to discover were not simply available at the store in the Untied States) and by, of course, paying another bribe. The inspector assures me we are now good friends and I ever need anything, or for that matter anyone, “taken care of ‘small, small’,” as the expression goes, I know where to turn. Clearly, to master the system, I still have some way to go, but perhaps a palm phenomenon kit could sweeten the deal. This is the advice I bellow to the Warrior Wives as the police finally decide to begin clearing the road.
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*Of which I may write something on this blog, as you read this, I will most certainly be back in America; however, I have some half formed ideas and “lost episodes” which I may write up over the summer – some even dating back to my time in Niger and for which I have a wider context to talk about them.

Cultural Anthropology Part 2

Being around white people - nay Americans - has produced more jarring a sense of culture shock than anything I have experienced in Ghana. I recently managed to hitch a ride north to Mole (pronounced like the Mexican sauce rather than like the ground dwelling mammal) National Park and Safari with a group of tourists/researchers from Utah, which again brought me into contact with Americans in quantity – again resulting in the aforementioned culture shock. It was not that these denizens of the Mormon promised land (and having once driven through Utah – the only promise I detected was sunburn and canyons); it was just that I found them somehow harder to relate to than most Ghanaians. As an Eastern Canadian in origin, with a strong European heritage still very much alive and well on both sides of my family, I’ve never felt completely at ease with American culture – despite my dual American/Canadian citizenship. (I’ve been known to tell the story of my trip to the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC as being the one time I’ve felt a strong sense of emotional connection to America only to have it obliterated by none other than a roving band of Americans, but I digress.) Contact with Americans for the limited period of this weekend drove home several points of contrast between the two cultures.

Ghanaians are more than happy to argue with you, to exchange a difference of opinion, but that is usually the end of it. They argue, almost what seems viciously sometimes about very intimate things such as religion, football teams (the unofficial second religion of most Ghanaians), and politics (and politics are the third great national passion – I was once told that to not have an opinion on Ghanaian politics is to not be a true Ghanaian) but then, after these exchanges, no hard feelings. Americans meanwhile will be far more politic, will not broach seemingly contentious issues, but then carry seething, though never spoken of animosity when differences are hinted at. Ghanaians also seem to carry a greater pragmatism about many of their political ideologies – even the staunchest supporters of the current government will elucidate at length about the deficiencies of that government – try getting an American Obama or Bush partisan to do the same. Ghanaians are, through experience, wary of single party rule and strive to see government turnover from election cycle to election cycle. This leads to problems in that it is far more difficult to realize long term planning projects if an administration cannot take credit for them; and with their departure from power likely sealed; anything that cannot be claimed at the end of a cycle is often simply not broached. American “politeness” falls into the realm of the ridiculous. During the long trip North, during a stopover at Muslim village boasting one of the oldest (they claim oldest, but the claim is controversial) mosques I was chastised by the Americans I was with for asking questions about Sufism in West Africa. Apparently these questions were viewed as too obtrusive – never mind that Ghanaians are delighted to talk at length about the various ins and outs of their religion and I was given lengthy and well-considered responses. To Ghanaians, their religion is part of life, and often to be advertised the same way support for football teams is advertised. As a result one is greeted with rear window sized stenciled messages on cars reading things like; “If God says yes, who could say no?” and “Satan is a liar” while most street businesses carry names such as; “Body of Jesus Fast Food” and “Christ the Lord barber and saloon” (sic – and incredibly often the word “saloon” is misused instead of “salon” resulting in hilarious ironies by which frequently anti-alcohol Ghanaians have long conversations about going to the saloon). In the Muslim North of the country, this trend is continued but with Islamic equivalents; so one gets “Allah is Great Dried Goods” (again proving that a lack of punctuation can have hilarious consequences), etc. People are often very happy to have an extended dialogue about the ins and outs of the minute details of their belief system; and one generally spends time trying to extricate themselves from such conversations not worrying about whether or not a Ghanaian will be offended by having the topic of their faith accidentally broached.

There is also more of a sense within American culture of wanting to appear more humble. While a Ghanaian will never let you know that they are poor; and will wear their Sunday best every day of the week (and in many cases washing dress clothing every day of the week to insure to insure that it remains spotless) to prevent anyone from thinking them as in any ways impoverished, American liberal tourists will go out of their way to try to demonstrate to Ghanaians how poor they are in the United States; despite this being obviously not the case to Ghanaians. Much of this seems to be tied to an ill-founded sense of American guilt about developing countries; but I ended up laughing myself sick as a middle class American masters student complained to a Ghanaian dishwasher making less than 20 cents an hour about how much his car insurance and iphone were costing him every month. The dishwasher, for his part, seemed to find the whole thing vaguely surreal, tried to muster some sympathy, and was later disappointed when the same American used his discourse on the monthly cost of his mobile phone as a rationale for not buying said Ghanaian a US $0.60 coca-cola.

Ghanaian dietary patterns often differ dramatically from those of North Americans. Foofoo is the national dish of Ghana. It is a combination of plantain and kasava, floating in a sauce made largely of spices, chicken fat and oil. Ghanaians will generally only eat one major meal a day, and that is almost always foofoo. People will tell you that they have not eaten that day if they have not eaten foofoo; causing ironies by which people can be too full on rice, or some other foodstuff to be able to be able to have eaten all day. Foofoo is enormously filling and is probably, a 3500-calorie meal on its own. Contrast this with the North American obsession with small, light meals – an obsession that I share; gastronomical exchange can prove difficult. There is also an American terror that comes into play with so-called “dark meat” (chicken legs, etc) and skins, which Ghanaians (and I) resoundingly reject.

Still, both groups, Ghanaians and Americans seem to have much in common when it comes to the ecclesiastical (and both seem to share a strange factional sense – especially when dealing with Islam), which, as far as I am concerned, the less said about, the better. Both are willing to proselytize, Americans more tacitly, Ghanaians, as noted above, far more overtly.

In the end, and as always, true social understanding proves difficult – and the tendency to make fetish of the other runs rife; still; all in all, I find Ghanaians less of an enigma than I do my own countrymen. And that says something.

Southern Exposure: Or, a Long Weekend in the South of Ghana

Jungle Primeval

Cacun National Park is in the South of Ghana, within an hour from Cape Coast. It boasts some of the oldest, fully preserved rainforest in the world, and a canopy walk on which you can observe the forest from something of a unique angle – after all, how often do you get to see massive trees from above, rather than starting up at them? More importantly, Cancun is partially open to hiking, and one can, go for a walk in one of the few un-colonized (for lack of a better term) stretches of rainforest in West Africa.

It had been a nice coincidence that I had been reading Alan Weisman’s excellent thought experiment “The World Without Us” that week; and had just finished it on the bus ride south. Weisman considers the world both before our ancestors descended from the trees and evolved, and how biological systems will likely patch themselves back together post homo sapiens. To realize that much of the Africa, and perhaps even the world had at one point looked like the rainforest I trekked through in Cacun; and would likely look that way again given roughly one hundred years without the parasitic and often destructive impulses of people stripping the land of its resources, is oddly disquieting. It is not that I am opposed to people or the built environment – my field is urban planning after all – it is just, as one breathes the clean, moist tasting air of a dense rainforest; it is painfully clear that what is still going to be around 10 thousand years from now, and what may not be. The realization that everything in that rainforest is living; and in the case of some of the trees – which are as large as any of the Giant Redwoods you see in the Pacific Northwest of the North America – have been alive for thousands of years is a humbling feeling. That the air tastes different from city air, or even from air in more recently planted forests – that the incredible filtration system of all of those living things which have been at work for millennia remains, in every way, staggering.

Life, in this forest, reaches deep into the soil and expands outwards. It feels permanent – and in a way it is. Though the whole of the ecosystem can be rapidly and easily destroyed through even slight climate variations – in a way, it is the frailty of this plant life that gives its adaptability. If some plant species perish, some will always naturally select for traits that are best suited to those variations. From the upheaval will always come new life. One is forced to come face to face with this in a rainforest. It is us and our edifices that are impermanent and the forest that is the natural order of things. As Weisman argues in his book, the chimpanzees that human beings are descended from, who climbed from similar rainforest tens of millions of years ago in Tanzania were driven by slight climatic variations. Those forests will remain and will sprout anew, and perhaps, with luck, the chimps with them, long after we are dead and gone.

The Ghost of Slavery’s Ships

The town of Cape Coast was at one time the base for the British West African colonization and of the European sponsored and, tragically, African implemented West African slave trade. Cape Coast Castle, a white, almost pre-art deco castle was where those recently taken as slaves were held, in large, crowded holding cells for months at a time, among piles of their own excrement and filth, before being put on ships and sent to The New World, South America, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. It is estimated that some six or seven million people passed through Cape Coast Castle, before being loaded onto ships. They were taken from all over West Africa – some from as far away as Mali or Cameroon. Many died in the squalor of the holding cells of the castle, where they sat in near total darkness, even before they were loaded on ships. The dead were often left to rot with the still living. The Polish journalist of decolonization, Ryszard Kapuschisnksi, in the section of his book on the fall of the Soviet Union, 'Imperium', detailing the holocaust and before that, Stalin's purges in the Ukraine, likened slavery and colonization as being another holocaust visited upon Africa by Western Europe. He has a point.

Cape Coast as a town is quite a bit more laid back than much of the rest of Ghana, though it was once the centre of the Gold Coast Colony (as Ghana was known during the period of British control). Now it is simply a relatively poor coastal community, with most people making their livelihood through the extraction of ever declining Atlantic fish stocks. Heaps of (largely plastic) garbage litter what would otherwise be very pretty beaches, and the coastline is visibly polluted with all manner of waste that has been discharged into the ocean.

Those that have achieved affluence in Cape Coast have done so through the successful mining of white guilt over slavery cottage industry. It is interesting that a robust tourism economy can be built in dwelling, at length, in the depths of human willingness to exploit and abuse their co-mammals. Indeed, the viciousness of the slave trade, and later colonization of West Africa by exploitative European empires, was heinous – and guilt over this is something seized on by the locals of Cape Coast, dramatically inflating prices of everything from taxi fares to souvenirs for visiting white tourists. The ancestors of the slaves then, would seem to be having their revenge, increment by increment then. Except, it is not that simple. African complicity in the slave trade was what made the whole thing possible. While European demand for slaves drove the trade, it was Africans that went out, rounded up their brothers on the continent and brought them to the Europeans to be processed and shipped out. This is a point only briefly and hastily covered by those leading the tour of Cape Coast Castle, and the former Portuguese slave castle of Almina (a Africanized version Al Mina, or 'the mine'), stressing, to them the uniquely European nastiness of slavery, then strongly hinting that a generous tip would go some way to begin 'healing those wounds'.

Slavery though, was also a normal part of many of the African Empires that existed well prior to white colonization. A similar process of imperial conquest, with Assante, the Songhai, the Fanti, and other African empires perpetually at war with one another - and actively enslaving their enemies as parts of the spoils of war, had played itself out for thousands of years in Africa (and in the rest of the world!). Indeed, what elevates the European slave trade is three factors, (1) the scope on which it was practiced, and (2) its systematic implementation of the trade and the technology gap between the oppressed and the oppressors; and (3) the brutalism of exploitation of the colonization that followed.

The experience at Cape Coast is interesting because it is clear, one really does begin to feel bad about the horrible things that ones ancestors had been up to; however you do not always feel bad in the way people from Cape Coast would like you to feel bad. It has been European acknowledgement that the whole process of slavery and colonization were wrong after some bruising defeats to the old post-war European empires, and anti-imperial narratives from the likes of Forrester, Orwell, Paul Scott and countless others that has lead to the pervasive feeling of guilt for practices which were, throughout ancient history, common place. No such consideration seems to be given to the equally large, no less ugly, and far less often talked about Ottoman and North African slave trade run through Morocco, which often saw Europeans enslaved as well as Africans. Perhaps it was the unintended racial egalitarian nature of this slave trade that sees it forgotten, while the European slave trade, the ancestors of its victims alive, and in many places, often disadvantaged by centuries of institutional abuse, in the Americas and Caribbean that elevates the horror of one while almost erasing from memory, the other.

Colonization is an abusive system, it was one that had advantages in places some parts of India (where the English Colonial Service and British built railroads were the ticket to emancipation and social mobility for many low caste Hindus who would otherwise be forced into lives of extreme poverty and menial labor to their Brahman brethren) but it remained at base and abusive system. Slavery was one clear aspect of this abuse, and it is something that, in many parts of the world, we seem to have finally achieved consensus of its grotesqueness; however this does not necessarily exonerate Africans who were involved in giving the sinews of this abuse. Guilt can only be useful to a point, but it is memory and vigilance that such abuses not be allowed again that must be the lasting legacy. Similarly, it is also far too easy for many West Africans to blame all of the ills of their countries on colonialism, (and the artificiality of the borders of many post-Colonial African states and massive resource extraction by European colonialists makes this argument) without trying to improve conditions and often while exploiting their countrymen. The lesson should always be one of the prevention of future transgressions rather than in wallowing upon the spilled blood of the past.

Accra on Sunday

Accra is dead on Sundays. It is funny experience to walk in the streets of a city of three million and encounter no one except for the perpetual onslaught of dejected taxi drivers, desperate for a Sunday fair, who anxiously honk their horns at you as they pass. A coworker of mine, noted that, one of the things he loved about his country was that, as a result of the widespread religiosity of the place, Sunday had a very particular feel. Sunday is sacred in Ghana, people go to church and then spend the day at home with their families. In a way it is nice, it proves that even a days respite can be gained from that most resiliant of beasts: capitalism. Shops are closed in vibrant commercial districts, with only the odd restaurant or bar (often in areas that tend to boast large numbers of foreigners) open. Indeed, I walked the whole four-mile stretch of the central business district without seeing a single open shop. The next morning, the same area was so congested it became completely impassable. On Sunday though, one can begin to feel very alone. All of the signs of recent human activity are still present. Trash litters the streets and due to the open sewers, perennial stink of urine that permeates West African cities are, as always still there but, as the premise of the Weisman book offers, everyone has simply vanished. One can start to entertain ideas of how long it would take the jungle to reclaim Accra were this status quo to persist. Then you start to go a bit crazy.

The Northern district of the city is called Asylum Down. It is a relatively affluent district that felt something like a Ghost town on a hot Sunday morning. I think the name is wonderful. It reminded me of an episode of “The Old Grey Whistle Test” (a long since deceased BBC music program) with the Smiths on it. In said episode, Morrissey and Johnny Marr hijack a class of English school children as a mechanism for Morrissey to put forward a litany of slightly prissy remarks and weird jokes that don’t really come off. The high part comes during a scene in which one of the children has the gumption to ask Morrissey, “Where are we going?” to which Morrissey quite stiffly replied, “We’re all going mad!” Asylum Down on a Sunday makes you feel that way. It’s emptiness, the apparent sheer lack of human life on the streets (with the exception of the cabbies, who genuinely are mad in Accra and school like sharks on a feeding frenzy at the site of a fair) makes one feel that perhaps, you have completely lost it, and are in an asylum on ones own making. (Deadpans) Eerie that.